Something is happening in the early jostling for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Three of the most prominent potential candidates are all rolling out deeply personal stories about troubled childhoods at roughly the same moment. The timing is no coincidence; it is a political calculation for the 2028 presidential election.
If you read my PJ Media colleague Stephen Green's piece on this story, you already know the basics. But I've been turning it over in my mind, trying to decode the calculus behind Democrats from privileged upbringings desperately trying to portray themselves as regular Joes who triumphed despite enormous hardship.
For example, in Josh Shapiro's new memoir, Where We Keep the Light, he describes what he calls "a happy childhood and, at points, an unhappy childhood home." He writes about his mother’s instability, and how he and his siblings believed "if we were good, we could stop the chaos and the yelling." His father was a pediatrician, and they were an upper-middle-class family.
JB Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, hasn't written a memoir, but he recently sat down with the New York Times to recall losing his father, Donald, to a heart attack at age 7 and his mother, Sue, to alcoholism when he was 17. He described his mother trying to explain her drinking to an 8-year-old version of himself and promising to beat it. "But she was never able to overcome it," he told the Times. "It overcame her and took her life."
Gavin Newsom wasn’t born into a billionaire dynasty, but he grew up surrounded by wealth and influence. His father’s close ties to the Getty family placed him inside one of California’s most powerful circles from an early age. Those connections later translated into real opportunities, including financial backing from billionaire Gordon Getty for his business ventures. But he portrays his personal story very differently, leaning hard into his parents’ divorce, his mother working three jobs while his father grew distant, and his struggles with dyslexia, which he has been playing up heavily on his book tour.
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For sure, these are real parts of their real lives. But it’s obvious here that each of these men is trying to rebrand himself as someone who struggled throughout life, pulled himself up from his bootstraps, and succeeded through hard work and grit alone.
This happens a lot. Remember, Kamala Harris had a privileged upbringing and still felt she had to claim that she used to work at a McDonald’s while in college, despite there being zero proof of this. So, why are Shapiro, Pritzker, and Newsom trying so hard to rebrand themselves the same way?
My theory: it's JD Vance envy. His 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy told the story of a kid who grew up in genuine poverty, with alcoholic grandparents and a drug-addicted mother, and made something extraordinary of himself. It's a powerful American story. Do you remember how Gov. Tim Walz tried mocking Vance for rising above a hard childhood? That didn't go so well. So the new strategy is to stop mocking and start competing, to find the darkness in their own stories and amplify it.
The Democrats' problem is obvious. Shapiro grew up in comfortable suburban Philadelphia. Newsom was raised in proximity to the Getty family’s wealth and attended elite private schools. Pritzker was literally born into one of the richest families in America. These people didn’t have hard lives. They just want you to think they did.
Keep in mind, Vance didn't write Hillbilly Elegy to create a mythology about his backstory for the purpose of running for president. He wrote it years before he entered politics. The suffering was real, the escape was real, and the book was written before any of it was politically useful. That's the difference. And no amount of careful memoir-crafting by today’s Democrats is going to close that gap.
