Sixteen months after Kamala Harris cackled her way into a loss against President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party seems to have realized its candidates need an image makeover to get voters to forget what their team actually believes.
The name of the game is acting normal and talking like a moderate.
For Democrats, that’s a stretch.
James Talarico of Texas is their bright new “moderate” hope.
He won a US Senate primary election this week largely by touting his Christianity, being respectful to his opponents, and generally presenting himself as the boy-next-door counterweight to his excitable opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett.
Look at this sane man, declared the media.
Time magazine touted his “authenticity” and gushed, “It’s populism and piety, the proletariat and the Pharisees all rolled into a Texas-sized operation.”
The Washington Post highlighted how Talarico was “leaning in to his Christian faith in political debate, an atypical approach for a Democrat.”
The New Yorker’s soft-focus photo accompanied a fawning piece that described Talarico as looking “like he’d just finished his paper route and was eager to shovel the church’s walk.”
It did the trick for the Lone Star State’s Democrats.
But the moderate façade may already be crumbling.
In 2020, Talarico was tweeting about the “virus” of “racism.”
Who had it? White people, he said — all of them.
“White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus,” he posted. “But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems.
“We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.”
This is what passes for “normal” among Democrats?
Ironically Talarico defeated Crockett, a black woman, for the nomination.
Maybe he’s the one with that infection.
In 2021 Talarico, a member of the state legislature, argued in favor of a bill that would allow biological boys to play in girls’ sports.
“God is nonbinary,” he declared on the state House floor.
“The thing I want us all to be aware of is . . . modern science obviously recognizes there are many more than two biological sexes,” he went on. “In fact, there are six.”
Believing in six (or more!) genders is insane enough to most of us — but six biological sexes?
The mind reels.
That same year, Talarico very proudly announced that his office was the first to put pronouns on staffers’ business cards.
Democrats are acting like this is no big deal. Who can remember who said what?
Those comments were made six whole years ago, they say, when the Harvard-educated Talarico was but a boy of, ahem, 30 years old.
Part of the equation, of course, is that the leftists want us to forget what they put us all through in the depths of the woke era, when they insisted “silence is violence” and enforced their unhinged ideas by bullying any opposing voices into submission.
Yet Talarico wasn’t just caught up in the woke moment, he was in the vanguard: He posted about his “contagious” whiteness weeks before the death of George Floyd.
So voters need to look deeper at these “normal” Democrats, because the staid moderate act only lasts so long.
Just look at New Jersey and Virginia, whose new governors both veered sharply left after running “moderate” campaigns.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill positioned herself as a reasonable, middle-of-the-road candidate. She ran on affordability issues and rarely mentioned immigration.
Upon taking office, she immediately signed an executive order limiting United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity on state property — and started pushing a 7% sales-tax hike.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger portrayed herself as a moderate mom on the campaign trail, but she too ended state cooperation with ICE right after her inauguration.
Meanwhile her Democratic legislature is busily prepping a slew of far-left bills for her to sign — everything from raising taxes on services like Uber Eats to banning gas leaf blowers.
She’s also signed legislation pushing an extreme gerrymander of Virginia’s congressional districts, after pledging last year that she had no plans to do so.
Just last month, a CNN poll found that 58% of Americans, an all-time high, believe the Democratic Party has become too liberal.
Democrats badly want to appeal to those voters, who feel like the party has gotten on the leftist crazy train and has zero interest in jumping off.
But they’re skipping the part about running actual, normal, sane candidates — in favor of people who can plausibly put on the act.
Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.
