By any metric, California is the most Democratic state. For years, Democrats have controlled roughly three-quarters of the seats in both the state Senate and the Assembly; after November’s midterm elections, Republicans will likely hold just four of the state’s 52 congressional seats. Democrats have won every election for the eight statewide offices since 2010, going 32 for 32, while also winning every U.S. Senate election and every presidential election since 1992. Democrats customarily win these statewide elections with between 60 and 65 percent of the vote. It’s not just Gavin Newsom who racks up such numbers; it’s also the party’s invariably obscure candidates for such down-ticket offices as controller and secretary of state.
Last year, Proposition 50—the Newsom-proposed ballot measure to ratify the legislature’s mid-decade congressional redistricting, introduced to offset the Republicans’ redistricting in Texas—was passed by state voters 64-36.
And yet, despite this huge partisan tilt, there’s a very real chance that the state will elect a MAGA Republican governor this November. Not that the two Republicans seeking that office are in any way popular: The RealClearPolitics polling average shows one favored by only 15 percent of voters, and the other by 13 percent. But every one of the eight Democrats also seeking the office is polling lower than that in the most recent surveys.
The culprit here is the state’s absurd jungle primary, a measure California adopted in 2010. Partisan primaries in the state have been condensed into a single June primary in which candidates of all parties (or no party) appear on the same ballot, with the top two proceeding to a November general election, where no write-in votes for other candidates are permitted.
The reason for that switch is that in 2009, state budgets required two-thirds majorities in each house of the legislature (they now require just a simple majority), and the Democrats—not yet commanding the level of support they’ve secured since—were one vote shy of that total in the Senate. They needed the vote of Abel Maldonado, the one moderate Republican in that body. But Maldonado, who was eyeing a future gubernatorial run, demanded they put a measure on the 2010 ballot that would scrap party primaries for the jungle. Maldonado and the state’s moderate Republican governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, calculated that this would lead to more moderate elected officials, though in the years since every moderate Republican in the state, including Schwarzenegger, has been driven from the party’s ranks.
Still, the idea sounded unobjectionable to voters at that time, and only a handful of pundits opposed it. I was one of those opponents, writing here and in the Los Angeles Times that the jungle might condemn the state to an elected leadership that’s hugely out of sync with state voters, if only two members of one party ran for an office that a passel of members of the other party were also seeking. After all, as California is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, more Democrats invariably run for statewide office than Republicans do.
That’s precisely what’s happened in this year’s gubernatorial contest, which features two viable Republicans and eight viable Democrats.
Do the math. Let’s assume the party breakdown of voters (factoring in the independent leaners) reflects the vote on Proposition 50: 64 percent pro-Democrat, 36 percent pro-Republican. Divide that 64 percent by 8—the number of Democrats in the field—and you end up with each getting 8 percent of the vote. Divide that 36 percent by 2—the number of Republicans in the field—and you end up with each getting 18 percent.
Of course, some Democrats will do better than others. Since the state switched to the jungle, usually one Democrat has so dominated the field that this problem hasn’t arisen, like Kamala Harris for Senate in 2016 or Newsom for governor in 2018. But there is no Democratic heavyweight in this year’s gubernatorial field. The candidates are not particularly well known to state voters; none has the kind of charisma or core constituency backing that enabled an AOC or a Zohran Mamdani to emerge from the pack.
In fact, the field is still in flux. For a long time, the leading candidate has been former Rep. Katie Porter, who won a reputation as a feisty progressive during her tenure in Congress. But Porter has been out of Congress, and largely out of the news, for several years now, and had some rocky personal appearances during her gubernatorial rollout. In the most recent polls, she’s running slightly behind the two Republicans, and in a virtual tie with Bay Area Rep. Eric Swalwell, a frequent cable news guest who is little known in Southern California.
Two former elected officials lag behind them: onetime Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, out of office for the past 13 years, during which his politics have moved decidedly rightward; and Xavier Becerra, who was Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services and, before that, California’s attorney general. Two other statewide elected officials are lagging even behind them, reinforcing the notion that the down-ticket statewide offices guarantee almost total obscurity: former state Controller Betty Yee and current state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, each of whom commands a level of support in the low single digits. Yee’s almost universally unknown record situates her, along with Porter, in the party’s progressive wing. Along with Thurmond—and none of the other candidates—she supports the wealth tax on the state’s billionaires that may come before voters on November’s ballot if it collects the requisite number of signatures.
