Chaos in California: state braces for its most turbulent election in years

Californians are frustrated and underwhelmed heading into Tuesday’s primary election, where voters will eliminate all but two candidates in the volatile race for governor, the messy battle for Los Angeles mayor and a series of congressional contests that could determine control of the US House in November.

With days left before the 2 June primary, there is little sign of the clarity that typically emerges in the closing stretch of a contested California campaign season. The race to succeed term-limited Democratic governor Gavin Newsom appears to have settled into a tight three-way contest among Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton, while voters in Los Angeles remain divided over whether to stand by embattled mayor Karen Bass or entertain a challenger.

At the federal level, a handful of newly redrawn congressional districts have intensified intra-party fights in some of the nation’s most consequential races.

In a state where Democrats hold a roughly two-to-one advantage over Republicans in voter registration, the uncertainty is striking. Donald Trump lost by more than 20 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election and no Republican has won statewide office since Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 re-election.

While Democratic officials in deep-blue California grapple with a crippling cost-of-living crisis, they are also under pressure from their voters to take a harder line against the Trump administration.

“About half of Californians feel that the state is going in the wrong direction,” said Mark Baldassare, the survey director at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). But, he said, their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in California is “overshadowed by a greater unhappiness about the state of the nation right now”.

Three-quarters of Californians say the nation is headed in the wrong direction, according to the latest PPIC survey, the highest share since 2003, when pollsters first asked the question, while only about 30% of likely voters approve of Trump’s job performance.

Concerns that the Trump administration might attempt to interfere in the state’s elections have alarmed Democratic voters, already worried that Republican redistricting efforts would push congressional control out of reach.

Yet with the president’s approval rating falling and inflation rising, amid an unpopular war with Iran, Democratsnationallyenter the midterm elections with considerable strength, tipped to win control of the House and potentially retake the Senate.

One ballot, no consensus candidate

Under California’s quirky nonpartisan primary system, all candidates regardless of party appear on the same ballot and only the top two vote-getters advance to November.

None of the Democratic candidates have consolidated the field, raising fears among Democrats that two Republicans could squeak through to the November general election – a possibility pollsters and political observers say is increasingly remote. Unpersuaded, many Democrats are holding on to their ballots, waiting for any late-breaking developments before making a final decision.

The most recent PPIC survey found Becerra, the former health and human services secretary, leading the race with 23%, followed by Hilton, the British-born former Fox News personality who has been endorsed by Trump, with 20% and Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist who is the choice of progressives, with 15%. Republican Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco and former US congresswoman Katie Porter also reached doubled digits. The Berkeley IGS Poll, released Friday, similarly put Becerra, Hilton and Steyer at the front of the pack.

Becerra’s unexpected rise followed the rapid implosion of Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor amid sexual assault and harassment allegations that he has denied.

“Six weeks ago, no one was looking at Xavier Becerra,” said Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor at Pomona College, who co-hosted one of the gubernatorial debates. “Now he’s the Democratic frontrunner.”

The mud-slinging has intensified in the final weeks, as the Democrats try to ensure their place in the top two. Becerra has argued he is the only candidate with the experience to solve California’s most intractable problems, while Steyer made the case that he is the only one with solutions big and bold enough to bring about the kind of structural change voters say they want. Hilton, meanwhile, has blamed the state’s woes on 16 years of what he calls “failed” Democratic governance and has argued that it is time for a change in political leadership.

“In another moment, a moderate Republican maybe could have launched a more meaningful campaign against the Democrats,” Sadhwani said. But, pointing to Trump’s strong disapproval in the state, she doubted Californians were in the mood to put his preferred candidate in charge of the most populous US state. “I don’t see a future in which Steve Hilton becomes the governor of the state,” she said.

Discontent with the status quo is shaping the race for mayor of the US’s second-biggest city.

In Los Angeles, Bass, the incumbent Democrat, is trying to overcome frustration over persistent homelessness, affordability and her handling of last year’s devastating fires. Opposition to Bass has splintered among her leading challengers: progressive LA councilmember Nithya Raman, and reality TV star Spencer Pratt, a victim of the Palisades fire whose bombastic social media-driven campaign has attracted attention far beyond the city limits.

Sadhwani said Pratt embodies the changing political landscape that has rewarded anti-establishment outsiders “who understand the new media environment that we’re living in, and they’ve been able to capitalize on it”.

Democrats’ battle for the House could hinge on California

The battle for California’s 52 congressional districts may carry the biggest national consequences. Democrats need only a handful of seats to reclaim the House for the final two years of Trump’s second term.

Approved overwhelmingly by voters last year, Proposition 50 allowed California to redraw its congressional lines in response to a broader redistricting war sparked by Republican efforts in other states. The redrawn districts created as many as five new opportunities for Democrats, while scrambling the political calculations for several Republican incumbents, including congressman Kevin Kiley, who left the party and registered as an independent as he faces a tough re-election, and late congressman Doug LaMalfa, whose death earlier this year set off a fierce contest to succeed him in his newly redrawn district.

One of the most closely watched races will take place in the central valley, where Republican congressman David Valadao is defending his seat, which now leans slightly Democratic. The Democrats vying to replace him represent the ideological span of the party, with Bernie-Sanders-endorsed political newcomer Randy Villegas facing off against Jasmeet Bains, a moderate state assembly member who is running with the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The district remains one of Democrats’ top pickup opportunities.

The redistricting fight has also produced a contentious Republican-on-Republican showdown in Orange county, where longtime GOP congressman Ken Calvert and fellow Republican congresswoman Young Kim have been drawn into the same re-configured 40th district, setting up a bitter battle to advance.

The opportunity to flip as many as five Republican-held House seats in California has become all the more crucial for Democrats following a US supreme court decision undermining the Voting Rights Act. The ruling last month has had a cascading effect as Republican-led states across the south race to redraw their maps, unraveling majority-Black districts.

In progressive San Francisco, the bruising race to succeed retiring former House speaker Nancy Pelosi has become a fulcrum for the many internal fights animating the party – on ideology, economic populism, how to take on Trump and whether Israel committed a genocide in Gaza. Amid the turmoil, Pelosi has endorsed Connie Chan, a San Francisco supervisor, who is running against Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator known for championing legislation to ramp up housing production and enshrining LGBTQ+ rights, and Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive who served as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first chief of staff.

The uncertainty surrounding the contests at every level have created a political environment unlike any the Golden state has seen in years, experts say. “There’s chaos in the Democratic party and a lack of direction, and we see that reflected in these candidates in many ways,” Sadhwani said.

Though California is expected to remain firmly Democratic and deeply resistant to Trump, the elections on Tuesday may serve as an early barometer for the party amid the noisy debate over how it moves forward.

“If it’s a Xavier Becerra and a Karen Bass – it says a lot about the establishment – and maybe our politics haven’t shifted as much as we thought,” Sadhwani said. “If it’s a Tom Steyer and a Nithya Raman, maybe we’re making a real leftward turn here, and people are just fed up with the establishment.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph