My fellow Californians, your government is lying to you. Without conscience or remorse. About two very important subjects: democracy and elections.

The lie is not new. It is 14 years old. And in our polarized era, it is a bipartisan falsehood—parroted by both political parties and defended by media of all types—including, perhaps, the newspaper or website where you are reading this column.

The lie is not hidden. The state uses your tax money to publish it in the voter guide and ballots it sends you.

So, what is this lie?

It’s that the spring state elections you participate in—like the one scheduled for March 5—are primaries.

“Primaries” are elections in which voters belonging to a particular party select the candidate who will stand for that party in a general election. The truth is California no longer has elections like that for either state elected offices or Congressional representatives. I know because I was there when 54% of California voters chose to eliminate such contests in June 2010, by voting to approve Proposition 14.

But no one ever got rid of the name “primary.”

Prop. 14’s official name was the “Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act.” But what it did was eliminate the primary and establish in its place a two-round, “top-two” system.

In California’s top-two, the first election of the year is the opposite of a primary. It’s a general election, in which candidates of every party are on the ballot together.

That means that California’s fall election—in which the two top finishers from the “primaries” face off—is also mislabeled now. We call it a general election. But it’s actually a run-off election between the top two candidates from the spring elections.

This confusion, like so much in California’s crazy-quilt political system, is the fault of well-intentioned good government types. Reformers spent decades trying to make politics less partisan by eliminating primaries. But they often still referred to their proposals as “primaries,” because the term was familiar and court-tested.

You might think this is a meaningless matter of nomenclature—a small-time fraud, like the grocery stores that sell shrimp that isn’t really shrimp or call sparkling wine “Champagne.” But you’d be wrong. The “primary” lie suppresses turnout when it matters most: in the March elections.

Voters usually focus on November, when the whole country goes out to the polls. But California voters have more choices and power in the March election when their ballots have the widest variety of candidates.

For that reason, March is the election voters should prioritize. But they don’t. California’s turnout patterns are the same as they were before we eliminated primaries. In 2022, only 27% of eligible Californians cast ballots in the spring election, as opposed to 41% in November 2022. In 2020’s presidential election year, the figures were 38% for spring, and just shy of 71% for November.

That made sense before 2010, but it doesn’t anymore.

If you’re a California voter, and you didn’t know any of this, don’t blame yourself. No one ever made it clear. There’s been no real educational effort to explain this changed reality or to get Californians out to the polls for the more important spring election. Election officials, media, candidates—the whole world, really—still call the first election “the primary,” and treat it as if it’s a warm-up to November, rather than the main event.

That’s hypocrisy. This state’s leaders and media routinely rail against misinformation in the democratic process even as they repeat this basic and damaging “primary” misinformation every election year. They run their campaigns and sell their subscriptions as defenders of democracy, but their inability to correctly label elections means that people don’t understand the real stakes, and perils, of the top-two system.

For more than a decade, I’ve been a lonely voice asking our leaders to correct themselves, and label elections accurately. I’ve talked with state officials and media, including members of the Los Angeles Times and New York Times mastheads. I’ve suggested alternatives to the “primary” label. I prefer “general” but would be happy with “first round” or “the main event” or “The Big One.”

I’ve gotten nowhere.

Some people simply don’t see the problem. Some acknowledge the error but say their hands are tied—because Prop. 14 and state documents have called the spring election a “primary,” they need to call it that too. Others say it would just confuse the public to correct the record now.

But we shouldn’t give up.

So this year, let’s resolve to take The Big One seriously. If more Californians showed up at the polls on March 5, more Californians would get to winnow down the top two who make November’s runoff. With more voters, we’d get more representative verdicts on everything from our next U.S. Senator to whether we want to change California’s mental health policies, as Prop. 1 proposes.

This year’s spring contest provides an unusually promising opportunity to address the labeling problem. Because this March there is a real primary on the ballot—the presidential primary. Prop. 14 didn’t abolish contests among Democrats to nominate a Democratic presidential candidate, or among Republicans to nominate a Republican.

That makes this year’s ballot a mix—a true presidential primary alongside our statewide general election, in which Californians can choose from multi-party lists of candidates for the state legislature, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. Since this election is both a primary and a general, state leaders could use the ballot to explain the distinction to the public.

Donald Trump is all but certain to win California’s GOP presidential primary. His campaign is based on an election lie—that he won the 2020 contest. California media and Democratic politicians will rightfully condemn him for that in the weeks ahead.

The problem is, they have their own record of lying about our elections. Sure, their lie isn’t as fascist or as dangerous to the republic as Trump’s election denialism. But it is a lie nonetheless. Right now would be a wonderful moment to admit error and fix this election’s label.

The post California Keeps Repeating Its Own Election Lie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is a clear pattern, a back and forth, that my co-authors and I identified in researching for our book, The Party Decides. While rule changes may give the upper hand to voters for a few presidential cycles, elites will always try to find ways to stage this voting process in their favor.

