California Primarying (On Such A Winter’s Day)

Last fortnight, California held its first primary elections held under the ‘Top Two’ electoral system, approved by a ballot initiative in 2010. The system has been welcomed by those who bemoan partisan gridlock in American politics, such as Norm Ornstein, the co-author (with Thomas Mann) of several books on the functioning of Congress. Already, the system has produced some weird results – several all-Democratic and all-Republican runoffs, the Democrats missing the runoff in a swing seat in San Bernadino County because of vote-splitting, and noted birther Orly Taitz having a decent shot at the gubernatorial runoff.

The top-two runoff is most commonly associated with French presidential elections (parliamentary and département elections there are also held over two rounds, but more than two candidates can make the runoff). It was exported to many French colonies, and in the United States, it has only been used in Louisiana (fittingly, given its French heritage). In this post, I will draw from the French and Louisiana experience to explain why the ‘Top Two’ system is not a good choice for California.

The Le Pen/Duke problem: both France and Louisiana have had a candidate of the far-right make the runoff in a low-turnout election filled with multiple candidacies. In Louisiana in 1991, division among Republicans led Klansman David Duke to clinch a spot in the gubernatorial runoff against veteran Democratic pol Edwin Edwards. (When asked if there were any similarities between him and his opponent, Edwards remarked that “we’re both wizards between the sheets”.) In France in 2002, no-one in the sixteen-candidate field received more than twenty percent of the vote, the top three being incumbent Gaullist President Jacques Chirac (19.9%), National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (16.8%), and incumbent Socialist PM Lionel Jospin (16.2%). Jospin’s problem was the division among left-wing candidates – the combined vote of the five parties in his parliamentary coalition was over thirty percent. (Due to the threat of causing another such electoral earthquake, two of those parties have never since run presidential candidates.) Both these elections were walkovers for the mainstream candidate, while an extremist was given some measure of respectability by appearing beside them in the runoff. If Orly Taitz’s campaign had picked up more momentum, California could have witnessed a similar showdown this year.

The ‘Bonnet blanc ou blanc bonnet’ problem: in 1969, thanks to a poor showing by France’s left (the Communist candidate ran third and the Socialists, without François Mitterrand as their standard-bearer, couldn’t get into double digits), the presidential runoff was contested between two rightist candidates: George Pompidou of the Gaullist UDR and Alain Poher of the Christian democratic MRP. In the second round, the Communist candidate, Jacques Duclos, refused to endorse, declaring the two front-runners to be “bonnet blanc ou blanc bonnet” (the equivalent English phrase is ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’). The result was lower turnout, most markedly in working-class areas where the Communist Party was strongest. Similarly, Louisiana most recently experienced an all-Democratic gubernatorial runoff in 1987, but runner-up Edwin Edwards withdrew in favour of first-round winner Buddy Roemer (who switched parties during his term). A few Californian races will likely experience something similar in November: two runoff contenders of the same party leading to low turnout from supporters of the other, leading in turn to effects on up-ballot and down-ballot races.

The Chirac/Giscard problem: after seven years in office, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of the UDF (a mélange of Christian democrats, classical liberals, and rural conservatives) was challenged for the leadership of France’s right by Chirac, his former prime minister, who had resigned in 1976 over fiscal policy differences (he wanted Keynesianism, Giscard austerity), and spent the next five years passive-aggressively acting as a quasi-opposition figure, including denouncing the UDF as the ‘foreign party’ (parti de l’étranger) for its pro-European policies. In 1981, he jumped into a four-way contest against Giscard, Mitterrand, and Communist Georges Marchais. (The four main parties were so evenly poised in terms of vote share that a repeat of 1969 – a Giscard/Chirac or Mitterrand/Marchais runoff – seemed possible.) After placing third, Chirac refused to make a full endorsement of Giscard, saying that he would personally vote for him but wouldn’t recommend his supporters do so. With three of the last four opinion polls giving a 50-50 tie in the runoff, Chirac’s non-endorsement endorsement certainly made the difference. Instead of the two-week interval in French presidential polls, disgruntled Californian politicos have five months to ‘do a Chirac’ on erstwhile allies who’ve beaten them into the runoff.

The legitimacy problem: when France held its first direct presidential poll in 1965, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand were both able to poll above thirty percent in the first round. By contrast, no-one hit twenty percent in 2002, or thirty percent in 2012. (Nicholas Sarkozy managed 31.2% in 2007, thanks largely to an absence of other mainstream right-of-centre candidates.) The fragmentation of the electorate means that a repeat of 2002 is possible: indeed, polls in 2010 had Le Pen’s daughter Marine in a virtual three-way tie with Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. California will see members of Congress elected this year after having scored less than a quarter of the first-round vote, an outcome which their opponents will be able to hold against them for the length of their terms.

