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For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.
In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.
Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election.
So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost two-to-one, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?
For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two.
With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.
“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair.
The promise of top two
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.
Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base.
The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.
In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.
But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November.
In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans.
A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule.
That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.
Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.
There may be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top.
But such voters are rare — especially in June.
Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.
“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”
Does the system create more moderates?
Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.
In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November.
USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.
Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on “things not related to governance,” like gender or race.
In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election.
And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing may be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.
Shutouts and cynical games
There are obvious downsides.
Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.
Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa.
Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.
Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge.
A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.
That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.
With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair.
“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.
If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.
Changes on the way?
Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.
Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries.
“The fact that there are any (same-party general elections) is simply undemocratic,” Maviglio said. “People have the choice between only one party, like they’re in the Soviet Union?”
In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive.
In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.
“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don’t have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”
Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting.
Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.
Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.
Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member.
In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project launched a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.
“It’s very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we’ve seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.
Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.
