Law of unintended consequences: California’s top-two primary helps cement institutional intra-Party control
by David Atkins
In 2010 Californians enacted a top-two primary system, replacing the traditional partisan primaries with jungle primaries in which all primary contestants appear on the same ballot, and the top two advance regardless of partisan affiliation. The move was sold as a way to reduce the power of political parties in elections while giving independents a greater shot at elected office. It is the dream child of moderate Republicans who feel left behind by the Tea Party right, but are far too conservative to become even Blue Dog Democrats and now style themselves as “independents.”
It is a debatable question whether giving austerity-loving social moderates like Dan Schnur and Michael Bloomberg more political space to operate while weakening institutional political parties is a good thing. I would say it is not. But regardless of desirability of the intent, the results of the top-two primary have been counterproductive to that intent. No independents have been elected to state or federal office; very few even made it out of a state or federal primary. Meanwhile, elections have become even more partisan as a great many very partisan blue or red districts saw GOP-on-GOP and Dem-on-Dem battles all the way into November, leading inevitably to more polarized outcomes and greater special interest spending in elections. Political parties have also become more aggressive about forcing weak candidates out of primary races in order to avoid scenarios such as occurred in CA31, where two Republicans advanced to the general in what should have been a safe Democratic seat because seven Democrats split their votes. These problems with the top-two primary have all been widely reported.
But another largely unreported problem is also occurring that is reinforcing institutional control within the political parties at the county central committee level. To understand how, a small introduction to central committee structure is necessary.
Every Democratic and Republican county central committee has its own bylaws that govern who can be a member. Some committees are expansive and large, and some are very restrictive and small. In Ventura County, for instance, the Democratic central committee is approximately four times the size of the Republican one, despite nearly equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters in the county.
A key feature of nearly every county committee, however, is the elected membership. America is one of the few countries in which elections for these political party offices appear on the public ballot at taxpayer expense. These individuals appear on the public partisan primary ballot in even years, elected either by supervisory or Assembly district, their number a function of the number of fellow partisan voters in that district. To again use Ventura County as an example, elected central committee members are voted in by the public in each of the five supervisory districts. Democratic primary voters get to pick six elected members in the heavily Democratic 1st district, but only four in the much more Republican 4th district. Registered Republican primary voters have the opposite skew.
Generally speaking, county committee members elected by the public tend to have privileges greater than those of other members on the theory that being elected by the public carries more weight than being selected in a back room. If a central committee becomes too staid and institutionally sedentary, one of the best courses for a populist activist is to run a slate of candidates for county central committee on the public ballot. Tea Party and progressive activists alike have done just this in counties all across America in order to refresh their parties and shake up institutional dead weight.
This is where the unintended consequences of the top-two non-partisan primary come in. Remember that partisan central committee elections can only take place in partisan elections: you can’t have Democrats voting for Republican central committee members and vice versa. But in California elections there are now no partisan primaries except for one race: the President of the United States, in which federal elections law supersedes state law.
But, of course, the President is only elected on four-year terms. Which means that in California midterms there simply is no partisan primary. Democrats, Republicans and non-partisan voters all receive the same ballot. That in turn means that intra-party central committee elections can no longer be held on 2-year cycles, since no county central committee can begin to fund the expense of a public election on its own.
So central committees of both parties all across California have been forced to quietly examine their bylaws and shift to four-year cycles for elected committee members due to the top-two primary. That in turn means that it’s twice as hard for populist activists to run grassroots campaigns to shake up machine-like county committees.
As a committee member elected on the public ballot in 2010 and again in 2012, that’s great for me personally: I don’t have to defend my seat again until 2016. But it also means that there’s less recourse to get rid of me if I become corrupted and entrenched. As a county committee political party chair I now have less public accountability than a United States Representative thanks to the top-two primary, empowering me as a political party official while disempowering the public.
California’s top-two primary was an ill-advised and ill-considered move on many levels, some of which are only now becoming apparent. It’s a mistake other states should definitely avoid.
.