The culprit here is, partly, California’s “jungle” primary: an egalitarian-minded effort by which everybody sets out together, in one pool, and the top two vote-getters progress to the general election, regardless of the parties that they represent. The theory, when the system was established, by ballot, in 2010, was that it would reduce two-party polarization and encourage nuance. The practice, at least this year, has been an Archimedean displacement of power, as Democratic contenders filled the bottom of the bath with a divided vote, and Republicans, possibly to their own surprise, rose. What does a viable Republican governor of California look like in 2026? Hilton, a semi-reconstructed Tory, made his name as the head of strategy to David Cameron, the man who strategized his way to Brexit. Bianco, a former Oath Keeper, previously drew headlines for an investigation into jails in the county where he’s sheriff, in which nineteen inmates died in 2022. Both men led the field for weeks. California really is, for some, a land of easy dreams.
The idea of one of the bluest states in the Union dispatching a red governor to Sacramento so unnerved some Democrats that they counselled voters in the state (which sends early ballots to all registered voters, for return by mail or drop-off) to hold off until it was clear who landed as the Party front-runner. Many did: the election, as of the middle of the return period, had relatively low Democratic ballot returns—a dangerous game of chicken to play, and one that has caused the resources of a powerful Party to arrive late or not at all behind candidates ill-primed for sudden scrutiny. Becerra’s candidacy coincided with allegations that his staff had been involved in fraud, and resurfaced lingering concerns about the treatment of migrant children under his watch. (He denied involvement in wrongdoing in both cases.) He received a windfall almost too late, in the final stretch. Not that money seems to have mattered much in this race. The primary’s top outside fund-raiser, Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, brought in fifteen million dollars, with support from Silicon Valley, and scarcely broke single digits in polls.
The broader worry with this election is not really about primary systems or lacklustre politicians or even an alarming run of self-propelled implosions. It’s about whether the hardest leadership positions in government have become too hard for the most promising candidates to pursue. Observers note that California is filled with experienced, powerful Democrats. “Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Alex Padilla—any of them could have walked away with it,” a consultant on one of the gubernatorial campaigns told me. All these veterans have made clear that they have no interest in the governorship. Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor and a onetime speaker of the California Assembly who, fifteen years ago, was a politician often named in a rising power triumvirate with Harris and Newsom, is running, but he has struggled to get aloft, undone by the digital-media environment and his own long tail.
One fear is that these pipeline problems are not merely a Golden State issue—that California’s primary is a (very) dry run for the Democrats’ path to higher leadership, and specifically the great big beautiful office that will open in 2029. California is not usually regarded as an American microcosm. Yet there’s a case that, as far as liberal politics goes, it is just that: a giant state of querulous diversity, pulled between the warring interests of powerful industries, cast against extremes of natural-resource management, peopled by the super-rich and the dirt poor, beset by middle-class affordability problems, and held as a beachhead for both international talent and an underclass seeking opportunity. It is often called ungovernable, perhaps a little grandly. (“Difficult? Yes. Challenging? Very. Not ungovernable,” Pete Wilson, a former governor who heard the claim almost forty years ago, once retorted.) But if the strongest arm of the Democratic Party can’t assemble a pool of appealing, qualified candidates willing to meet the challenge, what are its odds in a messy national race?
Two theories have emerged for the specifically 2026 nature of the problem, both having to do with institutional decay. The first is that the task of governance, always hard, gets harder when true and untrue information is fired from every cellphone tower and when the public has no political memory to speak of. Once, a politician might have built a reputation, made alliances, assembled her base, marshalled her messaging, and embarked on a years-long strategy for change. Now that same leader can be felled by an Instagram pile-on or a spurious Substack rumor, and is likelier to shy from the long, slow, gritty work of governance. And, in the near term, how does she campaign? Do crazy stuff on social media? Send microtargeted mailers? Go on manosphere podcasts? Eat melted cheese at diners? The paradigm of contemporary campaign strategy is in quiet crisis, one symptom being darts-at-the-wall lineups like the California governor’s race—or, for that matter, the recent
New York mayoral contest, whose ballot-topping choices, Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa, represented three entirely different galaxies of political theory and practice. One thinks of the philosopher John Rawls, who held that an ingredient of successful democratic choice was “overlapping consensus”: people have untranslatable world views, and, in general, barely understand one another, but they can find enough alignment in their gyroscopes to make democracy and its disputes plausible. Today’s elections resemble contests without consensus; it is harder than ever to get a fix on what our decisive arguments are about.
Organizers might call this herding cats (a fair title for this spring’s gubernatorial primary). Rawls called it “the fact of reasonable pluralism”—pluralism being, like wealth production, a revered American virtue that, without road signs and lane lines, goes careering down a lonely path into the woods. We need some place to reach a common understanding of the ways we can be different together. A lot of older structures have fallen away. In California, Newsom, like Harris, represents the last political generation to have been elevated with help from the organizing leadership of the so-called San Francisco Machine. Comprising figures such as Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and John Burton, it ran California Democratic power loosely but assiduously for decades, brokering support, raking in money, straightening out spats, and seeing that the larder remained stocked with talent. With these lions’ valedictions, last of all Pelosi’s next January, it may not be coincidental that the cupboard now looks bare. The Machine was lambasted, fairly, for its clannish coördination and its efforts to keep Democratic politics in a certain mainstream style. But it’s not enough to say that the establishment is foul, if there is nothing fair to swoop in and replace it—a lesson that, in California, has been taught and taught again in painful ways. There will always be parking scrambles in the Golden State, which has a lot of cars, and almost enough places to put them. The challenge—and not just in politics—will be how to build a future in a fleeting opening for change. ♦
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Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.
