I Don't Know What You Did Last Tuesday

Last Tuesday's primary election brought the very unexpected loss of Democratic front-runner Dr. Lee Rogers, and the unusual outcome of two Republicans advancing to November in a district that, on paper, is just mildly Republican.

We're in the second campaign cycle of our new top-two open primary system. If you're one of the 15% or so who voted, you would have noticed that every race on the ballot listed every candidate, regardless of party.  It's "open" because voters of one party can vote for candidates of the other party and voters with no party at all aren't shut out any longer. It's a "top two" because the top two finishers, regardless of party, move on to the general election.

It's a common misconception that you get a smarter electorate as turnout decreases. That's sometimes true, but with these super-low turnout elections we've had lately, the electorate just gets…weird. It's a mix of an impassioned and hyper-informed core surrounded by a gooey glob of habitual voters. These are voters who are voting out of habit and/or duty and that habit and/or sense of duty doesn't necessarily die after they've stopped following the issues or candidates of the day. They skew older and more conservative than the rest of the electorate – and this is true in the rest of California.

So we wind up with results that don't make a lot of sense to anyone – not even the candidates. 

Just as the electorate is unpredictable, it's also conservative. Across the state, Democrats have a turnout problem with small elections. Republicans do really well in primaries, and amazingly well in special elections. Locally, Democrats will do about 15 points worse in the primary election than in a high-turnout general election. All else being equal, a Democrat can expect to get between 43 and 48 percent of the vote, based on current registration numbers and voting behavior.

If Democratic registration were just a few points higher, and a generic D could get 51% versus a generic R in November, the turnout disparity in the primary could quite possibly mean that a Democrat who could otherwise win in November would have lost in a primary like this. 

Let's say there was a further 4% bump in Democratic registration (which can be enough for November). Say Rogers gets three points and Thomas gets one, while Knight and Strickland each lose two. Rogers would still lose by more than a point to Knight.

Yes and no. The way the math worked in this election, just about any Democratic challenger would have sunk Rogers' chances. So just by running, Thomas unwittingly led to an all-GOP November. It so happened that he did better than anyone seemed to expect, but he could have done a lot worse and Knight and Strickland would have won. Likewise, had Troy Castagna and Navraj Singh not run, it would have made Knight and Strickland that much stronger.

So Lee Rogers came in third because he had opposition, period, and two Republicans nearly tied one another in an election that happened to have very low (and GOP-leaning) turnout. This was evident on all of the races on the ballot.  This is probably the first election any of us have seen where a single primary challenger could unwittingly dislodge his own party's favorite who himself would have a fighting, if somewhat distant chance in November. 

It's quite difficult to drive turnout for the race that appears tenth on the ballot. The only imaginable way to have changed this was if would-be Rogers voters really understood that there was a real chance of not seeing Rogers on the ballot in November. 

Maybe those voters needed to see it with their own eyes. I was aware of the possibility that Rogers could lose in the primary, and thought his rather high primary spending was a good indication that he knew that, too. But it seemed, at the time, that they were spending too much. They already did enough to win, no sense to pile on so much, this early. I was wrong, and in their own way, so was everyone else. 

We now know that both Democratic and Republican polling had Rogers placing in the top two, and often in first place. It's far more difficult and much more expensive to reliably know whether people are going to vote than it is to know who they would vote for. It's no as simple as asking "are you going to vote on Tuesday?" If you're doing it correctly you need to ask them a series of questions and score their likelihood to vote. And since just 15% were going to vote anyway, you'd have to talk to almost seven times as many voters as you would for a typical poll of registered voters. To truly know just how many people will vote and who they'll vote for was probably prohibitively expensive for these campaigns to do with any regularity. 

In short, it's just the product of the weird reality of the top-two primary-meets-unbalanced turnout. It takes elections like these for everyone to understand just how it can play out. It's a freak occurrence. It wouldn't have happened if Strickland pulled away from Knight, and it wouldn't have happened if Rogers hadn't faced any Democratic opposition, period. 

Probably not, and if we did, it will be a long time from now.

Open congressional seats are a rare thing. Barring some incredible scandal or personal tragedy, congressman leave when they seek a higher office or retire, and both Knight and Strickland are over 20 years from retirement.  In California, there is no higher prize for a Republican than a congressional seat – which is all the more evident now that our neighboring GOP congressman, Kevin McCarthy is poised to become one of the most powerful members of Congress. Neither Strickland or Knight are going to abandon their seat for a statewide race that they would surely lose. In eight years, we'll have new districts, but even if a newly-drawn district favors Democrats, it's unlikely to go blue to such a degree that it would discourage a sitting Republican congressman to quit. 

There's also a fair chance that the top-two primary will be scrapped in the near future. So far, it has a poor track record in delivering its intended purpose of moderate winners and is still officially opposed by all political parties. 

So for the meantime, we'll have a young Republican congressman. Even if they're unseated in a future race, subsequent races would then involve a sitting Democratic member of congress. A truly open seat may be decades away. The only disruptor I can think of is if Strickland were to win a close election in November and a serious candidate from the Knight column made a determined effort to knock him out in the next primary.

The lesson learned from this primary will not be forgotten by either party. Expect the parties to be especially aggressive in discouraging longshot candidates, like Thomas, and expect parties to do anything to crush such candidates that run anyway. A campaign in the same position as Rogers will see a candidate like Thomas as its opponent and to behave accordingly. A Knight/Strickland matchup – a very close and contentious GOP battle, is also less likely for the simple fact the Strickland candidacy was unusual in its own right: a candidate for another seat that's assured of a primary win go an abandon that race just months before the primary to run in another district with that odd combination of a million dollars and very little support from the local party apparatus.

Aside from Rogers, who has kept the door open to a future run, there isn't much of a Democratic bench. To the extent that there will be, it's more likely to see such a candidate gain momentum in the already-Democratic Antelope Valley (especially given Palmdale's CVRA loss) than in SCV or Simi Valley, where local Democrats have a way to go. And by that I mean that it's unlikely that we'll see two Democratic heavyweights emerge from different parts of the district, each unwilling to yield. 

Of course, anything could happen. Had I shared all my thoughts and predictions in the days prior to the election, I would have been proven quite wrong last Tuesday. But as strange and uncharted as last week's election was, we ain't seen nothing yet. November's election is going to introduce new angles that we haven't seen in congressional races anywhere. How it plays out is going to depend so much on the basic choices each campaign makes and the money (and kind of money) each is able to raise. Neither campaign has tipped their strategy so far, so we're all just holding our breath.