Dianne Feinstein, who will turn eighty-five next week, was born early in the Great Depression, the daughter of a San Francisco surgeon, and it seems increasingly likely that she will be a United States senator until she is past ninety. In the California primaries on Tuesday, Feinstein won nearly four times as many votes as her closest challenger, the state senate leader Kevin de León. Due to California’s unusual electoral system, in which primaries are nonpartisan, Feinstein will face de León again in the general election, in November. The sitting lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, himself the scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, won the nomination for governor, supporting the argument that the results were a victory for the state’s Democratic establishment, the arrangement of power that was formed in the twentieth century and has so far refused to yield in the twenty-first. De León argued that, in the Trump era, Feinstein had not stood up for “California values.” In the election, she crushed him.

The idea for some time has been that Southern California, with its demographic weight, would overthrow the San Francisco Democratic consensus that has prevailed in the state for decades. This year, two Hispanic politicians from the southern half of the state tried: de León, the fifty-one-year-old leader of the Democrats in the state senate, challenged Feinstein from the left; Antonio Villaraigosa, the sixty-five-year-old former mayor of Los Angeles, took on Newsom from a more complicated position, closer to the right. Both of these politicians placed a bet on Southern California as the state’s political future, but offered different visions of what it might be. De León, whose campaign ads insisted that America’s national politics had become incompatible with California’s values, gestured toward a more expansive left-wing program. Villaraigosa, whose campaign was boosted by billionaires who support the charter-school movement, suggested a more guarded retrenchment that emphasized immigrant striving and accomplishment, a West Coast “Bonfire of the Vanities” politics.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

It has been a strange, hot year in Southern California, marked by the terrors of immigration enforcement and the environmental chaos and apocalyptic imagery of wildfires. It has been shaped, too, by the crowding pressures of the West Coast’s homeless population, whose planned relocation to shelters in communities with large immigrant populations provoked sharp protests, and the conviction that the state’s unwanted were being dumped on relative newcomers. The year has seemed ripe for some sharp turn, to the left or the right. And yet as the primary campaigns unfolded in recent months the electorate moved calmly back to the leaders it knew. Newsom’s allies spent the last weeks of the campaign strategizing ways to boost the Republican venture capitalist John Cox into second place, ahead of Villaraigosa, and got the result they wanted. “California’s vision and America’s values are one and the same,” Newsom said in his victory speech last night—the ambitious, rich liberal recasting himself as a healer of the breach. Feinstein, meanwhile, had run up majestic margins in the late polling, and though de León managed to squeeze into second, her reëlection seems assured.

The logic of de León’s campaign had always been that Feinstein was no longer a good match for the state—moderate and careful and old while California was young and outspoken and progressive. This argument understood the state, but it underestimated Feinstein. Her reputation during the Obama years had come to rest heavily on her support of his Administration’s drone-assassination and domestic-surveillance programs, and in this political campaign she had bent, a bit, to the new atmosphere within her party. She reversed her long-standing support of the death penalty, and in the Senate voted against the nomination of Gina Haspel, who had been heavily involved in the C.I.A.’s torture program, to be the agency’s director. The first year and a half of the Trump Administration has also given Feinstein the opportunity to remind the public of her strengths, and the clarity with which she sizes up those around her in the political arena. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” she told Amy Barrett, a Trump judicial nominee and an outspoken Catholic, last year. As liberals called for a renewal of the federal assault-weapons ban after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, they remembered that Feinstein had sponsored the original one, in 1994. As they grew worried about the Trump Administration’s detention policies, they also recalled that it was Feinstein who had fought, for years, to document the C.I.A. torture program during the George W. Bush years. In November, in a hearing over Facebook’s role in the informational chaos of the 2016 election, the senior senator from California glowered at an all-male panel of the company’s executives. “We are not gonna go away, gentlemen,” she said, and, given the tone of the times, both the sentiment and the word “gentlemen” were expertly chosen.

Senators, unlike most other human beings, often have their greatest influence in their eighth decade, even their ninth, very occasionally their tenth, which is where Feinstein will be if she wins and finishes another term. If Feinstein’s bipartisan inclination has been seen as a liability during this first phase of the Trump Administration, then it may be a great asset during the next phase, when the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation will presumably land on Capitol Hill. Congress is then likely to be closely divided between the parties, and someone will need to forge a consensus. Feinstein is likely either still to be the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee—or (a more outside possibility) its chair—when the Trump era will pivot around the matter of why, and under what influence, the President summarily removed James Comey as the director of the F.B.I. Her reëlection campaign feels like a prelude to that episode, in which Feinstein has been revealed not as a figure out of time but, more simply, a talent.