From Barack Obama deriding Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” accidental elitist insults have become a tradition for Democratic presidential hopefuls. On Sunday, all-but-declared candidate California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) registered his own entry into the annals of American infamy, with one major twist — Newsom insulted the very primary voters he needs to woo.

Newsom appeared alongside Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D) at an event promoting the governor’s latest memoir to a predominantly black audience. (Incidentally, every detail of that sentence suggests Newsom cares more about running for president than about fixing the myriad problems of the state he currently governs.) The burden of the memoir is to explain why poor and minority voters should view a governor born with a silver spoon in his mouth as disadvantaged like them.

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you: I’m like you,” Newsom quipped, trying to give his book a helping hand. “I’m no better than you, you know. I’m a 960 SAT guy — and, you know, and I’m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act ‘all there’ if you got 940 — but literally a 960 SAT guy. I cannot — you’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.”

Although Newsom’s deliberate self-effacement generated chuckles in the moment, the comments did not age well. However his exact words are parsed, the fact remains that Newsom sought to establish rapport with his audience by playing stupid.

By contrast, Mayor Dickens rose from a broken home to graduate with a chemical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Master of Public Administration degree from Georgia State. Black Georgians don’t need to hear someone bragging about his sub-par SAT score to feel understood.

In fact, some black Americans took great offense at Newsom’s remark. Rapper Nicki Minaj — who recently went public as a massive Trump fan — excoriated the governor: “His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read.”

Indeed, that soundbite was the low-hanging fruit of Newsom’s comments that spread far and wide. For instance, Fox News’s Sean Hannity wrote, “@GavinNewsom Thinks a 960 SAT Makes Him ‘Like’ Black Americans. Let That Sink In,” along with a video of the remarks.

Apparently, that was such a brutal put-down that Newsom not only felt obliged to respond, but to do so in a way that showcased his command of the English language’s coarser words. “You didn’t give a s*** about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations s*******s — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia? Spare me your fake f****** outrage, Sean,” Newsom needled.

Unfortunately for Newsom, pulling out his playground language in such a public setting exposed it to the entire world. In this instance, it was Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) who stepped up to take Newsom to school.

“This seems like a good time to remind you that a black student in Mississippi is 2.5X more likely to read proficiently by 4th grade than if he or she lived in California. We would be happy to send one of our reading coaches to assist you,

@GavinNewsom. Learning is a lifelong journey, and you might achieve some of the gains that our black fourth graders have,” he wrote. “Incidentally, one nice feature of increased literacy is that you do not have to fall back on vulgarity to seem passionate. Let me know!”

Which came first: Newsom’s low opinion of the intelligence of black Americans or their lagging performance in California schools? To put it differently, did Newsom develop a low opinion of black intelligence by reviewing his state’s underperforming schools, or do California’s black students under-achieve because government officials like Newsom (and especially teachers’ unions) hold them to low expectations?

On one level, Newsom’s comments displayed the same casual racism as former President Joe Biden, who insisted to a crowd of Iowa Asians and Latinos in August 2019 that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” The same President Biden, in the waning dotage of his administration, referred to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as “the black man” in an interview with Black Entertainment Television. Apparently, when Biden could not remember the names of his cabinet secretaries, he could still remember his “diversity hire.”

The racism is not overt, intentional, or malicious. It consists merely of expectations that vary by race. The power of expectations to shape student performance is so well established in education that it has a name: the Pygmalion Effect. These discriminatory expectations thus play a role in reproducing the very racial discrepancies they presuppose.

Newsom’s racial pandering thus suffers from the blight of identity politics. By applying a Marxist worldview (critical theory) to race relations, progressive politicians have convinced themselves that voters can be categorized into various identity groups, and that these groups can then be won over by proposing remedies to their peculiar disadvantages (real or supposed).

This tactic overlooks the need to treat voters as individuals and respond to their individual concerns or needs. In the 2024 election, this strategy backfired, as Democrats missed the fact that many black and Hispanic voters were just as concerned about rising prices and economic growth as white voters — leading many of them to vote for Trump. (In the 2026 midterm elections, Republicans stand in danger of losing these voters for the same reason; they still care about the economy.)

Yet it would be a mistake to claim that inadvertent “racism” is the primary problem with Newsom’s failed pandering. That would commit the same mistake as progressives by giving too much attention to race. Rather, what Newsom suffers from most is elitism.

As a career politician with more money than he needs, Newsom simply struggles to understand the life experiences of the working-class voters he wants to woo. Most working-class black voters never dreamed of hosting private dinner parties in The French Laundry during COVID lockdowns. They simply want safe neighborhoods and access to good-paying jobs. Newsom claiming that he is dumb like them will win voters over about as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) raw hamburgers.