LOS ANGELES — At first glance, Rep. Mimi Walters doesn’t seem like the sort of Republican who’s about to lose her job.

A former investment banker who climbed the Republican ladder in ritzy Laguna Niguel, Calif., before heading to Washington, D.C., Walters has always felt like a good fit for California’s 45th Congressional District — a conservative-leaning, business-oriented patch of suburban Orange County, itself a traditional GOP stronghold. In 2014, voters there first elected Walters to Congress by 30 percentage points; two years later she won reelection by 17 points, even as Donald Trump lost the district to Hillary Clinton by 5.

Clinton’s win was unprecedented — no Democratic presidential candidate had ever captured CA-45 before — and thanks to demographic changes and local anti-Trump sentiment, the former secretary of state also flipped the rest of Orange County. Yet while Walters’s fellow O.C. Republicans have suddenly found themselves in the hot seat as a result — Reps. Darrell Issa and Ed Royce decided to retire, setting off fierce succession fights, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher faces several strong Democratic and Republican opponents — Walters has largely flown under the radar, the assumption being that she’s the safest of the lot.

But what if the very factors that make Walters seem less vulnerable than her GOP neighbors are same factors that could make her reelection campaign 2018’s best bellwether: the race to watch for signs not just of a Democratic win, but of a Democratic wave?

To regain control of the House, Democrats need to net 24 seats. That seems increasingly doable: The party is performing better than Republicans in generic ballot polls — surveys in which people are asked which party they would support in a congressional election — and President Trump’s approval rating is historically low. Swings of 24 or more seats aren’t historically uncommon, either; they’ve happened in half the midterm elections since 1994.

A wave election, however, would be something else: A transcontinental tide more akin to 2010, when the GOP’s Tea Party momentum was so strong that it didn’t really matter how solid a particular incumbent was, or how salient some local issue. The Republican Party flipped 63 seats, and the House, and there wasn’t much any individual Democrat could do about it.

Which is where Walters comes in.

In three key ways, her reelection fight is typical of 2018 as a whole — and that’s why it could be telling.

The first factor is Walters herself. Unlike Issa or Rohrabacher — or any Republican running in a Trump-era special election, over which Democrats have obsessed and in which they have overperformed — Walters has not been the focus of national controversy or the target of national Democratic hostility. Issa was an aggressive antagonist of Barack Obama; Rohrabacher has been called Vladimir “Putin’s favorite congressman.” Walters, in contrast, is not a name politician; she is not a left-wing bete noire. She is, instead, a perfectly ordinary, mostly overlooked Republican incumbent, with views that mirror the party consensus. If Walters were to lose in November, it wouldn’t be because she is exceptional in some way; the same would be true if she were to win. She is the opposite of an outlier.

Even Walters’ relationship to Trump is typical. Like most of the rest of the Republican Party, she has wagered that it will benefit her more to stick with the president than to strike out against him, despite his many deviations from conservative orthodoxy and decorum.

Initially Walters supported Jeb Bush for president, then Marco Rubio; she only came around to Trump after her preferred candidates tanked. But when Trump’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced shortly before the 2016 election, Walters refused to rescind her endorsement, or to comment in any way. And since the start of his administration she has compiled one of the most pro-Trump records in the House, voting in line with the president’s position 98.6 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight — including votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass Trump’s tax plan, both decisions that were broadly unpopular in California, where many voters rely on the state’s version of Obamacare and will lose valuable deductions under the new tax law.

In short, if the 2018 midterms are a referendum on the president, as most midterms are, Walters hasn’t given voters inclined to vote against Trump any particular reason to vote for her. Their agendas are identical.

The second “typical” factor at work in CA-45 is Walters’ Democratic opposition. Ever since Conor Lamb, a somewhat moderate 33-year-old Marine and former federal prosecutor, defeated his Republican rival, Rick Saccone, earlier this month in PA-18, a district that Trump won by 20 percentage points, politicos have argued over whether Lamb was a “political unicorn” — an impossibly perfect one-off candidate whose victory had more to do with his own performance than any underlying trend. The same went for newly-minted Sen. Doug Jones, the Democrat who last year defeated accused pedophile Roy Moore in deep-red Alabama. Democrats can’t possibly hope to run such idiosyncratically well-suited challengers nationwide, the thinking goes — and therefore they can’t possibly hope to keep scoring such big upsets.

This is unlikely to be an issue in Walters’ district. There are four Democrats angling to unseat the two-term congresswoman, and none of them are obvious unicorns. Instead, they make up a remarkably representative cross-section of the Democratic Party’s Class of 2018, which is defined by its abundance of rookie candidates, many of them women and/or minorities, who have decided to run for office in order to “resist” Trump’s agenda. There’s Katie Porter, 43, a Harvard-educated consumer protection attorney and law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has worked with Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. There’s Dave Min, 42, another Harvard-educated UC-Irvine law professor and a former economic aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. There’s Brian Forde, 37, a former tech advisor in the Obama White House. And there’s Kia Hamadanchy, 32, the son of Iranian immigrants and a former advisor to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Unlike Walters, who was a city councilwoman, mayor, state assemblywoman and state senator before running for Congress, none of her Democratic challengers has ever campaigned for elected office before. None is personally wealthy (like, say, entrepreneur Harley Rouda, who is running to replace Rohrabacher in CA-48). None has been touted as a top Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruit (like, say, stem-cell pioneer Hans Keirstead, who is also competing in CA-48). And none has benefited from a surge in out-of-state attention and donations (like, say, prosecutor Andrew Janz, who has become a progressive cause celebre because he is battling controversial Trump loyalist Devin Nunes in CA-22).  In terms of experience, fundraising, connections, national interest and raw political talent, each CA-45 challenger is close to the 2018 Democratic mean. They are your quintessential resistance candidates.

Their primary clash has been typical as well. (In California’s nonpartisan primary system, the top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of whether they’re Democrats, Republicans or independents; with Walters a lock for first, the fight for second place basically amounts to a Democratic primary contest.) No clear frontrunner has emerged, and the two most prominent candidates, Porter and Min, have been staging a small-scale version of the argument dividing the Democratic Party as a whole: Should Dems run as proud progressives and hope the base turns out in 2018? Or should they try to convert disillusioned Trump voters by burnishing their centrist credentials?

Porter has chosen the first path, touting her endorsements from left-wing icons Warren and Harris and pushing for single-payer healthcare; Min has hewed a little closer to the center, opposing Medicare for All as “a tremendous tax increase” that wouldn’t play well in such “a conservative district,” according to his campaign manager. (“Dave is not the candidate who is furthest to the left,” she added.) The race has been very close, with Min just barely clinching the state party’s endorsement at last month’s convention — his slim margin triggered a bitter floor fight — and Porter leading in some recent polls.

Whatever happens in California’s June 5^th primary, the surviving Democrat is likely to have survived because his or her campaign was more in tune with the mood of the party. And if a Democrat defeats Walters in November, individual attributes probably won’t be the biggest reason, either. Walters has enough advantages — money, incumbency, local political infrastructure — that her Democratic challenger will almost certainly need to ride a national wave to win.

Which brings us to the last “typical” aspect of the CA-45 contest: the district itself. Even though Clinton won there by more than 5 points — and even though Republicans have an 8-point registration advantage — its “partisan lean,” according to FiveThirtyEight, is actually tiny: just 1 or 2 percentage points in the GOP’s favor. This means that in presidential elections, with presidential-level turnout, the results in CA-45 almost exactly mirror the national results. The district has become a bellwether of sorts.

Of course, midterm elections aren’t presidential elections, and a lot of voters — especially Democratic voters — tend to skip them. But demographics could play a part here as well, as Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight has also pointed out. CA-45 is much more diverse than it was in Ronald Reagan’s day, with a population that is 18 percent Latino and 22 percent Asian; it’s also far more educated than the country at large, with 79.3 percent of residents having completed some college or more, versus 59 percent overall. In 2016, Trump underperformed among white college graduates, and even lost college women to Clinton by 7 percentage points. Combine that weakness with Trump’s widespread unpopularity among Latinos and other minorities, and you start to see why CA-45 (and the rest of Orange County) flipped to Clinton: Trump was a particularly bad fit for its evolving electorate.

And so if any voting groups are going to fuel anti-Trump tsunami in 2018, it’s these two: white suburban college grads and minorities. Both have been telling pollsters they disapprove of the president’s job performance in record numbers. Both have been propelling Democrats to victory in special elections. And CA-45 has both in droves, making it a perfect testing ground for the larger proposition.

Is Mimi Walters the most endangered GOP incumbent of 2018? Far from it. But due to the demographics of her district, the nature of her Democratic challengers and her own low-profile, pro-Trump orthodoxy, she may be the most typical — and telling. If you’re searching for signs of a Democratic wave, watch Walters. It could start sweeping through her corner of California first.

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For months now, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. has been that President Donald Trump, with his record disapproval ratings and chaotic leadership style, has made his party’s campaign to keep control of Congress even more challenging in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

But Friday Trump surprised the prognosticators by actually doing something that could, in theory, improve the GOP’s chances in November: He asked right-wing candidate Danny Tarkanian to abandon what was expected to be a hard-fought GOP primary challenge against Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, and pursue instead the U.S. House seat that will be vacated by Rep. Jacky Rosen, Heller’s likely opponent in the Senate race.

Tarkanian quickly acceded to the president’s request.

“It would be great for the Republican Party of Nevada, and it’s [sic] unity if good guy Danny Tarkanian would run for Congress and Dean Heller, who is doing a really good job, could run for Senate unopposed,” Trump tweeted.

On Friday, Tarkanian told the Reno Gazette Journal that he planned to file for the congressional contest later that day.  In a statement, the son of legendary University of Nevada, Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian added that he was “confident” he would have won the U.S. Senate race and done a “great job” representing Nevada, but that the president was “adamant.” Eventually Tarkanian agreed that a “unified Republican ticket” would represent the “best direction for the America First movement.”

