I understand Steve Singiser’s many beefs with California’s top-two primary structure, and I might be convinced that the law ought to preclude the top two coming from the same party. But, overall, I think the problems impact both parties equally, depending on circumstances, and that allows for third parties to have a better shot. To start with, California created the Citizens Redistricting Commission, which greatly expanded the number of competitive seats in the state. But there are still many uncompetitive seats. How do we hold an elected Democrat accountable in a 88% Democratic district? How about having them have to run against someone to their left? With the top-two system, we don’t run into the problem that third parties will doom the Democrat.
While the system creates some perverse incentives and can still result in disaster if too many left-leaning candidates run against too few right-leaning candidates, the normal consequence of a left-wing challenge to a Democrat is that the Democrat still finishes in the top two and has a chance to win the general.
California probably ought to start a progressive party that is sometimes willing to endorse Democrats. I’m almost certain that we’d see progressives elected to Congress from California before we’d see any (exclusively) Working Families members elected from New York’s fusion ballot. And that could form the basis for a viable left-wing third party that has actual representation in the Capitol.
We have had some issues with two progressive State Assembly candidates knocking each other out in the primary and a more centrist type defeating whoever is left standing in the general. But for the most part positive effects seem to have outweighed negative ones. Especially the increase in our Dem Congressional delegations and super majorities in the State Legislature, meaning some sane governance for the first time in a long time.
Interestingly, look for the Dem parties in other states to resist these types of changes, because it causes them to lose some control over who gets nominated. Even if it actually results in more Dems getting elected, as it did here in CA. Any push for reforms like these in other states will have to come from the grassroots (and ideally have a nonpartisan sheen); we had to put ours on the ballot in order to get them through.
Re: The Gerrymander issue, my understanding is that California was gerrymandered to protect incumbency, where as the poster wants it re-mandered to protect democrats.
Anyhow, remember USGrunt, the farther west you go the more states tend to be permissive. In some state you don’t even have provisions for ballot initiatives and in others the legislature has to vote to put it on the ballot. So this isn’t even possible in some places.
Yeah, I think you’re right there, although in CA protecting incumbents tends to have the same effects as protecting Dems.
Agree about the challenges in other states – for all of the faults of California’s direct democracy system, it does make reforms like this easier, and I’m not sure what the strategy ought to be in states where ballot access is more limited.
Too early to tell is this is a reform.
Most of the propositions/initiatives passed have been changes, but not reforms. And most of the changes have created straitjackets that constrain effective governance.
CA is a dysfunctional state that is only temporarily functional because of Democratic super majorities with a Democratic governor.
As Republicans learn that they need to run as Democrats to become Blue Dogs, we’ll see what happens. I’m not optimistic.
My preference would be for the Democrats to gerrymander the hell out of California, to balance all the gerrymandered red states. But no, we had to go and be fair and create the redistricting commission.
But it is what it is, and the open primaries could be a way to let the California Republican party go quietly extinct without having to go to the trouble of crushing them.
It could work out great on immigration, for instance, because there are a number of districts where Republican Congressmen (I think they’re all men) are currently representing large numbers of Latinos. So if they don’t do the right thing, their Latino constituents will be highly motivated to unseat them, and they’ll have two opportunities. And of course it won’t just be Latinos, because they’re hardly the only people in California who are disgusted by racism and xenophobia.
But we were highly gerrymandered before, and it cost Dems some seats. We unexpectedly picked up some new ones after the 2010 reforms.
Stephen, as a California Democratic Party member I love the increased legitimacy our Party gained by winning more than 2/3rds of the Legislative Districts without gerrymandering. It’s better this way. How can a Republican leader or rank-and-filer in States like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina take honest pride and confidence that they are doing the voter’s will, knowing that they dominate Congressional and Legislative spots only because they created some of the most anti-democratic gerrymanders in the history of the United States?
The alternative is to rationalize your gerrymandering to a sociopathic degree, throw caution to the wind, and behave as they have in those and other States. My view is that if those Legislatures continue to behave this way, they will absolutely decimate future support for the Republican Party, as people grow to see the GOP as a bunch of radical white supremacists, religious nuts and middle-class underminers. We can be frustrated by the moderation of the Democratic Party, but moderation has a proper role in governance. The GOP will find this out soon, I believe.
