Earlier this month, a minivan was driving north out of St. Lucie County on the Florida Turnpike when a commercial semitruck hauling a box trailer crossed directly in front of it. The truck’s driver, Harjinder Singh, was attempting to pull off an illegal U-turn by driving across the turnpike’s northbound roads. The minivan had no time to stop, crashing into and then being crushed by Singh’s truck. The two passengers in the minivan were pronounced dead at the scene, and the driver died later that day.
Singh was not a Florida resident. He was not even a lawful permanent resident of the United States. Multiple federal laws explicitly bar noncitizens without lawful permanent residency from obtaining a Commercial Driver’s License and require recipients to prove English language proficiency. But Singh, who illegally crossed the southern border and was denied work authorization during President Donald Trump‘s first term, lucked out. Despite failing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s English Language Proficiency assessment, Singh scored work authorization from the Biden administration and then, in defiance of federal law, a CDL from the sanctuary state of California.
In just his first three years as the Golden State’s governor, Gavin Newsom (D-CA) granted nearly 200,000 new standard driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and renewed another 600,000 under a process even more lax than the one that gave the functionally illiterate Singh a license to drive an 18-ton commercial vehicle across state lines. And yet, in a Very Online Campaign on the Left, Newsom is being touted as the Democratic Party’s path out of the wilderness.
California has the highest unemployment rate and the highest local inflation rates of any other state in the Union. But Newsom evidently memes really hard. With a team of millennials managing his press office account on X, Newsom has spent the last week trying to evoke Trump, deeming himself “AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR” and mocking Bed Bath & Beyond for moving all operations out of California.
“It was intended as a one-time joke, according to his office, but the response was overwhelming compared with previous posts,” reported the New York Times in a laudatory profile of Newsom’s latest attempt to garner attention. “The governor’s communications team — four core members and a couple of others who chime in — decided to keep going.”
Newsom’s personal X brigade, embracing the banner of “dark woke,” hasn’t exactly hidden his decadeslong presidential ambitions, juxtaposing the Democrat with Vice President JD Vance.
And the strategy has not only come from anonymous accounts but also directly from Newsom’s account.
The August air may be giving way to a crisp whisper of fall, but make no mistake: The latest attempt to astroturf Newsom into some sort of populist champion and popular jock to take on Vance is no different than a redux of 2024’s gambit to delude the nation into believing that Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was cool and Vance was weird. In other words, this is just a redux of “brat summer.”
Democrats are not wrong to panic. More than a year after the party coup ousted former President Joe Biden from the top of the ticket, Democrats are more unpopular than they have ever been in this century. Last month, the Wall Street Journal cited a CNBC poll that revealed the highest share, 63%, in 35 years of voters who view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Earlier this month, the same poll found that Trump maintains a 46% approval rating, while the Democratic Party’s approval rating is exactly half that.
From 2020 to 2024, Democrats lost registered voters to Republicans in every one of the 30 states that allow partisan registration, with a net 4.5 million voter swing to the GOP. Trump’s landmark gains with black and Hispanic voters haven’t seen any level of catastrophic erosion in his approval polls just yet, and Republicans are continuing to gain with men even as the Democratic consolidation of female support has stagnated.
To listen to the most livid of liberals, the problem is not that the party isn’t fighting hard enough but that it doesn’t look like it’s fighting hard enough. The “dark woke” strategy of spitting out more swear words and men copying Vance’s beard doesn’t have much to say about policy, but it does about pathos. When “they go low,” Democrats are no longer following the graceful guidance of former first lady Michelle Obama to “go high.”
Instead, in the words of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Democrats are “going to bury” the GOP.
There are a couple of facets to this strategy that don’t stand strong under scrutiny. The first, in particular to Newsom and his one-sided war with Vance, is that Democrats have already tried this before.
From April through August, Vance has maintained a net -6.7% favorability rating. That’s on par with what former Vice President Kamala Harris enjoyed at this point in her term and astronomically better than the near net -20% favorability rating that haunted her for most of the rest of her time in the vice presidency. This is, in turn, slightly better than the more than net -20% favorability Newsom scored in the run-up to Election Day in 2024.
And recall that the last time Democrats went all in on the “Vance Is Weird” gimmick, it resulted in Vance being the only candidate of the four names at the top of the ticket to head into election night with a positive favorability. Next to Walz and Harris, voters simply did not buy “Vance Is Weird.” Now, put the Ohio father, arguably the first running mate to pass the beer test in at least my lifetime, next to Newsom, the pampered scion of the Getty family, and Vance is not just weird; he is arguably the only normal main character in the dystopian drama that is the shadow 2028 election.
The other issue is the Left’s obsession with relitigating political strategy as an intentional distraction from the reality that voters don’t just hate the brand; they hate Democratic policies.
As we’ve discussed before, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have tried to give the Left a policy lifeline with the Abundance Agenda. But no major party leader has taken on the project in a substantive pivot away from the Biden legacy. And the knee-jerk response to Trump indicates that most Democrats are as beholden to Biden’s policies as ever, even if they threw their old man under the bus.
Trump has maintained uncharacteristic discipline in mostly focusing on deporting the worst-of-the-worst illegal immigrants. Some 70% of those illegal immigrants arrested by the Trump administration were already convicted of or had pending charges for another crime. Yet Democrats couldn’t wait to rally around suspected MS-13 member and accused wife-beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Hamas supporter Mahmoud Khalil. If you don’t want to deport these two, do you actually want to deport anyone?
Another weird thing about the “#Resistance” this time is that it hasn’t taken the actual chance to reclaim Congress’s power from not just Trump, but from the president, permanently. The Constitution explicitly reserves the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises” for Congress, not the president. Yet Democrats haven’t extended any real olive branches to the anti-tariff libertarians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) or Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to end Trump’s unilateral imposition of the largest tariff hike on U.S. citizens in a century. Similarly, Congress passed and Biden signed a law requiring that TikTok be banned earlier this year at the absolute latest unless the social media giant’s domestic operations were offloaded from the control of the Chinese Communist Party. But Trump has illegally refused to enforce this law.
Even the “Make America Healthy Again” madness has gone mostly ignored by Democrats. They could be rallying everyone from cancer survivors to autism awareness advocates off the partisan sidelines in response to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fact-free fearmongering about the disproven link between MMR vaccines and autism and his singlehanded crackdown on mRNA research for fatal and chronic conditions.
Alas, it is easier to meme than to govern. This round of “Newsom Is A Straight Rich White Man Who Is Cool Actually” is no different than Harris’s coconut trees, “Kamala Is Brat,” or “Vance Is Weird.” The goal is not to fight against Trump or even the imperial presidency as an institution. Democrats only want to look like they’re fighting, and Newsom looks enough like a cartoon villain to pull it off for this news cycle.