The switch came as welcome news in pretty much every corner of the Republican Party. Nevada’s 3^rd congressional district is seen as one of the GOP’s best pickup opportunities, in large part because Rosen won there in 2016 by a mere 3,943 votes. The opponent she barely defeated? Danny Tarkanian. He will immediately vault to the front of the nine-candidate Republican primary pack.

Meanwhile, Heller, widely considered among the most vulnerable Republicans in this Senate cycle, is undoubtedly relieved, after struggling to defend his right flank against Tarkanian while also preparing to square off against a polished, well-funded Democratic challenger in an increasingly blue state that voted for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Early polls have showed Heller losing to Tarkanian in the primary — and losing to Rosen in the general. Without Tarkanian to worry about, he’ll no longer have to walk such a narrow tightrope.

But the question for Heller and Tarkanian is whether the damage has already been done.

During his now-aborted primary bid, Tarkanian’s strategy was simple and effective, as we’ve noted before: assault Heller for being insufficiently pro-Trump — and insufficiently principled, especially when it comes to Obamacare.

“When [Heller] has seen a political advantage in attacking Obamacare, he has done so,” Tarkanian wrote in December. “When the tide seems to be running against repeal, he has opposed it and pushed back against calls for repeal.”

Tarkanian’s pitch was resonating in the primary because had a point: Heller had been all over the map on repeal. Tarkanian was also correct that Heller has waffled on Trump, declaring in 2016 that “I vehemently oppose our nominee” because he “denigrates human beings” but sounding (conveniently) friendlier after the pro-Trump Tarkanian entered the race. So far this year, Heller has collaborated with the administration on the tax bill, backed its immigration framework and boasted that he now enjoys a “much closer relationship” with the president than before.

Meanwhile, Nevada Democrats have been leveling the same attacks on Heller, claiming that his vacillations on Trump, healthcare and other policy issues prove that he’s more concerned with politics than principle.

Being attacked from both sides has had a major impact on Heller’s approval rating, which fell nearly 10 percentage points during 2017, one of the largest declines in the Senate.

It appears that Heller’s biggest electoral liability wasn’t Tarkanian, per se, but the growing perception that he lacks the courage of his convictions, and that he will do or say anything to keep his job. With Tarkanian gone, Heller will now be tempted to tack back to the center. But that will only reinforce the perception of his spinelessness. To win in November, Heller had better hope than Nevadans memories are short.

Tarkanian’s brief Senate bid may also prove to be handicap for Tarkanian himself. Shortly after entering the race last August, the candidate huddled at Breitbart’s Capitol Hill headquarters with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon — and emerged with the nationalist rabble-rouser’s imprimatur.

“[Bannon] told me he supported me 100 percent,” Tarkanian claimed in a BuzzFeed interview. “He said, ‘It was nice to see a candidate that exceeds my expectations.’ So I took that as a very good compliment.”

Since then, Tarkanian has taken pains to position himself as one of the most pro-Trump, Bannon-esque candidates of the cycle, espousing a hardline position on immigration and declaring that he believes “whole-heartedly” in all of “President Trump’s ‘America first’ policies.”

Tarkanian even refused to disavow Bannon after the president publicly broke with his former Svengali. “If Mr. Bannon chooses to support me in our effort to repeal and replace Dean Heller with someone who will truly have the president’s back, I welcome his support,” Tarkanian said at the time.

The question for Tarkanian is not whether he can win a GOP primary with this sort of scorched-earth strategy; he’s won five of them before, and he’s likely to emerge again in June as the party’s third-district nominee. The question is whether he can win a general election with it — particularly this year, and particularly in a district like NV-3.

Tarkanian’s electoral track record is not strong. In 2004, he ran for state senate. In 2006, he tried for secretary of state. In 2010, he sought the nomination to run against Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, but lost in a primary to Sharron Angle. In 2012, he ran in Nevada’s Fourth Congressional District, ultimately losing to Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, who lost the seat himself two years later. And then in 2016 he lost to Rosen.

“That’s kind of [Tarkanian’s] reputation,” a Nevada Republican strategist told BuzzFeed last year. “Like, oh God, him again?”

Tarkanian came close to defeating Rosen in 2016, with Trump atop the GOP ticket. But 2018 will be different. Incorporating the southern suburbs of Las Vegas, NV-3 is one of the most evenly divided congressional districts in America, voting for Al Gore by 1 percentage point in 2000, George W. Bush by 1 percentage point in 2004 and Barack Obama by 1 percentage point in 2012.  In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton there — but again, by only a single percentage point.

In a midterm cycle when backlash against the president is likely to be powerful and Democrats have already demonstrated an ability to recapture congressional seats in districts that Trump won by 20 percentage points, running as a staunch Trump Republican in a 50/50 blue-state district will be a risky approach.

Meanwhile, Tarkanian’s likeliest Democratic opponent, education advocate and philanthropist Susie Lee, will hardly be a pushover; to date she has secured the endorsements of the incumbent, Rosen; former Vice President Joe Biden; Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto; Rep. Dina Titus and former Senators Harry Reid and Richard Bryan. Lee is also married to a casino magnate and has more than $600,000 cash on hand — and millions more in her personal bank account.

In the end, Trump’s decision to push Tarkanian out of the Senate race and into the NV-3 congressional contest was a smart political play that will help Nevada Republicans next November. Whether it will help them enough to win is another story.

_____

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LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, Donald Trump will embark on his first trip to California as president, touching down at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego before heading south to inspect various prototypes of the much-ballyhooed “wall” he hopes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The visit comes one week after Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, sued California for passing a trio of “sanctuary state” laws that have (according to Sessions) blocked the administration from enforcing federal immigration statutes — and followed it up with a fiery speech in Sacramento accusing state and local Democrats of “boldly validat[ing] illegality.”

The fast and furious response from those same Democrats — “Outright lies,” snapped Gov. Jerry Brown; “White supremacy and white nationalism,” added state Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin De León — has prompted another round of breathless California vs. Trump media coverage, with the president rallying his right-wing base around hardline anti-immigration policies and the immigrant-rich Golden State relishing its role as ground zero of the so-called resistance.

“With a handful of exceptions — North Korea comes to mind — there are few governments that have worse relations with President Trump than California,” wrote The New York Times.

Yet the political stakes here are higher than many pundits seem to realize. That’s because the latest immigration clash between California and Trump isn’t just about California and Trump. It’s also about the broader constituency the president has been antagonizing since taking office, and is now antagonizing again: America’s growing Latino electorate.

When Trump won the 2016 election, the chattering class immediately declared that the Latino vote — which was supposed to show up in force and keep the Manhattan mogul out of the Oval Office — had failed, once again, to materialize, despite the candidate’s near-constant provocations (Mexican “rapists,” “The Wall,” “bad hombres,” threatening to revoke birthright citizenship, claiming a judge could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage, etc.).

But over the last year, studies have cast serious doubt on this assumption. Subsequent elections — especially Virginia’s, in 2017 — hinted that Latino voters have become more energized and mobilized, not less, since Trump took office. And looking ahead to the 2018 midterms, it appears that many of the races set to determine control of the House and Senate are taking place in areas with significant Latino populations.

Which means that in November, backlash to Trump among Latino voters could, in fact, decide the election — especially if Trump continues to rile up the right-wing over immigration, as he seemed determined to do Tuesday in California.

“It’s a comparative status question,” says Gary Segura, Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at University of California, Los Angeles and co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions. “Latinos tend not to vote in midterm elections; older, whiter, higher-income people tend to vote instead. So what will the presence of a president like Trump do? In theory, it will narrow that gap. Latinos will turn out in higher numbers than people expect — and that will make a difference in at least some of these races.”

The first data point to consider is 2016. The national exit polls showed Hillary Clinton winning 65 percent of the Latino vote to Trump’s 28 percent — a landslide, to be sure, but a smaller one than Obama enjoyed in 2012, when he clobbered Mitt Romney among Latinos 71 percent to 29 percent. Seeing that — and noting that Latinos still made up 11 percent of the electorate, the same as 2012 — pundits concluded that there had been no anti-Trump “surge” in 2016.

The only problem? The national exit polls may have been wrong. Since the election, researchers affiliated with Latino Decisions have examined precinct-level data from Arizona, California, New York, Florida, Texas and Nevada — actual tallies of how actual people voted in largely Latino neighborhoods, as opposed to the expedient sampling released on Election Night, which tends to distort minority sentiment for a variety of reasons.

What they’ve found are vast disparities between the exit polling and their own, more finely-tuned analyses.

In Nevada, for instance, exit polls reported that 60 percent of Latinos backed Clinton and 29 percent backed Trump. But last year, Francisco I. Pedraza, an assistant political science professor the University of California, Riverside, and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, a PhD candidate at UCLA, concluded that the split may have been more like 88 percent for Clinton versus 10 percent for Trump.

Researchers also discovered a wider-than-reported gap in Arizona (84 percent for Clinton to 12 percent for Trump, compared to 61-31 in the exit poll). And in California (83 percent for Clinton to 11 percent for Trump, compared to 71-24 in the exit poll). And in Texas (77 percent for Clinton to 18 percent for Trump, compared to 61-34 in the exit poll). And in New York. And in Florida.

The bottom line is that, contra conventional wisdom, Clinton likely ran ahead of Obama among Latinos in key states — while Trump likely ran behind Romney. This could be part of the reason why Clinton came a lot closer to winning Arizona (3.5 percentage points) and Texas (9 percentage points) than Obama did in 2012, when he lost those two states by 9 points and 16 points, respectively. It could also be why Clinton’s margin of victory in California was 1.3 million votes larger than Obama’s.

Of course, all that additional Latino backing did not put Clinton over the top in the electoral college, which was decided in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

“The real story is that Latino turnout was up in basically every jurisdiction in the U.S.,” says Segura. “The actual precinct vote shows that about 79 percent of Latinos nationwide voted for Clinton — up from about 70 percent in recent years. Those extra nine percentage points are obviously a reaction to Trump.”

