By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
For a long time, you and I have known, to our frustration
and disappointment, that California is effectively a one-party state. No
Republican has won a statewide race since Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected
as governor in 2006. With only minor interruptions, Democrats have controlled
both houses of the state legislature since 1970. You and I have long recognized
that a state being dominated by one political party for a long stretch has
far-reaching consequences, including cultivating a culture of laziness,
entitlement, and often corruption in the ruling party. Competitive general
elections tend to weed out the worst politicians or at least enforce real
consequences — or the risk of consequences — for weakness and scandals.
It is only now dawning on some California Democrats that
complete political domination of the state for decades has some bad long-term
consequences.
California Democrats Own the Golden State’s Problems
On paper, the 2026 California Democratic gubernatorial
primary does not lack for big names:
·
There’s Xavier Becerra, the former member of
Congress, state attorney general, and HHS secretary, who frustrated his colleagues in the Biden administration.
He is accurately nicknamed “the Cardboard Box Candidate” because he’s just an empty
vessel for whatever the progressive activists want.
·
There’s former member of Congress Katie Porter,
who is
not going to just sit here and let you ask her questions like that; one
more word out of you and she’ll dump boiling potatoes on your head.
·
Representative Eric Swalwell, the first
member of Congress to penetrate Chinese intelligence.
·
There’s former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa, well known for his warm, affectionate, and even passionate relationships with local television reporters.
If you’ve ever felt like local news covered an official or candidate like
they’re secret lovers, with Villaraigosa, there’s roughly a 50-50 shot that
it’s actually the case.
·
Billionaire former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, who wants the job so badly he stopped wearing his signature red plaid tie.
Look, I didn’t say that the California Democratic
gubernatorial primary had good candidates, I just said that they had big
names.
But apparently a bunch of California Democrats are
looking at the field and finding everyone “meh” and uninspiring. Melanie Mason
of Politico writes:
Looming over this
sluggish governor’s race is a more existential question: Are we entering the
era of the Incredible Shrinking California Democrat?
One
larger-than-life Californian, Willie Brown, certainly thinks so. The iconic
state Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor told me the quality of Democrats
running for the top job was simply not up to snuff for a state used to dazzling
politicians. And he had a theory why that is.
“The situation in
the state of California is it’s a one-party state. . . . There’s no competition
quality-wise, philosophically-wise,” Brown told me in an interview. “That’s why
we’re stuck with no great quality Democrats running.”
In other words,
California Democrats have so thoroughly squelched the Republican Party that
they’ve become victims of their own success. Many Democrats have methodically
worked their way up the ladder without facing the challenging races that
separate gifted political athletes from the JV squad.
Okay, get all your Willie Brown-Kamala Harris “spotting
young talent” jokes out of the way. If you’re not a fan of snide sex jokes,
this is probably not going to be a good day to check the comments section.
The fact that Willie Brown can recognize lasting negative
consequences of California being a one-party state should get other Democrats,
inside and outside of the state, asking related questions.
For starters, by any chance do you think the same lack of
general election competition in the state of California that has generated such
a “meh” field of candidates also plays a role in how poorly the state is
governed?
Let’s begin by granting that California, as the most
populous and richest state, is always going to have some unique and
larger-scale problems compared to other states. But its modern political
leaders have also inherited some unique advantages — some of the best and most
productive farmland on earth, the innovations and the economic engine of
Silicon Valley, two of the biggest ports in the country, the glamorous dream
machine of Hollywood, and plenty of highly respected universities. Companies can choose to relocate out of California, but
some of these features, like farmland, ports, and sunny weather, cannot move to
other states.
Current Governor Gavin Newsom and the heavily Democratic
state legislature have squandered all those advantages. As I wrote earlier this year, U.S. News and World Report
ranks
each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment,
California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in
employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th
in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th
in K–12 education. The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent
State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked
highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement.
California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and
second-worst in drunk driving.
If you can think of a metric of measuring a state,
there’s a good chance that California is underperforming in it.