The last two entrants into the field have joined it only recently, and unlike the other six, they each can fund campaigns that may propel them toward the top of the pack. In November, Bay Area billionaire financier Tom Steyer entered the race. Steyer is known as the leading funder of a number of California ballot measures, focused on promoting renewable energy, and one of the leading funders of Democratic candidates (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) and causes (he was the leading donor to Newsom’s Proposition 50). He entered, quixotically, the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, dropping out early after poor performances despite having spent more than $250 million of his own money. He has already dumped about $28 million of his fortune into this race, with a decidedly progressive message (breaking up utility monopolies, taxing the rich, and humorously, taking on campaign finance). One poll taken since Steyer entered the field shows his ubiquitous advertisements have roughly doubled his support, from 4 percent to 8 percent.
The other Democratic candidate with access to major funding is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who entered the race only 11 days ago. A onetime Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, Mahan’s candidacy comes with a Silicon dowry: The venture capitalists and tech billionaires who’ve funded his successful campaign for mayor are pledging to fund his gubernatorial bid at a level comparable to Steyer’s. Already, he’s announced $7 million in donations in the first week, more than any candidate other than Steyer. On top of that, several Valley tech executives have formed an independent campaign committee for Mahan, to which they’ve contributed $3.3 million. Mahan is a natural fit for the oligarchs, excoriating his party for being too pro-labor and kowtowing to “interest groups,” a category which apparently does not include the billionaires who’ve been boosting his candidacy and setting up anti-union PACs to move the party rightward.
My guess is that the four Democrats with a chance to make it into the top two are Mahan (whose spending may mobilize centrist independents more than it will attract actual Democrats), Swalwell (who has an MS NOW fan base), and the liberal duo of Steyer and Porter (who will split much of the party’s progressive wing). The remaining four Democrats will siphon votes from all of them.
The second-worst result to an all-Republican runoff would be one that pitted a Republican against Mahan—that is, two avowed anti-liberals in a very liberal state. But the worst result—an all-Republican November—has always been an inherent possible outcome of the jungle primary; it’s been a ticking time bomb since the day it was enacted.
The Republican who’s led the field in most of the recent polls, Chad Bianco, is the sheriff of Riverside County. He’s been a member of the ultra-right-wing semi-militia Oath Keepers and is an avowed opponent of vaccines. The Republican running second, Steve Hilton, is a longtime conservative strategist, a Fox News commentator who has promoted Trump’s nonsense about the 2020 election being “stolen.” Those could very well be the only choices Californians get this fall for governor.
As a general rule, a Democratic field of candidates isn’t packed beyond electoral sustainability. The one time it was came in 2012, when Pete Aguilar split the Democratic vote for an open congressional seat in a very Democratic Inland Empire district with a number of his fellow Democrats, thus enabling the only two Republicans on the ballot to advance to the November runoff. Two years later, chastened Inland Empire Democrats cleared the field for Aguilar, who then finished in the top two and handily defeated the Republican in November. (Today, Aguilar is the third-ranking Democrat in the House, chairing the party’s caucus.)
Losing one House seat due to an overcrowded field falls short of a calamity. Losing the governor’s office to either Bianco or Hilton would be a catastrophe. The prospect that either one could become governor, solely by virtue of beating every one of the eight Democrats in the field—even though those Democrats will probably win roughly 65 percent of the vote to their 35 percent—should be concentrating Democratic minds right now.
But it’s not.
If the Democratic Party were a real political party, it would bring pressure to bear on the bottom half of the field to drop out. When the state party convention begins in San Francisco on February 20, that should be the only item of business before it—condemning at least that bottom half for staying in the race and calling for a ballot measure to restore party primaries. Delegates should point out that an all-Republican gubernatorial contest in November will likely reduce Democratic turnout to the point that it may cost Democrats some other seats, including the newly redistricted House seats Democrats need to win if they’re to retake Congress.
If the late John Burton were still the state party chair, he likely would drench the candidates in such a torrent of invective that some might feel compelled to bow out. As Burton, alas, is no longer with us, the party needs some of its respected leaders—and there aren’t very many of them—to come before the convention and say that any floundering candidate who cares about the state and the nation has the duty to drop out, and that staying in the race is an act of profound betrayal.
The bigger problem is that the California Democratic Party has operated so deferentially to Harris and Newsom for so long that when Harris passed on running for governor, there was no heir apparent. That should be a good thing—a healthy democracy is one where voters, rather than party pooh-bahs, pick their candidates. But combined with the jungle primary, the anointment of Harris and Newsom when they’re not on the ballot courts disaster, and that’s magnified in a state that’s too big and too politically disengaged to rally much interest. The top two was inevitably going to produce one of two evils: elected officials who don’t match the will of the people, or a fiercely top-down selection that robs voters of an opinion. Neither is desirable, making the jungle primary not just dangerous but intolerable.
Absent any changes, however, the most anti-Trump state might well get a Trump acolyte as its next governor. Democrats, are you even paying attention?
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