California's Republicans may be feeling, well, a little blue, particularly compared with their more successful counterparts elsewhere. Yet despite the John Kerry victory here, and the landslide re-election of Democrats from Barbara Boxer on down, some strong red veins may be running underneath California.

Perhaps most intriguing was the marked improvement -- cutting the overall margin by 300,000 votes and adding 2.5 points to his total -- in the performance of President Bush over 2000. All this in a race that the Republicans all but abandoned and in a state where virtually the entire media were lock-step behind Kerry.

Much more important, and relevant for the future, was the very impressive performance of the president in what may be called the Third California -- the vast inland region from the Mexican border to the Oregon border. Virtually every county in this vast area, with the exception of Imperial County and closely divided Sacramento, went for Bush, usually by larger margins than in 2000. Much of the Third California looks more like Texas than the coastal counties when all the votes are in.

The Republican success in these areas reflects a national trend. The Bush victory, particularly the surprising popular vote margin, came largely from voters in rural and exurban areas. It was not just a victory of church-goers, but a geographic and demographic triumph of the land of McMansions, Target and new office parks over the hip sophisticates of the older cities.

These areas are now the focus of American middle-class aspiration, not only for Anglos but also for growing numbers of Asian and Latino voters. Nationally, these voters went roughly 40 percent for the president, a strong improvement over 2000. This could be important in California, where the archetypal voter of the future may be best described as a Latino or mixed-race middle-class homeowner in a suburb outside Sacramento or Riverside.

In this sense, suggests demographer Bill Frey at the Brookings Institution, the Democrats are in danger, both in California and elsewhere, of becoming "the party of the past," identified with economically stagnant cities segregated largely between the rich and poor, the undereducated and the overeducated. The Republicans, on the other hand, have the opportunity to become the party of aspiration, upward mobility and, ironically, through minority movement into the suburban periphery, ethnic integration as well.

In this respect, the success of the Republicans in the Third California and among minorities this time around will be more important as the 2000s unfold. After all, this part of the state is growing the fastest, both in terms of population and jobs.

Already, taken together, the Third California provides the home for more people than the ultra-liberal Bay Area, which has the slowest growth rate of population vote and is hemorrhaging middle-class residents to the interior.

One contravening theory has it that when these voters move east, they bring their liberal values as well as a bull market for new Chinese or Mexican restaurants, Whole Foods and Starbucks. This may be somewhat true, but evidence also shows that new circumstances, such as homeownership and childbearing, also can tilt them more to the center-right. Angelenos moving to Riverside-San Bernardino have not made the area more noticeably liberal, but arguably even more conservative.

Perhaps even more illuminating has been the vote on propositions this year. With the exception of the disgracefully overhyped stem-cell initiative, voters generally opted for moderately conservative positions on everything from health-care mandates to tort reform and changing the "three strikes" law. In most cases, they follow lock-step not the loony left in the Legislature but Bush's biggest California backer, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The vote over Proposition 66, the reform of three strikes opposed by the governor, shows this dynamic in action. It passed comfortably in the Bay Area, broke even in Los Angeles County and got walloped in the Third California, losing generally by 20 points or more. The attempt by the left and labor to impose mandatory health insurance on small business also lost, again in large part due to Third California voters.

Ultimately the ability to shift California from true blue to perhaps a lighter shade of blue, or even an off-pink, lies with the ability of the governor himself to redefine the still moribund state GOP in his own, more moderate image. There is little chance that California will ever go as hard right as, say, Texas or Georgia; the state is too fun-loving, free-thinking and ideologically diverse to be dominated by doughty evangelicals.

Yet as much as the state's voters reject fundamentalist conservatism, they also seem to be resisting the equally annoying, self-righteous activist trustafarians of San Francisco or Santa Monica as well as their greedy allies among public-sector unions and trial lawyers. Instead, California is shifting, hesitatingly but inexorably, toward a more centrist, and less predictably liberal, direction. The significant shift to Bush, the vote on the propositions, the growth of the Third California and the continued popularity of the governor all point to this conclusion.

Whether this is enough to restore true two-party politics in California, of course, is unclear. The Republicans have shown an innate ability to overplay even a middling hand and run truly awful candidates at every level. The Democrats also could show more common sense and veer away from their current tendency to hard-left politics. The party likely to do best will be the one that recognizes that most Californians prefer pastels over the darkest shades of either red or blue.