Bad Politics: Welcome To The Jungle Primary

Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day
You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play

I mentioned California’s “jungle primary” a few weeks ago.

It’s kinda stupid. And corrupt.

Instead of each party holding its own primary election, with the winners of each party’s primary then competing in the general election, in California’s system all candidates from all parties compete in a shared “jungle” primary and then the top two vote-getters compete in the general election.

The idea was to intentionally keep the smaller parties’ candidates from affecting the chances of a major-party candidate winning.

Really, they actually said this out loud at the time that it was adopted; they tended to use phrases like “supporting moderate candidates” and such, but it basically comes down to rigging the electoral system to favor the “least-risky” Democratic Party candidate even more than it already did.

And “supporting” any candidate is not what the system is for, so even by that argument it’s a corrupt system.

But it does have another not-very-surprising problem.

If the majority party has an abnormally large number of primary candidates, the jungle primary risks creating a general election where both candidates are from the next-largest party.

And as Eric Loomis at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog points out, we may well be facing that possibility this year.

Specifically, the Democratic Party have a large batch of candidates for Governor this year, none of whom have a significant level of existing support, and the Republican Party has two candidates with roughly equal levels of support.

This situation, if it continues up to the primary, could very well result in a bunch of Democrats getting 10% or less each and two Republicans getting 15% or so each. This would lead to a general election where 70% of the voters did not vote for either candidate in the primary.

This is deeply, deeply stupid.

The ideal solution would be to be using some form of ranked choice voting, of course, but it’s far too late to fix the system before June.

So that’s something to remember for later but it’s not much help now.

Loomis, being more than a bit of an authoritarian, thinks that the existing Party power brokers should take over and cut some deals:

Every big California political player, starting with the former Mr. Kimberly Guilfoyle in the governor’s mansion, needs to sit down with everyone but Swalwell and Porter and do whatever is necessary for them to drop out.

But, given that none of the candidates seem inclined to back out on their own, this may very well be the only option the system provides that can prevent a genuinely warped result.