So much has happened in the year and a half since the 2024 election that it’s easy to forget one of the clearest takeaways from Donald Trump’s victory:. Longtime readers of this newsletter are familiar with the statistics: Of the five states that swung the most towards Trump, four (New York, New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts) were deep blue, with Democrats in full control of state government. The movement at the local level was often even bigger: big, blue cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago outpaced the rest of the country in moving right. The upshot was clear: Democratic governance in blue states and cities had become political albatrosses for the Democratic Party.
Now, as we approach the midway point of the 2026 primary season, it’s not clear that the party is solving the problem.
Georgia
In the Peach State, Democrats have nominated Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, as their candidate for governor. Bottoms won last week’s primary in a blowout, surprising many observers who expected a runoff. She also brings liabilities related to her time leading the state’s largest city from 2018 to 2022. That tenure was a complicated one: It coincided with the COVID pandemic, and the subsequent violent crime surge was felt acutely in Atlanta in particular. Though Bottoms responded in stronger terms than many other Democrats — she strongly condemned rioters and avoided endorsing defunding the police — the political risks remain. The video and images of the 2020 riots are likely to feature heavily in Republican ads in the general election, something the campaigns of multiple of Bottoms’ former Democratic rivals mentioned in conversations I had over the past few months. To cap it off: Bottoms made the surprise decision not to run for re-election in 2021, instead opting to work in the Biden White House. While I’m dubious on how much voters will care about either, her affiliation with Democrats’ most recent, unpopular leader hardly represents the fresh direction many other candidates in purple states are running on.
The race’s stakes remain oddly under-appreciated, even among the most plugged-in Democrats. Georgia is by far the bluest state not to have elected a Democratic governor in the 21st century — in fact, it’s the only one Joe Biden won in 2020 that has not been led by a Democrat this century — and its hard-right state policy landscape is increasingly out of step with its political lean. The next governor will also serve through the 2028 election, when Georgia will likely be a crucial part of any winning Democratic coalition; both of the Republican candidates (who are currently battling in their own runoff) are far less likely to emulate outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp’s 2020 posture, when he accepted the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. Moreover, the election of a Republican, who would fill any Senate vacancy, could foreclose the presidential or vice presidential campaigns of either of Georgia’s senators.
California
On the other side of the country, Democrats are racing to the finish line with two flawed candidates leading the pack. Xavier Becerra, a former congressman, state attorney general, and HHS Secretary under Biden, and Tom Steyer, liberal billionaire donor, have become the unlikely final two in a race once expected to feature Democratic heavyweights like Kamala Harris or Sen. Alex Padilla. They, too, present distinct liabilities. Becerra, who was polling near the bottom of the pack until the surprise exit of disgraced ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell, is largely running on his opposition to Trump: My analysis of his campaign ads found every single one, with the exception of one spot trolling Steyer’s deep spending, mentions Trump’s name. One California insider I spoke to invoked Joe Biden’s famous 2008 phrase to describe his campaign as a “noun, a verb, and Donald Trump.”
Becerra also has by far the least detailed plan for housing, the state’s most pressing issue, of any of the top candidates, according to experts. Most recently, he’s struggled to respond to questions about how he plans to alter the state’s affordability crisis — arguably the most fair and basic question facing anyone seeking to lead the largest and most expensive state in the country — instead touting the state’s status as “the fourth-largest economy in the world.” Like Bottoms, he too brings the baggage of his association with the Biden administration, though that’s unlikely to be as much of an issue in deep blue California.
On the other end, Steyer is running as a populist class-traitor, a billionaire hellbent on taxing other billionaires. That meant endorsing just about every progressive tax-and-spend idea possible, including higher corporate taxes, higher individual taxes, a one-time billionaire tax opposed by outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a single-payer healthcare system no state has succeeded in implementing. All of this comes as, as I’ve written before, state revenue remains higher than in most of its recent history. His campaign cannot exactly be described as a grassroots uprising: Despite spending more than $200 million on his campaign so far, lapping his rivals and making his campaign the most expensive self-funded primary effort in history, he’s capturing just about 20% of the vote in polls.
The issue is not limited to governor’s races. In Washington, D.C., which is facing a dire fiscal situation, the Democratic primary for mayor has narrowed down to two council members, Janeese Lewis George and Kenyan McDuffie. Both have shortcomings: Lewis George has centered her campaign around a series of aggressive proposals, from a local Green New Deal to free drug injection sites, that would set up an immediate showdown with the Trump administration, which would likely jump at the chance to curtail the district’s home rule. McDuffie, meanwhile, has expressed support for measures like rolling back traffic enforcement — at a time when D.C. is now twice as deadly for pedestrians as a decade ago. In Los Angeles, the shortcomings of Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor, and Nithya Raman, a council member who only recently disavowed defunding the police, have allowed reality star Spencer Pratt a real shot at advancing to the general election, according to recent polls. The throughline of all these candidates is less about ideology — they range from registered democratic socialists to establishment figures — and more about the institutional inertia they represent.
To be clear, none of these in isolation presents a significant problem. Indeed, some may not prove to be problems at all. Bottoms’ odds, for example, may be underrated by observers, especially given the national environment and recent evidence in her state, where Democrats outvoted Republicans on primary day. But the broader picture is hard to ignore. The 2024 election offered a clear warning about the direction of Democratic governance. Now, in some of the year’s highest-profile races — including one of the premier swing states, the country’s largest state, its second-largest city, and its capital — the party is elevating figures who risk repeating the mistakes that hurt Democrats in 2024.
One last thing
Did this leave you depressed? Keep an eye out for a newsletter in the coming weeks with the opposite case — that Democrats like Kathy Hochul, Josh Shapiro, and Zohran Mamdani are correctly learning the lessons of 2024.
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