California governor Gavin Newsom announced Sunday night that he would appoint Laphonza Butler to the late Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat for the remainder of her term, which expires in 2024. Of course you’ve heard of Butler. Everyone has — she’s a true titan of California electoral politics, her name known to practically every voter in the Golden State. I actually overheard a couple of guys in a coffeeshop yesterday talking about what a great idea it would be if Newsom had the political genius to appoint her to the position.

Nah, just kidding, I know you’ve never heard of her either. Butler is the president of EMILY’s List, one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious abortion-lobbying organizations (so reporters probably don’t need to waste time inquiring into her opinion about Dobbs). Also, she is, quite amusingly, a Washington-area lobbyist, whose current listed residence is in Silver Spring, Md., and has been for several years. (She apparently also owns a second home in the Los Angeles area.)

As easy as it is to mock the selection of someone who hasn’t actually lived in California for years to fill out Feinstein’s term, in all fairness the same could have been said of Feinstein. There’s a surprisingly long (and admittedly embarrassing) tradition of politicians representing states they haven’t really lived in for many years. (Mitt Romney nods his head knowingly.) Butler is at least more of a Californian than Hillary Clinton was a New Yorker before she came to occupy Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate seat, disgracing it daily.

And as far as Newsom’s own priorities — not those of conservatives or, mind you, of Californians — are concerned, it was a pretty sharp move. Butler is intended as a “caretaker” who will not run again, a matter of grave importance to Representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, both of whom have been planning what will likely be bruising campaigns for the seat. In case she gets the taste for it, however, Butler begins with a handicap: her complete unfamiliarity to California’s electorate and the baggage of her D.C.-area lobbying background. Fundraising in California is hard enough for old pros like Schiff and Porter (who are currently raising upwards of $6 million for the upcoming statewide race); it will be a herculean task for an unknown like Butler to match them if she decides to run.

And in the eternal identity wars of California Democratic politics, Newsom — a straight white male whose ideological credentials, as hard as it is for conservatives to believe, arouse suspicions among those in his party’s left wing — can tell angry factions that he just appointed a black female lesbian abortion lobbyist (checking four boxes at once!) to replace the comparatively and thus intolerably “conservative” Dianne Feinstein. Newsom’s appointment of Butler to the U.S. Senate therefore makes a great deal of sense, so long you understand he is working in his own political interests, with an eye to shoring up demographics that will be key for him in any later national test. (Newsom, as I have noted previously, is almost comically unseemly in his eagerness to run for president.) It makes less sense if understood from the perspective of the interests of the people of California — but then, alas, that rarely has ever been the point with Gavin Newsom.