Which brings us to 2017 — the first big election of the Trump era. The Virginia gubernatorial race was supposed to be close, and the commonwealth’s House of Delegates was supposed to remain safely Republican. Neither prediction panned out. After a campaign defined largely by Trumpian tactics —  Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie ran ads about “sanctuary cities” and the MS-13 gang — Democrats won the governorship by 9 percentage points and picked up 15 seats in the legislature.

Why? Early voting among Virginia Latinos was up 114 percent from the last state elections in 2013, and the Election Day participation rate in heavily Latino districts was up 5 percent, from 33 percent to 38 percent. Latinos didn’t decide the election on their own: white, college-educated voters made up a larger share of the Virginia electorate in 2017 than in 2016, and for the first time, minority participation in general held steady from the presidential election to the gubernatorial election. But Latinos didn’t stay home, either — an early sign that, with Trump in the White House, the old rules of Latino turnout may no longer apply.

All of this will be crucial in 2018.  Many of the most pivotal House and Senate races are happening in places with a lot of Latino voters — and if they show up like they showed up in Virginia, and vote as heavily Democratic as they did in 2016, then Democrats could win back control of Congress.

Take California. The Golden State is home to seven Republican-held congressional districts won by Clinton in 2016 — nearly a third of the 24 seats Democrats need to flip in order to recapture the House of Representatives. Republican incumbents Ed Royce and Darrell Issa are retiring in two seats where Latinos make up a third (CA-39) and a quarter (CA-49) of the population, respectively. Both lean Democratic, according to the handicappers at the Cook Political Report.  An additional three seats are rated as tossups; a fourth “leans” Republican. They’re all between 20 and 40 percent Latino. Another targeted district — CA-21, where Democrat Emilio Huerta is challenging incumbent Republican Rep. David Valadao — is 71 percent Latino.

Texas and Florida are similar stories. FL-27 — the Miami-area district where Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring — happens to be more than 71 percent Latino; Democrats are favored to flip the seat. Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo’s district (FL-26) is a tossup, in no small part because it’s 70 percent Latino; Clinton won there by 16 percentage points after Obama won by 11. Meanwhile, GOP Rep. John Culberson, the most vulnerable incumbent in Texas, represents a district (TX-7, in the Houston suburbs) that is 32 percent Latino. The next most vulnerable Lone Star incumbent, Will Hurd, hails from TX-23, which runs along a majority of Texas’s border with Mexico. His district is 68 percent Latino.

On the Senate side of things, the Latino factor may be even more pronounced. To regain control of “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” Democrats need to net two additional seats. Their top targets? Arizona, where Republican incumbent Jeff Flake is retiring, and Nevada, where Republican incumbent Dean Heller has tied himself in knots over Trump’s policies on healthcare and taxes.

Latino voters could conceivably decide both contests. Arizona has America’s fourth largest Latino electorate, as a percentage of the overall voting population; Nevada, where former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid has organized a formidable Latino turnout machine, is sixth on that same list. And while national Latino turnout did not rise in 2016, it surged in Arizona and increased in Nevada, according to state-level Census data released last year — in part because of Democratic Party mobilization efforts and in part because of backlash to Trump. If Nevada and Arizona go blue, Democrats will likely take back the Senate.

There’s no guarantee that Latinos will show up later this year; white voters, and even black voters, have been almost twice as likely to turn out as Latinos in midterm elections.

Yet we’ve never seen what a midterm looks like with Trump as president. If recent history is any guide — and if Trump keeps needling Latinos the way he’s needling them this week in California — then it might look like nothing we’ve seen before.

_____

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LOS ANGELES — Dianne Feinstein has been the senior United States senator from California for the last quarter-century. She is the first and only woman to have chaired the Senate Rules Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. Before joining the Senate, she was the first female mayor of San Francisco; before that, she was the first female president of the city’s Board of Supervisors. In 1994, Feinstein authored the federal assault weapons ban; during President Obama’s first term, she led a groundbreaking investigation into the C.I.A.’s controversial post-9/11 interrogation program.

And yet on Saturday night California Democrats gathered at the San Diego Convention Center and voted not to endorse Feinstein for a sixth term, making her the first incumbent senator in decades to compete in a Golden State primary without the official backing of her party.

Instead, Democratic delegates threw most of their support — 54 percent versus Feinstein’s 37 — to challenger Kevin de León, a Los Angeles politician 33 years her junior with precisely none of her experience on the national stage.

The result wasn’t a total shock, though de León’s share of the vote was bigger than expected. California’s Democratic delegates tend to be progressive activists, and progressive activists, who’ve badmouthed Feinstein’s bipartisan instincts and relatively hawkish foreign-policy views for years, have become especially eager to unseat her since last August when she refused to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, arguing instead that he “can be a good president” if “he can learn and change.” Also worth noting is the fact that de León didn’t secure his party’s endorsement, either. For that, he would have needed 60 percent of the vote.

Even so, de León’s strong finish raises an intriguing question: Are Democrats in California— where shifts in American politics tend to happen first — on the verge of tossing out the party’s decorous old guard in favor of a new, more pugnacious generation? Is the so-called resistance a threat not only to Trump & Co., but to Democrats like Feinstein, too?

De León certainly hopes so; his entire candidacy is premised on that possibility. President pro tempore of the state Senate since 2014 — he is the first Latino to hold the position since 1885 — he will hit his term limit later this year. With a newly elected senator, Kamala Harris, serving along Feinstein; a popular mayor, Eric Garcetti, recently reelected back in L.A.; and a 2018 California governor’s race overstuffed with high-wattage contenders, de León is a rising political star with no obvious office to rise into. And so, seizing upon perhaps the only available opportunity, he immediately set about selling himself to a shell-shocked statewide audience in the wake of Trump’s election.

“That night, the night of Nov. 8, I was stunned, just like so many of my fellow Democrats,” de León told Yahoo News shortly before Trump’s inauguration. “But the next morning I got up and got to work.”

By “getting to work,” de León means something very specific: in short, doing whatever possible to transform California into ground zero for the resistance — and to cast Kevin de León, by extension, as one of the movement’s leaders. On Nov. 9, De León and his counterpart in the state Assembly, Anthony Rendon, released a letter proclaiming that California would “lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution”; in January 2017, they hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to shape their legal strategy.

Ever since, de León is particular has pushed bill after bill designed to thwart Trump’s agenda: SB 54 (aka. the California Values Act), which prevents the administration from forcing local police departments to assist in the deportation of undocumented immigrants, thereby transforming the whole of California into a so-called sanctuary state; SB 49 (a.k.a. the California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2017), which mandates that California enforce environmental and worker protection standards no less stringent than the ones that existed at a federal level before Trump took office; and SB 227 (a.k.a., the Protect California Taxpayers Act) which would allow Californians to circumvent Trump’s new caps of certain tax deductions by making charitable donations to the state.

Fifteen months later, de León can credibly claim that he’s done as much as any legislator in the country to oppose the president — and, of course, that’s exactly the claim he’s making on the campaign trail.

“My name is Kevin de León, and I am the President of the most progressive legislative house in America,” he said at the start of Saturday’s convention speech. “We carved it in stone: no matter the place of your birth or the hue of your skin, you can live in California in safety, dignity and, yes, sanctuary.”

Much of the rest of de León’s address was dedicated to drawing what political consultants like to call “contrasts” with his primary opponent.

He didn’t pull his punches. Feinstein, 84, is currently the oldest sitting U.S. senator; if reelected, she will be 91 when her next term concludes. Twice de León mentioned “congressional seniority,” and the implication was lost on no one.

He went on to say that “the days of Democrats biding our time, biting our tongue, and triangulating at the margins are over” — a not-so-implicit rebuke of Feinstein’s measured approach to politics, which The New Yorker once described as “slightly formal in style,” with a faithful adherence “to procedure and protocol” and a belief in “settling disputes privately, by argument rather than by force.”

De León then rattled off all of the insufficiently progressive things Feinstein has done, and that he “would never” do: “I would never oppose card check, and will never vote for school vouchers”; “I would never vote to allow federal agents to spy on American citizens without warrants”: “I would never vote to prosecute 13-year-olds as adults”; “I would never call our country “the welfare system for Mexico”; “I would never vote for two different wars lasting 17 years, costing countless American lives and more than five trillion dollars.”

And, lest anyone forget, de León made sure to mock Feinstein’s gentle comments about Trump.

“In your state Senate, Democrats act like Democrats,” he said. “We demand passion, not ‘patience.’ We speak truth to power, and we’ve never been fooled into believing Donald Trump ‘can be a good president.’”

Even beyond the convention hall in San Diego, de León has had some success with this line of attack; two of the state’s most influential unions, the SEIU and the California Nurses Association, previously endorsed his insurgent bid.

In December, Yahoo News followed de León to a series of campaign stops in Orange County, and found a candidate convinced that his moment has arrived. Wearing a navy-blue merino sweater, slim gray slacks and a silver Apple watch, de León appeared at least a decade younger than his 51 years; his impossibly black mop top helped to sustain the illusion. He mixed easily with Democratic regulars at the Plumbers, Steamfitters, Welders & Apprentices local in Orange, where he received a poster-size comic-book cover depicting Donald Trump as a tyrannical madman; later, he mingled with young, cosmopolitan Democrats sipping cocktails atop a luxury apartment building in Irvine.

“As God is my witness, I had no intention of running for U.S. Senate at that moment,” de León said of the day Feinstein made her remarks about Trump. “I’m the youngest child of a single immigrant mother who had a third-grade education. I never pined or aspired to be a politician. It’s never been part of my DNA. But I made a decision to send out a press release [criticizing her] that day, and I cannot tell you how many phone calls, how many texts I got, even from members of Congress, who always wanted to say this but were always afraid. I was like, ‘You’re afraid to criticize the obvious? That’s stunning to me.’ And that’s why I made the decision — that we need change, that we need a new voice. Not of the past, but of the present and the future.”

