The Governor of California has discovered the secret to winning 2028, and it involves throwing the most vulnerable people in his coalition into a closet labeled “Later.”
There is a specific kind of political epiphany that only happens in rooms where the bottled water costs twelve dollars and the audience is composed entirely of people who own summer homes in the Hamptons. It is the epiphany of the “pivot.” And at the recent DealBook Summit, California Governor Gavin Newsom had one of these moments. Sitting comfortably, radiating the kind of telegenic confidence that looks great on a poster but feels slippery in a handshake, Newsom dropped a line that was meant to be a life raft for a drowning Democratic Party. He said the secret to winning back the country is for Democrats to be “more culturally normal” and “less judgmental.”
It sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? “Culturally normal.” It sounds like a suggestion to eat more fiber or call your mother on Sundays. It is the kind of phrase that makes nervous consultants in Washington exhale a sigh of relief because finally, someone gets it. Finally, someone understands that the problem isn’t that the opposition is running a platform of vengeance and deportation; the problem is that Democrats are just too… weird.
But let’s be surgically precise about what “culturally normal” actually means in the current political lexicon. It is not a call for better barbecue recipes. It is code. It is a polite, sanitized way of saying that the party needs to walk away from the parts of its coalition that Fox News finds icky. And right now, the group that has been designated as the primary obstacle to “normalcy” is the transgender community.
The Podcast Pivot
This wasn’t an isolated slip of the tongue. It sits on top of a months-long project of “cultural moderation” where centrist Democrats have decided that their primary job is to lecture the left about tone. We saw it with policing a few years ago. Now, we are seeing it with trans rights in schools, sports, and healthcare.
The evidence is not subtle. Back in March, on his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom”—a title that sounds less like a show and more like a warning label—the Governor sat down with Charlie Kirk. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar, Charlie Kirk is a man who has built an empire on the idea that diversity is a virus. In that conversation, Newsom didn’t flip the table. He didn’t defend the humanity of trans kids. Instead, he told Kirk that it is “deeply unfair” for trans girls and women to compete in women’s sports.
He effectively echoed a Republican talking point. He validated the premise of the attack. At a moment when the Trump administration is waging a broad, terrifying offensive against transgender rights, threatening to erase legal recognitions and healthcare access, one of the leading lights of the Democratic Party decided the smart play was to nod along with the guys holding the torches.
This clip shook LGBTQ advocates to their core. This wasn’t a stray line. It was a clear break with his own earlier posture as a champion of California as a “trans sanctuary.” It signaled that the sanctuary has new hours of operation, and they are subject to change based on the latest focus group data from swing voters in Michigan.
The Theory of the Expendable Minority
The “be normal” message is the political equivalent of telling your weird cousin to stay in the car during the family reunion. The implied theory of politics here is that if a marginalized group polls badly, their rights become negotiable. The logic suggests that there is a hierarchy of human dignity, and your place on that ladder is determined by how comfortable you make a suburban dad in Ohio feel.
If the polls say that defending trans people is “divisive,” then the “culturally normal” Democrat stops defending them. They lower their voice. They change the subject to “kitchen table issues,” ignoring the fact that for a trans person, the kitchen table issue is often whether they will be legally allowed to sit at the table at all.
This framing reveals a profound misunderstanding of how life actually works. The whole class versus identity fight that pundits love to have is absurd because nobody lives in a single box. All politics is identity politics. Class is itself an identity. The cost of eggs is harder to afford if you cannot get hired because you are trans. The price of gas matters more if you are disabled and rely on a vehicle. You cannot separate the economic anxiety from the civil rights anxiety because they happen inside the same human body.
The Civil Rights Chain
There is an old metaphor about civil rights being a chain. The strength of the chain is the strength of its weakest link. The “culturally normal” strategy asks us to look at the weakest link—the group currently under the most intense fire—and say, “You know what? Let’s just cut that part off. The rest of the chain looks great.”
