‘the Cavalry Is Here’: With Democratic Sweep, California Plots Life After Resistance Spotlight

SACRAMENTO, California — It was just a year ago that California’s gerrymandering was the talk of American politics, the culmination of a years-long brawl between the state’s ruling Democrats and Donald Trump’s Washington.

Now, Democratic victories across the map have swelled the party’s numbers in Sacramento. But it’s the party’s gains everywhere else — in red swaths of the country, including flipping Texas, and in overtaking Congress — that is captivating the nation.

Democrats in Congress, led by two New Yorkers, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, are gearing up to hammer the administration, while California’s Nancy Pelosi is on her way out. California’s tech industry is on its heels, while its longtime conservative foil, Texas, is suddenly blue.

Once a fixture of larger-than-life conflict with Washington, California may now be entering its low-key era.“The size of the Democratic victory and the geographic scope of it, both in terms of its breadth and its surprising places — Mississippi, for example — means that California is no longer the focus of Trump resistance,” said Doug Herman, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. “And the issues that were forefront in this election, like housing and affordability, are going to be driving the politics in California over the next two years.”

California’s time out of the spotlight might not last long. Two Californians, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, are among leading contenders in the Democratic presidential primary. Rep. Robert Garcia is preparing to take over the House Oversight Committee, while Stephen Miller, the Santa Monica-raised immigration hardliner, is becoming Trump’s chief of staff. Attorney General Rob Bonta will still have a hand in legal clashes with the Trump administration, and the state will host the Olympics in 2028.

But for Democrats here, even if it is still California against Trump, it is no longer California alone — or even primarily — against him. And with Democrats taking over Congress, and the ranks of Democratic governors and attorneys general swelling, that element of conflict with Washington is diminished.

“It finally feels like the cavalry is here, and in a good way, in a resounding way,” said Democratic state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, contrasting the post-midterms environment to years of California being “the tip of the spear” of “fighting Trump at every turn.”

What comes next, she said, is an opportunity for “relentless fixation” on California-centric concerns. “I think it's going to free up our leadership to really focus on the things that that fundamentally California needs to fix on its own, like our housing policy, like making sure our schools are running well.”

The shift in posture in California was evident before Democrats went to bed on election night.

Newsom, the face of the Democratic gerrymander, spent the evening in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, away from election parties where Democrats were celebrating his lower-profile successor, Xavier Becerra. Aside from some all-caps posts to X, Newsom demurred from opportunities to gloat over opponents like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott losing reelection.

When Newsom did emerge later in the week in the headlines, it was over his decision to commute the sentences of prisoners on California’s death row.

In Sacramento, Democrats like Becerra were looking inward, not toward Washington, engaging in the more traditional push-and-pull of lawmakers, interest groups and the governor.

“There's an expectation on us to deliver,” Tia Orr, executive director of the labor union SEIU California, told POLITICO. "I told the new governor, in four years, can we look back and say that people's lives are better, and we improved people's bottom line?”

Becerra refused, meanwhile, to make “wild promises” when reporters asked Thursday about restoring some of his predecessor’s budget cuts, railing against what he called “this game about asking me to commit.”

California will undoubtedly continue to run into conflict with Trump. Becerra sued the administration more than 100 times when he was the state’s attorney general, and made resisting Trump a central tenant of his campaign. Bonta is still attorney general. And in Congress, the state’s delegation is growing by at least five members after redistricting helped the party flip as many House seats, increasing its muscle in Washington.

“We'll have multiple chairs of committees, including oversight, and so I think that the state will continue to be a huge player,” said Garcia. He said his top priorities will be “taking on Trump family corruption,” “abuses of ICE and DHS,” “corporate corruption,” and investigations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein.

But he will be doing it from a position of power in Washington, not California. And as California’s Democratic delegation has grown, so too have the delegations of other states. Members from other states are bidding to chair powerful committees from appropriations to armed services, a likely focal point amid the war. And Garcia taking the gavel will likely reduce conflict between Washington and California after the panel’s Republican leadership spent two years scrutinizing the state’s high-speed rail project, hospice fraud and homelessness spending.

Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón told POLITICO in a statement that the White House “still has a different set of priorities” than California. But like many elected Democrats here, she was also seeing a new political reality.

“I am hopeful that with a new majority in both houses at the federal level and with new State Senators joining our caucus, we will have the chance to focus less on defending ourselves from the federal administration and more on collaborating with them,” Limón said.

Jeremy B. White and Nicole Norman contributed to this report.