Cal­i­for­nia is set­ting the agen­da for the next gen­er­a­tion of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty pol­i­tics. And while Tuesday’s pri­maries saw mixed results for left chal­lengers, and some races won’t be decid­ed for days, that is a big win for the pro­gres­sive movement.

In California, we can see the outline of an alternative vision to neoliberalism and Trumpism shaping political debates—and the Democratic Party—on a statewide scale.

Last year, the bat­tle between pro­gres­sives and estab­lish­ment Democ­rats for the ​“soul” of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty focused large­ly around uni­ver­sal health care. That fight goes on, and Medicare for All has become a ral­ly­ing cry for pro­gres­sives, but it isn’t the only issue that’s reshap­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics in Cal­i­for­nia and across the nation.

The Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion, which has been track­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns this year, recent­ly pub­lished a list of the issues most often talked about by both estab­lish­ment and pro­gres­sive Democ­rats. Health­care is at the top of both lists while pre K‑12 edu­ca­tion sits in the top-five for both groups.

The com­mon ground on edu­ca­tion is hard­ly sur­pris­ing. But there is a twist in Cal­i­for­nia, where the debate has gone beyond the usu­al, pro for­ma nod to the impor­tance of ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion. It was actu­al­ly a cen­tral issue in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries, gain­ing strong sup­port from across the spec­trum of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.

For exam­ple, Gavin New­som, the estab­lish­ment Demo­c­rat who eas­i­ly won the most votes in the guber­na­to­r­i­al pri­ma­ry, made sup­port for uni­ver­sal pre‑K, along with pre­na­tal care, one of his key cam­paign promises.

That’s a sharp depar­ture from the cur­rent Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nor, Jer­ry Brown, who cites the high costs of uni­ver­sal preschool as a rea­son not to extend it to all low-income chil­dren. Cal­i­for­nia has about 3 mil­lion chil­dren who are 5 and under, and it has among the high­est child pover­ty rates in the coun­try. In L.A. Coun­ty, accord­ing to KQED, ​“more than half of babies and tod­dlers are eli­gi­ble for state-sub­si­dized care, but only 6 per­cent are get­ting it.”

Avo Makdess­ian, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Ear­ly Learn­ing at the Sil­i­con Val­ley Com­mu­ni­ty Foun­da­tion, not­ed that ​“this is the first time that babies, tod­dlers, preschool­ers are being talked about by the lead­ing can­di­dates for gov­er­nor and it’s real­ly, real­ly exciting.”

In the state leg­is­la­ture, mean­time, there’s already strong momen­tum for change. The Cal­i­for­nia Leg­isla­tive Women’s Cau­cus, for exam­ple, has recent­ly pro­posed a bil­lion dol­lars of new invest­ments in ear­ly child­hood pro­grams. The like­ly next gov­er­nor and the leg­is­la­ture are, at least in their rhetoric, in com­plete harmony.

Left coast

This piv­ot mat­ters — and it amounts to a defin­ing moment for the future of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty — for two rea­sons, one philo­soph­i­cal and one practical.

First, the bat­tle for the soul of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty isn’t just about where can­di­dates stand on par­tic­u­lar issues. It’s about whether the par­ty has a broad vision for our pol­i­tics and for whose inter­ests should be served.

In a polit­i­cal sys­tem dri­ven by cam­paign dona­tions and the influ­ence of wealthy donors and cor­po­rate PACs, the inter­ests served are often those of the wealthy and cor­po­ra­tions. That’s true among both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, and it’s the source of much of the anger among pro­gres­sives towards the Demo­c­ra­t­ic establishment.

Ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion, like uni­ver­sal health­care, goes right to the heart of this ten­sion. It’s impos­si­ble to talk about the issue with­out talk­ing about who wins and who los­es in our polit­i­cal sys­tem — and why. ​“By age 3, as a head­line in the Wash­ing­ton Post recent­ly put it blunt­ly, ​“inequal­i­ty is clear. Rich kids attend school. Poor kids stay with a grandparent.”

There are now sev­er­al decades of research show­ing the dra­mat­ic impact of invest­ments made in the ear­li­est stages of life on indi­vid­ual out­comes. Last year, in sum­ma­riz­ing that moun­tain of research, sev­er­al schol­ars not­ed that, while the qual­i­ty and con­tent of preschool pro­grams varies wide­ly, the evi­dence for their over­all effec­tive­ness is clear, and ​“chil­dren attend­ing pub­licly fund­ed pre-kinder­garten pro­grams are bet­ter pre­pared for kinder­garten than sim­i­lar chil­dren who have not attend­ed pre‑k.”

James Heck­man, a Nobel Prize-win­ning econ­o­mist and expert in the sub­ject, has writ­ten that ​“the evi­dence is quite clear that inequal­i­ty in the devel­op­ment of human capa­bil­i­ties pro­duces neg­a­tive social and eco­nom­ic out­comes that can and should be pre­vent­ed with invest­ments in ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly tar­get­ed toward dis­ad­van­taged chil­dren and their families.”

These invest­ments, Heck­man not­ed, are not only moral imper­a­tives. They make eco­nom­ic sense. They help ​“reduce the achieve­ment gap, reduce the need for spe­cial edu­ca­tion, increase the like­li­hood of health­i­er lifestyles, low­er the crime rate, and reduce over­all social costs.” The upshot? ​“Every dol­lar invest­ed in high-qual­i­ty ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion pro­duces a 7 to 10 per­cent per annum return on investment.”

