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GELFAND’S WORLD - The lessons from Tuesday’s primary elections are twofold: Number one: California voters are a lot smarter than the eastern pundits saw us. The second lesson is that political parties don’t really count in this state. I offer a few brief thoughts including a quietly stated ‘I told you so.’
Regarding the native intelligence of our voters, by which I mean those who would like to see their own party win: As everyone has been repeating, there was a theoretical chance that Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco could end up facing each other in the November runoff election simply because they might split 40% of the votes between them, resulting in each getting about 20%. Then, assuming that Democratic-favoring voters were incapable of strategic thought and that all 6 or 7 or 8 Democratic candidates were precisely equivalent, the Democrats could end up splitting the other 60% of the votes equally, with each candidate getting maybe 10 or 12 percent of the votes. The result would be Hilton and Bianco cruising to easy victories based simply on how few votes it requires.
In other words, the prediction was based on the idea that California voters are morons who don’t read, don’t watch television, and are unaware of these dire predictions. Notice that the prediction is also based on Republican voters being unable to figure out that there is a difference between Hilton and Bianco and therefore splitting their votes randomly.
As readers of this space will recall, I suggested that our voters were a tougher breed, that they would see right through the problem, and would eventually coalesce around one or two candidates. That is exactly what happened. The question was complicated by the huge amount of money that Tom Steyer threw into his campaign and the gazillions of television ads he ran.
Still, the voters understood the issue. Here’s one bit of evidence: Voters were observed to be holding off on filling in their ballots until the last minute. I attribute it to the fact that many voters were in fact waiting to see where to coalesce, and this involved waiting to find out which candidate was in the lead. Voters who originally supported Mahan or Porter went to Becerra or Steyer. That’s why these two split more than 40% of the votes between them.
Interestingly, Republican voters did something similar, dropping Bianco and going to Hilton, so that he currently has 27.5% of the total. As in many previous and current contests, there will be one Democrat and one Republican in the finals.
Another observation: Southern California voters are now two-for-two in rejecting billionaires who saturated the airwaves with their ads. They defeated Rick Caruso when he ran for mayor 4 years ago, and they have now defeated Tom Steyer in his bid for governor. They were joined by voters from other parts of California in defeating Steyer, as Tuesday’s results show. Perhaps California is creating a trend here, one in which candidates who so obviously are trying to buy an office are rejected by the voters.
Let’s talk about the power and influence of political parties here for a moment, not because they necessarily have any, but because there is a certain kind of author or pundit who writes as if there were some such thing. They certainly did exist in previous years: You can read about a not-so-long-ago example in Boss, by Mike Royko, which explains the Daly machine.
But in California, we have millions of registered Democratic voters who are pretty much ignorant of what the official party apparatus tells them. There are a couple or three thousand who get to go to the state party convention and vote on party endorsements. Some candidates try to take advantage of an endorsement by announcing it on their mailers, but it’s always in the fine print. Here’s the thing – the state party rarely gets involved in a contested election. Most of its endorsements are simply pro forma support for its incumbents.
In other words, the party doesn’t ordinarily involve itself in races for open seats (so very different from how those eastern political machines operated in the old days), and the vast majority of voters are blissfully ignorant of what the party would like to tell them. To cite one local example, I have a long-time neighborhood council colleague who collected endorsements from just about every elected official in the area, and failed to make the runoff. Note that when organized labor gets involved in a primary contest, the result is very different and can be substantial, because it involves mailers, television ads, and a base of voters.
I bring this issue up because, as we approach the 2028 presidential primary season, you will see columns about what the Democratic Party ought to do, along with criticism of what it did wrong the last time. I find these comments strange, because modern history shows pretty decisively that insider opinion and conventional wisdom fail to predict who voters will push to the top in the early primaries. Remember what all those esteemed Republican candidates said about Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign? (Hint: It wasn’t good.)
One other thought. In a previous column, I called out the moderators in the televised debates for doing the “gotcha” questions and failing to explore what a governor actually does in the state of California. Subsequently, Nick Patsaouras published an excellent column right here in CityWatch that you should read if you haven’t already. He discusses the need for a mayor who understands government and the political process and puts those ahead of headline-mongering.
One last tidbit. The usually excellent blog Talking Points Memo featured a commentary on the California primary that you can find here. It repeats the story that California was somehow in danger of an all-Republican runoff election due to our scandalous primary system. It even gives credit to Donald Trump for elevating Steve Hilton to his front runner status, and thereby saving a place in the runoff for a Democrat. It suggests that Katie Porter was dropped by our voters due to the arguments over her temperament, and ignores the point that maybe our voters were making a rational decision – to find a consensus candidate (out of 4 or 5 excellent possibilities) -- who wouldn’t have to deal with the gotcha arguments for the next 5 months. Notice that our voters made the same calculation with respect to San Jose mayor Mahan, even though he did not face the kind of scrutiny that Porter had to endure. They dropped Villaraigosa even faster.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
