“Wow, that was a bit of a mess.”
That observation by a Pomona College student referred to a particularly rowdy exchange during a gubernatorial primary debate on campus last week, in which candidates talked over one another, hurled insults, interrupted the moderator, and generally ignored the rules. “A hot mess,” responded CBS LA anchor Pat Harvey.
But the critique would have been just as apt for the race itself.
Eight major candidates — two Republicans and six Democrats — are competing in the June 2 primary. The two candidates with the most votes advance to the November election. It’s a lot, but there were 11 major candidates until recently. The crowded field might have been avoided, but neither political party has been able to agree on who to endorse, prompting the California Democratic Party chair to beg lower-polling candidates to do everyone a favor and drop out (two of them have).
A major debate in March was canceled at the last minute after being legitimately criticized for excluding the four candidates of color (really, what were they thinking?). And there’s been one big scandal: On April 12, then-Representative Eric Swalwell, the leading Democrat at the time, dropped out of the race and later resigned from Congress after several allegations of sexual misconduct.
Mariel Garza
With early voting starting this week, there’s no clear front-runner, polls are too close to call, and there’s a sense that just about anything could happen by Election Day. A one-party sweep? It’s possible. A last-minute write-in campaign by former vice president Kamala Harris? Sure, why not?
The uncertainty is driving many Californians, especially Democrats who are used to winning state elections, to distraction. My normally self-assured brother emailed me recently with this plea: “Just tell me who to vote for in the primary to keep two Rs from the general election.” Ha ha — sorry! No idea.
It’s a free-for-all, and I love it. This is how democracy is supposed to work — a true contest in which there’s no assured outcome and candidates advance based on the appeal of their ideas, skills, and character.
But there’s more happening here than just an open race for one of the choicest political jobs in the country, with two disorganized state parties. The chaos is a reflection of the ideological and generational divisions roiling the two parties nationwide, and it may be a preview of what’s to come in the midterms and the 2028 presidential elections.
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Among Democratic candidates, the divisions are well represented. There are two progressives in the race: Katie Porter, a former US representative from Orange County, and Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager whose politics have veered so hard left they earned the endorsement of a group founded by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
There’s a moderate Democrat in Matt Mahan, the fiscally conservative mayor of San Jose, in Silicon Valley. He’s the choice of tech industry leaders, who are bankrolling his campaign and with whom he’s rubbed shoulders since he became buds with Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, while they were dorm mates at Harvard University.
Democrats who aren’t looking for significant change in direction have a choice of three longtime California politicians: former Health and Human Services secretary and California attorney general Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
A similar dynamic is happening among Californian Republicans, who are sharply divided between two candidates with similar campaign messages — basically, that California has been wrecked by Democrats and can only be saved by a Republican governor — but strikingly different backgrounds and temperaments.
On one side is Chad Bianco, the fiery, ultraconservative sheriff of Riverside County, a mostly working-class county east of Los Angeles that is home to Palm Springs and the Coachella music festival. Bianco is deep MAGA and is such a Trump loyalist that he enacted his own version of election tampering earlier this year, seizing 650,000 ballots cast in the November election that had allowed Democrats to redistrict to their advantage, based solely on unsupported claims of fraud by a fringe political group.
Josh Gohlke
It must have burned, then, when President Trump gave his endorsement to a relative newbie Californian: Steve Hilton, a wealthy British American who moved to Silicon Valley for his wife’s career in the tech industry, where she has served as an executive for companies including Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Hilton made his name as a Fox News host, which may explain the Trump connection, after a career in British politics, notably serving as a strategist for former prime minister David Cameron.
If this were a normal election, I’d say that there’s no chance either of the Republicans would become governor of this deeply blue state. But the usual playbook has been thrown out, leaving partisan instability in one of the last places you’d expect to find it. The choices made by the largest state electorate on June 2, whatever they are, should offer a hint about what’s coming in November for the rest of the country — and, possibly, in 2028.
This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe, where I am a contributor to the Opinion section. It is reprinted with permission.
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