Politics

Democrats face an inflection point on trans issues after Newsom comments on sports

Published

1 year ago

March 6, 2025

Gavin Newsom’s provocative new position on trans athletes on Thursday reopened a rift in the Democratic Party that could serve as one of the earliest flash points in the party’s 2028 primary.

Within hours of the California governor condemning trans athletes playing in female sports — shocking his party in his home state — some Democrats unloaded on the likely presidential contender.

“It’s disgusting,” said Lori Lightfoot, the former Chicago mayor. “There are kids waking up today in California with this news thinking that their governor hates them, and rightly so.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) urged Democrats to “not take the bait and give in to their anti trans people rhetoric,” though she hadn’t seen Newsom’s comments.

Major LGBTQ+ organizations immediately made clear they’re looking at trans athletes as a litmus test for ambitious Democrats. “Our message to Gov. Newsom and all leaders across the country is simple: The path to 2028 isn’t paved with the betrayal of vulnerable communities —it’s built on the courage to stand up for what’s right and do the hard work to actually help the American people,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson.

But to moderates, Newsom was offering a lifeline for a party plagued by the culture wars and the polarizing politics of trans women in sports. His comments were the latest from a field of potential contenders seeking to distance themselves from the identity politics of 2024. In recent weeks, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized some approaches to promoting diversity as responsible for how “Trump Republicans are made,” while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker cited a coming budget deficit for a proposal to cut a health care benefit for some noncitizen immigrants.

“We just stepped too far out of the bounds and let the far left drive the narrative,” said a Democratic strategist from a swing state, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Our own voters don’t agree with trans athletes in youth or college sports.”

The strategist said, “To have the governor of one of the bluest states come out and say this, saying our party has gone too far left, then it’s a permission structure for other Democrats to do this, too — to start saying publicly what people have been saying privately.”

Still, Newsom was staking out controversial ground — and potentially alienating whole swaths of activists ahead of 2028. In the hours after saying in a discussion with conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Newsom’s new podcast that it’s “deeply unfair” for trans athletes to play on female sports teams, no other Democrats with 2028 presidential ambitions were willing to back him publicly.

Trans rights has been a difficult subject for Democrats since Trump turned the issue into a potent weapon in his 2024 campaign, unloading millions of dollars in attack ads on Kamala Harris, including one with the tagline, “Kamala’s For They/Them. President Trump is for you.” In the aftermath, many moderates argued the Democratic Party had shifted too far into identity politics and ideological litmus tests.

Newsom, in the same interview with Kirk, said he considered those ads — going after Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners — to be Trump’s most effective political attack against the former vice president.

Some Republicans cast Newsom as craven for bucking most other Democrats. On X, Trump ally Richard Grennell said the California governor should be seen as having “Flip-Flopped on Trans Athletes in Sports after viewing the polling.”

Recent polling supports moderating on the issue. While the majority of American adults support policies protecting trans people from discrimination, 66 percent of those surveyed favor requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth, and 56 percent support banning health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors, according to Pew Research.

On Capitol Hill, most Democrats said they hadn’t directly seen Newsom’s comments but greeted the revelation he had interviewing Kirk on his podcast with somewhat of an eye roll. They refrained from directly critiquing the governor even as they disagreed with the sentiment.

“I just saw the headline. I haven’t read it but I know where I stand,” said Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.). “We don’t mess with our young people, our young people, we got to bring them in, we don’t want to exclude them.”

Democrats had almost unanimously voted against legislation earlier this year that would bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s or girls sports. Although some lawmakers leading up to the vote like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) had generally said they opposed letting transgender athletes play girls sports, they ultimately chose to vote against the legislation and said it was overbroad.

“What’s unfair is the targeting of transgender kids and politicians abandoning them for political expediency,” said Rep. Sarah Jacobs (D-Calif.), vice chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus.

Asked Thursday about Newsom’s comments, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he hadn’t seen them but said Democrats opposed “unleashing sexual predators on girls throughout the United States of America.” Democratic leaders had dubbed the transgender sports bill the “Child Predator Empowerment Act” and argued it would lead to adults inspecting childrens’ genitals to assess their eligibility for sports.

In California, Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento described Newsom’s remarks ricocheting between their phones, trailed by incredulity and outrage at a governor who built his national political profile on recognizing same-sex marriage aligning himself with right-wing opposition to trans rights. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom defied federal and state law by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples

“We woke up profoundly disappointed and sickened, when you have someone who has been thoughtful and has been a very unwavering ally release a statement like that,” said Assembly member Chris Ward, a gay San Diego Democrat who has sparred with conservatives over trans issues. “Look, this is playing into a lot of the conversation that Donald Trump is obsessing about in order to distract us.”

Mia McCarthy, Amanda Friedman and Jeremy White contributed to this report.