A reminder: Back in 2018, Peter Leyden, CEO of a media
startup Reinvent, and Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress, wrote an essay contending that California represented
America’s political future, and that the entire country was about to enter an
era where it became, functionally, a one-party state: “California is the
future, always about 15 years ahead of the rest of the country. . . . America
finally needs to take the Republican Party down for a generation or two. Not
just the presidency. Not just clear out the U.S. House. Not just tip back the
Senate. But fundamentally beat the Republicans on all levels at once, including
clearing out governorships and statehouses across the land.”
That was almost eight years ago. As you may have noticed,
things have not turned out that way, at least so far, and a lot of people have
belatedly recognized that modern California is not the progressive technocratic
utopia that Leyden and Teixeira described.
Leyden and Teixeira recognized that “many Americans might
be wary of trusting a political environment where one party has complete
control of political power.” Guess what they pointed to as a sign that
California Democrats could be trusted with unilateral power?
Californians faced
those same questions and dealt with that new reality. In 2008, voters passed
Proposition 11, which created a Citizens Redistricting Commission to redraw
state legislative districts that over time had been heavily gerrymandered to
protect incumbents of both political parties. That commission was insulated
from politics and changed districts along more rational lines that took into
consideration natural geography and longstanding contiguous communities. Then,
in 2010, the voters passed Proposition 20, which applied a similar logic to
congressional redistricting.
Oh, bipartisan redistricting, of course! Hey,
there’s no way California Democrats would ever get rid of that.
As you will recall, this year California Democrats convinced voters to pass the “Gavinmander,” a new set of
district lines expected to help them win an additional five U.S. House seats.
The moment bipartisan redistricting — which some California Republicans argued
wasn’t really all that bipartisan — became inconvenient, California Democrats
got rid of it.
California’s bipartisan redistricting was the signature
accomplishment of California State Senator Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long
Beach. This year, his son, Josh Lowenthal, voted to repeal it.
(How did that conversation go? “Sorry, Dad, but I’ve got to destroy what you
spent years working to enact, because the opportunity to make Hakeem Jeffries
the next speaker of the House is just too important.”)
Considering the current condition of the state of
California, any Democratic presidential primary voter’s enthusiasm for Newsom
is baffling, and a de facto declaration that the voter doesn’t care that much
about governing.
(June 30, 2004: Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco:
“We’re moving . . . toward a goal and desire not to manage but to end
homelessness. It’s brilliant in its simplicity, if we have the courage to
change,” pledging that chronic homelessness in San Francisco would end by 2014.
By 2015, the city had at least 6,686 homeless people, and the city’s
emergency shelter system, with approximately 1,200 beds, was operating at
capacity. The city’s public
health system had records for 9,975 homeless individuals in the city.)
The second major question Democrats ought to contemplate
is, “Do you think the same lack of general election competition in the state of
California led to Kamala Harris having a tough time winning the swing states
she needed in 2024?” As I noted last year, Harris was basically engineered in a lab to wow wealthy
progressive San Francisco donors.
Do you think Harris’s path to power gave her the skills
and qualities she needed to appeal to folks in Michigan’s upper peninsula, or
western North Carolina, or the Atlanta suburbs or Lackawanna County, Pa.? We know the answer to that
question.
The third major question Democrats ought to contemplate
is, “Do you think the same lack of general election competition in the state of
California is going to help Gavin Newsom in a presidential general election, or
hinder him?”
Finally, the state of California has open primaries,
meaning all candidates for offices are listed on one ballot, regardless of
party, and only the top two vote-getters in the primary election — regardless
of party preference — move on to the general election. (This is how Harris
ended up facing fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 general election
for U.S. Senate.)
With such a large and evenly split Democratic field,
there is a small but nonzero chance that the top two Republican
candidates — former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County sheriff Chad Bianco — could
end up the top two finishers . . . and if that happened, California would be
guaranteed a Republican governor starting in 2027.
It’s an unlikely scenario, but California Democrats
absolutely deserve it.
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