The question now is whether de León can convince California. He may be more in tune with the zeitgeist than Feinstein; he may even be more in tune with the most active California Democrats, who have embraced their new role as Trump’s top antagonists. But ultimately de León’s candidacy could prove to be a case study in the limitations of resistance politics, rather than its power.

Feinstein is formidable, despite her deviations from current liberal orthodoxy. In an ordinary state, De León might have a shot at snatching his party’s nomination away from a moderate incumbent by running to her left in the primary. But California has a nonpartisan primary system, which means the top two finishers — likely Feinstein and de León — will advance to the general election regardless of who gets more votes on June 5^th. After that, moderation tends to be a plus, not a minus.

Meanwhile, Feinstein has rustled up $13 million for her reelection; de León has raised $434,000. The latest statewide poll shows her ahead by 29 percentage points (46 percent to 17 percent), up from 24 points in November. De León is fighting like mad to raise his profile, and more cash. But so far, he has only slipped further behind.

All of this is symptomatic of a larger reality: Feinstein may not be popular among self-styled resistance fighters, but how many resistance fighters are there, really — even in California? And how many are just as upset about moderate Democrats as they are about Trump Republicans? Enough to unseat a trailblazing woman who has been serving the state for decades and who won reelection in 2012 with more votes (7.75 million) than any other senator in U.S. history? Enough to replace her with a largely unfamiliar legislator who presided over the state senate during a sweeping sexual-harassment scandal?

Recently, Feinstein has started speaking out more forcefully against Trump. In January, she took the “extraordinary step” of releasing a key transcript from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Russia probe without the Republican chairman’s approval, earning a nickname from the president in the process: “Sneaky Dianne.”

“I think what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice,” she said in December.

Whether such boldness is a political gambit meant to neutralize de León is difficult to say. But either way, it serves to remind Californians that seniority has its advantages.

“To say you would come in as a rookie and be more forceful against Donald Trump than Dianne Feinstein means people are going to care about what the hell you say, because what you do will be marginal,” Bill Carrick, Feinstein’s longtime strategist, tells Yahoo News.  “You want to have an influential United States Senator? Dianne Feinstein is the ranking member on the judiciary, where she can actually do something to stop these judges who are outside the mainstream. On the intelligence committee, she’s a senior member investigating President Trump, particularly on Russian interference. And on the judiciary committee she’s investigating obstruction of justice. It’s campaign rhetoric versus reality. And it’s pretty preposterous.”

Anyone following the California Senate race should expect to hear more of this from Feinstein in the months ahead. It’s a canny point: that resistance can take many forms, and that a quieter, more traditional approach may still be most effective. Unless De León can prove otherwise, he won’t be able to repeat his San Diego upset in November.

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Read more from Yahoo News:

• House Democrats seek 20 to 30 more witnesses in Russia probe, but GOP resists
• Jefferson’s ‘tree of liberty’ and the blood of schoolchildren
• Author Eric Metaxas, evangelical intellectual, chose Trump, and he’s sticking with him
• Meet the teen girl behind the National School Walkout movement
• Photos: Chris Hondros’s life and pictures highlighted in documentary, ‘Hondros’

For months, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48), a 15-term veteran whose resolutely pro-Russia views have earned him the nickname “Putin’s favorite congressman,” has been considered one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country.

But over the course of the past week, Democrats have started openly asking whether some of the same forces that have been working against Rohrabacher could wind up putting another California Republican at risk: Rep. Devin Nunes.

Nunes (CA-22) has certainly been in the news a lot lately. Last March, the Central Valley Republican and House Intelligence chairman seized the national spotlight by accusing the Obama Administration of surveilling members of Trump’s transition team — a baseless charge that ultimately forced Nunes to recuse himself from the ongoing House investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. More recently, Nunes has reemerged as the author of a newly declassified memo insinuating that a biased FBI abused U.S. surveillance law to target President Trump.

On paper, Nunes and Rohrabacher have a lot in common. Both represent California congressional districts with an 11-point GOP registration advantage. Both have gotten tangled up in the controversy surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. Both have attracted polished Democratic challengers with the chops to compete in a general election. And both have progressive activists nationwide salivating about a formerly safe seat the party could potentially flip on its way to winning back control of the House in November.

In response to Nunes’s memo, the congressman’s leading Democratic challenger, Fresno County Deputy District Attorney Andrew Janz, has raked in $349,410 in donations since the document dropped on Friday, according to his campaign — $100,000 more than he raised in the previous eight months combined. On Thursday, meanwhile, Janz released a scathing anti-Nunes digital ad that has already racked up 600,000 views on social media.

“People here in the Central Valley, we have this perception, and it’s shared across the country, that Congress is broken right now,” Janz tells Yahoo News, echoing the attacks Democrats down south are lobbing at Rohrabacher. “Devin is really at the center of all this. He is the poster boy. He’s out there doing his own thing, advancing his own interests and protecting Donald Trump. He hasn’t held town hall meeting since 2010. That’s too long to go without talking to your constituents.”

Janz’s sudden visibility has Democrats wondering whether Devin could be the next Dana.

But a reality check may be in order. While the similarities between Rohrabacher and Nunes’ reelection battles are striking, the differences may have more to say about the shape of the coming election — and the limits of any potential Democratic comeback.

Take those party registration numbers. In both CA-48 and CA-22, Republicans hold a double-digit registration lead over Democrats. But Orange County Republicans and Central Valley Republicans are two separate species. The former tend to be well-off and well-educated; 41 percent of white O.C. Republicans, for instance, have college degrees. Among their Central Valley counterparts, however, that number is much lower: around 10 percent. As a result, voters in the two districts have very different takes on Trump. In the blue-collar, agricultural 22^nd, the president won last November by nine percentage points — while losing to Hillary Clinton in the more genteel 48^th. In other words, siding with Trump on Russia is likely to affect Nunes and Rohrabacher very differently.

Then there’s the matter of money. Both Nunes and Rohrabacher have grown accustomed to winning reelection by massive margins, often securing more than 60 percent of the vote against token Democratic opposition. But while Rohrabacher has reacted by becoming a lackadaisical fundraiser, Nunes has gone the opposite route. At the end of 2017, Rohrabacher reported having $713,144 on hand; Nunes reported having $3,844,805.

That’s a big difference, especially when you compare it to what their respective challengers have collected. In the fourth quarter of 2017, for instance, two of Rohrabacher’s Democratic opponents, stem-cell pioneer Hans Keirstead ($402,000) and real-estate entrepreneur Harley Rouda ($626,000), raised more than Rohrabacher ($272,000). Rouda currently has more cash on hand as well. Janz, in contrast, ended 2017 with $84,647. Factor in his recent fundraising bonanza and he’s still trailing Nunes by more than $3 million — a very difficult gap to close in one of the poorest parts of California, where big, Orange-County-style donors are few and far between.

Before the latest memo brouhaha, Janz’s campaign commissioned a survey from Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm, that showed Nunes only 5 percentage points ahead of a generic Democrat. The results suggested that even then, Nunes might be more vulnerable than previously thought. But there was a telling omission, too. The campaign has declined to release the results of a head-to-head match-up between Nunes and Janz, which implies that local voters chose Nunes by a larger margin when given the choice between two real-life candidates.

In conversation, Janz is upbeat about his chances.

“We just have to keep our eye on the ball and realize this is going to be a long hard slog,” he says. “A lot of Republicans and independents are dissatisfied with what Devin is doing — or not doing. Nobody wants some politician to be in public office for 15 years unchallenged. So I think that a lot of folks, come November, will like the fact that I’m a prosecutor who’s tough on crime. They’ll like that they’ll finally have a real choice.”

When asked about the challenges ahead, however, the candidate pauses for a full five seconds.

Finally, his campaign manager, Heather Greven, steps in. “There are a lot of challenges,” she says. “Andrew is just trying to narrow it down.”

How about Greven, then? What does she see as the biggest challenge?

“Telling our story,” she admits. “There is zero infrastructure up here for a race of this size. We’re really our paving own road.”

Ultimately, Janz’s best shot at staying competitive is if Nunes stays in the news. The more riled up rank-and-file Dems get about Nunes’ antics, the more small donations they will send to his rival (as we saw last weekend). In short, Janz needs to do more than run a strong campaign. He needs to become a national cause célèbre. Anything short of that and even a Democratic wave might not be enough propel him into office.

Read more from Yahoo News:

• Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff describes crucial meeting cited in Nunes memo
• The neo-Nazi has no clothes: In search of Matt Heimbach’s bogus ‘white ethnostate’
• ‘What will it change?’ Rural Iowa has better things to watch than a State of the Union
• Military blames ‘human error’ for hidden Afghan war data
• Photos: Punxsutawney Phil makes annual Groundhog Day prediction

Since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, much ink has been spilled over his unprecedented “war with the media.” The incessant refrain of “fake news,” repeated every time a story displeases him (and promoted via Trump’s own long-promised, long-delayed “Fake News Awards,” now scheduled for Wednesday night). The calls for boycotts, lawsuits and license challenges. The threat to “open up” libel laws. The descriptions of reporters and news organizations as “pathetic,” “scum,” “disgusting,” “very dishonest,” “failing” and even “the enemy of the American people.”

But while Trump’s hostility toward the press may be unusual in its vulgarity, intensity and openness, pretty much every president since the dawn of the Republic has expressed some form of frustration with the institution — and over the last few decades, politicians of every rank, particularly Republican politicians, have found that trashing the media can be a very useful way to rile up their voters.

In other words, we’re sort of used to it at this point.

That’s why it was remarkable when, shortly after 10:00 AM Wednesday morning, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who has mostly supported Trump’s agenda, if not his manners, rose on the floor of the Senate to deliver a blistering rebuke of the Media-Critic-in-Chief — and a passionate, unapologetic defense of the free press.