At this summer’s conventions, both parties are reconsidering the rules of the presidential selection process, after Donald Trump’s divisive triumph on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders’ strong Democratic challenge raised questions about the fairness of procedures. But no matter what reforms to the selection process that parties may pursue, the back-and-forth struggle between elites and the voters will likely continue.

Today, the nominating process is itself the product of reforms that didn’t alter this dynamic. Presidential elections now consist of both primaries—where residents simply cast their ballots in the area designated to them based off their address—and caucuses—where voters gather openly to decide which candidate to support.

This mix of primaries and caucuses is relatively new to American politics.

In the early decades of the Republic, members of Congress got together to decide presidential nominations. The rest of the nation was totally frozen out of the process. In the early 19th century, reforms designed to make the process more representative led to national party conventions. These gatherings enabled leaders from across the country to take part in the momentous decision of nominating a potential president. The convention system lasted for more than a century until there was a reform movement put in place to increase participation even further.

The modern presidential nominating process wasn’t born until 1968. The Democratic Party—like the rest of the country—was deeply and sharply divided over the war in Vietnam, when party leaders meeting at the convention in Chicago decided to select the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to take on Richard Nixon in November. There was rioting in the streets and shouting in the convention hall. The problem was not just that Humphrey was intimately associated with the Johnson administration’s hawkish military policies in Southeast Asia. What drew the ire of many was that Humphrey had failed to compete in any of the primaries and caucuses that nominating season. He was plucked from the wings and foisted upon the party in a very undemocratic fashion.

In 1968, this type of political movement could occur because primaries and caucuses were not binding. In the aftermath of that bitter convention, Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to democratize the nominating process. They decided that, starting in 1972, candidates who won the most votes in each contest would receive the most delegates from that state, conferring significantly more importance on the primaries and caucuses. Additionally, the candidate who amassed a majority of delegates—2,383 for Democrats and 1,237 for Republicans—would automatically become the party’s nominee. While McGovern-Fraser was a Democratic Party committee, Republicans followed suit and the two parties had in place extremely similar procedures by 1976.

The goal was to wrest the power to nominate away from the party bosses and give it to the people—and that is exactly what the McGovern-Fraser reforms succeeded in doing. Candidates for president were now essentially required to submit themselves to the voters in order to be crowned their party’s nominee. Democratic Party elites, seeing things slipping away, in 1982 convened the Hunt Commission to reform the process yet again. This time they sought to regain some of their influence by mandating that 20 percent of the delegates would not be bound by voter preferences and therefore would be able to choose whomever they wanted to support come convention time. These superdelegates only exist on one side of the party divide however, as the Republicans did not choose to emulate the Democrats this time.

One irony of this back and forth is that America’s presidential nominating process is among the most open and democratic in the world. Most other political parties worldwide do not have any sort of primaries, and many that do limit rank-and-file participation in a variety of ways. Also, some parties screen candidates and, without elite support, one cannot even run for the nomination.

But still, the litany of complaints about our system is long: The primary process goes on forever. It is too expensive for non-elite candidates. Iowa and New Hampshire, two relatively unrepresentative states that lead off the proceedings, have disproportionate influence on the final outcome. The votes of many citizens essentially don’t count because in most instances the contest has been wrapped up before their states’ scheduled primaries and caucuses.

Of course, if your preferred candidate is ultimately victorious, the complaints tend to be muted. But supporters of the losing candidates are often quite vocal in their disparagement of the system—and 2016 was no different in this regard.

If you look at the Democratic race, it was clearly a case of the party deciding for Hillary Clinton before the voting began. Clinton quickly locked in virtually all of the elite endorsements, making her the strongest frontrunner the modern system has ever witnessed. Clinton also benefited from the overwhelming support of those infamous superdelegates. And finally, the Democratic National Committee initially scheduled a relatively small number of debates and broadcasted most of them on Saturday nights, minimizing the potential damage to a Clinton campaign that had huge systematic advantages. Despite running under a legal and ethical cloud for most of her campaign, and facing a powerful insurgency led by a surprisingly charismatic challenger, Clinton prevailed in the end and became the first woman ever to be nominated by a major political party for president.

On the Republican side, the lead-up to the primaries and caucuses as well as the ultimate outcome could not have been more different. Party elites clearly would not or could not decide on a preferred candidate during the invisible primary period, splitting their support among several broadly acceptable aspirants including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. This opened the door for Donald Trump to capitalize on a populist anger simmering among the Republican primary electorate. Trump won his party’s nomination without any elite support going into the primaries and caucuses and prevailed despite most party elites preferring anybody but him.

One can already see countervailing pressures on the two major parties resulting from the drama of 2016. Sanders supporters are calling to abolish superdelegates and change states’ primary processes to make them more accessible. And Republican leaders will seek to gain a firmer grip on their nominating process to avoid the debacle that has been Donald Trump’s unlikely candidacy. In fact, we saw this play out earlier this week as anti-Trump forces in Cleveland tried to force various procedural roll call votes as a way of, if not stopping Trump, embarrassing him and his supporters.

