California Shows Why Nonpartisan Primaries Stink

If the Democratic field is weak, the Republican field is (much like the Republican Party itself) a catastrophe. Swalwell’s departure reduced but didn’t eliminate the risk that a Democratic split would cede the two top spots to Republicans Steve Hilton, a former Fox News blowhard previously known as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “pint-sized Rasputin,” and Chad Bianco, a Covid-mandate-defying sheriff of Riverside County who recently declared himself “very proud” to be a past member of the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group implicated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Hilton is endorsed by Trump and holds the lead in most polls. The likelihood that at least one of these extremists will end up in the general election makes a mockery of the principal goo-goo argument for the jungle primary, which is that it’s supposed to weed out extremists.

The top-two primary system is—as so many California ballot propositions turn out to be—a solution in search of a problem. Its roots, ironically, lay in the highly partisan 2003 recall election of California Gov. Grey Davis, which invited voters to choose an alternative candidate, Democrat or Republican, on a single ballot. Davis was recalled, and the actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in to replace him largely on the basis of name recognition. Schwarzenegger’s single-ballot victory predisposed the Governator to favor Proposition 14, the 2010 ballot measure that ushered in the single-ballot top-two system. “That’s how I got elected,” Schwarzenegger told NPR, “because I appealed to Democrats and Republicans, independents … everybody.” Actually, the way Schwarzenegger got elected was that a very combative car-alarm magnate named Darrell Issa, later a Republican member of Congress, spent $2 million to throw Davis out of office (and early on hoped to replace Davis himself).

Since Schwarzenegger, a fairly moderate Republican, was elected on a nonpartisan ballot, Schwarzenegger figured that single-ballot primaries would keep California from electing extremists in the future. But California hadn’t elected many extremists to statewide office before Schwarzenegger. Indeed, during the previous half-century, the only extremist elected California governor Ronald Reagan (1967-1975), and once he entered office Reagan’s extremism went into hibernation; Governor Reagan raised taxes and signed a pro-abortion bill into law well before Roe v. Wade. (The Gipper was much more conservative later as president.) I omit Pete Wilson (1991-1999) because Wilson was the opposite of Reagan, an extremist conservative governor elected as a moderate. It’s hard to remember now, but during his 1990 campaign Wilson’s conservative credentials were called seriously into question.