California Senate election shows limits of top-two voting
In the California Senate election this November, long-time Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is likely to glide to victory over Steve Garvey, a Republican and former Los Angeles Dodgers infielder. Schiff and Garvey advanced to the November election in this Tuesday’s “top-two” nonpartisan primary – a historically important election reform whose limits were revealed in this contest, and one that could be further improved with ranked choice voting (RCV).
In California primaries, candidates from all parties run against each other for two slots on the general election ballot. A front-runner who feels confident they’ll get one of the two slots can focus their primary campaign on picking a weak opponent for November!
That’s exactly the kind of gamesmanship we saw in this race. Schiff’s campaign spent millions of dollars on ads boosting Garvey, who had almost no campaign infrastructure of his own. The plan? Help Garvey got enough votes to come in second place, and keep a potentially more challenging opponent off the November ballot.
The gambit worked. Schiff and Garvey advanced, with Schiff leading with 33% and Garvey in a close second with 32% as of March 7. More progressive Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee – who likely would have been more competitive general election candidates in deep-blue California – won 14% and 7% of the vote, respectively. (Porter’s campaign tried its own ploy too, boosting another Republican to take votes from Garvey.)
As a result, in November’s California Senate general election, voters won’t be choosing among viable candidates with broad bases of support. Instead, they’ll be forced to either vote for a Democrat who is virtually guaranteed to win anyway, or for a Republican alternative with almost no chance of victory.
The “lock-out” problem
Uncompetitive general elections represent just one common problem with top-two primaries. The method can also cause multiple candidates from the same party to split their party’s support in the primary – so that no one from the party makes it to the general election, even if the majority of voters support that party.
Consider the 2012 primary for California’s 31st Congressional District, when Pete Aguilar and three other Democratic candidates collectively won about 50% of the vote – but split the vote so badly that Republicans took the top two slots, locking Democrats out of the general election.
The California and national Democratic parties have since used valuable time and resources to “cull large fields of Democrats in targeted contests” to avoid being locked out in November.
For instance, this year, Democrats spent millions boosting a single Democratic candidate – Rudy Salas – at the expense of fellow Democrats in the primary for California’s 22nd Congressional District, a district won by President Biden in 2020 and considered a top pickup opportunity for Democrats.
This is Salas’s second bid for the office; he made it to the November ballot in 2022 but lost that race. Yet Democrats feared that if they didn’t consolidate behind a single candidate, there might be no Democrat at all in the general election.
The bottom line is that top-two voting incentivizes candidates to play games, and pushes parties to “clear the field” of startup candidates to avoid splitting the vote. Further, it can punish voters by sticking them with fewer, less-representative choices in the general election.
A better way forward with ranked choice voting
California could improve its elections by using ranked choice voting in primaries, or by following Alaska’s lead and adopting a top-four system. With RCV primaries, voters and political parties alike wouldn’t need to worry about vote-splitting. For example, Democratic-leaning voters in California’s 22nd District could rank all the Democratic candidates, with their votes ultimately consolidating behind the strongest one. (Of course, this also applies to Republican-leaning voters in contests with multiple Republicans on the ballot.)
In an Alaska-type system, multiple candidates from all parties run on the same primary ballot, just like in California. But rather than competing for just two slots, the top four vote-getters move on to the general election, where voters can rank them using RCV.
If used in California, it would render the type of games played by Schiff, Porter, and partisans nearly moot – with four candidates advancing to face the larger and far more representative electorate. In the RCV general election, voters would be free to express their honest preferences – rather than worry that voting for their favorite candidate might elevate the candidate they like least. Candidates would be rewarded for building broad coalitions of support, including as voters’ 2nd or 3rd choices.
In short, RCV could help California build on its record as a leader in election reform – giving voters more voice and more choice, and making its election outcomes more representative.