In a year when Democrats appear poised for major election gains, the biggest blue state has become an unexpected headache for them.
Even as the party is excited about its prospects in purple and even red-leaning states, the unusual dynamics of California’s “top-two” primary system has created the incongruous possibility that voters there in November could be forced to choose between two Republicans to succeed Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. That outcome could unfold if the unwieldy field of eight major Democratic candidates fragments the vote enough to allow the two leading Republicans to finish one-two in the June primary and advance to the general election.
Most California Democrats remain reasonably confident that one candidate will coalesce enough support to avoid that fate in a state where Democrats usually win about 60% of the general election vote. Paul Mitchell, a leading Democratic data analyst, has created a website that runs thousands of simulations to assess the possible outcomes from the primary; he currently puts the chances of a Democratic shutout in the general election at just under 1 in 5.
But the risk that Democrats could be locked out of the general election is serious enough that it is spurring both increased pressure for action from party leaders and renewed scrutiny of the top-two system.
So far, the interventions from Democratic officials have been confined to the call from state party chair Rusty Hicks for low-polling candidates to consider dropping out. But many party strategists believe that elevating one of the party’s contenders into the top two will require endorsements from some combination of party leaders including Newsom, Sen. Alex Padilla and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“Voters need a clue,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist. “They need some kind of signal from the powers that be — and I believe that’s basically Pelosi and Newsom and Alex Padilla — about which of these candidates they ought to take seriously and which one they ought to vote for. Without that, it will continue to be a muddle in my opinion.”
How did Democrats get to this point?
The muddle in the California gubernatorial primary derives from both the structure of the top-two system and the relative weakness of the Democratic field.
Under the top-two system, all candidates — from both major parties as well independent and third-party candidates — run in a single primary, with the two highest finishers proceeding to the general election.
Democrats are worried about reaching that stage largely because none of their candidates has separated from the pack. Democrats had an obvious choice to unify around in each of the previous gubernatorial primaries since voters approved the top-two system in a 2010 ballot initiative: incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014, then-Lt. Gov. Newsom in 2018, and Newsom when he sought reelection in 2022.
This year, though, several leading Democrats passed on the race, most prominently Padilla (also a former secretary of state) and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Even Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis, though not as formidable a figure as Newsom was in 2018, chose to run for state treasurer instead.
Initially that left former US Rep. Katie Porter from Orange County, an economic populist in the mode of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as the front-runner. Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general and Biden administration Health and Human Services secretary, was seen as her principal rival. But Porter’s support wobbled last October after videos surfaced of her berating a news reporter, as well as her own staff members.
Porter’s stumble encouraged three more Democrats to enter: US Rep. Eric Swalwell, from a Bay Area district; billionaire Tom Steyer; and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is running as a Newsom critic and positioning himself as the most centrist alternative in the race. They joined a field that included former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former State Controller Betty Yee, each of whom has been polling in the lower single digits.
With so many choices dividing the electorate, the result has been a five-car pileup. In the most recent public polling by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, as well as the UC Berkeley Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, the Republican Steve Hilton, a British transplant and former Fox News host, leads a field crowded with Democrats. No candidate tops 20% support in either poll, with Hilton modestly leading both surveys and Porter, Swalwell, Steyer and Chad Bianco, the Republican sheriff of Riverside County, all bunched together behind him, with support just above double digits.
“With the entry of (Swalwell, Steyer and Mahan) relatively late in the race, it’s very hard to see one candidate on the Democratic side — or one candidate on the Republican side, for that matter — with a clear advantage and a defined constituency,” said Mark Baldassare, statewide survey director at the PPIC.
Even for the most talented candidates, it is unusually difficult to break through in California. Just building name identification, much less durable support, among the famously distracted voters in the nation’s largest state typically requires enormous spending on television. And apart from Steyer — a self-funding billionaire whose ubiquitous television ads may be generating as much voter exhaustion as support at this point — none of the other Democrats have raised enough money for a heavy ad presence (though many expect Mahan’s Silicon Valley support ultimately will allow him to outspend any Democrat beside Steyer).