The Chirac/Barre/Balladur problem: another consequence of the two-round system is that even when two candidates from the mainstream left and right face off, their party affiliation can be uncertain. Giscard or Chirac could have been the right’s runoff candidate in 1981, and Chirac was almost successfully challenged in 1988 (by the UDF’s Raymond Barre) and in 1995 (by dissident Gaullist Édouard Balladur). When the Greens almost overtook the Socialists at the 2009 European elections, it was conceivable that a similar dynamic might play out on the French left in 2012, but the Green surge was short-lived. California’s Democrat-GOP duopoly means it will avoid the inter-party effects of this problem, but this year’s Senate runoff is reminiscent of French elections. Incumbent Dianne Feinstein was the overwhelming choice of Democrats (49.5%), but the Republican field was splintered, and Elizabeth Emken goes into the runoff having obtained only 12.6% in the first round; Emken now has to win over the supporters of the other Republican candidates who collectively polled double her vote, while Feinstein’s fellow Democrats polled one-seventh of her total.

In addition to these criticisms, I will add a few general negatives of the ‘Top Two’ system as used in California. Firstly, because a candidate winning a majority of the first-round vote can’t be declared elected yet (a member of Congress can’t be elected until November, hence why Louisiana was forced to shift its ‘primary’ to election day and its runoff to December), a runoff will be held in districts where the candidate has already virtually been decided. Nancy Pelosi, for example, polled 74.5% in the San Francisco-based Twelfth District, but faces a Republican challenger in the runoff who received 14%. In some districts, there were only two candidates in the first round, and the same two will feature in a rather pointless runoff.

Secondly, the multiplicity of candidates with the same party affiliation makes it harder for voters to determine the ideological position of each candidate. The major parties are endorsing candidates, but that information is buried in the back pages of official voter guides. Political scientists have forever argued that strong parties make for a strong democracy, but California’s system encourages inter-party rivalry and random, uninformed choices. For example, I don’t believe that two percent of San Franciscans are LaRouchites – but a LaRouchite candidate running as a Democrat earned two percent of the vote there; Democrats who wanted to send a message to Nancy Pelosi had three other candidates to choose from, and little way of knowing that one was an extremist.

Finally, the supporters of the ‘Top Two’ system seem to hope that centrists will be successful by appealing to voters from both parties – but remember that this electoral system propelled David Duke and Jean-Marie Le Pen to runoffs. Even if it were true, the usual suspects, such as the state’s moderate Republicans, welcome it is a means of diluting the supposed menace of partisanship. Proposition 14, which won every county in the state except hyper-Democratic San Francisco and hyper-Republican Orange, was produced by the same technocratic, anti-political mentality that gave us Americans Elect, Unity08, and No Labels. The people of California have been sold a panacea for the state’s political woes which creates more problems than it solves.

The ‘Top Two’ system suffers from the usual defects of majoritarian systems: the marginalisation of minor parties, the role of ‘spoiler’ played by a successful one, and the incentive for parties to choose an inoffensive, moderate candidate (usually white, male, straight, middle-aged, etc.) For these reasons, I would recommend that every jurisdiction on Earth adopt some form of proportional representation; failing that, the Alternative Vote is the best majoritarian method, as it maximises voter choice and prevents votes from being ‘wasted’. But if California insists on the two-round system, it might consider the variant used in parliamentary and local elections in France: the top two qualify for the runoff, plus any others who poll over a certain threshold (10% or 12.5%). Candidates from the same side of politics are able to withdraw in favour of the other, making most runoffs a straight two-way contest: 417 out of 557 parliamentary seats will see a left-right duel in the runoffs there on June 17.

In the past, California has experimented with measures designed to reduce the influence of party hierarchies on nominations. Between 1913 and 1959, candidates could run in multiple primaries – like so many well-intentioned but backfiring reforms, it dates from the Progressive Era, when reformers sought to end the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s influence on the state’s politics. This is why Earl Warren appeared on the 1946 gubernatorial ballot as a Republican, a Democrat, and a Progressive, and how Richard Nixon ran third in the Democratic primary on his way to the Senate in 1950. Republican candidates regularly won Democratic primaries (the reverse happened less often), then governed as if tied to neither party. Today, California faces a similarly bleak future: runoffs between same-party candidates, uncompetitive elections, weak parties, and a candidate like Orly Taitz producing a David Duke-/Jean-Marie Le Pen-style shock.