California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks warned in a statement that for all the state's liberal bona fides it was possible that a large Democratic field could carve up the party's primary vote into small fractions and allow only two Republican candidates to advance to the November election. The all-GOP general election is possible under California's unusual top-two primary system, which puts all candidates on one ballot and only the top two vote-getters advance to November, regardless of party.
Primaries are not an inconvenience, they are the foundation of democratic legitimacy. You cannot argue that democracy is on the ballot in November while narrowing democracy in the primaries from now through August. If a candidate is strong, they should be able to earn support in open competition.
When I retired as the Mercury News editorial page editor in 2023, I wrote a farewell column urging readers not to give up on America, despite its many challenges. I reiterated my strong belief in the power of the law of accumulation, which posits that every great achievement is an accumulation of hundreds of small efforts that few ever realize contributed to the outcome.
She's [Crockett] got about as much chance of being the next senator from Texas as I do to have being the next senator from California, remarked Thiessen after being prompted by Perino. Her candidacy would be exactly everything that's wrong with the modern Democratic Party today. It's what I would call the first iteration of the Mamdani fallacy, which is that the lesson of the last off-year elections was We gotta go out and find some more energetic leftists to energize our base and run just like Mamdani did.'
We're starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's campaign focused on affordability, to communities protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel. The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that got us here?