Election night across the nation produced a blue wave — or rather a tsunami, as pundits put it, referring to the massive successes Democrats found, particularly in Republican strongholds.
Already deeply blue, such a swell in California is a bit harder to spot.
But the evidence was there, on the day after polls closed.
House seats that retained either a Republican incumbent or a GOP voter registration advantage after the 2025 partisan redistricting reshuffling were flipping, or at least on the verge of doing so.
The race for governor, while expected to be an easy victory for former Biden Cabinet Secretary Xavier Becerra, was called as soon as polls closed at 8 p.m., before any vote tallies were even posted on the secretary of state’s website.
In multiple legislative seats, including in a state Senate district covering Huntington Beach, Republicans awoke Wednesday struggling to maintain slim leads or jump ahead altogether.
“There’s no question that we saw a blue tidal wave across the country on Tuesday,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley, “but California was already at high tide.”
Waves, though, push sand or pebbles or debris, ever-changing shorelines. So will Tuesday night’s elections alter the landscape of the country.
And California, perhaps because of its deep roots already in Democratic politics, is poised to continue to play a role in molding that landscape.
In California, redistricting worked
Democrats are poised not only to take control of Congress next year, but to do so with a massive margin in the U.S. House.
That’s partly because California’s Democratic leaders convinced voters last year to approve a partisan redistricting plan that redrew the state’s congressional boundaries to make several seats easier for Democrats to win. The effort was to counter similar gerrymandering in GOP-led states by making seats more easily winnable for Republican candidates.
In California, that plan seemed to work, preliminary returns show.
Elsewhere, not so much.
In Texas, Republicans reconfigured three heavily Latino districts in the Rio Grande Valley, which had shifted toward Trump in 2024, to try to boost their chances of unseating Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. But both won reelection Tuesday. And Democrats instead unseated Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, whose district is sandwiched between theirs.
In Alabama, a Supreme Court ruling allowed the Republican-led legislature to revert to what the GOP considered to be a friendlier map. But Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures won reelection anyway, defying Republicans’ plans.
In Missouri, courts already struck down a plan to eliminate one Democrat-controlled seat. Voters, in turn Tuesday night, flipped a long-held Republican district, where an incumbent has served for more than a decade.
And not only did California’s redistricting plan work, but Democrats may also be on the verge of flipping at least one seat.
In California’s 22nd Congressional District, which includes Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera and Tulare counties, Republican Rep. David Valadao was unseated by Randy Villegas, a progressive endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Valadao was the last remaining Republican in the House who had voted to impeach President Donald Trump, and had a history of winning close races in the district.
Until Tuesday.
“Valadao is a guy who strategically positioned himself so he could keep Trump at arm’s length and culture wars stuff at arm’s length. But his arm wasn’t long enough,” said Matt Lesenyie, an expert in political psychology who teaches at Cal State Long Beach.
To be fair, Republicans were vastly outnumbered by Democrats leading up to Election Day, voter registration numbers showed.
Still, it wasn’t a milquestoast, moderate” candidate who won, but rather someone who is “unabashedly liberal,” Lesenyie noted.
But down in California’s 23rd Congressional District, in Kern, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, that’s another story.
Incumbent Rep. Jay Obernolte held onto a slim lead over Democratic challenger Tessa Lynn Hodge as the sun rose Wednesday.
The district was drawn to include a plurality of GOP voters and, leading up to the election, there were nearly 24,000 more registered Republican voters than Democrats.
This is a perfect example of a blue undercurrent in Southern California, particularly because the 23rd District flew a bit under the radar, political experts said. This was not a typical race targeted by national Democrats where oodles of money was spent, said Michael Trujillo, a Democratic strategist based in Los Angeles.
Obernolte has nearly $1.4 million cash on hand, according to his latest report with the Federal Election Commission, the regulatory agency that enforces campaign finance laws.
Hodge, meanwhile, reported having just $12,000 in mid-October.