“2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government,” Flake said. “The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”

Flake’s speech was so out-of-the-ordinary, in fact — so unfashionable in its praise of the press — that it raised a previously unthinkable question: Could we be seeing the beginnings of backlash? Has Trump’s anti-media aggression forced at least some otherwise skeptical Americans to recognize that, despite its flaws, the media is more than just a political punching bag — that it actually has a vital role to play in our democracy?

In his remarks, Flake — a longtime Trump critic who announced in October with a similarly stern floor speech that he would not be running for reelection — catalogued the “most glaring” of the president’s “official untruths,” from his “bizarre contention regarding the crowd size at last year’s inaugural” to his “oft-repeated conspiracy about the birthplace of President Obama”; from his “pernicious fantasies about rigged elections and massive voter fraud” to the “supposed ‘hoax’ at the heart of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation.”

Flake went on to note that, in their own attempts to delegitimize unflattering coverage, a rogue’s gallery of repressive autocrats — Syrian President Bashar Assad, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — have now taken to parroting Trump’s cry of “fake news” whenever the facts don’t suit them.

“This feedback loop is disgraceful, Mr. President,” Flake said. “Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible.”

Finally, Flake chastised his Senate colleagues for ignoring Trump’s efforts to undermine the First Amendment — and demanded that they, too, speak out in the future.

“No longer can we compound attacks on truth with our silent acquiescence,” Flake said. “Together, my colleagues, we are powerful. Together, we have it within us to turn back these attacks, right these wrongs, repair this damage, restore reverence for our institutions, and prevent further moral vandalism. Together, united in the purpose to do our jobs under the Constitution, without regard to party or party loyalty, let us resolve to be allies of the truth — and not partners in its destruction.”

In response to Flake’s broadside, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters that Flake was “not criticizing the president because he’s against oppression; he’s criticizing the president because he has terrible poll numbers” and is “looking for some attention.”

It’s unlikely, of course, that Flake’s fellow Republicans will echo his comparison of Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who, as Flake pointed out, also applied the phrase “enemy of the people” to anyone he wanted to get rid of. After Flake spoke, two senators — Dick Durbin of Illinois and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — stood to applaud and second his remarks. Both were Democrats.

Nor is it likely that Trump’s base will desert him over an issue as abstract as the First Amendment. Our politics is too tribal for that; Trump voters love when he attacks “elite” East Coast institutions, the media chief among them.

But what about the millions of other Americans like Flake: uneasy with Trump but hardly liberal, wary of the media’s biases but cognizant of its central Constitutional role? Could Trump’s rancor toward reporters backfire with that group?

The press itself is banking on it. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias has pointed out, “what’s particularly striking about Trump’s relationship with the mainstream press is the extent to which the pretense of an oppositional relationship with the White House has become a marketing tool.”

Yglesias continues:

“CNN’s ‘facts first’ branding campaign, rolled out last fall, was pitched to the press as an effort to “blunt Trump attacks” on the network. … The Washington Post, similarly, newly adopted the slogan ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ last year, pitching reading the Post not only as a way to be informed or entertained but also as a form of civic duty and obligation. [And] The New York Times, a for-profit, publicly traded company, last year began soliciting money from readers with a quasi-charitable pitch, emphasizing the idea that buying gift subscriptions is a means of supporting the company’s ‘mission.’”

There are signs that the media’s Trump-Era rebranding campaign is working. Subscriptions and traffic at both the Times and the Post hit record highs in 2017, and Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a movie that dramatizes that paper’s decision to defy another hostile administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers, has beat box-office expectations.

Yet if Flake really intends to counter Trump’s “fake news” onslaught, he still has a long way to go — especially if he wants the backlash to include members of his own party. According to a new Knight-Gallup poll, a majority of Americans consider “fake news” a very serious threat to our democracy, and 73 percent say the spread of inaccurate information on the internet is a major problem with news coverage today.

But the poll also showed that Republicans and Democrats disagree over what actually constitutes “fake news.” For Democrats, the term tends to mean untrue stories. For Republicans, it tends to mean “unfriendly” ones, with four in ten claiming that accurate reports that nonetheless cast a politician or political group in a negative light can “always” be dismissed as fake news. As a result, trust in the press has sunk to an all-time low among Republicans.

In 1976 — after Watergate and Vietnam; after the Pentagon Papers and “All the President’s Men” — 72 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media. Those days are almost certainly never coming back.

Still, on Wednesday, a sitting Republican senator took an unconventional step. He argued that restoring at least some of that trust is essential — and that his own party’s president should stop working to further erode it. The question now is whether other Republicans bother to amplify Flake’s message — or whether it gets simply gets drowned by Trump’s latest antics.

In the meantime, the media itself would be wise to follow the advice of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, whom Tom Hanks is currently portraying on screen in The Post.

“We hunker down and go about our business,” Bradlee once told an interviewer who asked how he handled criticism. “Which is not to be loved — but to go after the truth.”

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Read more from Yahoo News:

• Skullduggery podcast: It was 20 years ago today – a look back at the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (available here or wherever you listen to podcasts!)
• Obama reports no gifts from Putin in 2016 — sad!
• Trump denies he’s considering ‘bloody nose’ strike on North Korea
• New York’s Donald J. Trump State Park: A story of abandonment and decay
• Oprah and Trump go way, way back together. Here’s proof.
• Photos: Philippine volcano spews lava; thousands flee

LOS ANGELES — If you’re wondering whether a Democratic wave could wash away the current GOP-controlled Congress in November, check out what’s happened so far this week in the traditional Republican stronghold of Orange County, Calif.

Two short days ago, the situation was stable. Four congressional districts overlap with the O.C.; Republicans represent all four. Each of these Republicans (Ed Royce in CA-39, Darrell Issa in CA-49, Dana Rohrabacher in CA-48, Mimi Walters in CA-45) was considered vulnerable to some degree, in part because in 2016 Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in their districts — a first for a Democratic presidential candidate. But thanks to the power of incumbency, and a few big war chests, the Washington consensus said that only Rohrabacher’s race was a toss-up. The rest still leaned Republican.

What a difference 48 hours makes.

On Tuesday morning, Royce, the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stunned the political world by announcing his retirement. “In this final year of my Foreign Affairs Committee chairmanship, I want to focus fully on the urgent threats facing our nation,” Royce said in a statement. “With this in mind, and with the support of my wife Marie, I have decided not to seek reelection in November.

Then, one day later, Issa followed Royce’s out the door. “Throughout my service, I worked hard and never lost sight of the people our government is supposed to serve,” Issa said in a statement. “Yet with the support of my family, I have decided that I will not seek reelection in California’s 49th District.”

In response, the authoritative handicappers at the Cook Political Report flipped both seats from Lean Republican to Lean Democrat, improving the Dems’ odds of picking up the 24 seats they need to take back the House.

Democrats, of course, rejoiced. “The Republican agenda in Washington has been a direct attack on Californians,” crowed Drew Godinich, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “California Republicans clearly see the writing on the wall and realize that their party and its priorities are toxic to their reelection chances in 2018.”

But beyond the predictable partisan messaging, what does this week’s sudden upending of some the most important House contests in the country actually say about the looming 2018 midterms?

First, the DCCC may have a point. “Toxic” is too strong a word, but there has been a real conflict between the priorities of the GOP leadership in Washington — both on Capitol Hill and in the White House — and the electoral interests of blue-state Republicans.

Take 2017’s two defining legislative efforts: Obamacare repeal and tax cuts. The former, which never passed the Senate, was wildly unpopular in California, where residents have flocked to the state-run health-insurance exchange. Yet both Royce and Issa felt compelled to vote for it, despite near-constant protests from activists in their districts.

The Trump tax cuts, meanwhile, inspired even more Golden State outrage, largely because they slashed deductions for mortgage interest and for state and local taxes, which disproportionately benefit Californians. Both Royce and Issa publicly struggled to get to yes on the bill; eventually, Royce did, and Issa — gun-shy after securing reelection in 2016 by a mere 1,600 votes — did not. But their constituents know that what really matters is which party controls the House, and the national GOP agenda isn’t working to the advantage of most Republicans in California — or high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey, either.

This tension has, in turn, underscored the deeper Trump Era challenges facing Royce, Issa and their ilk. Clinton won Orange County — a place that had been the heart of the conservative movement, fueling the campaigns of Barry Goldwater and, later, Ronald Reagan — for two reasons (as I’ve written in the past).

The first is that Orange County is changing. In 1980, roughly 285,000 Latinos lived in the O.C. (about 15 percent of the total population). As of 2014, that number had grown to more than 1 million (or 34 percent of the total population), and Latinos are expected to surpass non-Latino whites as the county’s largest group by 2027.

In recent years, the local Asian population has surged as well. The result is a region that’s much more diverse, and much more reliant on immigrants, than it was in Reagan’s day.

At the same time, the white voters who still make up a plurality of Orange County’s electorate are, for the most part, a particular breed: wealthier and more educated than average.

Which brings us to the second force at work here: Trump. In 2016, the New York developer underperformed among white college graduates, and lost college women to Clinton by 7 percentage points. Combine that weakness with Trump’s widespread unpopularity among Latinos and other minorities, and you start to see why Trump lost Orange County by 9 percentage points only four years after Mitt Romney won there by 6. He was a particularly bad fit for its evolving electorate — and now that he’s president, his 39 percent approval rating and anti-blue-state policies probably aren’t helping matters. (The Trump administration’s decision to allow oil companies to resume offshore drilling — and then to exempt Florida, but not California — angered Californians who may still remember disastrous spills off their beaches.)

All of which has conspired to make reelection more of a slog for Issa, Royce and other suburban and/or blue-state Republicans nationwide — and to make retirement sound more appealing. The numbers tell the tale. As NPR’s Jessica Taylor has noted, there are now “31 Republicans who will not seek re-election in November: 19 who are retiring outright and another 12 who are running for higher office.”

