California 2024, first round (and Adam Schiff for Senate)

California’s first-round of election is 5 March, concurrent with the presidential primaries. Note that I do not consider the votes in California for US Senate, House, and state legislative seats to be a “primary,” despite that name being used officially. The parties hold genuine primaries for president–actually, of course, contests among slates of delegates for candidates seeking each party’s nomination. However, for other offices, we have a two-round top-two system. This March election is the first round–the rules do not advance the top vote-winner in each party to a general election contest, as in a primary for a single-seat office (like a US Senate seat). Instead the top two advance even if they are from the same party–and only the top two, meaning no minor parties on the November ballot (unless one happens to have cracked the top two in some contest).

I have been consistent in saying this was an undesirable system, and represented an abolition of partisan primaries, ever since it was just a proposal on the ballot on June, 2010. This year’s contest for the US Senate seat has really demonstrated the sense in which it is not a primary as we usually understand the term, primary. There are three current US House members who are Democrats and are running for the US Senate seat. (It is the seat opened up when Dianne Feinstein died.) The leading contender of these three, Adam Schiff, has been running ads that totally bypass the “primary” and tell voters why they should not vote for Steve Garvey (yes THAT Steve Garvey), a Republican. Schiff is not even pretending to be running against the other Democrats (Katie Porter and Barbara Lee). In fact, one suspects he wants to ensure Garvey is his opponent in November rather than prolong the intra-party contest to the runoff. Garvey seems to have a fairly invisible campaign. I say that anecdotally, and only because I see TV ads for Schiff and Porter regularly, but have not seen one for Garvey (or Lee). In fact, the way I learned Garvey was a candidate was from Schiff constantly hammering the point that Garvey is too conservative for California. Schiff surely has done an excellent job raising Garvey’s profile as a Senate candidate.

This is, of course, a perfectly sensible strategy to follow when your electorate is solidly Democratic and the rules could give you a Democratic opponent in the final round. That might be a tougher contest to win than one against a Republican. To be clear, he is not running as “the candidate best qualified to defeat Garvey.” He is running against Garvey as if this were the general election and there were no other candidates.¹ And my point about this electoral system all along has been that it is–it’s the first round of a two-round general election.

Garvey, in addition to being basically invisible as far as campaigning goes, looked totally lost in the portion of a multi-candidate debate that I saw. I mean, it was pretty embarrassing. However, I will give him credit for at least attempting to stake out moderate positions, by the standards of today’s Republican Party. Pretty much the only way a Republican can win statewide here is by being perceived as moderate, and it helps to be a political novice with a celebrity reputation to build on. Call it the Schwarzenegger model. It is, however, far less likely to work in a contest for Senate than for Governor, and Garvey’s celebrity reputation is surely not what it once would have been, given that his baseball career ended in 1987.²

The media are kind of playing along with Schiff’s strategy. Consider this headline: “Schiff, Garvey in ‘statistical tie.'” The item in the SF Chronicle is reporting on a poll by UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies from a few days ago showing Garvey actually in the lead, with 27% and Schiff with 25%. Of course, this contest is one for two places–in the runoff. So the relative vote shares of the top two are hardly relevant. What’s relevant is the contest for the second place. You have to read through a bit of the Chronicle article to find out how big the gap is over the next candidate. Porter is at 19%. She has slipped a lot, relative to Schiff. The same pollster back in November had Porter and Schiff close for the top slot (17% and 16%), Garvey at 10%, and Lee at 9%.³ And the USC Dornisfe poll from early February had Schiff in the lead but a close race for that second runoff slot between Porter and Garvey. We can’t attribute all this movement in the polls to Schiff’s ads, of course. But if he was trying to make himself and Garvey the top two instead of himself and Porter, mission accomplished.

I don’t normally make endorsements of candidates on this website, but I will say that I will be voting for Schiff. The two leading Democrats in this contest are not dramatically different in their overall records.⁴ However, all three differ on one issue I care deeply about, especially right now–standing with Israel. Lee is terrible on this issue (calling for a “ceasefire” from the beginning), and so I am glad to see her struggle in the polls. Earlier in the campaign I thought I would vote for Porter in the first round, mainly to postpone the choice between her and Schiff till November. Schiff has been consistently supportive of Israel, and in mid-February issued a statement calling for passage of the bill to aid Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan that has been held up by the far right wing of the House Republican majority. Porter has taken some good foreign policy positions (e.g., on Iran last December), and her earliest statement after 7 Oct. was good. However, a more recent one (in December) was not so good. It was not offensive, and did not call for Israel to cease its war against Hamas. In fact, it was pretty typical mainstream peace process stuff, for a bilateral ceasefire and negotiations for a “democratic Palestinian state.” Sure, sounds good. But the solution she is talking about will be hard enough even if Hamas is decisively defeated; it would be impossible as an outcome of a negotiated ceasefire of the sort she is dreaming of. If Porter were the only mainstream Democrat in the running, this statement would not keep me from voting for her. But we have a better one. Schiff has my vote.⁵

