Millions of votes are still being counted in California, where the primary results of the two state races for governor and mayor of Los Angeles remained inconclusive as of Wednesday afternoon.
That’s on top of most congressional and local races — a slow process typical of the Golden State because of the way counties count ballots and the deadline for receiving ballots (they must be marked before Election Day, but can arrive at counting stations days later).
The race drew attention to California’s “grassroots” system, where the top two candidates advance regardless of party affiliation. Democrats worried early in the gubernatorial race that their field was so large and so closely divided that two Republican candidates could cut corners.
As things stand, at least one Democrat will advance in both races: Biden’s former Secretary of Health and Human Services and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra looks likely to enter the gubernatorial election in November, while current Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will qualify for a runoff – the first sitting LA mayor since 2005 not to win outright.
Who they’ll face is a big open question: Former Republican Fox News host Steve Hilton is currently leading the race for governor, and could hold off an all-Democrat race later this year. Bass, meanwhile, faces challenges from left-leaning city council member Nithya Raman and former Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose insurgent campaign has renewed city races.
The slow counting process isn’t the only reason this is taking so long, though. Voters were reluctant to rally around a single candidate in a gubernatorial or mayoral race — contributing to slow vote returns. – with many expressing dissatisfaction with their choices and the Democratic-dominated government. There is a sense of frustration among voters: with Trump, with the status quo, with homelessness, with the incumbents. However, despite all, the government can get more of the same.
To better understand where Californians are coming from, I turned to Dan Walters, a columnist at CalMatters and a veteran historian of state politics. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
This has been seen as the longest and most chaotic gubernatorial election in recent California memory. How did we get here, and is that historically true?
It was very different because there was no pre-campaign predecessor. There is a stage before the official campaign is launched where potential candidates are kind of testing the waters. That never happened here. Everyone was asking around, Who is going to run?
We found this plan where Kamala Harris stood for how long, a month, two months, make his decisions. And then there were others who thought about it, Rob Bonta, the attorney general, Alex Padilla, one of our United States senators – in the end they all said, “No, we don’t want to run.” Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor, also announced that she would run, and then dropped out.
All these things were going on, and we didn’t even know who was running until the campaign started earlier this year.
Has this ever happened in California? This lack of leadership?
I’ve covered gubernatorial elections here for 50 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. No one else has ever seen anything like it either, for the governorship of the nation’s largest state. It seemed to be more people they hesitate run away Maybe they wanted to run, for whatever reason, but maybe they just thought running California was too hard. I mean, why would Alex Padilla give up a lifetime seat in the US Senate?
But the main thing (is) there was no natural predecessor. Eight years ago, we knew Gavin Newsom was going to run for governor. It was clear from the beginning. We didn’t have that this year. And that kind of shuts everything down. And so we finally have a field of 61 candidates, 10 of which you could call serious candidates – that turned out. Then, former congressman Eric Swalwell became the one-time Democratic primary in early April. And then, within a few days, he was out of it after he got out accused of sexual violence and resign from Congress.
That ends up helping Xavier Becerra, who was down about 4 percent in the polls at the time in early April. And he became, basically, the candidate of what you might call the Democratic establishment. Voters went to him or stopped and he jumped up, and it was just him and Tom Steyer, who. spent 200 million dollars many attacking Becerra at the end.
It also seemed to me that it was the voters who were about to run for the safer option – like 2020 when everyone seemed to be rallying around Biden.
Some people called Becerra California’s Biden – a safe bet, in other words. People wanted something familiar, something safe. Look, there’s a lot of anger out there about inflation and the cost of living, gas prices, housing prices, that kind of thing. And I think people hate someone like Steyer who comes along and says, “I’m going to fix it!”
And this was not like in the old times of the Democratic removal, where you are looking for a signal from above, and an intervention from someone like Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi?
Well, there was no such thing. It didn’t just happen. So it was a wonderful, very wonderful campaign.
Is there something about the governor’s job that makes it unnecessary? What is the state of the state? Are there structural issues that make it difficult to manage or govern?