The last time either party had nearly that many members vacate their seats during a midterm year was 1994. Twenty-eight Democrats departed that cycle — and the GOP eventually took control of Congress, gaining a staggering 54 House seats in what was billed, at the time, as a “Republican Revolution.”

So yes, the back-to-back retirements of Royce and Issa are symptomatic of something larger: an electoral landscape that is rapidly shifting in the Democrats’ favor.

This sort of momentum wouldn’t matter much if the Dems weren’t prepared to capitalize on it. But so far, they seem to be.

Six Democratic candidates are already running for Royce’s seat, including Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnam-War-refugee-turned-pediatrician-turned-two-time-cancer-survivor; Andy Thorburn, a teacher-turned-union-leader-turned-millionaire-businessman; and Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran and former shipping manager who became a philanthropist after winning a $266 million lottery prize in 2010.

And four Democrats are gunning for Issa’s job: environmental activist Mike Levin, who’s raked in more than a million dollars since announcing his candidacy in March; Sara Jacobs, a former Obama administration official endorsed by EMILY’s List; Paul Kerr, a real estate investor who outraised Issa last quarter; and Doug Applegate, a Marine veteran and attorney who nearly defeated Issa in 2016 in that cycle’s closest Congressional contest.

In other words, these are not the gadflies, vanity candidates and sacrificial lambs that have tended to run against Royce & Co. in previous elections.

But before Democrats get too excited, a note of caution. This cycle’s unprecedented glut of Trump-resisting recruits could be a mixed blessing — particularly in California, and particularly in contests without a GOP incumbent on the ballot.

The Golden State, you’ll recall, has a nonpartisan primary system: Democrats, Republicans and independents all compete against each other in the primary, and the top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of party affiliation.

Here, the risk is that splitting the Democratic vote four or six ways in a historically conservative area could allow two Republican candidates to come out on top — a result that becomes more likely when a GOP incumbent is no longer monopolizing the Republican vote and a couple of serious Republicans step in to replace him or her.

Which is probably what will happen now that Royce and Issa are gone. Though the California GOP has been decimated statewide, the party’s infrastructure remains strong in Orange County. Well-known candidates are already volunteering to run in Royce’s place, including former assemblywoman and longtime former Royce aide Young Kim, whom Royce immediately endorsed.  Also in the mix are former state Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff and Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson.

New Republican candidates are expected to announce soon in Issa’s district, where top names include state Assemblyman Bill Brough, who has said he’s “considering running”; Diane Harkey, chair of the California Board of Equalization, which administers taxes and fees; and Scott Baugh, a former Orange County GOP chairman.

None of these Republicans will have incumbent-level name ID — or cash. But they also won’t have congressional voting records, which means they’ll be able to put more space between themselves and the national GOP (and Trump) than any incumbent.

The bottom line is that by announcing their retirements in quick succession, Royce and Issa have emphasized how everything is set to break the Democrats’ way in 2018. But riding a wave to victory next November will require skill and strategy and maybe a bit of luck — and now more than ever, Orange County is the place to watch to find out if the Democratic Party can pull it off.

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Read more from Yahoo News:

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• Oprah and Trump go way, way back together. Here’s proof.
• Photos: Record rain and mudslides hit California

 

In the 1985 cinematic masterpiece Back to the Future (and its sequels), teenager Marty McFly often relies on a simple but effective method to escape unpleasant situations.

“Whoa, whoa, Biff,” Marty says nonchalantly, pointing over the shoulder of his nemesis, Biff Tannen. “What’s that?”

Again and again, Biff, or one of his equally loathsome relatives, wheels around to see what Marty is pointing at — and again and again, Marty socks him and runs away.

In 2017 America’s collective news feed was like one Marty McFly after another: a nonstop succession of tweets, insults, novelties and transgressions, many of them coming from the current occupant of the Oval Office, that compelled us to look this way and that way and this way and that way.

Meanwhile, the deeper story of the day often receded into the distance, cast aside by a news cycle struggling to churn through all the conflict and chaos created by our Disrupter-in-Chief, President Donald Trump.

Now that 2017 is coming to a close, however, we thought it would be useful to look back on the year with some perspective and highlight some of the most important stories that didn’t get the attention they deserved the first time around — usually because America was too distracted by whatever that was over there.  

In no particular order:

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Trump’s campaign to reshape the courts

Amid all the punditry and prognostication about the administration’s fumbling attempts to advance its agenda on Capitol Hill, the press and the public largely overlooked how successful Trump has been at leaving his mark on a different branch of government: the judiciary.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he had 54 judicial vacancies to fill; when Trump took office, he inherited twice that number, thanks in large part to Mitch McConnell’s strategy of halting the judicial-appointments process during Obama’s last two years in the White House. The new president has proceeded to fill these vacancies at an unprecedented rate, and his nominees have been “the youngest, whitest, male-est, and most conservative in modern memory,” as the New Yorker’s Jeff Shesol recently pointed out. As a result, Trump has brought about “a wholesale change among the federal judiciary” that will “have a significant impact on the shape and trajectory of American law for decades,” says Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. “This will be the single most important legacy of the Trump administration.”

And the president may only just be getting started. Last month, the founder of the influential Federalist Society unveiled a plan that would allow Trump to add “twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325)” — and would ultimately leave the courts evenly divided between judges appointed by Trump and those appointed by the previous nine presidents combined.

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Mike Pence prepares for Trump’s downfall — just in case

In public, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s staunchly evangelical No. 2, is the very picture of deference and loyalty; he has repeatedly demonstrated that he will defend the president no matter what he says or does.

But behind the scenes, Pence is reportedly thinking ahead to a time when he may no longer have to play the good soldier. In May, Pence became the first sitting veep to form a national political action committee at the beginning of his term, a move that will make it easier to campaign for other Republicans now — and later, perhaps, for himself. (Pence’s PAC has gone on to raise more money than President Trump’s.) In July Pence installed Nick Ayers, a sharp-elbowed political operative, as his chief of staff. Pence has traveled to important political events in Iowa, the first caucus state, and opened the vice presidential residence to key conservative activists. Finally, “Multiple advisers to Mr. Pence have already intimated to party donors that he would plan to run if Mr. Trump did not,” according to the New York Times.

Pence rarely surfaces in the headlines; his boss sucks up all the oxygen. But he’s worth watching. Earlier this month the Atlantic reported that after the “Access Hollywood” tape threatened to derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Pence was “contemplating a coup” — and he immediately “made it clear to the Republican National Committee that he was ready to take Trump’s place as the party’s nominee.”

As Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation digs into Trump’s finances and closest confidants — and as a potential Democratic wave builds in 2018’s House and Senate races — it’s easy to imagine Pence himself preparing for a post-Trump future that could come sooner than expected.

“It’s not a matter of when Republicans are ready to turn on Trump,” one senior GOP Senate aide told the Atlantic. “It’s about when they decide they’re ready for President Pence.”

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All talk — and little action — on the opioid crisis

It was one of 2016’s signature campaign issues: the opioid addiction crisis ravaging small towns from New Hampshire to New Mexico. Every candidate, Republican and Democratic, vowed to do something about it once in office, including Donald Trump. “[T]he people that are in trouble, the people that are addicted, we’re going to work with them and try and make them better,” Trump said. “And we will make them better.”

As president, Trump issued an executive order to establish the Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, a five-member panel tasked with proposing solutions to the drug epidemic. But the commission missed its first deadline, in June, and its second one, in July, before finally releasing its report in August. Then, after insisting that “we’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” Trump repeatedly promised that he would declare a national emergency “next week” — and repeatedly missed that deadline as well. When the president finally got around to making a declaration, in late October, it was as a public health emergency and not as national emergency — a distinction that meant no significant new federal funding, even though experts inside and outside of the administration argue than tens of billions of dollars would be needed to even begin to combat the epidemic.

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The unprecedented surge of Democratic candidates

Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama have already gotten a ton of attention. Less noticed, however, is the fact that Democrats already have 400-plus candidates running for the House in 2018. That’s more than twice as many as either party has previously boasted at this point in the election cycle.

Political scientists say there’s a strong relationship between the number of candidates a party recruits and the party’s win-loss record on Election Day, as we’ve noted before.

In a recent analysis for the data-focused FiveThirtyEight website, Seth Masket of the University of Denver plotted the Democratic share of viable early House challengers — that is, candidates who raised more than $5,000 by June 30 of the year before the election — against the number of seats Democrats eventually gained or lost on Election Day.

He found that in every election since 2004 in which Democrats fielded more candidates than Republicans, they also wound up gaining seats — an additional 2.5 House members per each additional percentage-point advantage in early House candidates, on average. The most extreme example was 2006, when nearly 70 percent of the early House candidates were Democrats. That year, the party netted 31 seats on Election Day.

Apply the same formula to the 2018 cycle, Masket noted, and Democrats will be on track to pick up 93 House seats — the third-largest gain in U.S. history.

Will Democrats flip that many seats? Unlikely. But the party only needs to net 24 to retake the House. That’s much more plausible. The only way to lay the groundwork for a wave election is by fielding solid candidates for as many flippable seats as possible, then waiting for the national mood to turn in your favor. That’s exactly what Democrats have been doing.

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Trump’s behind-the-scenes effort to sabotage Obamacare

Republicans have made no secret of their desire to end Obamacare. They spent much of 2017 repeatedly trying — and repeatedly failing — to get repeal legislation through Congress. But while that drama was unfolding on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration was quietly doing everything in its power to set the system up for failure — regardless of whether or not it was ever officially repealed.

Over the past 12 months, Trump & Co. have cut the open enrollment period in half, from 12 weeks to six weeks. They have slashed funding for Obamacare advertising by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million. They cut funding for in-person assistance by 40 percent — then let the budget run out entirely. And at the last minute they pulled out of state-level open-enrollment events and stopped federal payments to insurers, driving up premiums by as much as 30 percent for some plans. All of this while hinting that the individual mandate — the fine on people who don’t have insurance — would not be enforced.

