California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra motions during an election night event Tuesday, June 2, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) California may soon elect its first Latino governor in modern history. Los Angeles voters nearly denied a second term to the city’s first female mayor. Not long ago, those developments would have dominated political analysis. This year, they barely registered.
Democrats have long contended that America’s central tension is the question of who belongs and have organized their politics accordingly. But the California primary offered a striking lesson in how much has changed.
That contrast was especially clear in the governor’s race.
Earlier this year, Democratic Party leaders openly worried that too many candidates were dividing support in the jungle primary and urged some to suspend their campaigns. Much of the party establishment coalesced around then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Meanwhile, Xavier Becerra, a former state attorney general, Cabinet secretary, and one of the most experienced public servants in the field, struggled to generate comparable enthusiasm from party insiders.
Becerra is now the frontrunner. That outcome says something important about what Democratic voters were actually looking for rather than what party leaders assumed they wanted.
Democrats spent much of the 2010s believing that demographic change itself was a political strategy and that the achievement of identity politics was making demographic 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 on the strength of their ideas and their 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, and 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, unglamorous 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, to call out discrimination, to open doors, and to signal to voters that their communities had a seat at the table. Those goals were real, and the progress was real.
The problem is that the politics calcified long after the culture had 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 what they called “wokeness.” But that framing was always too convenient and self-serving to be the whole truth. What actually happened is more interesting. Voters — including the very 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 the way it talked about them rather than what it delivered for them.
California’s primary election crystallized something that has been apparent in the national data for years. Becerra is poised to advance and likely to be elected based on his record as an experienced and even-keeled public servant and as a fighter for working families. His background is incidental to his pitch, not central to it. That is 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 of them 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 party’s gatekeepers, including Hicks, Sen. Adam Schiff, and major union leaders, lined up behind the top three candidates, all of whom were white. Candidates of color with genuinely impressive resumes, among them former city mayors, statewide officeholders, and executives who had managed billion-dollar budgets, languished at the bottom of the polls, starved of institutional support.
Becerra, one of those formerly nudged toward the exit, will face Republican Steve Hilton in November.
The party chose performance, but the voters chose substance. And in doing so, they did something the party’s own leaders could not: They treated candidates of color as politicians to be judged on their merits, not symbols to be managed.
That is not the end of diversity in American politics. It’s the quiet end of identity politics as a substitute for good governance.
Sara Sadhwani, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College and senior researcher at AAPI Data. She serves on California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission and is a member of the Los Angeles County Governance Reform Taskforce.
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