Super Tuesday results ensured the renominations of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, barring some unanticipated adverse health events. So, who’s going to win in November?

Polls give us clues. Trump continues to have the small but persistent lead in public polls he has maintained since November 2023 — in contrast to the 2016 and 2020 cycles, in which he often trailed in national and target state polls.

But polls are only one indicator. Actual votes are another. And we’ve had one contest this year that provides important clues to the November vote: the California primary.

Primary voters in California, like those in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, have voted not just for president but also for members of Congress and (in North Carolina) governor and statewide officials. Those contests may draw turnout from voters with little motivation to participate in seemingly already decided presidential primaries.

And California, unlike those states but like Louisiana and Washington, has, except at the presidential level, all-party primaries, in which the top two candidates, regardless of party, advance to the general election.

The results of all-party primaries in many but not all cases turn out to be good forecasts of the general election.

It’s true that this year’s California primary came eight months before the November election, and in eight months, events can surprise and opinions can change. But today’s polls are subject to the same caveat.

The big news from California is that, with 85% of the votes counted, Democratic support is sagging a bit. With no viable opposition in the state to Biden or Trump, Democrats cast 59% of presidential votes and Republicans 39%. That’s down from the state’s 63%-34% margin for Biden over Trump in 2020.

Similarly, in the all-party primary for the U.S. Senate, Democrats got 59% of the votes and Republicans 39%.

Those numbers don’t mean difficulty for Biden in carrying California’s 52 electoral votes or for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Congress’s chief propagator of the Russia collusion hoax, in replacing Feinstein in the Senate.

But it does suggest gains for Republicans in congressional and state legislative districts, and it does lend credence to polling data, reviewed last month in this space, showing Trump and Republican gains among Hispanic and Asian voters.

This year, Republicans won majorities in 13 districts to Democrats’ 39, a vast improvement on the 46-7 Democratic margin in 2018 when, in reaction against Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won back the House majority and the speaker’s chair.

Republican incumbents in three heavily Hispanic and Asian seats who were elected with 51% in 2022 got between 55% and 56% of primary votes this year. And Republicans won between 43% and 49% of primary votes in nine other districts, seven of them heavily Hispanic. Most of those seats aren’t seriously contested this year, but most may be in years to come.

California has seen something like this before. Over the last three generations, the state has been populated by two brief but enormous surges of migration of (to oversimplify) Midwesterners from 1946 to 1973 and Mexicans from 1982 to 2007. The Midwesterners provided majorities first for Pat Brown liberals and, after riots in Berkeley and Watts, for Ronald Reagan conservatives. Midwestern migrants enabled Republicans to hold the governorship in six of eight elections from 1966 to 1994.

Gentry liberals’ high turnout will probably keep California Democratic, but Republican trending in lower-turnout Mexican areas will reduce their ranks in Congress well below Pelosi highs.

Meanwhile, California has been losing population, down 538,000 between 2020 and 2023, even as it lost one U.S. House seat in the reapportionment following the 2020 census.

California bitterly clings to much of the high-tech and entertainment industries, but it seems to be losing its hold, in the days of Reagan, on the imaginations of most immigrants and Americans alike.