No matter the reforms, the struggle between elites and voters will go on.

The post Americans Have Been Fed Up With the Presidential Nomination Process for More Than 200 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s even dumber that a small state, like Iowa, with its first-in-the-nation caucuses and swing status in general elections, is a presidential kingmaker. And who are the morons who have let this sad state of affairs go on for more than a generation? We Californians are.

Yes, California has moved its primaries up and around the presidential calendar to try to make itself important. But that doesn’t work. For one thing, Iowa and New Hampshire have the power of tradition and state laws that protect their early status. For another, these small-fry states have hoodwinked the country into believing that small, rural places are better presidential proving grounds and give a chance to lesser-known, less-funded candidates. No matter where California shows up on the calendar, we are easily dismissed for our size; how could California be anything more than a test of money and name recognition?

If we’re going to take our proper place in picking presidents, we’ll need an entirely new strategy. We have to stop moving our massive state clumsily around the primary calendar. Instead, we have to out-Iowa Iowa. We have to make ourselves smaller.

How? California is really a collection of regions that have the scale and character of normal states. Our new strategy should be: pick one region that offers all the things Iowa offers—small population, a rural character, no big cities, an engaged political culture—and hold an early presidential contest in just that region. We could even sweeten the pot for candidates: Instead of holding a California-wide primary for the whole state, we could delegate our votes—and the assigning of delegates—to that one region. So a high-stakes California fight could play out on just a manageable battlefield.

Which region? My fellow Californians, let me introduce you to the Central Coast Caucus.

Offered to the nation as a single political entity, the six Central Coast counties—Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz—could answer every argument that’s ever been made for Iowa’s primacy.

You want a small population? The Central Coast has just 2.3 million people—that’s 800,000 less than the 3.1 million who crowd Iowa. You don’t want big cities? The Central Coast’s most populous municipality, Oxnard, has fewer people than the metropolis of Des Moines.

You want rural voters who know their agriculture? Iowa has the corn and soybeans, sure, but the Central Coast has three signature crops—the berries of Ventura, the lettuce of the Salinas Valley, and all the glorious wineries in between. You call yourselves the Heartland, Iowa? While you’re clogging arteries with high-fructose corn syrup, the Central Coast is growing heart-healthy fruits and vegetables. And having candidates and voters drinking lots of California wine is probably the only way today’s crazy American politics could begin to make sense.

Iowa and the Central Coast are both middling places—literally in the middle between larger and more important entities (Illinois and Missouri in Iowa’s case, and L.A. and San Francisco in the Central Coast’s). And they have similar economic mixes of agriculture, finance, energy, and manufacturing. Both have relatively clean, competitive politics that incorporate extremes, but tend to the moderate. And while Iowans boast that they can pick winners, the Central Coast includes the state’s most reliable political bellwether, San Benito County.

But the Central Coast, while covering Iowa’s bases, offers so much more. The six counties are far more diverse than Iowa, which is 87 percent white. The Central Coast boasts a number of strong universities—UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo just to name three. And while Iowa has its charms, it can’t begin to compete in scenery with a region that extends from Point Mugu to Big Sur and the Monterey Bay.

Iowa is not a great place to raise money, but in the Central Coast, candidates could chase votes and cash in the same beautiful venues—think Pebble Beach, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, or even Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. And instead of the endless pursuit of endorsements of Iowa county party chairs you’ve never heard of, the Democrats could have an Oprah primary (she has a place in Montecito) and the Republicans could stage a Clint primary (Eastwood lives in Carmel). And of course, compare the January weather in Sioux City and Santa Maria. If you give the media and political professionals who run our presidential politics a choice between winter in Iowa or the Central Coast, which would they choose?

So let’s get our act together and give them that choice in 2020 (sadly, it’s too late to do this in 2016). Schedule the Central Coast Caucus the same week as Iowa’s, and watch us bleed Iowa of attention and candidates. It wouldn’t be long before presidential candidates were doing their photo ops on the Santa Cruz boardwalk instead of in front of the butter cow at the Iowa State Fair.

The Central Coast Caucus would be good for California, too. The national attention would force our weak county parties to raise their games. With the new caucus’s central location, young people from all over the state would come and have the opportunity to work on campaigns, and learn skills and make connections that can change their lives.

Overlooked issues would also get attention. Candidates would confront homelessness on the beach in Santa Barbara, the perils of offshore oil drilling, and drought. Public health might get a boost from candidates doing photo ops at yoga classes in Seaside instead of greasy spoons in Cedar Rapids. (I’d pay good money to see Ted Cruz try kite surfing). And who knows? Maybe the heavy reliance on migrant labor in Central Coast agriculture might force candidates to speak in more human and grounded ways about immigration and related issues.

Whatever the issue, the Central Coast Caucus would make sure that no one gets to be president without the sign-off of some Californians. And it would remind the rest of the country that it only takes a small piece of our great state to conquer the world.

 
 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to Salinas as the Central Coast’s most populous city. It is Oxnard.

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