The summer’s hottest flick? The DeSantis-Newsom buddy movie.

What is going on here? More than you might guess. The two mega-state governors, brawling for days, are on oddly parallel missions: Both want to run for president in 2024 and wrest control of their parties from an old guard along the way. DeSantis, 43, and Newsom, 54, have found excellent foils in one another as they work to nudge Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both septuagenarians, to the sidelines. While Trump and Biden decide whether to run again, DeSantis and Newsom are seizing their opportunities.

Newsom spent $105,000 to air an artful attack ad against DeSantis on Fox News in Florida. “Freedom, it’s under attack in your state,” the Californian said in a message timed to coincide with July Fourth. “Don’t let them take your freedom.”

DeSantis responded by noting that California’s population declined the past two years. “It’s almost hard to drive people out of a place like California, given all their natural advantages, and yet they’re finding a way to do it,” he said at a news conference.

The buddy movie is chiefly important for raising the profiles of both men at a time when the two parties are having some second thoughts about their most likely nominees. But the Newsom and DeSantis back-and-forth has the potential to become a real debate about ideology as the two parties search for direction in the post-Trump era.

Florida’s governor says his state is a magnet because he’s “created a citadel of freedom.” DeSantis promised “freedom from indoctrination” as he signed a bill in April to ban the teaching of critical race theory. The governor used this f-word 35 times last month in a news release announcing he signed the state’s budget.

Newsom, meanwhile, is on the leading edge of progressive efforts to revive Democratic appreciation of freedom. In the Independence Day commercial, he says California still believes in “freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and the freedom to love.” Newsom’s version of freedom is that Americans should “live free from fear of gun violence” and government control of women’s bodies.

The two men aren’t without their drawbacks. Newsom, with fine suits and slicked-back hair, got in trouble for attending a lobbyist’s birthday party in 2020 at a tony Napa Valley restaurant in violation of covid-era rules he had issued. As mayor of San Francisco, he had an affair with the wife of a top staffer as he was exiting a five-year marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle (who is now engaged, as it happens, to Donald Trump Jr.).

DeSantis has his own demerits, of course, but they fall in different categories. A working-class kid who sailed through Yale and Harvard Law, he emerged with a chip on his shoulder about his roots (which helps him as a pol) and a tendency to remind people that he’s the smartest guy in the room (which does not).

Both governors relish house-to-house fighting in the culture war and delight in trolling the opposition. Newsom became a national figure in 2004 for defying state law as mayor and issuing the first same-sex marriage licenses. DeSantis, who barely won his 2018 governor’s race, became a household name for opening his state up in 2020 when most governors kept theirs closed.

Neither is afraid of big business. Newsom announced last week that California’s state government will begin producing its own insulin to undercut the market price charged by pharmaceutical companies, which conduct vital but expensive research and development. DeSantis dismantled a special tax district created 55 years ago that enabled Disney to build the world’s most popular theme park because its chief executive criticized a bill that bans educators from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with students before the fourth grade.

Both men are clearly risk takers who sense an opportunity to turn the page on Trump and Biden and still run as Washington outsiders in an era of deep frustration with the status quo.

Of course, it’s far from clear that either Biden or Trump will stand aside. And even if they do, there is no guarantee that DeSantis or Newsom will emerge as a nominee in 2024. But the two governors are already altering the landscape on which those questions will be answered. And their interests are, for the moment, in a strange alignment of convenience.