Finally, kudos to the pollsters for USC for including this crucial question in their poll in early February:

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1. In fact, while the candidates I have mentioned are the only ones that could be considered “serious,” there are 27 candidates for the full term, of whom eleven indicate their “party preference” is Democratic, ten Republicans, and one each from American Independent and Libertarian (the rest have no declared party affiliation). There are seven candidates running for the partial/unexpired term, which will last only several weeks. The rules require that there be an election concurrent with the full-term one to fill the remainder of this one (with the seat being held by a gubernatorial appointee, who in this case is not a candidate, until a winner of the partial term race is certified). ↩︎
2. I remember in his playing days, or shortly after, there were rumors he would enter politics. But maybe three dozen years was a little long to wait. ↩︎
3. Lee has 8% in the more recent poll. ↩︎
4. Per their DW-NOMINATE scores, Porter is the most moderate, Schiff is somewhat to the left, and Lee far to the left. Their scores and percentiles (of the whole House) are: Porter –0.224 (53), Schiff –0.35 (70), Lee –0.677 (99). Source: VoteView. ↩︎
5. I will add that Garvey is the only one of these candidates with a prominent statement on his campaign website about Israel. And I like it. So maybe I should vote for him. But I can’t quite bring myself to do that, even just this once, in the first round.
   
   Lee’s website indicates, if you click on her link for Global Peace and Security, that she is “the only candidate to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza.” Schiff’s site does not seem to have a section on foreign policy, but his views as a Representative are well known. Porter also has little to say on her Senate campaign site; I found the above-linked statements on her House site. ↩︎

California’s STUPID electoral system, 2022 first round edition

Yesterday was the “primary” that is NOT a primary in California. As I tried to warn the good voters of the great California Republic back in 2010, this “top two” system would be a bad idea. Yesterday offers some further examples of why it is indeed a STUPID ELECTORAL SYSTEM.

My favorite current example is state Senate District 4 (yeah, we do boring district names here).

Source: CATarget on Twitter.

Nearly 56% of this district’s voters voted for candidates branded on the ballot as Republican. Yet, because this is NOT A PRIMARY, but is just a top-two runoff system, the voters will choose in November from two Democrats, whose combined vote total is just 44%. Brilliant!

(For Democrats, it almost looks like a successful contest under two-seat single nontransferable vote (SNTV), with the party coordinating to equalize on two candidates, but I won’t give them that much credit. As for Republicans, well, they just punted away a win for the taking in a body where they regularly struggle to win even one third of the total seats.)

Statewide, we may have an intraparty runoff in one contest, the one for Insurance Commissioner. When the count was at 75% reporting, it looked like this:

Note the close race for the second runoff slot, between a second Democrat and a Republican. In this case, even though I will not waver from my conviction that this is a STUPID ELECTORAL SYSTEM, I will be happy with the result if Levine faces Lara in the runoff. In fact, Levine was one of the few candidates on this whole LONG ballot that I actually voted for. Lara is very expendable, due to being somewhat ethically challenged. In fact, it is certainly not impossible to imagine him losing in November, even to a Republican. Anyway, regardless of how I feel about the specific candidates, the notion that the so-called general election would be between two candidates of the same party is a bug not a feature. That it is for a statewide contest makes it even more so. (It would not be the first time; in fact, twice we’ve had US Senate contests on a November ballot that were between two Democrats.)

In a subsequent update, with “100% reporting” Howell has pulled ahead. However, 100% does not mean the count is finished. Far from it! There is probably still a decent chance Levine will pull back ahead for the second runoff slot. If Levine pulls back into second place, the Republicans will have shot themselves in the foot by their almost perfect vote-equalization “strategy.” If one of the Republicans finishes ahead of Lara, I am going to be mildly upset at Eugene and JJJ for splitting the anti-Lara Democratic vote. Ah, the hazard of SNTV-style competition for two slots in an eventual one-seat contest!

Speaking of US Senate contests in California, we got two of them this time! No, it is not that both seats are open (as was the case here in 1992, or more recently in Arizona and Georgia); both votes were for the same seat. The incumbent, Alex Padilla, was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to the vacated seat, and state law requires that there be a special election at the next scheduled election to fill the unexpired portion of the term. So we voted on that, as well as on the new six-year term starting in 2023.

The image on the right is the unexpired term term, and it is on the back of the page that has the full term (image on left). This is confusing! There are also many fewer candidates for the partial term than for the full term. We get 23 of them for the full term!