Politics

Michigan pollster accuses McMorrow campaign of killing unfavorable Senate poll

Published

11 hours ago

June 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A prominent Michigan pollster is accusing state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s Senate campaign of pressuring a state capitol news outlet into killing a survey of the heated Democratic primary.

The pollster, Steve Mitchell, told Blue Light News the survey was conducted on behalf of Michigan Information & Research Service, an independent news outlet covering the state capitol that his firm regularly works with. But MIRS ultimately chose not to publish the survey after pushback from the McMorrow campaign.

The poll found McMorrow at just 6 percent ahead of the state’s pivotal Aug. 4 contest, far behind former public health official Abdul El-Sayed at 42 percent and Rep. Haley Stevens at 33 percent.

“The poll, in the eyes of the McMorrow campaign, understated their support,” Mitchell, whose firm Mitchell Research & Communications conducted and paid for the poll, told Blue Light News. “And they put intense pressure on MIRS, and therefore MIRS decided that they weren’t going to run the survey. That’s their decision, and I support their decision.”

McMorrow has trailed the other two candidates in a number of recent public surveys, but 6 percent would mark a new low — a sign her campaign for the critical Michigan Senate seat may be mired in third place. McMorrow’s campaign told Blue Light News the polling methodology was faulty and that its resulting memo was riddled with errors, including spelling her name wrong.

Kyle Melinn, a news editor with MIRS, said he killed the poll after speaking with the McMorrow campaign and other pollsters.

“I told Steve that the campaign did raise issues with the poll, and that they were pressuring me to not run the poll,” Melinn said in an interview. He added that after registering the McMorrow campaign’s concerns, he solicited the advice of other pollsters, and “didn’t run it because I didn’t feel comfortable with it.” The other unidentified pollsters shared his issues with the poll, according to Melinn.

McMorrow campaign spokesperson Jackson Boaz said in a statement that “Voicing concerns about a poll isn’t a pressure campaign. They chose not to publish a survey that is deeply flawed.” Asked whether the campaign had asked MIRS not to run the poll, Boaz said, “MIRS chose not to run the poll because they agreed the poll did not meet their standards.”

Boaz said the McMorrow campaign reached out to MIRS after “we noticed odd things about the data,” including that 0 percent of Black voters were undecided in the race; 0 or 1 percent of voters in Detroit and its metro area were undecided while other parts of the state had undecided voters at 25 percent, 48 percent, and even 54 percent; and that McMorrow was at just 5 percent support in her home base of Oakland County.

Their suspicion — which they said MIRS confirmed — was that the poll allowed anyone to take it through an open link, rather than having access controlled to ensure a random and representative sample of the state.

The poll was conducted through a methodology known as text-to-web, in which random voters are selected to receive a text message link to a survey to fill out. That allows pollsters to ensure they are reaching an appropriately wide-ranging group of voters. But the McMorrow campaign said all respondents received the same open-access link, which would allow anyone with the link to take the poll — potentially multiple times.

“The outlet that sponsored this poll declined to publish it because it didn’t meet their standards.

It was conducted through an open SurveyMonkey link sent over text, meaning anyone who

received this poll could vote multiple times or send the link to friends and supporters to impact

the results,” Boaz said in a statement. “This is fundamental polling malpractice. We urge either of our opponents, or any reputable pollster, to stand by this shoddy methodology.”

In an interview, Mitchell admitted he got some of the polling memo wrong, saying for example that he meant to write El-Sayed supported Medicare for All, not “Social Security for All.” But he said he stood by the poll and its methodology.

“I have always had 100 percent confidence in all the polling I do,” Mitchell said. “I believe that we’ve been very strenuous in the methodology that we use. We’re very careful about it. We weighted it well, and more importantly, we have a track record that shows we are a strong and good pollster.”

“A poll is a poll,” Mitchell said when asked about the open link question, sharing a poll with Blue Light News from GOP gubernatorial candidate John James that he said used a similar approach.

The controversy over the spiked poll underscores the importance of the Michigan Senate race. Democrats view defending the open seat as crucial to reclaiming the Senate majority, and the party establishment has mobilized hard against Bernie Sanders-backed El-Sayed, who they argue could pave the way to Republican Mike Rogers flipping the seat in November.

But recent pollssuggest McMorrow is falling behind El-Sayed, who is experiencing a surge in support, and Stevens, who is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

In the memo about the contested poll, Mitchell wrote there has been a “huge erosion in support for Mallory McMorrow.”

“One of the reasons for her seeming collapse is the fact El-Sayed had received a large amount of unpaid media because of the endorsements by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Hasan Piker the anti-Semitic podcaster while Haley Stevens had an outside organization spend more than $6 million on her candidacy,” Mitchell wrote. However, he added: “Our poll was conducted June 11-13 which coincided with an ad buy of at least $5 million on behalf of McMorrow that started just the day before we began our polling. Therefore, McMorrow’s ads did not have enough time to impact our results.”