WaPo’s Karen Tumulty examines “How Adam Schiff threw a curveball into California’s Senate race.”
If you are anywhere in the vicinity of a television in California, it is hard to miss the ads being run by Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic front-runner in the March 5 primary to fill the Senate seat of the late Dianne Feinstein. They warn, as one puts it, that someone in the race is “too conservative for California.”
Those spots — on which Schiff’s campaign has spent close to $5 million, according to media tracking firm AdImpact — are pretty much the best thing that political novice Steve Garvey has going for him. They aim not to quash support for Schiff’s only significant GOP opponent but to gin it up in right-leaning corners of the state.
No one thinks Garvey, mostly remembered for his decades-ago career as a first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, has much of a chance of actually getting elected in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1. And the truth is, Garvey is barely bothering to campaign. (The subject line of one of his recent fundraising emails was: “Remember the 70’s?”)
So why the curveball commercials?
Schiff’s ads are lifting Garvey’s poll numbers, possibly enough to get him onto the November ballot under California’s unusual primary system, in which the top two finishers, regardless of party, will advance. There are more than two dozen contenders in the primary. Some of the latest polling shows Garvey moving into second place, past Democrats Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, both of whom are members of Congress.
Porter, a darling of the activist left, is calling foul. (This will be the last lame baseball pun I use in this column, I promise.) Were she to come in second, Schiff might actually havea competitive race in the fall.
Schiff’s tactic,as cynical as it is, is becoming common in California and elsewhere. What’s more, Porter began running digital ads touting another Republican, attorney Eric Early, a perennial candidate polling at slightly more than 2 percent, as “the real Republican threat in the California Senate race.” She hopes Early will cut into Garvey’s vote.
I’ve written before about Democratic candidates spending money to bolster the campaigns of radical Republicans in order to influence GOP primary voters to give themselves a more beatable general election opponent. I consider it an odious practice.
Not only is it unsporting to interfere with another party’s election but it’s bad for our national politics. First, it has the potential of backfiring. Since our elections tend to be binary contests between Democrats and Republicans, it could well result in the election of a radical Republican. Second, it further reduces comity and the chances of cooperation since it targets precisely those Republican candidates who are most likely to cooperate with Democrats in governing.
California’s Top Two system further incentivizes the practice. Because it’s a heavily Democratic state, it was intended to generally give voters a choice between the two most popular Democrats running for a given office. But, since there are generally more Democratic than Republican candidates in the race, there’s good reason to do what Schiff is doing. And, indeed, he’s not alone: it’s an increasingly widespread practice. Rob Bonta employed it in his 2022 race for re-election as attorney general. Gavin Newsom used it in his 2018 and 2022 races.
Now, in fairness, there is mounting evidence that, after a very slow start, the system is starting to have the desired impact.
Even notable scholars in the democracy reform field were initially skeptical that Top Two would make much of an impact, let alone make California less polarized. But it’s important to think back to where California was when Top Two was just getting underway. California’s Legislature was ranked at the time as the most polarized in the nation. And not by a sliver, either. In fact, the gap between California and the second-most-polarized state at the time, Colorado, was larger than the gap between any other consecutively ranked states.
So given how polarized California was, it’s unreasonable to expect Top Two to have immediately turned the state into a beacon of moderation and civility. The evidence we’re after is not that Top Two has been a near-overnight panacea but rather that it has brought about incremental but measurable progress on depolarizing the state. By this standard, the system is working.
Between 2013 and 2018, California’s state legislature was one of only five in the country that became less polarized. In fact, since California implemented its Top Two system only Kansas and West Virginia depolarized more. Meanwhile, polarization increased in the vast majority of states — 38 out of 50 — during this period.
California’s performance under Top Two is even more impressive when judged against other states in the West, which have polarized more than those in any other region. From 2013 to 2018, the four states where polarization increased the most were Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Utah. Thanks to Top Two, California is trending in the opposite direction.
Top Two is also substantially lowering extremism among members of Congress from California. Again, the debt ceiling vote is a compelling recent example. All 12 Republican members from California voted for the bipartisan deal to avoid default.
To be fair to critics, early data did tell a different story. In 2014, research showed that Top Two had had no meaningful effect on elected officials’ behavior. However, University of Southern California political scientist Christian Grose analyzed data up to 2018, allowing for more time to observe potential effects of the reform. Grose found that legislators elected under Top Two were almost 20 percent less ideologically extreme than legislators elected in closed primaries. Consistent with this trend, Eric McGhee, a political scientist at the Public Policy Institute of California, found that Top Two had led Democrats to create a friendlier business environment by reducing regulatory barriers.
For years, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other electoral reform advocates have argued that Top Two would reduce ideological extremism and polarization in government. While many Californians are understandably frustrated by continued acrimony and extremism in the state, the Top Two primary system has California moving in the right direction — at a time when most of the country is not. The state was deep in the well of polarization but is making progress.
So, it may be that the boosting of extremist candidates as a cynical tactic is an outlier. Still, while reducing polarization is a reasonable societal goal, it’s clearly not in the interest of some of the candidates. For Newsom, Schiff, and others, it’s much better to run against an extreme candidate than a more appealing one.
