Two articles in local papers flagged by YahooNews cast more light on last Tuesday’s primary in California.
Ranked choice voting advocates Marcela Miranda-Caballero and David Daley take to the LA Times to argue that “Steve Garvey’s strange win is a loss for California election reform.” You’ll never guess their solution.
The Dodgers don’t usually get any intentional help from their archrivals, the Giants. But something that strange just happened in California’s primary: Former Dodgers great and current Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Garvey advanced to the general election along with Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff — after being elevated almost entirely by the other team. The former National League MVP’s long-shot bid for the Senate benefited from an estimated $35 million in television ads from a surprising source: Schiff and his allies.
Why did the Burbank Democrat spend a small fortune boosting Garvey’s name recognition and blanketing the airwaves with ads that touted the former first baseman’s conservative credentials? You might call it a squeeze play: Schiff wanted to keep his two closest Democratic competitors out of the fall race, and he succeeded. Garvey claimed the second-highest vote total in the top-two primary, while Democratic Reps. Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland finished in third and fourth, leaving them out of the running.
This is a classic example of a problem that could be solved by ranked-choice voting, a tested, nonpartisan reform that discourages this sort of gamesmanship and more accurately represents what a majority of voters want.
While I generally dislike the “jungle primary” system used by California, decry candidates or parties spending money to advance weak candidates, and support ranked choice voting, it’s not at all clear how it would solve this particular problem. Schiff would still have benefitted from boosting a weaker candidate who wouldn’t be the second choice of enough Californians to defeat him. Indeed, one imagines Garvey voters would prefer Schiff to Porter or Lee, so RCV might actually enhance the incentives for gamesmanship.
Miranda-Caballero and Daley offer a twist on a pure RCV model:
One option is for California to adopt a “final four” model such as the one being used successfully in Alaska. Instead of advancing just two candidates from the primary, the state admits the top four to the general election, which is then decided by ranked choice.
This allows multiple candidates of different ideological stripes within a party to run against one another without splitting the field, which is particularly important in an overwhelmingly blue state like California. It also helps ensure that both major parties have at least one candidate in the general election. That could have allowed Schiff, Garvey, Lee and Porter to all make their cases before a much larger and more representative November electorate.
Aside from narrowing the race to fewer candidates early, I’m not sure why you’d combine instant-runoff voting with a runoff. Aside from forcing people to show up twice in a system that has a built-in runoff and creating significant added expense, it allows the most motivated voters to weigh in first. Regardless, I don’t see how this model solves the Garvey problem, either.
Longtime California journalist Jim Newton takes to the Palm Springs Desert Sun to argue “California Republicans have been reduced to a foil for Democrats. That’s not good for anyone.”
The Republican Party established the citizens initiative, referendum and recall in California. It championed tax increases, gun control and expanded abortion rights. Earl Warren, a former state party chair and chief justice of the United States, looked forward to welcoming 10,000 new immigrants every Monday when he served as governor.
The GOP now has a new role in the nation’s biggest state: a foil for Democrats.
That’s not good news for California. It’s not even good news for Democrats, whose one-party rule grows ever more calcified and arrogant in the absence of meaningful debate. But it’s where we are.
Warren has been dead for half a century and was last elected governor almost three-quarters of a century ago, so I’m not sure the example is overly salient. But it sets up a larger point.
After a few paragraphs rehashing the Senate race and one for LA District Attorney, Newton continues,
One-party rule narrows debate and alternatives. Whatever you think of Garvey, it’s discouraging that the ideas California Republicans once espoused now can be easily ignored by ruling Democrats.
This is the state that gave us Warren, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Republicans who once connected with California priorities. They saw the value of environmental protection – as president, Nixon created the EPA – and celebrated the contributions of immigrants.
Those with long memories or access to history books will recall that conservatives in California once welcomed migrant labor, while César Chávez was among those advocating for tighter border controls, since those immigrants competed for jobs with members of his union.
Warren built roads and universities and was willing to raise taxes to invest in the state’s future. He championed universal health care and liked to say that his job required him to provide for 10,000 new Californians every week. He was elected three times – once, in 1946, as the nominee of both the Republican and Democratic parties.
As for Reagan, the icon of modern conservatism, he raised taxes, supported gun control and expanded abortion rights as California’s governor.
But the Republican Party has slipped away from that history and positioned itself increasingly out of step with most Californians. This is a state that prizes its environment – a state office building bears the slogan “Bring me men to match my mountains” – values individual autonomy and hence abortion rights, and has a long history and relationship with Latin America.
Again, Newton’s examples are ancient history. Reagan’s second term as California governor ended in 1975 which, again, is almost half a century ago. It was a different Republican Party and, indeed, a different California.
But one needn’t go back quite that far to when the GOP was not only competitive but actually dominant in California. Republicans won the state’s electoral votes in every election from 1952 to 1988 save the disastrous 1964 contest. Republicans won the governorship in 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2002, and 2006.
While my preference would be that Republicans chose their own nominee for the general election, the real problem isn’t that Democrats can use the jungle primary to manipulate the November matchup but that the party is so anathema to California voters that boosting Garvey comes with little downside risk.
Modest systemic reforms could help make our elections more representative of the wishes of the people. But a sane GOP that didn’t have to write off California would fix a lot of problems. How the hell we get there, I haven’t the foggiest.
