The Impending California Disaster

I really really hate the entire world of “election reforms” to “give people more choices.” They are, to me at least, a classic example of “let’s get the politics out of politics” moves that end up serving special interests, along the lines of term limits, as one egregious examples. They also suffer from not recognizing that the average American voter is a moron and so pretend to believe that if you just give people more choices, the people will consider all the options and make the right choice for them and that’s democracy and is good.

Instead, you risk what actually could happen in California if all these big egos don’t get out of their own way, which is the foolishness of the jungle primary leading to this very blue state having a final choice between two Republicans for governor this fall.

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 Harold Meyerson writing this and he’s right about almost everything, so of course he was right about this too. Fundamentally, the problem is ego, the great problem of all politicians:

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.

Every big California political player, starting with the former Mr. Kimberly Guilfoyle in the governor’s mansion, needs to sit down with everyone but Swalwell and Porter and do whatever is necessary for them to drop out. Villaraigosa is so 20 years ago, Becerra is hopeless, the others have just enough support to help elect a Republican. Honestly, Porter has become ridiculous herself. Policywise, she’d be great, but she’s actively mean to a lot of her own staff and that has spilled into her relationships with journalists. Whatever it takes, clear all but two people out of here. Any Democrat is going to win this race. But one of them has to be in the top two.

“Good government liberals” love things like electoral reforms of all stripes and they are both a waste of time and counterproductive. Kill the jungle primary everywhere.