California’s Open Primary: Not an Open and Shut Case

Abstract

California’s Open Primary: Not an Open and Shut Case Darry Sragow Now that a couple of election cycles have been run in California under the open or so-called “jungle” primary approved by the voters in 2010, political insiders have been sifting through last year’s primary and general results hoping to assign meaning to outcomes that are, depending on your point of view, either random or the consequence of several interrelated variables. Most of the people I know in politics pay no attention to the stock market, and most of the people I know who invest in stocks pay little attention to day-to-day politics. But they share a common trait. Just as some Americans are obsessed with figuring out what causes the performance of the financial markets, especially individual publicly traded equities, so, too, others pour over past election results to divine the presumed predictors of future campaign outcomes. In the long run, it’s not what the stock gurus or political gurus think the explanation is for what may be going on at any moment, but how the markets, financial or electoral, behave that really matters. The 2014 election cycle left few footprints on the California electoral landscape. The Democrats swept every statewide office, kept commanding control of both houses of the legislature, and actually increased their share of the Congressional delegation. Almost every incumbent was reelected. Putting aside the op-ed debate regarding the open primary’s virtues and vices, it has yet to meaningfully alter the partisan outcome of California elections. That’s the bottom line; that’s how the political market performed. Does that mean the open primary can be judged a failure? Not in the least, certainly not yet. It has the potential to change the long standing rules of political engagement and election outcomes in ways that candidates and campaign strategists are just beginning to understand, never mind the voters themselves. In contemplating how the open primary may ultimately alter political behavior and election results in California, here are three things to think about. The first is context. The open primary is the latest in a series of implicitly related steps by California voters to blow the doors off what they perceive to be an essentially closed governing process. It is, in economic terms, another in a series of anti-trust measures enacted by the voters to provide themselves with a broader, more appealing range of choices. And unless and until the voters get what they want, we should expect to encounter more reform efforts. In 1990, the first volley imposed stringent term limits on California statewide officeholders and members of the State Assembly and Senate. In essence the voters recognized that they couldn’t stop themselves from reelecting incumbents and crafted a self-imposed solution that, it is almost universally agreed, if nothing else facially diversified the California legislature by ethnicity, gender, gender preference, and age.