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 were too wedded to cultural politics and a vocabulary that put off many voters, from pronouns to terms including “Latinx.” That turned off a key segment of voters, a number of Democrats now believe.

Earlier this month, even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who will own the progressive lane of the 2028 presidential contest if she becomes a candidate, laughed when she quoted a New York City councilman saying, “Woke 1 was crazy.”

It was a shift of sorts for Ocasio-Cortez and a nod that the left flank may have overstepped in recent years, particularly in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats are looking back not only at the pronouns, but the calls to “defund the police,” and a broader embrace of “cancel culture.”

More recently, some centrist Democrats have become increasingly worried about the Democratic Socialists who have won in a string of primaries.

The battlelines have focused on corporate money in politics and U.S. policy toward Israel, but the centrists area also worried that tenants of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), such as abolishing the Senate and prisons, could be used by the GOP to bludgeon Democrats as the ab-normal party.

Appearing on MSNOW’s Morning Joe on Monday, Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff to President Obama who is considering a run for president in 2028 sought to distance himself — and the Democratic Party itself — from the DSA.

“You’re a separate party,” Emanuel said on the program. “You’re not a caucus or a wing of the party…We’re not open to being taken over.”

“You think people want defunding the police, open borders, opening up the prison doors, I’ll see you in November,” Emanuel continued. “The only way to win is turning red to blue, not blue to midnight blue or cobalt blue.

“You want to get a minimum wage? Red to blue. You want to expand ACA healthcare and get back premium support for working and middle-class families who live paycheck to paycheck? Red to blue,” he added.

Republican strategist Susan Del Percio, who does not support Trump or the MAGA movement, said Emanuel’s tack was the right one, particularly as Democrats fight to make the reasonability case.

“Candidates absolutely need to realign themselves with normal but it’s not enough to be ‘normal.’ You gotta push back on the DSA because no matter how normal the Democrats position themselves, it’ll never be good enough for the voter if the voter associates the Democratic Party with the DSA.”

“And the only one who is doing that is Rahm Emanuel, and he’s doing it well,” she said.

But one Democratic strategist pushed back on the notion that the party should be setting a dividing line at a time when it’s rebuilding and gaining trust from voters.

This source noted that it is the Democratic establishment that has an image problem.

“To a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, the ideologues tend to be the ones who are a little more pure, and have less complications,” the strategist said. “People prefer them to Chuck Schumers and the status quo.”

“We tested out ‘normal’ in 2020 with Joe Biden and that’s not actually what people want,” the strategist added. “I think people romanticize that.”

Others say going normal in 2028 is the best route for the party.

A Democratic donor who spoke to The Hill said if candidates want to win in 2028, they will want “to stand up the most normal candidate” against the Republican nominee.

“The candidate who is the most normal and reasonable will win,” the donor predicted. “But it’s going to be the most normal with a twist. That doesn’t mean we’re going to allow Republicans to throw all the punches. The opposite.”

Democratic strategist Anthony Coley said voters want a return to normalcy because they are “frustrated by prices that are too damn high and weary of the constant drumbeat of Trump-driven drama.

“What they want is actually pretty simple: competent, no-bull—- political leaders who say what they’re going to do and then do what they say.”