Ranting On...California's Top-Two Primary

Sara Jacobs (D-CA), one of several Democrats running in
California's 49th district

In a few weeks, California, the largest state in the country (in terms of population) will cast its all-important primary ballots.  Perhaps more than any other state on the map, California stands apart as the one that will surely determine whether or not the Democrats take control of the US House.  This is because Republicans currently hold seven seats that were won by Hillary Clinton two years ago, making them prime targets for the DCCC.  If they were to win all 7 of them, in fact, California's own Nancy Pelosi would be a third of the way back to her Speaker's gavel.  But the Democrats also have a very serious problem, one that continues to keep up members of the party (myself included), and one that really calls into question if the Golden State may be unintentionally promoting the least democratic primary process in the country.  They are worried about the dreaded top-two primary system.

The top-two primary system is one employed by only California and Washington (Louisiana has a similar system, but one that allows someone who wins a majority to win the seat outright immediately after the primary).  In these states, candidates do run for public office under a party label, and the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.  This could mean that the general election would feature two Republicans, two Democrats, a combination, or perhaps one (or two) third-party candidates alongside a D/R.  Either way, it theoretically could result in a party being shut out in the general election.

The logic behind this is both easy to see and easy to counter.  The thought process likely was that this would put less pressure on the two-party system, and perhaps allow people "not to waste their vote" on candidates they don't support, because their favorite candidate may advance to the general.  It's a system that tries to take away some of the importance of the party system, and instead focus the race on the issues at-hand.  Both Washington and California seem to be attempting to embolden third party choices, and ensure that whomever is chosen is ultimately chosen by a majority, since write-ins and sore loser candidacies aren't allowed (as a result, in November, whomever wins will take a majority, something other states can't guarantee).

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA)

This falls apart, though, because these primaries oftentimes involve too many candidates, and as a result both candidates can skate through with only a small portion of the electorate.  The best example of this happened in 2012 in California's 31st district.  The district was largely assumed to be among the Democrats' best pickup opportunities.  In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama had defeated John McCain in the newly-drawn district by 15-points, and he & eventually Hillary Clinton would win the district by even more than that in subsequent elections.  However, the Republican incumbent, Rep. Gary Miller, won 26.7% of the vote and State Sen. Bob Dutton won 24.8% of the vote; the closest Democrat on the ballot, Redlands Mayor Pete Aguilar, got 22.6% of the vote, but because of three other Democrats being on the ballot, wasn't able to overtake Dutton to advance to the general election.  In total, Democrats held 48.5% of the votes totaled in that year, and yet because of the way the system was structured, that wasn't good enough to get them a candidate to advance to the general election, one where President Obama was easily clearing double-digits and likely would have doomed Miller had he been against Aguilar (the latter ended up winning the following cycle, and still holds the seat).

You see the problem here, right?  A technicality in the law is allowing the "actual" second choice of the people in terms of political ideology to be forgotten, and quite frankly 2018 could make 2012 look relatively calm.  At least in 2012 you could make the argument that the Democrats didn't win the majority of the vote in the primary...that may not be the case in 2018 in races where the split of the vote is all over the place.  Three Hillary-won districts (CA-39, CA-48, and CA-49), for example, seem like prime contenders for the Democrats to get north of 50% of the votes in the primary while still not getting a candidate through to the general.  This is because there are too many Democrats on the ballot in these states.  Both sides in these contests have a half dozen contenders a piece, but because the Republican field seems to have only 1-2 "serious" candidates (whereas the Democrats have 3-4) it's entirely possible that the Democrats won't advance candidates in three of the most winnable races on the map.

That's wrong, and should be obvious to even the most partisan of people that not representing the will of the people and letting candidates get through is as stupid as letting the electoral college decide the presidency as opposed to the popular vote (it's a very similar concept if you think about it).  There are really two solutions here.  One, go back to the old primary system, as it at the very least kept people represented for the general, though it does continue to punish voters and force them to vote strategically rather than for whom they want to represent them (a conservative voter might like the Libertarian better, but will vote for the Republican because he's the only person with a chance at winning).  Or they could advance Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), which feels like what they should have done in the first place here.  In IRV you wouldn't be punished for picking a lesser-known candidate, and this would actually embolden the third-party or independent candidates this system was trying to protect.

Looking at CA-31 in 2012, for example, IRV probably would have advanced the correct two candidates (probably a Republican and a Democrat in that case) because those people who listed a different Democrat may have put Aguilar before either Dutton or Miller.  And if they didn't, there wouldn't be any postulating about how the Democrats "lost it on a technicality."  This could still result in a general election between people of the same party (I suspect that California's 2016 Senate race probably would have still been between Kamala Harris & Loretta Sanchez), but we'd be guaranteed that the top two candidates in the primary actually advanced.  As it is, the Republicans are likely to do considerably better in June than the voters actually intended them to do, and it's very possible that control of the House of Representatives will be won on a technicality.