Now, the main event…

For all the talk of anti-establishment fervor inside the Democratic Party—calls for generational change, pitchfork mobs coming for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, insurgent populists muscling aside moderates—California’s primaries this week were a triumph of machine politics and a sign that Democratic voters were more interested in pragmatism than big promises.

In the governor’s race, Democrat Xavier Becerra is leading the field and looks likely to advance to the top-two runoff after running a do-no-harm campaign backed by the state’s consultant class and pretty much every corporate entity that does business in Sacramento. Barring some wild swing in the vote count over the next few days, Becerra’s chief Democratic rival, billionaire former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, will be left behind. Steyer spent more than $200 million of his own money campaigning on big systemic change—taxing billionaires, building a million new homes, enacting a single-payer healthcare system. But California Democrats, apparently, preferred the incrementalist. “There was a reward for being consistent and calm and steady in what Becerra is doing,” former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti said on CNN last night.

In the L.A. mayor’s race, embattled incumbent Karen Bass, who is deeply unpopular in her overwhelmingly liberal city thanks to her hapless response to last year’s wildfires, still netted far more votes than Nithya Raman, the democratic-socialist-aligned challenger to her left, and Spencer Pratt, the law-and-order attention merchant to her right. Unlike those two, Bass had the support of a political machine: organized labor, activist groups, nonwhite voters, pastors, and key Democratic endorsements. In recent months—as Pratt began to dominate the conversation over public safety—Bass finally figured out how to talk to her city with some humility, copping to mistakes and admitting that the homelessness problem will take time to fix, while also assuring voters that violent crime is down, that she’s hired more cops, and that she’ll keep standing up for immigrants in the face of Donald Trump’s deportation ambushes in California.

As with other elections around the country dating back to last year, Democrats won or advanced by focusing on the basics. Yes, there were promises to stand up to Trump—table stakes for any Democratic messaging. (“California is bigger than Trump,” Becerra said in his primary night speech. “Our values are undeniable—and undeportable.”) But Tuesday’s winners, generally, ran on the cost of living, safe streets and playgrounds, good schools, and healthcare costs. Not exactly peak woke.

“Californians are rightfully furious about the cost of living, but they have no interest in returning to a time when politicians were more focused on ideological purity tests than providing good schools, clean and safe streets, and cheaper gas,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic strategist and advisor to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, a proud back-to-basics moderate Democrat. “Trump is the nonstop chaos agent in their lives. They want competence and stability.” Law pointed to Lurie’s sky-high approval ratings, saying “He’s focused on what matters in people’s lives” in the Bay Area. “The election results on Tuesday were a resounding validation of that approach.”

In House primaries, crepuscular Democratic members of Congress like Brad Sherman and Mike Thompson easily beat back younger, well-funded challengers as they advanced to runoffs against token Republican opponents. The populist left also flopped in key races. Candidates claiming the mantle of Bernie and A.O.C.—Ammar Campa-Najjar in a San Diego–area district and Saikat Chakrabarti gunning for Nancy Pelosi’s long-occupied seat—fizzled down the stretch. Pelosi herself flexed her muscle to box out Chakrabarti, coming in late to endorse a more moderate successor, Connie Chan, sending her to the runoff against another moderate, Scott Wiener.

The leftists aren’t totally cooked. In the Central Valley, where Democrats want to unseat Republican Rep. David Valadao, the Bernie-endorsed Randy Villegas has a slight edge in the vote count over the establishment’s choice, Jasmeet Bains. And in Sacramento, 81-year-old Doris Matsui might be facing a runoff against the much younger, more progressive Mai Vang, a teacher vowing to take on the country’s billionaire class. Both newcomers can win. But if they make it to Congress as part of California’s new delegation next year, under new congressional maps, they might be the loners on the left.

No one should extrapolate too much about the state of a political party—or the country—from any single primary in a single state. The marquee elections in California, for governor and Los Angeles mayor, have plainly been weird, with many Democratic voters holding on to their crowded ballots late and voting strategically under the state’s top-two primary system. And California is almost prohibitively expensive to run in, no matter the office, making campaigns difficult for underdogs. But watching the results trickle in last night and today, it’s safe to assume that Democrats in this deep-blue state scrutinized their many options and decided that the normie libs were just fine, thank you very much.

Speaking of normies, Spencer Pratt is most assuredly not one. But his rise can’t be separated from his normie appeal on public safety, an issue very salient to voters in Los Angeles, and not just Republicans. To be clear: While Pratt is likely to make the runoff against Bass—meaning the very online among us will have to endure five more months of A.I.-slop videos cooked up by his supporters—there is almost no chance he will actually make it to City Hall in November. As unpopular as Bass is, the city is just too blue for a candidate with an R next to his name, especially one who landed a quasi-endorsement from Trump last month.

Like Trump, Pratt can be brash and shameless. But unlike Trump, he has been relentlessly on message about the perception of disorder in the city—and he generally shirks national culture-war fights. That’s why he has expanded his support beyond just Republicans, who make up only about 14 percent of the city’s registered voters. Pratt, though, is hovering around 30 percent of the vote, suggesting he’s pulled in independents and maybe even some Democrats—a dynamic I wrote about last month. Why? Well, for all the media focus on his tactics and screen-first approach to campaigning, the reason is really just his message, and the message is not complicated. Whether in L.A. or Lubbock, the median U.S. voter prioritizes public safety over a range of issues—climate, democracy, matters of identity and culture. And data shows that voters also believe the Democratic Party doesn’t really care about public safety anymore—crime, homelessness, drug addiction. Democrats have ceded that turf to Republicans, like Pratt. But they don’t have to.

There has been plenty of focus lately on the D.N.C.’s bungled autopsy report, which was supposed to get to the bottom of what the party did wrong in 2024. But there already was a great autopsy, which I wrote about last year, called Deciding to Win—a deep, data-rich report conducted by the center-left outfit Welcome and endorsed by a range of bold-faced names across the progressive coalition: David Plouffe, Dan Pfeiffer, Matt Stoller, Sarah Longwell, Lis Smith, Jon Favreau, and so on. (You can read it here.) Among its findings: Only 4 percent of voters said that Democrats, as a party, prioritize crime as one of their top three issues. Instead, voters said, Democrats care way more about LGBT issues, abortion, and climate. A clear majority of voters (56 percent) also said they wanted Democrats to focus more on reducing crime. And the share of voters who see the Democratic Party as “too liberal” has increased dramatically since 2012.

“We need to focus on our popular positions, particularly on healthcare and the economy, while moderating our unpopular positions, particularly on immigration and crime,” the report’s authors wrote. “Going forward, it will be critical for our party to reduce the gap between what voters want Democrats to focus on and what voters think we do focus on.” Voters in L.A. have been screaming for years that they want city leaders to focus on costs, affordable housing, and, yes, public safety. The issue set was there for the taking for any Democrat who wanted it, but Pratt grabbed it first.

Bass, of course, couldn’t run as an incumbent pointing her camera at street homelessness and dangerous tent encampments. But her challenger from the left, City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, might have found more success in the primary by just admitting that Angelenos feel unsafe—without also dehumanizing homeless people on the streets, as Pratt often does. Instead, Raman seemed contemptuous of Pratt’s very presence in the race, which meant she was also seen as dismissing the real concerns of his supporters, as if raising questions about drug abuse near playgrounds was some kind of lowly MAGA distraction. Pratt’s strength as a political figure—however limited in this election—has been gut instinct and emotional storytelling. That can make for a compelling choice in an election when your rivals prefer white papers and press conferences.

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