Of all the Democrats who were triumphant on Tuesday night, perhaps the biggest winner wasn’t even on the ballot. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom advanced himself in the 2028 presidential sweepstakes by shepherding the passage of Proposition 50, an initiative that would allow his party to redraw the state’s congressional map in their favor.

With apologies to Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro and his state supreme court wins, nothing else happened in this year’s voting that will more directly help Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.

If Democrats capture the House in 2026, they may have Newsom to thank as much as President Donald Trump. The ballot measure will likely drop the number of Republican-held congressional districts in California from nine to just four. 

Once seen as an uncertain and somewhat risky gambit, Newsom’s ballot initiative prevailed easily, 64 percent to 36 percent.

Gerrymandering, you say? To be sure, Newsom injected partisanship into the process for predictably partisan purposes. But he will tell you that Proposition 50 was a direct response to Texas redistricting efforts, which were aimed at squeezing more Republican House seats out of that red state. Trump has been pushing other GOP-controlled state legislatures to do the same, with mixed results.

Fighting Trump is just what the doctor ordered in today’s Democratic Party, especially now that progressives have tasted their first real electoral success since 2024. But Newsom went through all the stages of grief after Trump returned to the White House. Like many Democrats, he initially sought to try to win back the voters lost to the then-ascendant MAGA coalition. 

At first, it looked like Newsom was going to hug the center lane as he traveled toward the Democratic primaries. He yukked it up with conservatives on his podcast, defended Steve Bannon to the former Kamala Harris sidekick Tim Walz, and seemed to be rethinking his commitment to biological men participating in women’s sports.

But it didn’t take long for Democrats to return to #Resistance mode, and Newsom quickly complied. He fought Trump on illegal immigration and the anti-ICE protests that rocked Los Angeles. He fought Trump on the National Guard being used to suppress the unrest. He has aped Trump’s signature social media style and ridiculed the orange man, in contrast with other Democrats’ off-putting earnestness. 

Over time, Newsom’s stock has steadily risen. Harris, the former vice president, still polls reasonably well based on name recognition, and her memoir of the 2024 campaign has had strong sales. But Newsom has been catching up in the polling averages, sometimes beating her in their shared home state of California, and he won’t have a loss to Trump—or the blowing of $1 billion in campaign cash—on his resume when he hits up the donors.

Newsom exudes sliminess and smarminess. He makes a used car salesman look like a Mormon missionary, Bill Clinton like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. California is a model for the kind of governance much of the country would like to avoid.

Yet Newsom also has an undeniable political talent. He now has one of the Democrats’ biggest redistricting wins under his belt. He fights, as people like to say about their politicians these days. Most importantly, however, is that if the last decade has taught us anything, it is that if you can win a major-party presidential nomination, you could potentially be the president of the United States.

There are a million things Democrats need to fix from 2024. Newsom briefly experimented with some of them, before concluding that rank-and-file Democrats weren’t really all that interested in changing. And the truth is, Democrats may not have to. If enough voters are unhappy with Republicans, the Democrats are the only alternative.

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Both major parties have been trading power back and forth for the past quarter-century. Most presidential elections are close, at least in the battleground states that matter most. The Democrats who won on Tuesday night weren’t appreciably better than the ones who lost a year ago, although maybe they shut up just a bit more about wokeness. (That seems unlikely to hold much longer with New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.)

Really, the only two major adjustments the two parties have made in the last 30-plus years came from the nominations of Clinton and Trump. Clinton’s 1990s successes ended up inflicting longer-term damage on the Democratic Party. Trump is an acquired taste and tends to wear out his welcome with suburbanites. 

If in circa 2027, we are experiencing inflation and war, no matter what else Trump accomplishes, it’s possible Newsom won’t look so bad to a critical mass of voters.