California may soon have its first Latino governor in modern history, while Los Angeles voters nearly denied a second term to the city’s first female mayor. Not long ago, these milestones would have dominated political analysis. This year, they barely registered.
Democrats have long argued that America’s central political tension revolves around who belongs, organizing their strategy accordingly. But the California primary offered a stark lesson in how much has shifted.
That contrast was especially clear in the governor’s race. Earlier this year, Democratic leaders worried that too many candidates were splitting support in the jungle primary and urged some to drop out. The party establishment largely backed then-Rep. Eric Swalwell. Meanwhile, Xavier Becerra—a former state attorney general, Cabinet secretary, and one of the most experienced public servants in the field—struggled to generate similar enthusiasm from insiders. Becerra is now the frontrunner. That outcome reveals what Democratic voters were actually looking for, rather than what party leaders assumed they wanted.
Democrats spent much of the 2010s believing demographic change itself was a political strategy, and that the achievement of identity politics was making representation normal. The lesson of the 2020s may be that demographic representation is now expected, but electoral success depends on delivering tangible results. A path back to national power for Democrats in 2028 runs through that distinction. It means recruiting and elevating candidates of all backgrounds based on their ideas and records, not their visibility.
The California primary offered a cautionary tale of what happens when the party gets this backward. Becerra is the son of immigrants who grew up in a California farmworker family, yet in the primary, nobody was talking about that. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the city’s first Black woman mayor, became the first sitting incumbent in over 20 years to be forced into a November runoff. The race turned not on her identity, but on her handling of homelessness, the Palisades fire, and a nearly billion-dollar budget shortfall.
That silence is the story. A party that spent decades celebrating “firsts”—first Black president, first Latina Supreme Court justice, first woman elected as the Democratic presidential nominee—is now watching those firsts get evaluated using the same ruthless metrics as everyone else: competence, results, and accountability. Identity politics was never just cynical tokenism. At its best, it was a genuine attempt to correct for centuries of exclusion and to signal that communities had a seat at the table. Those goals were real, and progress was real. But the politics calcified long after the culture moved on. Democrats kept speaking the language of representation to voters who had largely accepted the premise and moved on to asking harder questions.
The backlash was easy to misread. Republicans said it was a rejection of “wokeness,” but that framing was too convenient. What actually happened is more interesting. Voters—including the minority voters Democrats assumed were animated by identity appeals—began to prioritize concrete outcomes over symbolic ones. Latino voters in particular have been drifting toward Republicans for a decade. This is not because they rejected their own identity, but because they found the Democratic Party increasingly focused on how it talked about them rather than what it delivered for them.
California’s primary crystallized something apparent in national data for years. Becerra is poised to advance and likely be elected based on his record as an experienced, even-keeled public servant and a fighter for working families. His background is incidental to his pitch, not central to it—a meaningful inversion. And Bass is losing ground, not because Los Angeles voters have turned against a Black woman mayor in the abstract, but because thousands lost their homes and watched her administration stumble in real time. This is what accountability without asterisks looks like, and it is, in a strange way, another form of progress.
The timing makes this reckoning even more urgent. Not long ago, the Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, effectively rendering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, in Justice Elena Kagan’s words, “all but a dead letter.” The decision guts the primary legal tool minority voters have used for 60 years to challenge racially discriminatory maps, and its consequences for Black and Latino representation in Congress will be severe. Democrats should be fighting that ruling with every tool at their disposal. But they should also sit with the uncomfortable irony it surfaces: The legal scaffolding built to guarantee minority representation is being torn down at precisely the moment when minority voters themselves are signaling that representation alone was never enough. You can have a seat at the table and still fail the people who sent you there.
The lesson for Democrats is not to abandon diversity, but to expect it. The party’s coalition is genuinely broad, and that breadth is a strategic asset. Earlier this year, when Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks sent an open letter urging underfunded, under-polling candidates to step aside, it was widely understood to be aimed at candidates of color in the race. Meanwhile, the trend of voters prioritizing competence over identity is also reflected in other races, such as the record primary loss rate for House members seeking higher office in an anti-Washington wave, and the D.C. mayoral primary where progressive Janeese Lewis George leads as voters test ranked-choice voting.
