California’s dreary election: How the state’s Democrats are diminishing democracy

It’s difficult for voters to muster much interest in electing a state insurance commissioner or dicing up the sports gambling market even in the most tranquil times. Slogging through California’s litany of lesser political offices, compromised candidates and bespoke ballot questions benefiting one or another interest is that much more tiresome in the imposing shadow of a national election that could deal the latest body blow to American self-rule.

But if Democrats are the party of democracy, and California is the nation’s Democratic heartland, shouldn’t California Democrats be, you know, better at it? California is the Democrats’ show, but this election is no democratic showcase.

The outcomes of the eight statewide races on the ballot are largely foregone conclusions — and not because the mostly incumbent Democrats favored to win are such a formidable crop of public servants. On the contrary, thanks to a lengthy list of scandals and miscues, nearly half the officeholders on the ballot stumbled into this campaign carrying enough luggage for a full set. All are nevertheless expected to be buoyed into the next term by Democrats’ 23-point registration advantage, low interest in their relatively obscure offices and the sheer absurdity of their Republican opponents.

Voters who negotiate that gauntlet will be forced to sort through the latest ballot measures, which ask them to weigh in on a dialysis clinic labor dispute for the third time in four years, arbitrate a fight over sports gambling and consider a reprieve for the least appealing special pleader on this year’s ballot — which is saying a lot — menthol cigarette makers.

This ballot is such a drag that it almost qualifies for a surgeon general’s warning. But is that really the fault of California Democrats? Well, yes.

The party’s most damning responsibility is for the candidates. Democratic state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is the worst example, having served a first term that was a veritable carnival of corruption allegations suggesting coziness with the industry he regulates and general hostility to accountability.

But he’s not the only example. Democratic state Treasurer Fiona Ma has Lara to thank for making her list of lapses seem modest — though only by comparison — from her idiosyncratic interpretation of pandemic safety to her expensive and unorthodox lodging arrangements. And Tony Thurmond, the Democrat running for a second term as the nominally nonpartisan state superintendent of public instruction, watched senior officials flee his reportedly “toxic” regime even as he gave a top California education job to a far-flung friend who decided that, to paraphrase W.C. Fields, he would rather continue living in Philadelphia.

And yet all these officials are expected to coast into another term, not least because they have retained the Democratic Party’s full support.

Perhaps the party can be forgiven for backing the likes of Lara, a longtime insider, four years ago. But the Democrats and most of their top officials, up to and including Gov. Gavin Newsom, stayed in his corner even after his disastrous term and the emergence of a viable Democratic challenger, Bay Area Assemblyman Marc Levine. Given that Levine failed to survive June’s top-two primary by just a few thousand votes — ensuring that Lara is now running against a probably sacrificial Republican — the Democratic establishment could have easily made the difference.

The top-two primary, now a decade old, keeps failing to promote intraparty competition, especially for statewide office, because of fragmentation of the dominant party’s vote and the absence of a runoff provision.

This ballot points up other structural problems. The state has too many arcane offices that voters can’t be expected to understand or care about. Too many of them are filled by long-term appointees who acquire the benefits of incumbency without facing an election — three of whom have now held statewide office for nearly two years before their first encounter with voters. And lawmakers are failing to do their job and spare voters from sorting through myriad legislative controversies in the form of initiatives.

Given that Republicans haven’t won a statewide office in 16 years or held a legislative chamber in 26, all those problems come down to the Democrats, too.

Granted, Republicans aren’t doing any favors for California democracy — or American democracy — by drifting into authoritarianism and rendering themselves consequently powerless on the West Coast. But the GOP’s talking points are correct insofar as the Democrats own California and its discontents. For the sake of the state as well as a country that is reconsidering its form of government in all the wrong ways, the ruling party should care more about making California as democratic as it is Democratic.