There’s been a surge of interest in electoral reform among TAI’s columnists lately. Larry Diamond argues that the system of ranked-choice voting, on the ballot now in Maine, might be one possible way to ameliorate the viciousness of contemporary electoral politics. Bruce Cain, meanwhile, explores various options for reforming party primaries, looking for ways to bring problem-solving statesmen into office rather than just the uncompromisingly partisan sharks who invariably do well among base voters left and right. Overall, he’s pessimistic, especially regarding California’s open primary system, commonly known as “top-two.” He writes that it “has had little or no effect on party polarization in either the state legislature or congressional delegation.” He’s right but doesn’t go into detail on the top-two system. It deserves a deeper look.
California’s top-two primary system was implemented statewide first in 2014 after having been passed into law by ballot proposition in 2010, at the end of the Schwarzenegger governorship. The argument for Prop 14, at the time, was that party primaries produce the worst of both parties, resulting in extreme candidates, liberal or conservative, being the voters’ only choices. Top-two was intended to give people more moderate, compromise-friendly choices in a state whose past is closer to purple than red or blue.
The mechanism of top-two was simple: It replaced party-specific primaries with a general “jungle” primary, mandating that only the top-two vote-getters in the primary election—regardless of party registration—would advance to the general election. Theoretically, this would be good for sane, centrist, third-party candidates who would be able to make their enlightened case to a public no longer shackled by party rules. Theoretically, it would also be good for sane, centrist major-party candidates, who would no longer have to appeal to the most extreme elements of their parties to secure nomination. All seemed to be set for the 2014 elections, when the measure would be implemented and a new generation of moderate, bipartisan office-holders would rise to elected leadership.
Except it didn’t work.
Top-two was in large part based on the assumption that California was a state with a lot of moderate voters who were anxious to have their voices heard, not drowned out by extreme partisan activists. There was a lot of statistical evidence for this view, as well: Since the mid-2000s, political scientists had been noting the rise of Decline-to-State (DTS) and later No-Party-Preference (NPP) voters, and even now in 2017, DTS/NPP voter registration in California is at an all-time high, rivalling and almost surpassing Republican registration. For whatever reason, though, these voters weren’t turning out.
The 2014 elections were the last gasp of the old semi-competitive bipartisan order, where Republican candidates squared off against Democratic candidates for most of the statewide offices in the general election. But this might have been an aberration; Democrats Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and then-Attorney General Kamala Harris were all incumbents and inspired no party challengers, so Republicans Neel Kashkari, Ron Nehring, and Ronald Gold were able to run against them. Even the open office of Secretary of State had both a Democratic and a Republican seeker, Alex Padilla and Pete Peterson, in what turned out to be a close race (though the presence of a Republican on the ballot may have been due to the other Democrat, Leland Yee, bowing out over a corruption scandal). The other statewide offices saw the same trend: The Democrats generally fell in line behind a party champion, while competitors were edged out (the State Controller race being an exception.) This allowed a Republican to garner enough votes to be on the ballot.
Still, when the dust settled after Election Day, no Republican stood as a new California statewide official. The Democrats had won all the constitutional officer seats, and the California GOP began its short descent into general statewide irrelevance. This would be further cemented in the 2016 U.S. Senate election for the retiring Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat. With GOP registration dipping, pragmatic Republicans like Assemblyman Rocky Chavez and former state GOP chairman Duf Sundheim tried to run on a platform reaching out to Republicans, Democrats, and No-Party-Preference voters, which was what the top-two primary was originally supposed to encourage candidates to do. But Sundheim and Chavez—and other low-level GOP candidates like Ron Unz and Tom del Beccaro—never stood a chance against the two Democrats in the race, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of Orange County and Attorney General Kamala Harris of the Bay Area.
Had the CAGOP endorsed a Republican candidate, perhaps a Republican would have edged past Harris and made it a competitive partisan Senate race. The presence of half a dozen Republicans on the ballot didn’t help any one of them, though, and Loretta Sanchez and Kamala Harris easily made it into the general election. Of the two of them, Sanchez was widely viewed as the “moderate” Democrat, who would reach out to working-class Latinos and Republicans in an effort to build a bipartisan, multiracial electoral coalition to beat the more progressive and establishmentarian Kamala Harris. With the Republicans having failed to use the top-two as it had been designed, Sanchez would use it and prove that it could work.