Finally, BooMan, I don’t see a third party gaining traction in California unless governance turns very, very badly again as it did in the last decade. If that had lasted a while longer, it would have been difficult to predict how we would have responded. However, we righted the ship in time, just passed a budget without needing to consider radical Republican input at all, and the CDP Progressive Caucus is wielding more effective influence within the Party now.
It is funny that the first-two-past-the-post primary system actually gave the Dems a super majority. That wasn’t supposed to be what happened. The plan, when this idea was first dreamed up, was for the GOP to issue their famous control-from-the-top to set up two centrist-sounding candidates and let the progressives split the votes. But they didn’t count on the rise of the tea party.
Ultimately, though, this is a really bad system. The UK, for example, is suffering from a horrible conservative government that won only 37% of the vote. All the other parties are far to the left of the tories but they split the remaining 63%. A similar problem happened in Canada, who is also suffering devastation under a minority-elected conservative government.
Not too many years ago the French, who run a similar system for President, got stuck with a run-off between a vile right-winger a an extremely vile, openly racist, right-winger. Again, though these two candidates couldn’t muster even 40% of the vote in the main election but the multiplicity of candidates on the left split the 60+% majority of the vote, forcing that result. Yes, vile right-winger won, and with a large majority of the run-off vote, which gave him an undeserved veneer of legitimacy.
Run-offs are the answer to this or the Australian system which I prefer.
I think that now that there have been a few bad experiences, you will see either party fragmentation or party leadership exerting some control on the number of entrants in the primary. And it puts pressure on the candidate to turn out as many voters as possible in order to make the cut; that is the challenge for little-known or third-party candidates.
That’s another argument for the Australian system.
So I just read Singiser’s beefs, and the one most persuasive to me as a liberal and State Party member is the wasted money and energy in Dem vs. Dem races, particularly ones like the Sherman/Berman ridiculousness. That the two were largely similar in policy views made it all the more wasteful.
That said, Steve is taking outlier results like those in CD 31 and treating them as though they cropped up all over the place. In fact, they did not. Dems gained 5 Congressional seats in California in 2012 and achieved the badly needed supermajorities in the Legislature, something experts thought unlikely all the way to Election Day. Finally, even with the wasted money/activism in isolated cases like the Sherman/Berman race, we won every single Statewide office and all the Propositions most crucial to the future of the Party and the State.
Goodness me, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Weird – I live in CA but saw no evidence of this change in the 2012 primary. Anything that would help us get rid of Diane Feinstein would be a godsend. Ironically, I write this as she has just done the first thing I ever remember approving of her doing: writing to Obama in support of Yellin over that douchebag Summers.
Still, it doesn’t make up for all the other crap she’s pulled – like greenlighting Alito and Roberts and working around the clock to gut health care reform. And don’t get me started on Lieberman – something our less disgusting junion senator is also guilty of.
So with this new setup, if a progressive could outpoll the republican it set up a feinstein vs. the left general election?
Washington state has had a similar top-two system for a number of years now. It basically destroyed the Libertarian and Green Parties, which both had a lot more momentum before its adoption. (Though in the GP’s case there was a lot of self-inflicted assistance.)
The reason is fairly simple: under the old system, if you won your party’s nomination you were on the ballot in November. Under Top Two, in all but the most very liberal or conservative districts (where the incumbent D or R routinely gets 80%+ of the vote anyway), the third parties come and go in the summer primary, when far fewer people are paying attention – less media, less money, fewer chances to engage the public. Third parties never have a chance to build their capacity to the point where they can actually mount a credible challenge.
The state parties also hate the top two, because they lose control over the nominating process. (This has especially been a problem with state Republicans being stuck with some truly rancid candidates.) But they’re mostly concerned with their struggles with each other. That each benefits from further reinforcement of their duopoly is, at best, a minor side benefit for them. But it’s a life-or-death thing for those other parties.
Ironically, we’re in the midst of our primary election right now (all-mail ballots, due Aug. 6) and Seattle is likely to put an actively Socialist candidate in the top two for a city council seat (vs two Democrats, one the 16-year incumbent.) But this is Seattle – there are no out Republicans running. And the Dem. incumbent will still be a heavy favourite.
The socialist, Kshama Sawant, is the most talented Left party candidate I’ve seen in a long, long time – and beating the third candidate (who has raised a substantial amount of money), should she do it, will be an impressive achievement. But the fact that it takes a candidate of rare talent, in an electorate that’s already a serious outlier in terms of how liberal it is, to even survive the primary tells you how rigged against third parties Top Two is.