Whoever becomes the next party chair will have to navigate political crosscurrents while helping to heal from the fallout of Bauman’s departure last year in a sexual misconduct scandal. | AP Photo California Democrats have unprecedented power. Why is the party so uneasy?

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Democratic Party has never been this powerful — and its incumbents are feeling the heat.

The party rides into the 2020 election with Democrats in every statewide office, while California Republicans — who once gave the country Ronald Reagan — have been reduced to an afterthought in the Legislature and diminished to just seven slots in a 53-member House delegation.


Yet Democrats' rising fortunes have flowed in part from an energized activist base that, even as it buoys candidates, is channeling an anti-establishmentof progressives say 2017 was A New Hope, 2019 was The Empire Strikes Back,” said RL Miller, a longtime party activist.

California Democrats point to multiple instances in the last few years where a restive base has clashed with elected officials. Democratic dominance, combined with a primary system in which the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party, has meant more Democrat-on-Democrat contests.

Last year, the Democratic Party of Sacramento County voted to remove three local elected officials for endorsing the incumbent district attorney, who was a registered Republican when she ran for reelection. The move was assailed by some Democrats as a counterintuitive purity test.

“I thought that was a bad decision, and those members who are my colleagues are great Democrats,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who as a