But that was not to be. On November 9, 2016, as Donald Trump celebrated his own upset victory, Kamala Harris and California’s more progressive and establishmentarian Democrats rejoiced over her 20-point victory over Congresswoman Sanchez. The top-two system had failed twice in the same election—first by precluding a partisan race, and second by failing to elevate a self-identified “moderate” candidate to victory.
In the aftermath of 2016, a new political reality has dawned in the collective political imagination of the California political operative class, left, right, and center. California is a one-party state, and not just a one-party state but one in which the elite, left-leaning faction of that one party calls all of the important shots. Future elections may disrupt this trend and bring more centrist-leaning “Mod Squad” Democrats into power, but for now, the money, power, and endorsements are in the Democratic Party’s elite progressive wing. That’s one step worse than one-party rule.
The 2018 election is projected to look less like the 2014 election—where Republicans squeaked out spots in the general election because the Democratic incumbents faced no challengers—and more like the 2016 election. Open seats in the Governor’s office, Lieutenant Governor’s office, and most other statewide offices are inspiring a feeding frenzy among ambitious Democrats. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, an institution unto herself who has announced her 2018 reelection bid, has even inspired a crop of progressive challengers (and no serious Republicans challengers yet). The state GOP, defeated and nearly destroyed, has turned to such helpful antics as inviting Steve Bannon to speak at their convention. It is in no place to check the ascendant Harris wing of the California Democratic Party.
Next year’s leading Democratic candidates for Governor—Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and State Treasurer John Chiang—are all popular enough that they will almost certainly edge out the Republican lightweights quixotically pursuing the governorship. The 2018 governor’s race, in fact, is starting to look a lot like the 2016 U.S. Senate seat race- a progressive Bay Area Democrat, concerned with climate change and taking donations from the public-sector unions around the state, adored by the Democratic Party’s kingmakers and touted as a future presidential candidate, versus a low-level Southern California Latino Democrat, actively working to build a cross-party coalition, focused on bread and butter issues and gaining the support of physical industries and private sector unions, whom no one pays much attention to. All the money and machine power of significance will go to Gavin Newsom this time around, and he’ll probably beat Villaraigosa easily.
There are two implications to this story of incredible significance. First off, in electoral reform, the political constellation on the ground matters. The biggest lesson of top-two in California is that the political interest groups that dominate a polity, when faced with a reform to the power structure, will seek to take advantage of it. And in California’s Democrat-dominated politics, when 54 percent of voters chose to move from a multiparty, first-past-the-post primary system to an open, top-two blanket primary system, they inadvertently institutionalized a mechanism for the politically dominant Democratic Party to get its preferred candidates into office regardless of how “moderate” or “extreme” they were. This, importantly, subverted the original goal of the open primary system, and so should be a cautionary tale for reformers—particularly those in deep-blue or even deep-red states—who would like to mimic California’s open primary system to some degree. This is not to say that some reform of state party primary systems isn’t necessary, but reformers should make sure those reforms don’t backfire in spectacular fashion.
Second, in Democratic Party politics, we are seeing the rise of a “bench” of young, prospective future presidential contenders in the Obama-Plus mold—brought to power partly because of California’s political and demographic trends, and partly due to the historical accident of the top-two primary system. Senator Kamala Harris owes her easy victory to it, and Gavin Newsom may owe his future governorship to it as well. Given that much of the rest of the country is turning red, and that California remains one of the last statewide bastions progressive Democrats can roam freely in, it is more than likely that California Democrats will be powerful players in the near future when it comes to rebuilding the Democratic Party. Their social liberalism and climate activism, in particular, gives them a bit of cover against the Berniecrat progressives’ worst criticisms, despite their somewhat plutocratic financial backers. And those backers also make them somewhat more acceptable to the current Schumer-Pelosi old guard, whose time on the political stage will soon be over.
Wallace Stegner was at least partly right to say that “California is America, but moreso.” It does seem true, at any rate, that the Golden State is a laboratory for ideological and policy experiments to be tested nationally later. Thus anyone interested in implementing top-two experiments at the state or local level elsewhere in the country needs to understand California’s experience. It may yield better outcomes in more ideologically and politically heterogeneous states, but in states that are dominated by a single party—that is to say, most states these days—a top-two system is likely to further shield the party in power from competition. And in a still polarizing America, that kind of regionalism would be destructive.