January 28, 2025 - 4:00pm

What does it mean to be a “normal” Democrat in 2025? Earlier this month, Peter Savodnik of The Free Press profiled Sen. Elissa Slotkin, framing the Michigan Democrat as a voice of reason within the party, “reclaiming its soul” as a member of “Team Normal”.

“It was not normal, she said, to alienate voters,” Savodnik wrote. “It was not normal to obsess over race and gender.”

What counts as obsessing over race and gender? Slotkin navigated the Trump-era culture war just as you’d expect an ambitious Michigan Democrat to navigate it, siding with the progressive Left in most major culture war battles while not being the loudest person in the room. Slotkin spent the Trump years supporting legislation and policies which conflated sex and gender identity, opening up single-sex spaces and female teams to biological men and boys. She co-sponsored the radical Equality Act. She participated in a reading of I Am Jazz, an infamous children’s book aimed at normalising childhood transitions.

As a congresswoman, Slotkin opposed Betsy DeVos’s Title IX reform against campus kangaroo courts, which even the Washington Post’s editorial board said brought “needed balance” to schools. In the same year, Slotkin also voted to impeach Trump in 2019. And when the pandemic started, she showed enthusiastically embraced the latest progressive cause célèbre: censorship. As a former CIA analyst, Slotkin took the occasion to urge more content moderation from social media companies, and even hosted a conversation on disinformation that featured Renée DiResta and Nina Jancowicz, the former executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board.

Like most Democrats, she believed the country’s cultural centre had shifted — until the backlash became a potent political force and she began back-pedalling. Better than many Democrats, Slotkin understood that she needed to be perceived as normal and saw identity-based messaging an impediment to that. “We don’t need to obsess about identity politics,” she said in November.

After Kamala Harris’s election loss, Slotkin told Dave Weigel: “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” adding that her party should take its messaging “not from the faculty lounge, but the assembly line”. Politico summarised Slotkin’s “theory of the case” as “economic security begets social progress, and in that order.”

The senator argued: “There’s a whole theory of the case that we got the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s because after World War II, America was so strong economically, we had such a strong middle class, that people understood that someone else having rights doesn’t take away from my rights.”

Her theory may be true, but a clever messaging strategy doesn’t make Slotkin a convincing representation of normalcy. It makes her deceptive, someone who believes voters will ultimately swallow their identity-politics medicine as long as they have good healthcare.

A lawmaker should not be able to take so many divisive stances on, for example, trans ideology and present herself as “normal” without some pushback from journalistsThis will be especially important as Democrats respond to the Trump 2.0 vibe shift by memory-holing their Trump 1.0 stances, hoping enough kitchen-table messaging will make voters forget the past.

People can genuinely change their minds. But Slotkin isn’t even facing questions about her prior record, and is instead being allowed to coast into centrist acclaim by criticising identity politics and cultural progressivism without ever addressing her own contributions to the problem. Journalists shouldn’t let her, or any other Democrats who claim to have been a voice of reason all along, get away with it.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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