How a Party Offends Its Voters

Daniel McCarthy
Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:20:49 -0800
Opinion

Gavin Newsom won't be the Democrats' 2028 presidential nominee unless he wins a significant share of the African American vote.

So how's he courting it?

Promoting his new memoir in Atlanta, the California governor decided to forge a connection by boasting about his poor SAT scores and difficulty reading.
Updated: Tue Feb 24, 2026

Gavin Newsom won't be the Democrats' 2028 presidential nominee unless he wins a significant share of the African American vote.

So how's he courting it?

Promoting his new memoir in Atlanta, the California governor decided to forge a connection by boasting about his poor SAT scores and difficulty reading.

"I'm like you," he said.

"You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy" and "you've never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech."

Newsom suffers from dyslexia, but he obviously wasn't assuming he was addressing a room full of voters with the same debility.

He just looked around and concluded this audience wouldn't have high academic aspirations.

"How insulting" was the response on X from Nina Turner, a former Democratic state senator in the battleground state Ohio and now a senior fellow with the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.

The outspoken rapper Nicki Minaj was just as direct: "His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can't read," she posted.

Even a tactful Democratic consultant quoted in TheGrio said she was "disappointed" by Newsom:

"He's a great wordsmith, so I was kind of bothered by the way that he said it," Ameshia Cross told the outlet.

Luckily for Newsom, some of his rivals for the 2028 nomination have even less rapport with black voters. Polls often register Pete Buttigieg's African American support at zero percent.

The likes of Buttigieg are no threat to Newsom no matter how many gaffes he makes, but his fellow Californian Kamala Harris is another story.

It's true her 2020 campaign didn't even make it to the first primary — it imploded in December 2019.

But Harris failed upward, getting chosen as Joe Biden's running mate and then replacing him without a competition four years later.

Now she's Newsom's roadblock.

The '28 race isn't far away: In about a year, all the contenders on the Democrats' side will be clear — and maybe they already are.

Newsom and Harris have serious liabilities, not least the deteriorating condition of the blue state they both call home:

Does the whole country want to wind up like today's California?

Do businesses and families fleeing Newsom's state for the freedom and lower taxes of Texas and Florida want the governor's ruinous recipe attempted nationwide?

Yet Democrats looking for an alternative to the California scheme represented by Harris and Newsom have little to choose from.

Pennsylvania is the nation's most important battleground state, and culturally and economically similar enough to other battlegrounds like Ohio and Michigan that a successful Pennsylvania pol might have the right stuff to sweep the Electoral College.

But Josh Shapiro, the Keystone State's Democratic governor, has problems of his own with one of the party's key constituencies — critics of Israel.

Shapiro is Jewish, and nowadays that in itself is a problem for some in the Democratic base.

According to The Washington Post, Shapiro's forthcoming memoir reveals the Harris campaign pressed him about dual loyalties when vetting him as a vice-presidential possibility:

"Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?" he was asked. "Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?"

"If they were undercover," Shapiro recalls replying, "how the hell would I know?"

Harris thought she could walk a fine line two years ago, hanging onto the votes of the anti-Israel left — then storming the streets and college campuses in protest against the war in Gaza — while maintaining the Democrats' longtime grip on the Jewish vote.

The Democratic National Committee's "autopsy" of her campaign concludes she failed. Progressive voters punished Harris because they didn't think she and Biden were hard enough on Israel.

The DNC isn't making the report public, but the word is out.

The party's at war with itself over Israel, as younger and more progressive Democrats turn increasingly anti-Zionist and at times openly anti-Semitic.

A generational shift is irreversible. This is the rising character of the Democratic Party, and the 2028 contenders will be forced to choose a side.

Can Newsom court Jewish voters any more deftly than blacks?

Democrats hope the Republicans' own infighting will save them.

President Donald Trump himself has reportedly asked Tucker Carlson to stop going after Israel — to no avail.

The online-influencer right isn't yet the force at the ballot box that the Democrats' young activists are, but it threatens to alienate one of the GOP's electoral mainstays, pro-Israel evangelical Christians.

Will the 2028 election come down to which party offends its own voters more?

The Democrats are off to an impressive start with Newsom's backhanded attempt at being "relatable" and the party's fear of releasing its own analysis of how it lost last time.

As rough as this year's midterms might be, Republicans are well positioned for 2028 — if only they avoid going to war with themselves.