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The California Democratic Party watched the governor’s race this week with some relief — relief it has not yet earned.
Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra is currently in second place behind Republican Steve Hilton. And billionaire progressive Tom Steyer was trailing behind in third in the latest count.
It’s clear Democrats will get at least one candidate through to the November election, so the nightmare scenario — that two Republicans would advance in the nation’s bluest state — disappears.
But before anyone congratulates themselves, they should be honest about how we got here.
The once-leading Democrat, Eric Swalwell, exited after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including one allegation now under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney.
The timing may or may not have been coincidental, but election campaigners have long known that a well-timed scandalous disclosure can do what campaign ads cannot. Whether the allegations were timed to surface by a political actor or simply by the time it took for journalists to corroborate rumors, the effect was the same: The frontrunner collapsed, the field scrambled and California Democrats narrowly avoided a political catastrophe.
That is not a system working. It is a system in which the mechanisms for sorting candidates — relatively low-turnout primaries, fragmented fields, outsized spending — reliably produces chaos and occasionally produces outcomes that should not require luck to avoid.
The winner of the gubernatorial primary likely will claim the nomination with somewhere around 25% of the vote. In relatively low turnout primaries, where about 2 in 10 eligible voters typically participate, that works out to be the active preference of perhaps 1 in 22 eligible Californians. That’s a remarkably thin mandate to call democratic.
The structural problem runs deeper than this race. California’s legislature, like most, answers to its donor ecosystem and its most activated partisan base — not to the majority of Californians who face a housing crisis, a utility monopoly, a school funding shortfall and wildfire risks. These problems do not go unsolved because solutions are unknown. They go unsolved because the incentive structure facing legislators does not reward solving them.
Ranked-choice voting would reduce the fragmentation that makes these chaotic primaries possible.
For example, a top-five primary followed by ranked-choice voting in the general election would produce a governor with a genuine majority mandate, not a small plurality of a small fragment of the eligible electorate.
Take Alaska, where the top four candidates advance to the general and the winner is selected by ranked-choice voting. Voters backed the switch six years ago, and in 2024 rejected a referendum seeking to reverse it.
But ballot design does not fix the underlying engagement problem. What moves disengaged voters, who are the overwhelming majority in primaries, is not just a better process. It is a credible reason to believe that showing up will produce a visible result for concerns they actually have.
America’s Tocquevillian history hints at what is needed. Trusted civic organizations, such as unions, faith communities, neighborhood associations and veterans’ groups, historically stepped into the gap between government and the people. Today, empowered by new civic infrastructure and modern tools, they can give California’s middle majority the connective capacity to research candidates together, extract policy commitments and speak to voters with moral authority.
Electoral reforms are necessary but insufficient. The deeper problem is not the ballot — it is the collapse of the organized civic life that once connected voters to the institutions that govern them. Rebuilding that infrastructure is not a workaround. It is the most important work we can be doing today, not just for California but for America.
California dodged a bullet. It usually does. But dodging bullets is not a governance strategy, and the relief of this particular escape should not substitute for the structural reform and civic empowerment the state still needs.