That’s the argu­ment for pro­gres­sivism in a nut­shell. Valu­ing peo­ple over prof­it is the right thing to do, and it pays off the long run, whether in health­care, eco­nom­ics or education.

Such an argu­ment can’t always over­come the deep cor­rup­tion of our pol­i­tics and the influ­ence of spe­cial inter­ests. But, it is a win­ning argu­ment, polit­i­cal­ly. A poll of Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers last fall found that 70 per­cent con­sid­ered ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion a high pri­or­i­ty, putting it on par with pub­lic safe­ty. The cost of health care was the num­ber one vot­er con­cern, with 79 per­cent rank­ing it as a top or high priority.

As goes California

The prac­ti­cal rea­son that any of this mat­ters is that California’s tra­jec­to­ry may very well be the nation’s trajectory.

That’s true in the short term, espe­cial­ly since Democ­rats nar­row­ly man­aged to avoid the worst-case sce­nario of not field­ing a can­di­date in some House races. Under California’s pri­ma­ry rules, the top two vote-get­ters advance to the gen­er­al elec­tion, regard­less of par­ty, and in sev­er­al races the Demo­c­ra­t­ic vote was divid­ed among a large field of candidates.

To win con­trol of the House, Democ­rats need to pick up 23 Repub­li­can-held seats, and Cal­i­for­nia has sev­en prime pick-up oppor­tu­ni­ties — seats in a dis­trict that vot­ed for Hillary Clin­ton but are now rep­re­sent­ed by a Repub­li­can. Tuesday’s results in Cal­i­for­nia fea­tured good news for pro­gres­sives in a num­ber spe­cif­ic races. In the 4th U.S. House dis­trict, for exam­ple, pro­gres­sive Jes­si­ca Morse (who promis­es to ​“be a strong advo­cate for uni­ver­sal preschool in our district’s school sys­tems”) won the chance to chal­lenge one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive House mem­bers, Repub­li­can Tom McClin­tock. In House Dis­trict 45 – wide­ly con­sid­ered a bell­wether—a pro­gres­sive who sup­ports Medicare for All, Katie Porter, won the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion over a can­di­date who cam­paigned on a more cau­tious agen­da of improv­ing Obamacare.

But there is a much a big­ger pic­ture to keep an eye on, beyond the results of par­tic­u­lar races and their impli­ca­tions this fall.

Twen­ty years ago, California’s pol­i­tics looked very much like our cur­rent nation­al pol­i­tics. With the sup­port of both Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats, the state had recent­ly passed major tax cuts that ben­e­fit­ed the wealthy while starv­ing the pub­lic sec­tor, and it had adopt­ed some of the most anti-immi­grant poli­cies in the nation.

Soci­ol­o­gist Manuel Pas­tor calls Cal­i­for­nia a ​“fast for­ward” ver­sion of the nation in his recent book on the sub­ject, State of Resis­tance. But, he writes, ​“a fun­ny thing hap­pened on the way to the state’s long-pre­sumed dis­as­ter. Cal­i­for­nia stopped skid­ding and began to turn around. … Pub­lic pol­i­cy is final­ly turn­ing to the issues of income dis­tri­b­u­tion, with the state extend­ing an income tax increase on the wealthy, rais­ing its min­i­mum wage in dra­mat­ic fash­ion, and shift­ing pub­lic school fund­ing to stu­dents most in need.”

In truth, even in light of its recent trans­for­ma­tion, Cal­i­for­nia has nev­er ful­ly deserved its rep­u­ta­tion as a bas­tion of pro­gres­sivism. Its senior sen­a­tor, Dianne Fein­stein — one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive Democ­rats in Con­gress — should put that notion to rest for good. Fein­stein will face a pro­gres­sive chal­lenger this fall, Kevin de Leon, but will like­ly win the race eas­i­ly. On Tues­day, she received 44 per­cent of the vote to de Leon’s 11 percent.

And yet, it’s also true that California’s polit­i­cal sys­tem is begin­ning to engage with the prob­lem of inequal­i­ty and grap­ple with pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy solu­tions in ways that will, hope­ful­ly, make it a bell­wether. That’s true not only in the realm of ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion but on cli­mate change, afford­able hous­ing, health­care, infra­struc­ture invest­ment and a broad range of oth­er issues. As Pas­tor notes, these trans­for­ma­tions have been in large part the result of orga­niz­ing by social move­ments. ​“Rather than what we saw in D.C. in the admin­is­tra­tion of Barack Oba­ma — in which a mod­er­ate­ly pro­gres­sive pres­i­dent found him­self unable to accom­plish his agen­da as the grass­roots excite­ment of his cam­paign fiz­zled and the red-hot heat of Tea Par­ty activism shift­ed the dynam­ic — change in Cal­i­for­nia was pro­pelled by a buzzing band of orga­niz­ers who pushed for a more inclu­sive and more sus­tain­able state.”

In Cal­i­for­nia, in oth­er words, we can see the out­line of an alter­na­tive vision to neolib­er­al­ism and Trump­ism shap­ing polit­i­cal debates — and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty — on a statewide scale. The par­ty still suf­fers from many deep-seat­ed prob­lems. It is, like our entire polit­i­cal sys­tem, awash in cor­po­rate mon­ey and large­ly run by elites. But not being naïve about the state of play doesn’t require being entire­ly cynical.

While we won’t know for decades what effect this pro­gres­sive swing in Cal­i­for­nia will have on our nation­al pol­i­tics, it does give plen­ty of signs of hope.