California’s Republican Party is so weak that no Republican has won statewide office there in 20 years. Yet there’s some danger this fall that the Golden State—where nearly twice as many voters register Democratic as Republican—will elect a Republican governor. It’s even conceivable that the general election will be a contest between two MAGA Republican gubernatorial candidates. Blame California’s top-two nonpartisan primary system, a good-government reform adopted by ballot referendum in 2010 that was supposed to weed out extremist candidates.
Let’s agree from the outset that California’s top-two primary, also known as a jungle primary, is not the only reason this year’s governor’s race is a mess. We start with the problem that the candidates have all, in some way, come up short.
Until last summer, the Democratic smart money was on former Vice President Kamala Harris. For Harris, running for governor would have been a sensible move—certainly more sensible than running again for president. But in July, Harris removed herself from consideration. That cleared the path for Rep. Eric Swalwell. Swalwell was well on his way to becoming front-runner when allegations of rape and other sexual misbehavior compelled him to drop out of the race and resign from Congress. Much of Swalwell’s support then swung to Xavier Becerra, who was Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden. That took many of Becerra’s former colleagues in the Biden administration by surprise, and four of them, speaking not for attribution, told Politico last week that Becerra is kind of an empty suit.
Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter rode high in the polls for a while, but lately she’s been slipping. Porter got caught on one video being verbally abusive to a staffer (“Get out of my fucking shot”), and on another berating a CBS News reporter in Trumpian fashion (“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?”). The other top-polling Democrat, billionaire former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, has lately been gaining support, but billionaires are in pretty bad odor these days. (To read my contribution to the billionaire-bashing literature, click here.) Cal Matters reports that Steyer is “on track to run the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in California history.”
I also feel duty-bound to report that Democratic former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who placed third in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, is running again this year. But he’s been polling at one or two percent, which is very painful to watch.
If the Democratic field is weak, the Republican field is (much like the Republican Party itself) a catastrophe. Swalwell’s departure reduced but didn’t eliminate the risk that a Democratic split would cede the two top spots to Republicans Steve Hilton, a former Fox News blowhard previously known as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “pint-sized Rasputin,” and Chad Bianco, a Covid-mandate-defying sheriff of Riverside County who recently declared himself “very proud” to be a past member of the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group implicated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Hilton is endorsed by Trump and holds the lead in most polls. The likelihood that at least one of these extremists will end up in the general election makes a mockery of the principal goo-goo argument for the jungle primary, which is that it’s supposed to weed out extremists.
The top-two primary system is—as so many California ballot propositions turn out to be—a solution in search of a problem. Its roots, ironically, lay in the highly partisan 2003 recall election of California Gov. Grey Davis, which invited voters to choose an alternative candidate, Democrat or Republican, on a single ballot. Davis was recalled, and the actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in to replace him largely on the basis of name recognition. Schwarzenegger’s single-ballot victory predisposed the Governator to favor Proposition 14, the 2010 ballot measure that ushered in the single-ballot top-two system. “That’s how I got elected,” Schwarzenegger told NPR, “because I appealed to Democrats and Republicans, independents ... everybody.” Actually, the way Schwarzenegger got elected was that a very combative car-alarm magnate named Darrell Issa, later a Republican member of Congress, spent $2 million to throw Davis out of office (and early on hoped to replace Davis himself).
Since Schwarzenegger, a fairly moderate Republican, was elected on a nonpartisan ballot, Schwarzenegger figured that single-ballot primaries would keep California from electing extremists in the future. But California hadn’t elected many extremists to statewide office before Schwarzenegger. Indeed, during the previous half-century, the only extremist elected California governor had been Ronald Reagan (1967-1975), and once he entered office Reagan’s extremism went into hibernation; Governor Reagan raised taxes and signed a pro-abortion bill into law well before Roe v. Wade. (The Gipper was much more conservative later as president.) I omit Pete Wilson (1991-1999) because Wilson was the opposite of Reagan, an extremist conservative governor elected as a moderate. It’s hard to remember now, but during his 1990 campaign Wilson’s conservative credentials were called seriously into question.
Even if you dispute the foregoing analysis, you’ll surely agree that when Schwarzenegger campaigned for Proposition 14, he wasn’t thinking “Let’s head off extremists like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.” The fact that most Republican and Democratic party leaders very sensibly opposed Prop 14 enhanced its appeal to voters, and the measure became law.
One of the arguments for open primaries is that they increase participation, but in 2018 Jamelle Bouie argued in Slate that this hadn’t happened in California. “Because there are no parties choosing nominees,” wrote Bouie, “top two is essentially the first stage of the general election—with much lower turnout because of its timing in June.”A June 2023 report by the nonprofit Unite America Institute disputed this. I have no idea who’s right. But that same report’s conclusion that California’s top-two primary reduces polarization looks pretty silly right now given Steve Hilton’s strong performance in the polls.
It’s important to remember that when newspaper reporters and political scientists talk about political polarization, they are mostly talking about Republican extremism. Yes, Democrats have lately shifted a little bit to the left, but Republicans spent most of the past 40 years shifting ever-more rightward, and in the age of Trump Republicans have adopted a nonideological thuggish authoritarianism best described as Whatever Donald Wants, or WDW. Because Trump has systematically purged the GOP of any conservative or moderate who resists his authoritarianism, the Republican Party has become the WDW Party. With Trump’s ever-declining approval rating down to 38 percent, the best way for Democrats to win is to make clear that they oppose the WDW Party. Jungle primaries are bad at accomplishing this.
Strangely, Republicans are better able to grasp the value of single-party primaries. Louisiana, which had a jungle primary similar to California’s, passed a law in 2024 eliminating it for congressional and state supreme court elections (while preserving it for statewide and state legislative races). Republicans don’t especially like open partisan primaries, either. I’m of two minds about these. Open partisan primaries free voters from the requirement that they be registered with the party holding the primary, allowing a Democrat, say, to vote in a Republican primary. I find that part a little screwy. But I see the benefit in inviting independents to participate in open primaries, and I have no difficulty believing that doing so increases overall voter participation, which is a very good thing. Republicans not being great fans of voter participation, South Carolina and Colorado Republicans recently sued to go back to restricting primary voters to registered Republicans.
The good news is that Democrats are starting to wake up to the problems inherent in top-two primaries. Rusty Hicks, chair of California’s Democratic party, recently called for the elimination of California’s jungle primary, and Steven Maviglio, a Democratic consultant, recently proposed a statewide ballot initiative to “Undo the Top-Two.” It’s too late for 2026, alas, but moving forward it looks as though Democrats will do a better job of protecting their blue-state majorities.
