Current polling:
Steve Hilton, a Republican - 14
Katie Porter, a Democrat - 13
Chad Bianco, a Republican - 12
Eric Swalwell, a Democrat - 11
Tom Steyer, a Democrat - 10
*Other candidates - 30
Don’t know - 10To be clear, the primary is a top two race, so whoever the top 2 candidates are go to the general and those are your two choices for Governor.
With 1 point separating 1 from 2, 2 from 3 and so on, it could very easily be Hilton and Bianco (the only 2 Republicans running.)
30% of the vote is going to “Other”. Those folks need to drop out and endorse a candidate who can actually win.
What a broken electoral system. Not that much of America has a functional democratic system
Top two is such a dumb fucking system. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some of the Democratic candidates are Republican plants to dilute the vote.
That’s the problem, there are only 2 Republicans running vs. 9 Democrats.
Split 9 ways, there’s no way for a Democrat to make the top 2.
The solution is party primaries, one for the Democrats, one for the Republicans, I don’t know who decided on this single primary bullshit.
You are on this ballot, but we do not grant you the ranked choice voting.
Why did California pick such a clearly terrible way of running primaries? It could have worked with ranked-choice voting but, the way it is now, you get hilarious features like the Republican frontrunner being incentivized to have people vote for the other Republican rather than for him (because if he’s #1 and a Democrat is #2, he definitely loses the general election, but if he’s #1 and the other Republican is #2, he has about 50% odds of winning).
It’s a poison pill to force strategic voting and push people towards candidates that are backed by money. Colorado turned down ranked choice voting, and a lot of it was due to a similar single-vote primary system being packaged with it to make it not work well for actually electing candidates the people want. Voting reform activists knew this and made sure enough people knew that ranked choice elections was a trojan horse for a bad single vote primary system.
Ranked choice voting has become my top policy issue
Long-term it’s the most important change we could make. It’s what can get us candidates people actually like, rather than constantly voting for the “electable” one with corporate backers
It’s times like these I wish California would utilize the Pretender System to elect a governor. It would solve so many problems.
I’m thankful for their fucked uo voting system because it got me candidate Gary Coleman and governor Schwarzenegger
That was before open primaries.
Before primary reform and Schwarzenegger was elected during a recall which is frankly a system that needs to be burned down and rebuilt.
Well, democrats as a whole are largely organized around facilitating republican policies, so I guess this checks out.
If the two Republicans both with the primary and go on to the general election, could a campaign to recall the winner start gathering petitions to get on the general election ballot before they even know who they’re recalling?
Could a candidate get elected and recalled in the same election?
I don’t suppose write-in votes are a thing in that election but it would be mighty funny if two Republicans made it on the ballot and neither of them won
