Peter Schrag: California could have been worth its weight in votes

Next Tuesday's Pennsylvania presidential primary comes as an ironic reminder for Californians of yet another missed opportunity: In chasing what they thought would be political clout worthy of the nation's largest state, our leaders set a February primary date that marched us still deeper into irrelevance.

The result – coming June 3 – will be a statewide election, the second of three this year, that will probably be the lowest-turnout and, with one exception, the most inconsequential election in California history. And all for less than naught.

The original idea, for those who repress follies past, was to set California's presidential primary early enough so that (a) we'd have a real voice and get serious attention in choosing major-party candidates and (b) if voters passed a ballot measure on the same day reforming the state's term limits law, incumbent legislators would have a chance to serve a few more years in their present offices. That, of course, was the prime motive for the whole thing.

The great rescheduling failed on both counts. California got lost in a crowd of other states balloting on presidential candidates on Feb. 5, yet another Super Tuesday that didn't settle much except to help drive Mitt Romney out of the Republican race. That was not a negligible achievement, but almost inevitable sooner or later.

And the slippery initiative, advertised as a reduction in the total time any individual could serve in the Legislature from 14 years to 12 but which allowed termed-out Assembly members, including the leaders, to stay in their present seats six more years and give senators another four-year term, was handily defeated.

The real decisive weeks in this presidential primary, it now turns out, may fall precisely when California might have had its own primary and for many years did – and during a period when it would have been the only large state still in play.

On Feb. 5, California competed with nearly half the states in the union, including most of the largest. On June 3, the last day of presidential primaries, we would have been competing for candidates' time and energy with Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, which among them have a population just a little larger than Orange County.

That might have given California voters and debate questioners a chance to press the candidates on a host of California-relevant federal issues: immigration reform; paying for the incarceration of illegal immigrant felons; revising aid formulas that favor Northeastern states with shrinking populations against growing states such as California; ending the drain of California National Guard troops and materiel now going into the bottomless pit of Iraq.

It might have allowed us to highlight the enormous economic, environmental and nutritional costs, both here and throughout the world, of sucking up to the ethanol lobby and to Midwest farmers generally.

It might have offered a chance to ask the candidates if they intend to continue hounding users of medical marijuana, which California voters legalized in 1996 and divert additional resources that could be used more profitably to a host of more pressing national security matters.

It might have allowed questions about the intention of the candidates in choosing members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission willing to act as real watchdogs so that the multibillion-dollar market manipulation of 2000-2001 that Californians are still paying for won't happen again.

Some of those questions can still be raised in the general election, but not with the focus made possible in a primary contest in which California might indeed have been the decisive state.

The most commonly cited cause these days for hyperpartisan politics are election districts that are mostly safe for one party or the other. Thus the real contests take place in the primaries, and the victories there tend to go to extremists rather than moderates.

The state's term limits assure that one-third of Assembly members and roughly one fourth of state senators will be termed out every two years, which usually makes the vote to fill those seats a contest between relative unknowns.

But with this year's split between the February presidential primary and the congressional and legislative primaries, the almost certain low turnout is likely to make the result even less representative – a cross between ideological extremism and blind man's buff.

This is democracy? The only items of statewide interest on the ballot will be Propositions 98 and 99, a pair of competing eminent-domain measures, one from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association that would, among other things, ban rent control and a tamer one from the League of Cities. But they're hardly sufficient to bring out a lot of voters.

To be sure, there was no certain way to predict that there'd be an avalanche of states following California to its early primary date. But it was still a bad bet that compounded the mess of the nation's tangled presidential primary system, and did less than nothing for California.

About the writer:

• Reach Peter Schrag at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779.