California’s top Democrat plots voting revolution to snatch governor’s race from Republicans

The chair of the California Democratic Party has had enough of the possibility that Republicans could lock out Democrats in this year’s governor’s race — and wants to change the the voting system to prevent that in the future.

Rusty Hicks is one of the first prominent Democrats this year to embrace a wholescale change to how the state holds its primaries, where currently the top two candidates regardless of political party advance to the general election.

“The current system we have does not work,” Hicks told the Guardian. “It needs to be revised or repealed.”

While any such changes won’t happen in next month’s primary, Hicks in the same interview said he love to see a different structure proposed to voters as early as the end of this year, either from the state legislature or “someone with significant resources” who could place a measure on the ballot.

Hicks did not detail any alternative structure that he would suggest.

California’s current “jungle primary” system was approved in 2010 by voters as an electoral reform by Republican then-Governor.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said it would give moderates and pragmatists in both parties better chances of winning.

Prior to 2012, the state held primaries like most other states currently do: registered voters of the two major parties separately chose their party’s candidate to face off in the general election.

Under that system, the more extreme elements of each party would have more sway, some argued.

The open-for-all primary has had some unintended consequences of quirky gamesmanship. For example, Gavin Newsom’s 2018 campaign for governor promoted Republican candidate John Cox to avoid a Democrat-on-Democrat general election.

This year, though, Democrats seem to have felt powerless. A crowded field of Democratic candidates have given rise to a chance that Democratic voters may split their votes too wide apart that the two Republican candidates – Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – would advance to the general election.

Those fears — while mostly dismissed by many Democrats now as some Democrats have surged in the polls — still have led Hicks in the past to call on lower-polling Democrats to drop out.

The system needs “a review, a reconsideration and maybe even a repeal,” Hicks said.

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