Despite these efforts, 2017 Obamacare enrollment proceeded at a faster pace than in previous years. And even with less time to sign up, the total number of HEATHCARE.GOV enrollees — 8.8 million, according to figures released by the White House on Thursday — nearly matched the figure for 2016. For now, that unexpected result seems likely to stave off the  self-perpetuating cycle of falling enrollment and price increases known as a “death spiral.”

But Republicans are still in the hunt. The party’s new tax bill eliminates the individual mandate altogether, which could wreak further havoc on the otherwise stable system in 2018. So  the next time Republicans claim Obamacare is failing, it’s worth remembering why — and who’s responsible.

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America’s neglect of Puerto Rico

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, whose residents are American citizens, was devastated earlier this year by Hurricane Maria. This didn’t exactly go unnoticed at the time. When President Trump traveled to San Juan and threw paper towels to survivors, or got in a Twitter war with the city’s mayor, or accused Puerto Ricans who criticized the federal response of “want[ing] everything to be done for them,” the mainland press paid attention.

But since then, the spotlight has moved on — while the island continues to suffer. The official death toll is 64, and Trump has bragged about how it’s not “in the thousands.” But a recent New York Times investigation has found that it very well may be. According to the Times, 1,052 more people than usual died on the island during the 42 days after Maria made landfall on Sept. 20. Many of these additional deaths are likely attributable to delayed medical treatment or poor conditions in homes and hospitals — consequences of the power outages and water shortages that have afflicted Puerto Rico since the hurricane.

Even now, three months later, only 64 percent of the power grid has been restored; clean water is still scarcer than it should be. At the same time, the U.S. House has included a 20 percent import tax on products manufactured in foreign jurisdictions in its tax-reform bill — a tax that could cost the “foreign jurisdiction” of Puerto Rico tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs. The island still receives only a fraction of the Medicaid funding for which it would qualify if it were a state. And so far Congress has approved a mere $5 billion in aid — far less than the $94 billion the Puerto Rican government says it needs to recover.

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Defeating ISIS — but backtracking in Syria

On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump famously pledged to “bomb the s*** out of [ISIS].” That’s largely what his administration has been doing. Then again, it’s largely what the Obama administration was doing before Trump.

Trump has made some changes, loosening the “rules of engagement” and allowing war planners at the Department of Defense more autonomy. But those are tactical shifts. In 2017, under Trump, the United States’ overarching anti-ISIS strategy continued to work — to the point that the Islamic State has basically been defeated, at least for the time being.

This welcome progress on one of the world’s most dangerous situations has gotten lost amid headlines about ISIS-inspired attacks, whether in London, New York or elsewhere, which lone wolves continue to carry out. The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq and the place where ISIS had first declared its “caliphate,” began in October 2016  and concluded in July; in October, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces captured Raqqa, the Syrian city that had become the caliphate’s de facto capital. These successes followed earlier wins across Iraq and Syria, and have led Iraq, Iran and Russia to declare victory over ISIS in recent weeks.

U.S. military officials warn that the jihadi group is resilient and could always stage a comeback. But with ISIS on the run, the question now turns to the larger Syrian civil war, which has killed more than 400,000 and displaced more than 10 million. Under Obama, the U.S. supported the Syrian rebels in their efforts to oust dictator Bashar Assad. But the Trump administration has backed away from that commitment, allowing Russia to fill the void. It now looks as if the war will end on Vladimir Putin’s terms — with Assad still in power.

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Ask any Democratic activist in Washington, D.C., what they think of centrism — or moderation, or bipartisanship — and they’ll probably tell you the same thing.

So pointless. So naïve. So passé.

In an age of fake news and choose-your-own-reality Facebook feeds, of Infowars and Breitbart, of a Republican Party that lurches further right with each election and a president whose agenda seems to consist solely of sledgehammering his predecessor’s legacy, the only sane response, these Democrats have concluded — and the only real way to regain power, starting with the 2018 midterms — is to veer left with similar ferocity and “resist” at every turn.

“The problem with the Democratic Party is that they have been trying to convert Republican voters or cajole white working-class voters,” Aimee Allison, president of Democracy in Color, recently told the Washington Post, neatly summarizing the conventional wisdom among progressives. “The job of Democrats this week, in 2018 and in 2020, is to excite the base.”

And yet 2,300 miles away in Phoenix, the woman who is likely to become one of the Democratic Party’s marquee Senate nominees next year seems to have missed the memo entirely.

Meet Kyrsten Sinema: three-term congresswoman, lapsed Mormon, openly bisexual and nontheist trailblazer, Ironman triathlete — and, with $4.1 million on hand, the early frontrunner in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, which is one of the few contests that will decide control of the world’s greatest deliberative body in 2019 and beyond.

Oh, and she is also one of the most moderate, bipartisan, aisle-crossing Democrats in all of D.C.

Sinema has yet to launch the media offensive that typically marks the start of campaign season; so far, she’s only submitted to a single brief interview with the Arizona Republic. But in that article, Sinema made it clear that she will be campaigning in a manner that seems to clash dramatically with the prevailing view among progressives — namely, that if Democrats want to win back Congress, and eventually the White House, they should disregard America’s dwindling centrist bloc and focus instead on harnessing their own voters’ righteous anger at Trump.

Trump is “not a thing,” Sinema insisted when the Republic asked about her message. “[He’s] not a part of what I think my constituents are worried about or think about.”

Nor, she added, is partisanship. “It’s not about a party,” Sinema said. “It never is about party. It’s about putting people ahead of party. I don’t think party matters much to people.”

This sort of “No Labels” talk has a long history on the campaign trail. But what makes Sinema’s rendition unusual is not just that she’s delivering it at a time when such sentiments have never been less trendy among party regulars.

It’s that her record really does back it up.

As a result, Sinema’s candidacy raises a crucial question for the Democratic Party going forward: Is the only way to fight Trumpian fire with fire? Or, under the right conditions, can a less “resistant” approach still make sense? (Sinema doesn’t have the primary field to herself — rivals include Muslim-American attorney Deedra Abboud and tech entrepreneur Bob Bishop — but she is seen as the prohibitive favorite.)

“Elections aren’t one-size-fits all,” says Sacha Haworth, Sinema’s campaign spokeswoman. “The national narrative doesn’t decide these races. People don’t wake up in Arizona reading Twitter and think that’s the news of the day. So it’s crucial to keep your eye on the goal and continue being the sort of person your constituents elected you to be.”

It’s hard to overstate how resolutely centrist Sinema has remained during her nearly five years in Congress. She was one of just seven House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would repeal the estate tax; one of just five House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband Internet rates; one of just six House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal funds; and one of just seven House Democrats who voted to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Sinema has also joined the GOP in voting for bills that would deregulate the banking industry, provide $1.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico, weaken Obamacare’s employer mandate and prevent Syrian and Iraqi refugees from being resettled in the United States until tighter vetting processes could be implemented. She has even voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader — twice.

According to the Lugar Center, all of this makes Sinema is the fourth-most bipartisan member of the House, and the most bipartisan Democrat. Meanwhile, the data-driven website FiveThirtyEight had determined that the Arizona congresswoman has voted with President Trump 50 percent of the time — more often than all but one other House Democrat.

It’s early yet — Sinema is barely campaigning, and the national political class is barely paying attention — but already there are signs that progressives will have some problems with the candidate who’s likely to represent their side in the fight for one of 2018’s two most flippable Senate seats. (Right now, Democrats need two pickups to split the Senate 50-50 — and if Doug Jones defeats Roy Moore in the Alabama special election on Dec. 12, two would be enough to retake the chamber.)

“There are issues, murmurs within grassroots groups and the progressive community, the environmental community and others, including immigration advocates,” Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told the New York Times in October, explaining why he has been withholding his endorsement. “[There is] still a lot of resentment.”

These murmurs will only grow louder once the race ramps up — as will the inevitable arguments that by voting with Republicans and not only downplaying Trump but touting her meetings with him, Sinema could dampen enthusiasm among the base (particularly Arizona’s surging Hispanic population) without picking up the support of diehard Trump Republicans in return.

But it’s worth considering another scenario as well.

Arizona’s Ninth Congressional District was created after the 2010 census. Curving around central Phoenix to the north, east and south, it wound up containing almost the exact same mix of Republicans (34 percent), Democrats (31 percent) and independents (33 percent) as the state itself. Prior to declaring her candidacy in 2012, Sinema had once been a member of the Green Party; fond of designer shoes and glasses, she jokingly described herself as a “Prada socialist.” But Sinema campaigned (and later legislated) as a centrist who was “willing to work with anyone to get things done,” and after securing the new seat by a mere 10,000 votes, she has won reelection by widening margins (13 percentage points in 2014, and 22 percentage points two years later).

Sinema has reason to believe a similar strategy could work statewide. On the GOP side, staunch Trumper Kelli Ward will battle a more establishment-friendly Republican — such as Rep. Martha McSally of Tucson, an occasional Trump critic — in a divisive, expensive primary race that will almost certainly yank the party to the right. Meanwhile, Sinema will continue to target the familiar voters who’ve propelled her to victory in the Ninth^,, which  despite its even partisan split, voted for Clinton by 16 percentage points: independents and suburban, college-educated Republicans who are turned off by Trump but aren’t particularly turned on by the resistance.

This explains why Sinema recently told the New York Times that — in the Times’ paraphrasing — “a Democrat would have to campaign in a virtually nonpartisan way to win a Senate race” in Arizona, criticizing “national Democrats for moving too far to the left.”

“It’s irresponsible to promise a platform that you can’t deliver on,’’ Sinema added. “You’re not going to get free college.”

This also explains why, in the end, Arizona progressives may be unsatisfied. But amid what may be a national, anti-Trump wave election, would they really refuse to show up and vote in the one contest that could, more than any other, help them achieve their ultimate goal of halting President Trump’s agenda in its tracks?

