The California governor’s race is a stress test for democracy

By Daniel Wolff, especially for CalMatters

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The California Democratic Party is watching this week’s gubernatorial race with some relief — relief it has yet to earn.

Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra is currently in second place behind Republican Steve Hilton. And progressive billionaire Tom Steyer trailed in third place at the last count.

It’s clear that the Democrats will push at least one candidate to the November election, so a nightmare scenario — that two Republicans will advance in the nation’s bluest state — disappears.

But before anyone congratulates themselves, they need to be honest about how we got here.

One-time top Democrat Eric Swawell left after that many women accused him of sexual misconduct, including one allegation now being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney.

The timing may or may not be coincidental, but campaigners have long known that a well-timed scandalous revelation can do what campaign ads can’t. Whether the allegations were timed to surface by a political actor or simply the time it took for reporters to confirm the rumors, the effect was the same: the front-runner collapsed, the field was shuffled, and California Democrats narrowly avoided political disaster.

This is not a working system. It is a system in which the mechanisms for sorting candidates – relatively low voter turnout, fragmented fields, extraordinary expenses — reliably creates chaos and sometimes leads to outcomes that shouldn’t require luck to avoid.

The winner of the gubernatorial primary is likely to claim the nomination with about 25% of the vote. In relatively low-turnout primaries, where about 2 in 10 eligible voters typically participate, this turns out to be the active preference of perhaps 1 in 22 eligible voters. This is a remarkably thin mandate to call democratic.

The structural problem runs deeper than this race. The California Legislature, like most, responds to its donor ecosystem and its most activated partisan base — not to the majority of Californians who face a housing crisis, utility monopoly, school funding shortages and wildfire risks. These problems do not remain unsolved because the solutions are unknown. They remain unresolved because the incentive structure facing lawmakers does not reward resolving them.

Ranked voting would reduce the fragmentation that makes these chaotic primaries possible.

For example, primary five of the first five followed by ranked voting in the general election will produce a governor with a true majority mandate, not a small plurality from a small fragment of the electorate.

Take Alaska, where the top four candidates advance to the general and the winner is chosen by ranked-choice voting. Voters backed the move six years ago, and in 2024 rejected a referendum that wanted to repeal it.

But newsletter design doesn’t solve the underlying problem of engagement. What moves disengaged voterswho are the overwhelming majority in primaries, is not simply a better process. This is a compelling reason to believe that showing up will produce a visible result for the concerns they actually have.

Tocqueville’s American history suggests what is needed. Trusted civic organizations such as labor unions, faith communities, neighborhood associations, and veterans groups have historically stepped into the gap between government and the people. Today, empowered by new civic infrastructure and modern tools, they can give California average majority the bonding ability to research candidates together, elicit policy commitments, and speak to voters with moral authority.

Electoral reforms are necessary but not sufficient. The deeper problem isn’t the ballot—it’s the collapse of the organized civic life that once connected voters to the institutions that governed them. Rebuilding this infrastructure is not a workaround. This is the most important work we can do today, not just for California, but for America.

California dodged a bullet. It usually is. But dodging bullets is not a governance strategy, and the relief of this particular escape should not be a substitute for the structural reform and civic empowerment that the state still needs.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.