This comes on the heels of Republican Ann Davison winning the Seattle city attorney election and as a number of other Republican-aligned candidates make headway in Democratic primaries and non-partisan municipal elections in a number of historically progressive cities. This is most apparent in the successful recall of the progressive San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, but can also be seen in the first-place primary finish of the real estate developer and recent Republican Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayoral race, and the first-place primary finish of Los Angeles’s rogue sheriff, Alex Villanueva. Progressive movements centered on racial justice, criminal justice reform, tenants’ rights and more have spent the last decade building power locally in cities across the country these movements are now running into a serious and well-financed backlash from the entrenched interests they vowed to fix. California represents the vanguard of a phenomenon of urban reaction.
The election did see some huge results which will have implications across the country, in particular on the municipal level. Republicans may pick up a few seats in California if there ends up being a giant Republican wave this fall, but they are still a defeated force at the federal and state level in all but a few pockets of California. Today, there’s effectively no threat of Republicans being involved in state-level governing. As recently as a decade ago, Republicans in California could threaten Democrats when they had an advantage in the national climate.
In California’s top statewide races, Democrats easily finished with a large majority of votes across the board, with Republicans struggling to even approach 40% of the statewide vote. Despite their failure at a federal level, conservative forces are on the move in California using a playbook that will be repeated across the country. The second is that once partisanship is removed in the eyes of voters, conservative forces have a lot of room to operate. The first is that California is still a one-party state. T here are a few clear lessons from the recent primary elections in California.