It’s a question that will determine whether Sinema’s brand of centrism is, in fact, on the way out — or whether the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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LOS ANGELES — For Democrats in Orange County, Calif., it has started to seem, in recent months, as if the question is not so much “Who’s running for Congress in 2018?” as “Who isn’t?”

In February, Democratic real estate broker Boyd Roberts announced that he would be challenging longtime GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48) in the upcoming midterm elections.

In March, businessman Harley Rouda, another Laguna Beach Democrat, declared that he would be gunning for Rohrabacher’s job as well.

In April, Laura Oatman, an architect and mother of five, entered the race.

Then came pioneering stem cell biologist Hans Keirstead. And American Airlines pilot Tony Zakardes. And lawyer Omar Siddiqui. And Nestlé executive Michael Kotick.

And these California Democrats aren’t unique.

Earlier this month, the party won key victories in Virginia, New Jersey and scores of other local contests across the country. But one of the biggest stories of the night — if not the biggest — was recruitment, particularly in the battle for control of Virginia’s Republican-dominated House of Delegates.

In previous years, Virginia Democrats had failed to field challengers in politically promising districts, conceding dozens of seats to vulnerable but unchallenged GOP incumbents. But 2017 attracted droves of diverse, often rookie candidates electrified by President Trump and itching to “resist,” and by Election Day, Virginia Democrats had standard-bearers on the ballot in 88 of 100 districts — the most anyone could remember. The party wound up winning 16 seats, roughly twice the number even the most optimistic partisans had predicted before the election.

This, in turn, has led to newfound optimism for the party going into 2018. According to Politico, Democratic leaders are now predicting “a fundraising and candidate recruitment surge, powered by grassroots fury at the Trump administration.”

When it comes to recruitment, the conventional wisdom is clear: The more candidates, the merrier.

“Given the failed agenda being pushed by Paul Ryan and Washington Republicans, it’s no wonder that strong candidates are stepping up to the plate in Orange County and across California,” says Drew Godinich, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The deep bench of outsider candidates is a testament to the incredible grassroots energy we are seeing on the ground.”

Or as the DCCC chair, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., has said elsewhere, “No party ever lost an election due to too much energy and momentum.”

But 2018 is shaping up to be such an unusual election cycle that one has to wonder:

Could an unprecedented glut of Democratic hopefuls — and the crowded primaries that are sure to follow — tip the scales the other way?

Could Democrats be in danger of having too much of a good thing?

This, at least, is the line that Republicans in the traditional conservative stronghold of Orange County are peddling.

“All the Republicans are unified behind one candidate in each of these races and the Democrats have divided loyalties to candidates who have no name ID,” county GOP Chairman Fred Whitaker has said, according to the Orange County Register. “I’m pretty happy with it.”

And so, more than anywhere else, the O.C. will be the place to watch to find who’s right.

In November 2015, with roughly a year to go until Election Day 2016, only one Democrat had launched his candidacy across all of Orange County.

Now there are seven Democratic candidates running in Rohrabacher’s district alone — and 23 in the O.C. as a whole, where diversifying demographics, a dwindling Republican registration advantage and Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking countywide victory in 2016 have Democrats eyeing four GOP incumbents previously considered safe: Reps. Rohrabacher; Ed Royce, CA-39; Mimi Walters, CA-45; and Darrell Issa, CA-49.

For the most part, these challengers are not the gadflies, vanity candidates and sacrificial lambs that have run against Rohrabacher & Co. in prior elections.

There’s Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnam-War-refugee-turned-pediatrician-turned-two-time-cancer-survivor. There’s Andy Thorburn, a teacher-turned-union-leader-turned-millionaire-businessman. There’s environmental activist Mike Levin, who’s raised nearly a million dollars since announcing his candidacy in March. And there’s retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate, who came within 1,622 votes of unseating Issa in 2016.

Not to mention 19 more like them.

Political scientists say there’s a strong relationship between the number of candidates a party recruits and the party’s win-loss record on Election Day.

“If a party can convince a large number of skilled and experienced candidates to run for office, those candidates tend to do better and the party tends to win more seats,” Seth Masket of the University of Denver wrote in August for the data-focused FiveThirtyEight website. “Democrats had twice the number of challengers that Republicans did in 2006 and then took over the House in that election, while a similar advantage yielded similar payoffs for Republicans in 2010.”

In his analysis, Masket plotted the Democratic share of viable, early House challengers — that is, candidates who raised more than $5,000 by June 30 of the year before the election  — against the number of seats Democrats eventually gained or lost on Election Day.

He found that in every election since 2004 in which Democrats fielded more candidates than Republicans, they also wound up gaining seats — an additional 2.5 House members per each additional percentage-point advantage in early House candidates, on average. The most extreme example was 2006, when nearly 70 percent of the early House candidates were Democrats. That year, the party netted 31 seats on Election Day.

Apply the same formula to the 2018 cycle, Masket noted, and Democrats will be on track to pick up 93 House seats — the third-largest gain in U.S. history.

Which brings us to the problem with the political science on recruitment: The numbers so far this cycle are way off the charts — making it pretty much impossible to predict how things will ultimately shake out.

Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Michael Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, 391 Democratic challengers have already raised $5,000 or more. No other cycle comes close. The next highest tally belongs to the GOP, who in October 2009 boasted fewer than half as many candidates (184) with $5,000 or more. In fact, at every fundraising level — $5,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 — the Democratic class of 2017 is more than twice as large as the Republican class of 2009.

Also unprecedented is the fact that, so far this cycle, 85 percent of the candidates who’ve cleared $5,000 are Democrats. By October of 2009, Republicans could only lay claim to 72 percent of the $5,000 club — and they still managed to pick up 63 seats the following November, thanks to that year’s tea party wave.

So far, so good for the Dems, right? Absolutely. But the flipside of this flood of Democratic challengers is that a lot of them are clustering into a few pivotal races, competing against each other for the opportunity unseat the most vulnerable Republican incumbents. As Malbin points out, “eight Democratic challengers have filed FEC reports in the race against the incumbent, Jeff Denham, in California’s 10th District. Seven are running against Dana Rohrabacher in CA-48, seven against Peter Roskam in Ill.-6, and seven against John Faso in NY-19. The most these 29 challengers can do in the general election is defeat four incumbents.”

In other words, there may be 391 viable Democratic challengers out on the trail right now, but they’re only running against 156 Republican incumbents — which means that, on average, 2.5 Dems are already competing in each primary contest, with roughly a year to go until Election Day. Rewind to this point in the last Democratic wave cycle (2006), and you’ll see that the average number of primary candidates back then was significantly lower: about 1.4 Dems per contest.

None which is bad for the party, per se. The only way to lay the groundwork for a wave election is by fielding solid candidates for as many flippable seats as possible, then waiting for the national mood to turn in your favor. By that measure, this year’s Democrats are miles ahead of where Republicans were in the fall of 2009, when only 97 Democratic incumbents had drawn viable challengers.

Yet it’s not impossible to imagine that squeezing seven or eight Democrats into a competitive House primary could have some unintended consequences.

“The level of enthusiasm that comes with such a crowded field almost always outweighs any downside,” says Dan Schnur, a former spokesman for Republicans Pete Wilson and John McCain who until recently ran the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “But there needs to be some type of organization or structure through which to channel all that energy.”

The first thing to note is that unlike 2006, when then DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel “recruited the right candidates, found the money and funded them and provided issues for them,” 2017 is all about fired-up grassroots activists making the leap to electoral politics on their own. This means less grooming, less district-by-district tailoring, less top-down centrism — and more rookies, more idiosyncrasies and likely more progressivism.

From there, it’s a short leap to a more unpredictable primary season. As in the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest — when the popular vote was divided among a dozen candidates — the eventual nominee could wind up being a plurality candidate who represents a passionate faction of the party. But that isn’t always the same thing as a nominee who’s the best fit for the district in a general election.

In fact, some Democrats worry that in such a scenario Republicans could “put their thumbs on the scales,” says Dave Min, one of two University of California, Irvine law professors running against Walters in CA-45 (along with five other Dems).

“With so many candidates, we run the risk that the incumbent will play in our primary,” Min tells Yahoo News. “Republicans could spend money to help pick a weaker candidate — the challenger they want to face in the fall.”

A cramped field can also complicate fundraising. The problem isn’t so much a lack of donations; so far, overall receipts have been impressive. It’s that “we all have to spend down to zero in the primary, while the Republican incumbent saves her cash,” according to Min. “So she’ll have more than a million dollars on hand to define the contest from day one — while our nominee will have to start over from scratch.”

Meanwhile, things could get even wilder in California, where control of Congress may ultimately be decided — and where Democrats compete against Republicans and independents in a nonpartisan primary system. (The top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of party affiliation.) Here, the risk is that splitting the Democratic vote seven or eight ways in a historically conservative area could allow a non-Democratic challenger to finish second and go head-to-head with the GOP incumbent next November.

This has happened before. In 2012, Republican Rep. Gary Miller was gerrymandered out of his previous district (the 42nd) and forced to run in a new, majority-Hispanic district that leaned to the left. In the primary, Redlands Democrat Pete Aguilar actually won the most Democratic votes — but because three other Democrats were also running, Republican Bob Dutton squeaked past him with 25 percent of the vote and faced off against Miller in the general election.

It could happen again. In CA-48, for instance, one Republican, Stelian Onufrei, is already campaigning against Rohrabacher — he has pledged to spend half a million dollars of his own money — while another, former county GOP Chairman Scott Baugh, is waiting in the wings with more cash on hand than Rohrabacher himself. A Libertarian and an independent candidate are running as well.

(The DCCC has said that, to prevent such outcomes, “We absolutely reserve the right to get involved in these primaries where necessary.”)

In the end, Democrats should be excited about how many candidates they’ve recruited for 2018 — and how many have simply volunteered. The biggest class of challengers in recent memory? That’s a good problem to have.

But it’s also worth remembering that the party is proceeding into uncharted territory — and that 2018’s most congested primaries could shake out in some unusual ways.

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