The culprit here is, partly, California\u2019s \u201cjungle\u201d primary: an egalitarian-minded effort by which everybody sets out together, in one pool, and the top two vote-getters progress to the general election, regardless of the parties that they represent. The theory, when the system was established, by ballot, in 2010, was that it would reduce two-party polarization and encourage nuance. The practice, at least this year, has been an Archimedean displacement of power, as Democratic contenders filled the bottom of the bath with a divided vote, and Republicans, possibly to their own surprise, rose. What does a viable Republican governor of California look like in 2026? Hilton, a semi-reconstructed Tory, made his name as the head of strategy to David Cameron, the man who strategized his way to Brexit. Bianco, a former Oath Keeper, previously drew headlines for an investigation into jails in the county where he\u2019s sheriff, in which nineteen inmates died in 2022. Both men led the field for weeks. California really is, for some, a land of easy dreams.<\/p>\n
The idea of one of the bluest states in the Union dispatching a red governor to Sacramento so unnerved some Democrats that they counselled voters in the state (which sends early ballots to all registered voters, for return by mail or drop-off) to hold off until it was clear who landed as the Party front-runner. Many did: the election, as of the middle of the return period, had relatively low Democratic ballot returns\u2014a dangerous game of chicken to play, and one that has caused the resources of a powerful Party to arrive late or not at all behind candidates ill-primed for sudden scrutiny. Becerra\u2019s candidacy coincided with allegations that his staff had been involved in fraud, and resurfaced lingering concerns about the treatment of migrant children under his watch. (He denied involvement in wrongdoing in both cases.) He received a windfall almost too late, in the final stretch. Not that money seems to have mattered much in this race. The primary\u2019s top outside fund-raiser, Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, brought in fifteen million dollars, with support from Silicon Valley, and scarcely broke single digits in polls.<\/p>\n
The broader worry with this election is not really about primary systems or lacklustre politicians or even an alarming run of self-propelled implosions. It\u2019s about whether the hardest leadership positions in government have become too hard for the most promising candidates to pursue. Observers note that California is filled with experienced, powerful Democrats. \u201cKamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Alex Padilla\u2014any of them could have walked away with it,\u201d a consultant on one of the gubernatorial campaigns told me. All these veterans have made clear that they have no interest in the governorship. Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor and a onetime speaker of the California Assembly who, fifteen years ago, was a politician often named in a rising power triumvirate with Harris and Newsom, is running, but he has struggled to get aloft, undone by the digital-media environment and his own long tail.<\/p>\n
One fear is that these pipeline problems are not merely a Golden State issue\u2014that California\u2019s primary is a (very) dry run for the Democrats\u2019 path to higher leadership, and specifically the great big beautiful office that will open in 2029. California is not usually regarded as an American microcosm. Yet there\u2019s a case that, as far as liberal politics goes, it is just that: a giant state of querulous diversity, pulled between the warring interests of powerful industries, cast against extremes of natural-resource management, peopled by the super-rich and the dirt poor, beset by middle-class affordability problems, and held as a beachhead for both international talent and an underclass seeking opportunity. It is often called ungovernable, perhaps a little grandly. (\u201cDifficult? Yes. Challenging? Very. Not ungovernable,\u201d Pete Wilson, a former governor who heard the claim almost forty years ago, once retorted<\/a>.) But if the strongest arm of the Democratic Party can\u2019t assemble a pool of appealing, qualified candidates willing to meet the challenge, what are its odds in a messy national race?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The culprit here is, partly, California\u2019s \u201cjungle\u201d primary: an egalitarian-minded effort by which everybody sets out together, in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,989,4594,18818],"class_list":["post-341231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-elections","tag-governors","tag-midterm-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}