Michael Russnow is a California scriptwriter and recently an officer with the Writers Guild of America. He has worked on many well-known television series, and some films, and is a Democrat and a former congressional aide. He has this commentary on California’s top-two “open primary” system here.
He mentions the California June 2012 primary ballot, which lists 24 candidates for U.S. Senate. Having that many candidates in the primary season is not unusual in California. In 2010, there were 23 candidates on the various primary ballots for Governor. But, in 2010, no California ballot was crowded, because those 23 gubernatorial candidates were distributed on the separate primary ballots of six different political parties. The top-two system creates one large primary ballot for all seven of California’s qualified parties, so the system gives the appearance of lots of candidates.
California has fewer legislative candidates in 2012 than it did in 2010.
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I was watching a political morning show that talked about this. In one of the races there is a long termed encumbant senator against a newcomer, a city council member. With Top-Two, even if either candidates gets over 50% of the primary vote, they will have to run again in the general. With CA’s budget problems, do they need these extra costs?
How big is the 2012 biggest primary ballot in CA ???
Big enough to fill big earthquake cracks ???
i.e. how many zillion tons of snail mail ballots have gone to the absentee voters ???
Union officials don’t like Top 2, because they lose the influence over the Democratic primaries, where they can concentrate on union members in both their GOTV efforts and candidate endorsements. Remember the big opponents of Propositin 14 were the public sector unions.
Russnow’s complaining about California’s scrambling of candidate order is a red herring. It might actually be better to simply go to a complete random order. As it is now, you might see three K names, and figure that you have passed the F’s.
For the assembly the main difference is the lack of races with huge numbers of candidates. In 2010, there were 4 districts with 8 or more candidates, 2 with 11, and in 2012 there are none. On the other hand, there are more races with 5 or more candidates.
1-2 2010 34 2012 30
3-4 2010 31 2012 30
5+ 2010 20 2012 20
So while it is true that there were more total candidates, that was primarily due to a few anomalous districts. A typical district has slightly more choices.
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Perhaps the moron reformers in CA will amend the top 2 stuff —
The top 2 party hack gangs each will nominate ONE candidate – except IF the 2nd highest in one gang has more primary votes than all the candidates in the second highest gang.
Only then have 2 candidates in the same gang.
All independents would be deemed to be in a gang for the above.
How does the number of legislative candidates compare with 2008, the last presidential year? Also, in the long run, is there a pattern of more or fewer candidates in presidential years than gubernatorial years?