But if a politician is willing to trim trans rights when they become inconvenient, why should any other group that has ever been unpopular feel safe? If the standard for defending a community is “does the majority already like them,” then the Democratic Party isn’t a defender of rights; it is a fan club for the status quo.
Imagine a 2028 campaign ad. The camera pans over a golden wheat field. Gavin Newsom walks toward the lens, sleeves rolled up, hair perfect. “I believe in an America that is normal,” he says. “An America where we don’t judge.” And scrolling rapidly across the bottom of the screen, in a font usually reserved for pharmaceutical side effects, is a disclaimer: Offer of normalcy not valid for groups currently out of favor with swing voters. Terms and conditions may apply to your gender identity, reproductive choices, and history of protest.
The Cowardice of the Middle
This pivot to “cultural normality” is not just cowardly; it is strategically dumb. On one side, you have the Ezra Klein-style realpolitik that argues coalitions are about winning power so you can protect rights. This is the “eat your vegetables” argument. You have to swallow the transphobia now so you can stop the fascists later.
But on the other side, you have the reality that throwing one group under the bus demobilizes not just that group but everyone who stands with them. You cannot build a durable majority by telling part of your base that their existence is “off-brand.” What is Newsom’s actual pitch to trans people and those who love them? “Please vote for me while I talk about you as a problem we need to manage more quietly”? “Support me, and I promise to only betray you on the issues that make me look bad on Fox News”?
Voters who care about civil rights notice when leaders treat rights as seasonal. They notice when the pride flag goes up in June and comes down the moment a pollster whispers the word “woke.”
Who Defines Normal?
And let’s have some fun with the phrase “culturally normal.” Who decides what that is? Whose culture gets coded as the baseline?
In this context, “normal” is a stand-in for straight, cisgender, non-disabled, non-immigrant, and uncontroversial to white suburban sensibilities. It frames anything outside of that narrow band as an aberration, a deviation, a “weirdness” that needs to be toned down.
It erases the lived reality of cities, classrooms, workplaces, and families where queer and trans people are not exotic outliers but central figures. It pretends that the “normal” American family looks like a 1950s sitcom, when in reality, the American family is a messy, beautiful, complex web of identities that doesn’t fit into a focus group box.
One can almost imagine the DNC strategy memo. It is a color-coded chart tacked to a wall in a windowless room. On the left, in soothing blue, are the “Normal” groups: Union workers (but not the loud ones), soccer moms, veterans. On the right, in flashing red, are the “Too Much for This Cycle” groups: Trans kids, protesters, anyone who uses a pronoun that confuses a boomer. The strategy is simple: Hide the red, highlight the blue, and hope nobody notices that you have erased half the country.
It is dark comedy that is only a half-step removed from the real debate happening in Democratic circles right now. The panic is palpable. They are terrified of being painted as the party of the “fringes,” so they are actively pruning the fringes, forgetting that the fringes are where the energy, the youth, and the future of the party actually live.
The Test of 2028
As we look toward the 2026 midterms and the 2028 primary season, this fight frames the existential question for the Democrats. What kind of party do they want to be?
Will they choose the path of short-term “normalcy” that trades away the rights of whichever group is most hated on talk radio that year? Will they become the party of “We’re just like the Republicans, but nicer about it”?
Or will they choose the harder path? The path of defending everyone. The path of forcing the country’s definition of “normal” to expand until it actually includes the people who live here.
The “culturally normal” pitch is a trap. It is a concession to the bully. It validates the idea that some people are too “weird” to deserve full protection. And once you concede that, you have lost the moral argument. You are just haggling over the price of the betrayal.
The unsettling question that Newsom’s logic poses is this: If you are willing to shrink trans people’s lives in order to look normal, what guarantee does anyone have that their own rights will not be the next thing on the cutting room floor once the polls wobble again?
If “normal” requires the erasure of the vulnerable, then maybe “normal” is the problem. And maybe the Democrats should stop trying to be the party of normal and start trying to be the party of brave. Because right now, looking at the polls and the podcasts and the panic, “brave” is the one thing they definitely are not.