I am actually not sure whether the rule in the partial term is top-two runoff, or if a majority on this ballot will suffice. [Update: both are same top-two rules; I’ll keep the rest of this paragraph as it was.] It is used to be the case, even before top two was adopted for all formerly partisan elections, that special elections could be over in one round if one of the candidates–with all, regardless of one party, running against each other–won over half. I do not know if that applies here, or if the top two automatically go to a runoff, as in the full term election. If a majority suffices, you technically could have someone sworn in right away to serve only till early January. If the runoff is required anyway, then the person elected for the partial term would serve for only a few weeks. Of course, it is moot. The appointed incumbent is sure to win both contests anyway. But this is another of those poorly thought out provisions of California election law that could produce a strange result (not as bad as the recall/replacement process, about which see what I wrote last year, but bad enough).

Another thing I was watching for was to see just how well Newsom would do. At the moment, he is all the way down to 56.3%, although that percentage could well creep up again. Just last year, NO on the recall got 61.9%. In the 2018 November runoff against a Republican, he won 62.0%. So he may be slipping! Okay, not by much. Even though he will easily win a majority in this round, we get to vote on him yet again in November. What a great democracy–a majority gets to proclaim it wants its governor three times in just over a year!

(Side note: If you add the votes of a few other token self-identified Democrats running for governor to Newsom’s total, you get 58.4%.)

His opponent will be Brian Dahle, a not so well known very far-right and evidently anti-vax Republican from one of the state’s most rural districts, way up on the Oregon and Nevada borders; in fact, as far as most Californians are concerned, it might as well be Idaho. (He is interesting in that he serves in the state senate while his wife, Megan Dahle, serves in the state assembly, in the seat Brian formerly held. They are farmers, so I have kind of followed their careers.)

And then my ballot also included this contest.

That’s right, we have just two candidates. But, of course, this is a top two election, so they both have already qualified for the November ballot just by showing up! WHAT A STUPID ELECTORAL SYSTEM.

As you can guess from the candidates’ indicated occupations–why do we even let candidates list their occupation on the ballot?–and as you would know from the “Fruits” side of this blog, this is very much an agricultural district. Aguiar-Curry makes ag policy a key part of her legislative behavior (so I follow her career, too!). She has been a walnut grower for years. Walnuts are a major crop here, as are wine grapes, as well as almonds, tomatoes, corn, sunflower…. the list is long.

(Funny aside, B. Dahle derides Newsom as a “wine salesman” but here we have a Republican candidate who proudly lists “winemaker” as one of his occupations on the ballot. Wine is big business in this state!)

For this state assembly contest, I was tempted to vote for one now and the other in November. Just because. But instead I decided to vote for neither.

I have never left so many parts of a ballot blank. So many candidates (26 for Governor, 23 for the full term Senate seat), so few I cared enough to vote for. WHAT A STUPID ELECTORAL SYSTEM, and what a disappointing excuse for a democracy the California Republic has.

California statewide election vote totals

All of the offices elected statewide in California now have only two candidates in the November election, due to the “top two” runoff system. However, because the first round is no longer a primary in which various parties can pick nominees for the November ballot, the contests can feature two candidates of the same party or one or more independents instead of candidates of one or the other major party. (This is also true of district contests like US House and state legislative seats.)

Thus I thought I would exploit these features–constant number of candidates, but variable affiliations–to probe how a party’s failure to place a candidate in the top two affects voting. I am not claiming any causality or doing any subtle analysis here. Just blunt comparisons of statewide totals, which are suggestive.

Two contests, including Lt. Governor and US Senator, featured two Democrats. One featured a Democrat and a non-party candidate. One contest features two non-party candidates, because the state constitution mandates that the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) is a non-partisan post. (This is the one office that could be decided in the June first round; it is a straightforward majority-runoff system.)

The bottom data row averages the Democratic and Republican votes across the five races that were Democrat vs. Republican. The right-most data column indicates how the votes cast compare to the governor’s race: a ratio of the vote total in a given race over votes cast for governor. Not surprisingly, governor drew the highest total.

We can see that the average Democrat won just over 5.1 million votes and the average Republican 3.1 million, in contests that had one and only one candidate of each of these two parties. Moreover, all the contests that were D:R straight fights had roughly 98% of the votes of the governor’s race.

On the other hand, if there were two Democrats, the total was under 90% of the governor total (83% for the Lt.Gov and 88.5% for the US Senate). This obviously is partly because many Republican-leaning voters simply skipped the intra-party Democratic contest. (The SPI race, where I believe both candidates were actually Democrats, has a similar ratio.) Nonetheless, that is not the entire story, as the total for the two Democrats in both these races is a lot more than the average single Democrat, at the same time as the leading Democrat did considerably worse than the average single Democrat. In other words, at the same time as Democrats split their own votes across their two candidates, clearly the candidates also picked up some Republican votes. This would be really interesting to investigate on a more granular basis.