One of the best measures of how little impression the Democratic candidates have made is the lack of definition in the candidates’ support. In polls, Porter has somewhat more support among voters who identify as the most liberal and Swalwell runs a little better in his home base of the Bay Area and among older Democrats — who may be the heaviest consumers of cable news, where he frequently appears as an unwavering antagonist to Trump.
But beyond that, none of the typical fault lines in a Democratic primary are evident. Women usually cast nearly three-fifths of the vote in California Democratic primaries, according to Mitchell’s figures, but in the PPIC polling the three Democratic leaders — Porter, Swalwell and Steyer — are drawing the same limited support among both women and men. Latinos will likely cast about one-fourth of the Democratic vote — but in the PPIC polling no Democrat (including the two Latino candidates, Becerra and Villaraigosa) is winning more than 1 in 10 of them.
All of this suggests even the top-polling Democrats remain largely ill-defined, without a constituency they can naturally target to expand their support. “There is no one here who has their own lane,” South said.
Most analysts in the state say that among the Democrats, Swalwell has shown the most potential to pull away. Sen. Adam Schiff has endorsed him. Several figures prominently associated with Newsom have signed onto Swalwell’s campaign effort; veteran consultant Ace Smith, one of Newsom’s top strategists, is running an independent expenditure committee supporting Swalwell.
And Swalwell has secured a series of prominent labor endorsements, including from the powerful Service Employees International Union and California Teachers Association. “There was some excitement that we could maybe coalesce the working people and push somebody across the finish line,” said David Goldberg, president of the 310,000-member CTA, which voted to endorse Swalwell last week.
Still, other big unions have backed Porter (the California Teamsters and a local affiliate of the United Auto Workers) or Steyer (unions representing nurses and domestic workers), and the state AFL-CIO split its endorsement among the top three and Villaraigosa — which many consider the equivalent of not endorsing anyone at all.
And though Swalwell may have the most potential to grow, other campaigns believe he also has some of the most obvious vulnerabilities: including ethics questions surrounding an AI company he started, challenges over the large number of votes he’s missed, and threats from Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel to release decade-old investigative files about Swalwell’s interactions with a female Chinese intelligence agent.
Late last week, Steyer released his first negative television ad against Swalwell and many involved in the race expect him to eventually target Porter, too. Knocking down Porter and Swalwell may be his only chance to reach the top two as, effectively, the last Democrat standing.
“If Steyer has got limitless money and he turns the guns on Swalwell and Porter, I think he can do a lot of damage to them,” says Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, in a view echoed by many Democrats. (From the other direction, business and labor housing interests last week unveiled a committee to air ads attacking Steyer.)
An all-out Steyer assault on Porter and Swalwell is one component of the nightmare scenario unnerving some Democrats. The other prong would be Mahan, the San Jose mayor who has strong financial backing from Silicon Valley, simultaneously spending heavily enough to raise his support to double digits.
Mitchell, the Democratic strategist, believes the scenario of four Democrats all clustering with low-double digit support would greatly raise the risk of a Democratic lock-out in the general election — from about 1 in 5 to about 2 in 5. Other Democrats consider the current — and prospective — risk higher than that.
Even so, it would require threading a needle for Republicans to secure both top spots. Most analysts agree that Republicans are likely to command somewhere between 34 to 38% of the total primary vote, and a few points of that might bleed away to minor GOP candidates. Even if Hilton and Bianco split the GOP portion exactly in half, that means the highest that both could reach would be around 18-19% of the overall vote.
That being the case, “My gut check has been that some Democrat has to get to 20%,” Mitchell said. “At 20%, mathematically they can’t be boxed out of the general because the Republicans aren’t both going to get 21%. There are just not enough Republicans.”