We have a lot of what I would call existential issues – things that will greatly affect how California develops in the future. You have water supply issues, you have homelessness, you have chronic budget deficits, you have low educational attainment. There is no end to these things that need resolution but are not resolved. And they will all be lying on the desk when the next governor takes over next January. Right away, they got a lot to handle. And you see Gavin Newsom with all his energy and his participation, and everything is not well handled with these issues at hand.
Is it fair to blame candidates and campaigns when these structural issues exist?
There’s definitely something in the structure – it’s difficult when you’re dealing with complex issues because it takes a high level of agreement, of agreement, because the system of the American government is a series of restrictions.
Committees, legislatures, the floor, the governor – every one of those hurdles, you have to go through them all. And if you miss just one, you’ve failed. And so it’s basically a bad process. It is designed to make it difficult to formulate policy. Agreement with all stakeholders – business, labor, trial lawyers, environmentalists, consumer protection advocates – is very difficult and perhaps impossible to govern effectively in California. You have to go in with very small promises, keep those promises, but in order to do that, you have to ignore all the bigger, more difficult issues of existence.
How much of this can we blame on the top-two primary system (the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general, regardless of party affiliation)?
The two-seat system was forced on both sides by a budget deal involving Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2009. He forced the legislature to put it to a vote in 2010, and it passed. The Democratic leadership never wanted it. The Republican leadership never wanted it. And after the fear that Democrats had this year about the possibility of a deadlock by having two Republicans finish one, two, I think there’s a lot of sentiment among Democrats to pull it off.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has seemed to dodge some criticism from voters and opponents for the fact that she has very little power: She likes to remind people that she can’t let the police arrest ICE agents, she doesn’t have control over schools or public health because that falls to the county, and she couldn’t control the weather when wildfires destroyed entire neighborhoods last year; Xavier Becerra did the same thing in the election, when he talked about the problems caused by Trump.
That’s a whole other bag of stuff. Karen Bass is definitely in trouble. If you’re an incumbent mayor and you can’t get 50 percent in the primary, that means the majority of voters are against you, and so he has to worry a lot about what’s going to happen in November.
He’d probably win against Nithya Raman – Los Angeles is liberal but not left-wing – but Pratt, that’s a bad card, man. He represents the anger of Los Angeles. There is a lot of anger in Los Angeles about the fire and about the aftermath of the fire and the response and rebuilding. Karen Bass really didn’t do herself any favors with the way she handled the whole thing, and it’s coming back to haunt her, and she may pay the price.
Pratt had it very clever ads powered by AI and certainly a lot of passion. I think Bass beats Raman, but I think with Pratt, he has a potential problem here because he has tapped into the voters in Los Angeles, their dissatisfaction with the state of homelessness, crime, and fire.
What else can we say about the results of other races in the state so far? What can we make of Tom Steyer’s experience?
Of course we still have votes to count, but I can say it looks like Democratic voters rejected the more progressive wing of their party. Steyer had camped as Bernie Sanders’ best friend in California. He was spreading the word full on single-payer health care, taxing billionaires, breaking monopolies, everything, the whole agenda of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He accepted that as his platform, and it didn’t get him that far – plus he spent $200 million.
I wouldn’t say that this is exactly opposition to the progressive movement, but it may reflect this post-2024 feeling within the party that they have identified themselves as very “woke”. In fact, Gavin Newsom said that not too long ago, he said that he thought the Democratic Party was too far left, and needed to be “more normal.”
There is certainly a misconception that California is a woke left-wing paradise. You say that is wrong?
The results we saw from yesterday suggest that. The most progressive candidate for Nancy Pelosi’s seat has passed San Francisco didn’t do well, Steyer didn’t do well, apparently. I’m still not convinced that the left-wing mayoral candidate in Los Angeles didn’t do well.
Not going back, but the feeling that “no, we don’t want to go that way.” Becerra is a Democratic, “don’t rock the boat” politician. By no means is he a left winger. And actually, if you look at the polling results…the Latino population in California, which is the largest race, is not very left-wing. If you look at the parliament and start looking at the different types of Democrats in the parliament, the moderates tend to be Latinos and Blacks, while the progressives all seem to be white liberals. So California is not as progressive as it is often portrayed in the national media.
And there are many Republicans in California – a quarter of registered voters.