“In a race like this, that perfectly defines what a real, national large blue wave would look like: seats and incumbents that weren’t on anyone’s radar screens the Wednesday after the Tuesday where we’re seeing a potential heartbeat for the Democratic challenger. That’s probably the most local piece of evidence on the federal side that we can look at.”
The race had not been called as of Wednesday morning.
“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton opined Tuesday night after his resounding loss.
‘Lawyer up’
As Democrats began to celebrate their imminent control of Congress, Rep. Robert Garcia, who is expected to lead the main investigative committee in the House, had just two words to say.
“Lawyer up,” the Long Beach Democrat posted onto — and then pinned to the top of — his official X account.
Just those two words ignited a cornucopia of headlines, highlighting the warning to Trump and other Republicans from the incoming House Oversight Committee chair. That widespread attention, though, also underscored the role California lawmakers — from Garcia to House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of Fontana to U.S. Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — are set to play in Washington with a new Democratic majority.
“Almost every Southern California Democratic House member will have much more influence next year than they’ve had for the last two years, but Robert Garcia is about to become very, very famous,” said Schnur.
Garcia, said Lesenyie, is set to “be the face and the agenda setter for accountability.”
Still, despite Garcia’s quick rise to stardom in the Democratic Party — the former Long Beach mayor was elected to Congress in 2022 — he may need to find his footing in the new majority, said Schnur.
Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat who is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House, has said the party will focus on affordability issues as well as holding the Trump administration and others accountable.
“There are a lot of members, including party leaders, who want to focus on policy matters, specifically inflation and affordability,” Schnur said. “There’s certainly an important role for oversight, but it may take a while for them to figure out how large that part of their agenda should be.”
Lesenyie’s advice?
“Protect the brand. You can’t investigate everything, but investigate the things that come to a conclusion by the end of the summer so they can move on.”
The 2028 of it all
Yes, we know the 2026 election was just this week. But a rise of star power among Democrats nationwide brings with it a bevy of implications for the 2028 presidential contest.
There are the newer names that have arrived on the scene, like James Talarico, who flipped a U.S. Senate seat in Texas.
There are also some more familiar folks who only bolstered their appeal on Tuesday, such as Jon Ossoff, who resoundingly won reelection to a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, or New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose influence spread across multiple midterm contests, including Abdul El-Sayed’s U.S. Senate victory in Michigan.
“The path to the presidency may have gotten a little bit more challenging on Tuesday night” for potential candidates like Gov. Gavin Newsom, said Schnur.
“A Democratic majority is good for any candidate who wants the party’s nomination, but the fact that Democrats won so big and won with aggressively left-leaning candidates in swing states and districts makes it somewhat harder for a candidate like Newsom,” he said.
“Because the Democrats won by such immense margins, Tuesday night was much more an AOC night than a Newsom night,” Schnur said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez. “The party progressives will be that much more energized and that much more convinced that they can win in competitive districts and purple states.”
“Newsom is still going to be one of the party frontrunners, but a narrower majority would have been somewhat of a help for someone with his political biography.”
Trujillo, though, is looking at 2028 through a different lens.
Specifically, he’s looking at South Carolina, a strong Republican state that leads the Democrats’ presidential primary nominating calendar. And where voters just elected Annie Andrews, the first Democrat chosen to represent them in the U.S. Senate since 1998.
“How many new names have just become immensely powerful powerbrokers in the party? One of them is the newly elected senator for South Carolina,” Trujillo said.
With her new influence, should Andrews get involved in the primary and back a candidate, that will “infuse that candidate’s presidential campaign with a lot of momentum andpresident.”
Andrews, Trujillo said, “is an important piece of the puzzle now for Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom,” should they decide to run for the White House.
“I don’t think looking at potential presidential candidates right now is the right thing. I think there are new and interesting characters they have to maneuver around, and our new (South Carolina) senator is one of them.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