Smith, the Newsom strategist supporting Swalwell, predicts Democratic voters will inevitably consolidate behind the top candidates as the primary approaches. “Voters are smart, and when they get to the point that they realize they are casting their vote on a person who has no chance, they generally seek a person who has a chance,” he says. “There is just that natural selection process that always happens.”
But other Democrats remain nervous that voters won’t coalesce enough on their own without stronger signals from party leaders such as Pelosi, Padilla and Newsom.
Though Newsom has declined to endorse a candidate, a Republican governor in California would be a huge cloud over his possible presidential bid in 2028. Not only would Republicans and conservative media cite it as proof that the state had rejected his leadership, but in practical terms, a GOP governor would likely seek every opportunity to unearth damaging information about Newsom’s record. Even if a Republican wins, he might not hold office for long, since Democrats universally say they would move quickly in 2027 to try to recall him; but avoiding the initial embarrassment of a GOP victory might ultimately force Newsom to pick a favorite in the primary.
Strategists for several Democratic candidates said the most influential endorsement of all would be from former President Barack Obama. But neither California nor national Democrats closely following the race yet see any indication he’s likely to weigh in. And some operatives worry that if the Democratic vote remains split among so many candidates, even the highest-profile possible endorsements offer no guarantee of boosting any Democrat into the top two.
Time to reform the reform?
California voters approved the top-two primary in 2010, around the same time they voted to transfer authority for drawing state legislative (2008) and congressional districts (2010) to an independent commission.
With the Newsom-backed Proposition 50 last November, the state voted decisively to temporarily bypass that commission to create up to five more Democratic-leaning US House seats. The top-two primary could be the next reform to face reconsideration.
Back in 2010, outgoing Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the principal sponsor, argued the top-two system would reduce polarization and encourage more centrist compromise.
It hasn’t completely frustrated those hopes, but the gains have come with unanticipated complications, said Christian Grose, a University of Southern California political scientist who has studied the reform. (Grose was caught in controversy recently when a qualifying formula he developed for a Democratic gubernatorial debate excluded all the low-polling candidates of color, which led sponsors to cancel the debate.) In its impact on general elections “it’s working as people anticipated,” Grose said, but “there’s a lot of unintended consequences in the primary stage that reformers didn’t anticipate.”
The system’s benefits have been most evident, Grose said, in state legislative and congressional elections in strongly Republican or Democratic areas. In those instances, two Republicans or two Democrats often advance to the general election, which creates an incentive for one to try to expand his or her coalition by courting voters from the area’s minority party. “Once you have two candidates (from the same party) running, there are incentives to move to the center,” Grose said.
Stutzman, the GOP consultant, agreed. “The business community would say this has worked out pretty well in that in safe Democratic legislative seats where we could get Democrat versus Democrat races, the incentive structure becomes centrism,” he said.
In primaries, though, the top-two system has generally failed to elevate moderate choices or to encourage contenders to pursue cross-party coalitions, as sponsors hoped. In practice, Republicans and Democrats have usually run separate primaries under a common roof, appealing almost entirely to their own partisans. Candidates have also learned how to game the process in a way that reduces competition — as when Newsom in 2018 and Schiff in 2024 spent money to lift a Republican into the general election so they wouldn’t have to run against a potentially more competitive fellow Democrat.
“The top two was built on a fallacy that partisanship was a function of (separating) the Democrat and Republican primaries rather than a function of… how people think about elections,” Mitchell said. “Ultimately, people who are Democrats don’t cross over and vote for Republicans and people who are Republicans don’t cross over and vote for Democrats. What it’s resulted in more is these games.”
Any Democrat who reaches the general election would be a prohibitive favorite over any Republican, especially with Trump’s approval rating in the state so low. That means the only realistic way a Republican will succeed Newsom is if Democrats can’t come together enough to raise one of their candidates to as little as 20% of the primary vote. Most Democrats still believe they will somehow avoid that fate, but with each passing week, more are growing nervous that they can’t map out exactly how.
