What’s wrong with the California primary? Not much if you’re an entrenched politician

Rarely have so few voted so much for so little than in California’s latest primary election. The state is perfecting democracy in form rather than substance, cursing the small subset of voters who reliably engage in its elections to an often pointless pantomime of participation.

California ostensibly invites voters of every political affiliation to weigh in on a wide range of offices — twice in the case of this year’s bizarre U.S. Senate election — and an even wider range of ballot questions. The state in recent years has added a single, pan-partisan primary and universal access to voting by mail to longer-standing democratic innovations such as recalls and initiatives, which have only proliferated since their introduction during the Progressive Era. And yet Tuesday’s primary embodied none of the goals of such reforms.

Even ahead of the voting, California’s latest ill-attended “top two” primary promised no contests for its top two offices, governor and U.S. senator. The results so far portend fall match-ups between powerful Democratic incumbents and probably sacrificial Republicans.

Gov. Gavin Newsom was drawing more than triple the votes of his nearest rival, Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle of Lassen County, who hasn’t been vaccinated against COVID, won’t acknowledge President Joe Biden’s legitimate election and maintains that California isn’t tough enough on homeless people. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, who was elevated to his seat by Newsom, was enjoying a similarly lopsided showing against Mark Meuser, a Republican attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits against Newsom’s administration over pandemic precautions, defended Donald Trump from adult film star Stormy Daniels and lost resoundingly to Padilla before.

The sometimes-beleaguered governor and a senator who owes his office to him are therefore both coasting toward reelection. So are some of their fellow Democrats down-ballot. They include another Newsom appointee, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, and state Treasurer Fiona Ma, who appears to be easily enduring whatever consternation exists over her lodging expenses and a subordinate’s harassment lawsuit.

Even some of the races that appeared more competitive going into the primary could end up looking less so. Take Ricardo Lara (please). The scandal-scarred insurance commissioner drew a vigorous challenge from a fellow Democrat, Assemblyman Marc Levine, but could get the gift of a Republican punching bag in the fall. With about half the votes counted, Levine was narrowly trailing Republican Robert Howell, the owner of a small Silicon Valley electronics firm, and narrowly leading another Republican, perennial also-ran Greg Conlon.

The open race for controller featured several experienced Democrats as well as Hoover Institution fellow Lanhee Chen, this year’s standard bearer for the indefatigable optimists still awaiting the reemergence of that fabled creature, the reasonable and politically viable California Republican. But given that Chen wasn’t quite garnering 40% of the vote as of last week, he could face the same dim prospects as other Republicans running statewide in the fall. His likeliest opponent is Board of Equalization Chair Malia Cohen, the establishment-supported Democrat leading the rest of the field. State Sen. Steve Glazer — like Levine, a Bay Area Democrat with a proven capacity for challenging his party — was lagging in fourth place as of Thursday, making a competitive race between Democrats unlikely.

And the election was certainly no party for Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, the no-party-preference candidate for state attorney general. She failed to become only the second statewide candidate to survive a top-two primary without a D or an R next to her name. With less than 8% of the vote as of last week, Schubert was in a closer race with the Green Party’s pick than with any of the top contenders. That means Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, another Newsom appointee who has yet to be elected to his office, will also face a Republican who has never been elected to anything.

The top-two primary admirably attempts to address serious problems in a state dominated by a single party, enabling broader participation and, at least theoretically, more competitive general elections than traditional partisan primaries would allow. Finding ways to challenge Democratic officeholders grows more urgent as California Republicans squander any chance of doing so by failing to reject the national party’s neo-fascism. The abysmal condition of the state’s GOP was exemplified by last year’s abuse of a California reform from another time, the recall, which served to vividly demonstrate the party’s powerlessness just nine months ago and helped hurtle the governor toward another term.

But top-two is a crude instrument that largely fails to overcome voters’ partisan reflexes, which are particularly strong when they have to make decisions about the sort of arcana that occupy the lower reaches of California’s ballots. Moreover, winnowing overpopulated fields down to binary contests in a single pass can yield strange results. A crush of candidates from the majority party can fragment the vote, favoring a minority party with no hope of success in the fall. California’s nearly nonexistent barriers to ballot qualification exacerbate the problem, flooding ballots with unserious candidates.

Some combination of reasonable ballot thresholds and runoff requirements could help. Ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to indicate their first, second and subsequent preferences for an office, could facilitate a series of “instant” runoffs based on a single election. That would ensure competition for broad support rather than relatively small pluralities of a splintered electorate.

But fixing the primary — as well as recalls, initiatives and other quirky California misadventures in electoral reform — depends heavily on the ruling Democrats. And they’re unlikely to be motivated by the irrelevant opposition or the latest low-interest, no-contest election.