Politics > California

The Unfortunate Truth in Gavin Newsom’s Gaffe Regarding the SATs

"You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy,” he said.

William Sullivan | March 12, 2026

Presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom has been taking time away from destroying my state that he governs to hit the 2028 campaign trail, and he made a bit of short-lived news with his stop in Atlanta to have a discussion with Mayor Andre Dickens and a crowd largely comprised of black attendees to promote his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry.

“I’m not trying to impress you,” he said, “I’m just trying to impress upon you …  I’m like you, I’m no better than you.  You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy,” and he continues by saying that he never reads his speeches because he “can’t read.” 

It was an obviously offensive thing to say, and if there was a calculation in Newsom bringing this up, it must have been this -- Newsom wanted to present himself as academically mediocre and disadvantaged because he believes that black Americans, as a collective demographic, are academically mediocre and disadvantaged.

And, sadly, on neither point would anyone who has studied this subject for more than five minutes disagree.  Black American youth are today disadvantaged, primarily because the explosive growth of the welfare state, implemented by Newsom’s central planning Democrat forebears like Lyndon B. Johnson dating back to the 1960s, has crippled them. 

“The welfare state,” writes the late, great Walter E. Williams, “has done to black families what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do, and that is to destroy the black family.” 

The practical result of this effort is on display all around us.  The percentage of two-parent black households plummeted in the decades since the 1960s, as subsistence checks provided by daddy-government replaced fathers as the providers for their families. 

The result has been that many children are growing up in more rudderless, single-parent homes, with young men particularly suffering from the chronic lack of fathers.  This has left millions of black Americans trapped in crime-ridden communities and broken public schools.

Yes, black Americans are academically disadvantaged, thanks in many ways to Democrat policy and cultural influences that do nothing to promote excellence in education as a virtue. 

But, sadly, black American students today lag more than Gavin Newsom seems to know or has ever considered, because the SAT score that he cites is significantly higher than the average SAT score of black students in America today.  And sadly, largely for the aforementioned reasons, that isn’t saying much.

Gavin Newsom is a shrewd politician, to be sure, but I’ve never taken him for much of a thinker.  Neither does he, as he’s now publicly admitted, but there are some facts suggesting that he may not have fully thought through the touting of his SAT score.

Newsom knows that a 960 isn’t a great SAT score, and he knows, like most Americans, that black students tend to underperform on the SAT as a demographic reality.  But to say that his score is “like” the average black student’s score today is wholly wrong for a few reasons.

First, Gavin Newsom graduated high school in 1985.  There have been myriad changes to the test which have artificially elevated scores in recent years.  To put it simply, a 960 score would translate to roughly a 1030-1040 on today’s SAT.  So, where a 960 score would put a test-taker at about the 36th percentile today, Gavin Newsom’s adjusted score would put him at about the average of all SAT test-takers when he took the exam.

In other words, Newsom wanted the audience to think that he was somewhere close to the bottom-third of SAT scorers, for some reason.  In truth, he was, then and now, in the meatiest part of the curve – entirely average, academically.

And the sad news doesn’t end there.  As I mentioned, even if his 960 score were accurate, it would be a score significantly higher than 907, which was the average black test-taker’s score in 2025.  This puts the average black student taking the SAT today at roughly the bottom-fifth to the bottom-quarter of test-takers.

And wait, there’s more – even that number is inflated because the changes that have been made to the exam over decades have been designed, specifically, to level black students’ scores with other demographics. 

You see, changes were made to the exam which were explicitly made to create racial equity in outcomes since the 1990s. 

The essay portion of the exam that was common in yesteryear?  That’s entirely optional now.  It awards no points, so why should testers prepare to write an essay?

The vocabulary has been dumbed down, and I won’t sugarcoat that.  “Rote memorization,” which unshakably remains a feature of any disciplined educational endeavor from plumbing to neuroscience, suddenly became an unreasonable expectation for aspiring college students.  Therefore, “obscure” and “esoteric” words were replaced with “high utility words.”  Many logical components of the exam, such as questions involving analogies, synonyms, antonyms, etc., were also largely eliminated on the grounds that some students with tutors might have an advantage, or some such.

Another key component, meant to levelize scores, was the elimination of penalties for guessing.  When I took the exam in 1998, the standard coaching was to generally not make random guesses on the exam.  Each incorrect answer amounted to a deduction of a quarter point, so the logic was that it was better to not potentially diminish your grade by guessing. 

This wasn’t a feature of the exam that some weird racists designed to keep black students’ scores low – it was a test to gauge a student’s ability to appraise his/her own uncertainty, and to calculate the odds in answering the question.  If you could narrow the potential answers down to two, you would guess.  If you had no clue, it was better to leave it blank.

Today, testers can simply guess away with reckless abandon, statistically granting one-to-two points for every four questions that an exam taker in my day would have skipped due to not being reasonably certain of the answer.  This takes away a critical risk-assessment element of the test, yet another thing which apparently is unnecessary in evaluating the value of students and professionals today, I suppose.

Disparities continue to exist, however, despite all these efforts.  Asian students are broadly outperforming white students who are outperforming black students, because disparities will always exist among human beings.  The idea that systemic racism is what has led to these disparities is the least plausible of myriad explanations.

The truth is, as many Americans know well, there are three kinds of people who’ve taken the SAT.  Those who tell you their score because they are proud of it, those who don’t tell you because they’re either ashamed or don’t want to be boastful, and those who are lying about what they scored.

Newsom is either the first or the third among those cohorts.  Historically speaking, proudly referencing unimpressive academic results would be an odd thing for an American presidential candidate to tout on the campaign trail, but such are the times.  The Democrat cult, as Newsom knows well, is devout in its adherence to the gospel of DEI.  It prefers to celebrate mediocrity and equitable outcome rather than to celebrate pure exceptionalism.

Image: Screenshot from X video.

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