All eyes were on California yesterday. First the good news:

• Governor: Phil Angelides won the Democratic primary despite a $35 million onslaught from Steve Westly, but the race was highly negative and drove Democratic turnout down - which probably hurt Francine Busby in CA-50. We need the most popular Democrats in the country - Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, and Howard Dean - to join California Democrats in a unity dinner with Steve Westly so we can turn out a strong Democratic vote in November to beat Schwarzenegger and win the crucial House races.
• Secretary of State: Debra Bowen won the primary 60%-40% by promising verified voting. We must make sure she wins in November so she can play a crucial role both in California and nationwide in fighting corrupt electronic voting machine vendors.
• CA-04: Charles Brown won the primary to take on John Doolittle, who had a tough primary.
• CA-06: Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey beat her conservative primary opponent by 2:1.
• CA-11: Jerry McNerney won the primary to take on anti-environmental leader Richard Pombo, who got only 62% in his primary against a moderate. If McNerney can win those moderate votes, he has a good shot at winning.
• CA-26: Cynthia Rodriguez Matthews won the primary to take on closeted gay hypocrite David Dreier.
• CA-51: Bob Filner won his primary with 55% and will continue his progressive leadership in Congress.

But otherwise there were no suprises:

• CA-36: Progressive activist Marcy Winograd ran a fabulous primary against pro-war and pro-wiretapping Jane Harman, but lost 62%-38%.
• CA-50: Francine Busby lost the special election in this solidly Republican district to Brian Bilbray by 49%-45%. Busby will get another chance to beat Bilbray in November.

The Busby-Bilbray race was the one Washington insiders were watching most closely, looking for early signs of a Democratic tsunami in November in the wake of the Duke Cunningham scandal. Republicans spent a whopping $4.5 million to turn out 60,000 votes in a district that cast 170,000 votes for George Bush in 2004. Busby gained 18 points from her 22-point defeat in 2004. Still, Busby might have scored a huge upset if she had not carelessly accepted the help of undocumented volunteers at the very end of the campaign - an issue that was caught on tape and used by rightwing talk show hosts in the final days of the campaign to mobilize the rightwing base. Here's Chris Bowers:

In 2004, Busby lost the CA-50 by 22.0%. Today, it looks like she will lose by around 4.5%. And that was with the NRCC spending $4.5M on the race. If Republicans want to spin losing 18 points after spending $4.5M of committee money as a good thing, go for it. After all, spin is basically why they spent so much money on this race. By blowing their wad in a solidly Republican district, they wanted to change the media narrative on the election in their favor. It will probably work, given how subservient and generally inaccurate the media tends to be when it comes to Republicans and elections. In reality, for a Republican candidate to pull 49.5% of the vote in a district with 44.5% Republican registration is shocking. Given those numbers, Bilbray probably managed all of 20% of the vote among independents.

No matter what the media says, no Democrat should be mistaken about this result. First, this is a huge, seismic shift in our favor that bodes extremely well for November. If we receive an 18% shift nationwide, we will win the House easily. If Republican candidates are pulling only 20% of the independent vote, the Indycrat realignment is still on.

At the same time, this is not as good as we could have done. The situation for Republicans is so bad right now, that even our huge leads in the generic ballot hide what Paul Rosenberg pointed out: we should be doing better. Just because we are winning does not mean we are using winning strategies. Our ten-point advantage in the generic ballot should be fifteen. The eighteen point shift we saw in CA-50 should have been twenty-five. Bilbray will win with under 50% of the vote, and there was low turnout relative to past California primaries. Clearly, there was an opportunity for us to do more.

We had some real victories tonight, and we still have time to rectify our mistakes. Fortunately, come November, even Busby will have another chance. I just hope that as a party we realize that there are clearly better strategic paths for us to take than the ones we are currently following. Tonight, as David Sirota writes, Jon Tester showed us just such a path.

I won't pretend to have all of the answers at 3:30 am. Things are going pretty well, but they could be going even better.