Like many people I’ve been enjoying reading Gavin Newsom (or whoever runs his social media) trolling Donald Trump by parroting Trump’s patented brand of semi-coherent dementia-brained rant. The all-caps, the quotation marks, the repetition of childish nicknames and catch phrases… it’s all very enjoyable if you’re a hardcore Trump hater. But that’s also why I worry about it as a tactic.
It’s extremely fun if you’re already anti-Trump, but as we learned in 2024, the already-anti-Trump are not really the people we need to reach if we want to get through this era. We need to be reaching the politically disengaged, the people who still vote but don’t pay much attention to politics. I’m not sure any of this stuff appeals to them. Worse, I worry, it might drive them away by perpetuating that godawful “both sides” mentality that says this is all about rich white guys vying for power, and nobody cares about the actual voters.
Newsom is very focused on the politics, not the policy. He’s promising to redraw district lines and (temporarily) gerrymander California to “fight fire with fire” as Republicans prepare to gerrymander Texas and other states. I think that’s a smart and necessary step, but I fear a focus on something so inside-baseball as congressional district lines goes over the head of most voters.
Contrast that with someone like Zohran Mamdani, who is laser-focused on the day-to-day issues that impact the lives of constituents. He’s not talking about district lines, he’s talking about lowering rent and the cost of groceries, improving transportation, and so on. That has made him incredibly popular with independent and unaffiliated voters, including the young men Democrats struggle so much to attract… and yet while they embrace Newsom, the national Democrats fight like hell to distance themselves from Mamdani and his very popular platform.
What does that say to everyday voters? It says the Democrats care about how many seats they win, and don’t care much about how expensive people’s lives are. That doesn’t seem great to me.
Stipulated, Mamdani is a candidate for mayor of a single city, so a focus on day-to-day cost-of-living type issues is perhaps more central to his campaign… but I think what we saw from Trump’s success in 2024 is that a focus on those kinds of issues is equally important on the national stage, at least in this moment as Americans enter a secret recession.