Democrats, shook by woke and Trump, make case they’re the normal ones

The 2028 Democratic presidential primary is shaping up as a contest over who can seem the most reasonable.

Prospective candidates are imploring their party to be normal, while battling among one another over who is the most normal of all.  

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is making an appeal to his party to become more “culturally normal,” while Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has urged his fellow Democrats to “talk like a normal human being.”  

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) has said that those in her party need to speak in ways that aren’t reminiscent of “the faculty lounge,” a nod to the pundit class. 

It all looks like a pushback against “woke,” which many Democrats blame for their losses in 2024.

And it’s also an attempt to ride out what Democrats believe is the backlash forming against what they see as the absurdities of the Trump 2.0 era in Washington, D.C. and the country at large.

“As we look forward, and this is most relevant in the presidential primary process, the question general election voters will ask is, ‘Which of these candidates seems reasonable to me? And which one of them is less crazy?’” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, the moderate think tank. 

“And somehow Democrats have come up on the losing side of that twice and we can’t let that happen again,” Bennett added, referring to the two wins by Trump in 2016 and 2024. 

Since the 2024 election, Democrats have wrestled with how they lost their way with the electorate, particularly the working class and Black and Hispanic voters, who were traditionally part of their coalition, but spurned Vice President Kamala Harris for Trump.

In election post-mortems since then, Democrats have concluded that they........

© The Hill