Finally, the Insurance Commissioner race is notable. The “no party” candidate in the race is actually a Republican. In fact, he served under that party affiliation in the office before. But candidates choose, before the June first round, what party “preference” to indicate on the ballot (from the approved list), or whether to indicate no party preference. In this contest, the Democrat got far below the average for his party. It could be that there are Democratic-leaning voters who remember Poizner and think he did a good job, although he left the office in 2011, so I have some doubts. Alternatively, it could be that not running under the party label is a good strategy for a Republican in this state. He did not win, but he did get 49.0% of the votes, running around half a million votes ahead of the Republican gubernatorial candidate and around 700k ahead of the average Republican on the statewide ballot. Maybe other candidates of the weaker party in the race will hide their party label in the future, given the current electoral system makes it possible to be one of the top two without a stated party preference.

California’s new electoral system, part 2

The new electoral system in California is a top-two majority runoff with the possibility of multiple candidates from one party. Please, do not call it a primary, because it isn’t. In a primary, a political party permits voters to select its candidate for the general election. However, under the new California system, the general election will now be just a runoff between the top two candidates, regardless of party. That is, at most, two parties will be represented on the general-election ballot, but it is possible for both candidates to be from the same party, or no party (if both of the top two in the first round were non-partisan).

We might call it two-round SNTV, for lack of a better term. The reference to SNTV–single non-transferable vote–calls attention to the fact that two or more candidates of the same party can be competing with each other, but co-partisans are unable to share votes with one another to ensure that they don’t divide the vote and cause none of them to advance. (As noted, the second round can also feature two candidates of one party, but then there is no risk of coordination failure, as the winner will be from that party, obviously.)

In the first use of this system this week, there are a few cases that could represent SNTV-style coordination failure. There will be several legislative races in which the November choice will come down to two candidates of the same party. Most of these are in districts with an entrenched incumbent who will happen to face a (token) intra-party challenger, so there is no coordination problem. There just is no opportunity for voters in November–who will be more numerous than they were in the first round–to register a partisan choice for one of the other parties. I will focus my attention, then, on a few cases in which the runoff contenders are from one party, and they did not combine for significantly more than half the first round votes. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

A particularly striking example occurred in US House District 8: The runoff will feature two Republicans, Paul Cook (15.5%) and Gregg Imus (15.0%). The third place candidate just missed qualifying for the runoff: Democrat Jackie Conway (14.7%). There were 11 other candidates, including a second Democrat who had 9.7%. While the combined votes of ten Republicans is over 70% and thus this was not a district a Democrat was likely to win, the Democratic Party nonetheless narrowly lost the right to even make their case to the general-election electorate.

In US House district 31, the top two candidates are both Republicans: Gary G. Miller (26.7%) and Bob Dutton (24.9%). There were four other candidates, all Democrats, and the top-scoring one, Pete Aguilar, had 22.8%, missing the runoff by just over 2 percentage points. While the two Republicans combined for a majority of the votes, they did so just barely, with 51.6%. It is not out of the question that a Democrat could have won this district–especially given the difference in turnout that we can expect, as well as the long gap between elections and the potential importance of candidate quality. But the Democrats will not get to make their case in this potentially winnable district.

In fact, this last example points to another potential pitfall of the system: even if some candidate wins a majority in the first round, there still must be a runoff. What will be really interesting is the first case in which the majority “winner” in round 1 loses round 2 due to the different turnout or other reasons. Something to watch for.

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Naturally, if this is “part 2” there was also a part 1, complete with a pretty picture!

California’s new electoral system

This is what California’s ballot for US Senate looked like today.

Click for detail of a portion of this ballot

This is an image from Orange County; there would be regional variations in format. This example seems especially bad, with some of the candidates, including the incumbent, listed in a short second column. ((The ballot where I voted managed to have all these candidates in a single column.))

That’s 24 candidates, including several with the same indicated “party preference” as others running. The electoral system is now “top two”. Rather than an actual primary, in which each of the recognized parties will winnow their field to one candidate for the general election in November, the top two–regardless of party and regardless of whether one obtains an overall majority today–will face each other in November. And only the top two, meaning no minority party presence (unless one of the third party candidates somehow manages to be in the top two). ((Strangely, one of the recognized parties, the Greens, has no candidate even in this first round.))

I am not a fan of this new system. I did not cast a vote in this particular contest.

California Prop 14

In Tuesday’s election in California, Proposition 14 would eliminate the current system of partisan primaries and institute a majority-runoff system.

It’s a bad system for voter choice, meaning no third-party or independent candidates on the November ballot (unless one of them happened to have made the top two in the first round, five months earlier when issues may have been different and turnout lower). Many districts under this “reform” may have two Democrats or two Republicans as the only candidates in the “general” election.

I agree with Stop Top Two that Californians should vote no on 14.