California’s Top-Two Primary Isn’t Making Politics Better. By Matthew Yglesias

California’s Top-Two Primary Isn’t Making Politics Better

A nonpartisan system was supposed to boost more mainstream candidates, but it has led to chaos and gamesmanship.  

March 3, 2024 at 1:00 PM UTC

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

California Democrats want to talk about California Republicans.

Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc.

California is a very blue state, so the question in its 2024 US Senate race isn’t whether a Democrat will fill the seat long held by the late Dianne Feinstein, but which Democrat. The leading contender, Representative Adam Schiff, is a standard-issue liberal supported by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But he’s facing serious challengers from the left: Representative Katie Porter, endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Barbara Lee, the longtime progressive champion.

Welcome to the jungle primary, a misguided reform that’s supposed to boost mainstream moderate candidates but in practice leads to chaos and bizarre gamesmanship.

To wit: Garvey, a famous former baseball star, is the closest thing to a viable Republican in this race. But it’s still California, and nobody sees him as a genuine threat to win in November. The names on the ballot next fall will be the two candidates — regardless of party — who get the most votes in the primary.

Schiff, who has a high profile due to his role in former President Donald Trump’s impeachment, has been leading in the polls and is all but guaranteed to make it to the ballot in November. The question is who will join him, Garvey or Porter. They have been neck-and-neck, though the latest poll actually has Garvey finishing ahead of Schiff on Tuesday. That same poll also has Schiff easily beating Garvey in November, while a Schiff-Porter race would start out as a dead heat.

So Schiff’s calculus is obvious: He wants to face Garvey in the fall. Schiff would be the Democratic nominee against a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. The national GOP has 10 or 11 better pickup opportunities in the 2024 cycle, and won’t waste a dime in Garvey’s candidacy.

If Porter is the other candidate in November, by contrast, she would get money and media attention from a national constituency of progressives looking to put one of their own in a seat guaranteed to go to a Democrat anyway. That helps explain why Porter is talking up Early: It’s an effort to split the Republican vote and get herself into a head-to-head matchup with Schiff.

Now, you might think that Schiff could defeat Porter by combining the votes of Republicans and moderate Democrats. And it’s certainly plausible. But that scenario needs to take into account what happened in the 2018 California Senate race.

Six years ago, a state senator named Kevin de Leon challenged Feinstein from the left, criticizing her vote for the Iraq war, the first round of Bush tax cuts and other ideological heresies. Feinstein won easily, 54% to 45%. But the map was weird. Feinstein dominated in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, while de Leon won the Central Valley and cleaned up in the remote rural northern and eastern parts of the state — where most of the state’s Republicans live.

That doesn’t make very much sense ideologically. But California Republicans knew who Feinstein was, and knew they didn’t like her — so they voted for her opponent, even though he was more left-wing. Porter could benefit from the same phenomenon. Schiff is sufficiently well-known and well-despised from his feuds with Trump, that Republicans may well pull the lever for his further-left rival.

The other oddity about this campaign is that it is very low-stakes for a US Senate election in America’s largest state. It’s not going to influence the balance of power in the Senate one way or the other. It is, however, a case study in the failure of the top-two system, which also has a large influence on the US House of Representatives thanks to the huge size of the California delegation.

That failure, in turn, speaks to America’s problematic distaste for political parties as institutions. The theory of top-two is that if the party’s primary voters are excessively dominated by extremists, then it’s better not to have party primaries at all.

But it turns out that without party organizations to define the contours of a race, what you get is chaos and gamesmanship. The outcome of what is essentially a Democratic primary hinges on the irrelevant question of which Democratic contender can do a better job of manipulating Republicans to either consolidate behind a guy who’ll lose anyway, or divide their loyalties.

There’s nothing disastrous about this on the merits. Either Schiff or Porter would be a fine senator. What’s frustrating is that even though the defects of this reform effort are plain to see, it persists.

A more pragmatic politics requires stronger party organizations, not weaker ones. It’s no secret, after all, what it would take for a Republican to be viable in a statewide race in California: They’d have to be markedly more moderate than the average national Republican. A strong state party organization tired of losing could put forward candidates like that, even if many of its rank-and-file members were personally more conservative. And a strong Democratic Party would need to respond to a viable Republican with pragmatism of its own. In development economics, this is what is known as a virtuous cycle.

It feels like a pipe dream, I know. In practice, extreme factions tend to be more organized and active than moderate ones. But that doesn’t change the fact that elections are won by people who bother to organize and show up. There’s no substitute for just doing the work. The idea that there is — through a nonpartisan primary process, or some other means — is the real pipe dream.