What just happened in California? |
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What just happened in California?
How to make sense of a very messy election.
Millions of ballots are still being counted in California, where the primary results for the state’s two marquee races for governor and mayor of Los Angeles remain uncalled as of Wednesday afternoon.
That’s on top of a handful of congressional and local races — a slow process that is typical for the Golden State because of how counties count votes and the generous deadline for receiving ballots (they must be postmarked by Election Day, but can arrive at vote-counting centers days later).
The race brought significant attention to California’s “jungle primary” system, where the top two candidates advance regardless of party. Democrats worried earlier in the governor’s race that their own field was so large and closely divided that two Republican candidates might make the cutoff.
As things stand, at least one Democrat will advance in both races: Former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra looks likely to move onto the gubernatorial election in November, while incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will advance to a run-off — the first sitting LA mayor since 2005 to not win reelection outright.
Who they will face is the big open question: Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton is leading the gubernatorial race at the moment, and may prevent an all-Democratic contest later this year. Bass, meanwhile, faces challenges from a lefty city council member, Nithya Raman, and the Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose insurgent campaign has remade the city contest.
The slow procedure for counting votes isn’t the only reason this is taking so long, though. Voters were reluctant to rally around a single candidate in either the governor or mayoral contest — contributing to slow ballot returns — with many expressing unease with their choices and with the Democratic-dominated government. There’s a sense of deep voter frustration: at Trump, at the status quo, at homelessness, and incumbents. Yet despite it all, the state might just get more of the same.
To better understand where Californians are coming from, I turned to Dan Walters, a columnist at CalMatters and veteran chronicler of the state’s politics. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
This has felt like the longest and messiest gubernatorial election in recent California memory. How did we end up here, and is it really that historic?
It was so different because there was never a pre-campaign frontrunner. There’s a stage before the official campaign launches where potential candidates are kind of testing the waters. That never happened here. Everybody was asking around, Who’s going to run?
We got this deal where Kamala Harris stood around for what, a month, two months, making up her mind. And then there were........