California’s liberal-progressive leadership has plenty of legitimate problems to focus on, from out-of-control wildfires to rampant homelessness, failing public schools, and a spiraling debt crisis. But Golden State Democrats these days are spending most of their time worrying about a far more terrifying crisis: the outside chance of a Republican winning power thanks to the “jungle primary” system that Democrats themselves championed not too long ago.
The last Republican to win the governorship in California was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was first elected in 2003 to replace recalled Democrat Gray Davis. The Austrian Oak was then reelected in 2006.
As governor, Schwarzenegger supported Proposition 14, which he sold to the voters as a nonpartisan top-two primary system. “That’s how I got elected, because I appealed to Democrats and Republicans, independents… everybody,” he said. Ironically, he was the last Republican elected to any statewide office in California.
Under the jungle primary system, all candidates, regardless of party, run on the same primary ballot. Then, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. This means that a general election could feature two Democrats or two Republicans.
For 16 years, this scheme has served Democrats well. For any reader unfamiliar with the “jungle primary,” all candidates appear on one ballot in June, regardless of party. This year, however, most polls show that left-leaning voters are splitting their support among numerous Democrats, while Republicans have divided their support between two Republican candidates.
This produced the sum of all fears for the Democrats responsible for the inept and often corrupt governance of California. During the first several months of 2026, two Republican candidates led the field. Steve Hilton, a longtime conservative strategist and Fox News commentator, and Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, outperformed any single Democrat in the polls. Bianco has since fallen back, according to the RCP average, but Hilton still leads the pack.
The Democrats first tried to avert this disaster by asking members of their own party to drop out of the race. As the New York Post reported, “California’s top Democratic party boss is urging candidates for governor to immediately drop out of the race to avoid a nightmare scenario of two Republicans advancing to the November [general election].” The candidates ignored this, so now the Democrats want to scrap the jungle primary system. The New York Times reports:
“Steven Maviglio, the Democratic consultant who filed the initiative, has always objected to the top-two system but said he was motivated to try to repeal it this year after seeing the possibility of Democrats being shut out of the general election… It is not yet clear if the measure will draw substantial opposition. The California Chamber of Commerce was a key supporter of the 2010 move to create a top-two primary.”
It is curious that Maviglio claims that he “has always objected to the top-two system” but suddenly decided to launch his campaign to repeal it this year. To his credit, he isn’t coy about his motive. The Times quotes him as follows: “The fear of having to vote for Steve Hilton or Chad Bianco sent a shiver up my spine.” He clearly doesn’t feel any apprehension when choosing between two Democrats, despite the well-documented damage they have done to California.
This is typical of the “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” attitude of Democrats in California. People like Maviglio can live with the jungle primary system as long as his party wins. He knows that, because Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, the only way for a GOP candidate to win a statewide office is if the top two candidates to emerge from the primary are Republicans. Yet, when the voters threaten to produce that very result, the jungle primaries have to go.
As former Governor Schwarzenegger put it, “Of course, the politicians want to undo reform that is good for the people and not for the politicians. They will always choose to move the goalposts instead of performing better.” Meanwhile, according to a report in Politico, current Gov. Gavin Newsom claims there is a “break-the-glass” contingency plan to prevent the Democrats from being “locked out” of the November general election by two Republican candidates.
He was not very specific about this plan; however, this should be the real “shivers down the spine” moment for Californians. Democrats have had no problem locking out Republicans from general elections, but now Newsom is apparently threatening some extralegal action to save his party from that fate, voters be damned.
Meanwhile, Politico notes that the Democratic Governors Association has recently begun a direct mail campaign emphasizing the “fierce” conservatism of Steve Hilton. The purported purpose of this opposition campaign is to help Hilton consolidate the Republican Party’s voters and vitiate their support of the other leading GOP candidate, Chad Bianco, in order to prevent him from finishing in the top two.
Interestingly, Newsom has failed to endorse any of the Democrat candidates running against these two Republicans. This is peculiar, considering that the leading Democrat in the primary is Xavier Becerra, who served as California’s attorney general under Newsom until he became the Secretary of Health and Human Services during the misbegotten Biden administration. Steve Hilton, on the other hand, received the full-throated endorsement of President Trump:
“I have known and respected Steve Hilton, who is running for Governor of California, for many years. He is a truly fine man, one who has watched as this once great State has gone to Hell. Gavin Newscum and the Democrats have done an absolutely horrendous job. People are fleeing, crime is increasing, and Taxes are the highest of any State in the Country, maybe the World. Steve can turn it around before it is too late.”
There has been a lot of speculation in the corporate media that Trump’s endorsement would somehow backfire on Hilton. The idea is that, by endorsing the frontrunner, the President has destroyed any chance that the Republican Chad Bianco will emerge from the primary as one of the two. But Bianco had already fallen to fourth place and is running seven points behind Hilton, who will probably face some Democrat like Xavier Becerra or Tom Steyer in November.
In the end, despite the worst intentions of the Democrats, it will be all but impossible to get rid of the jungle primary this late in the current cycle. Early voting has already begun for the June 2 primary, and any proposal to return to a traditional partisan primary system would have to be approved by the voters in a referendum. That means California is stuck with its current system until 2028 unless Newsom’s “break-the-glass” plan involves breaking the law.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
