California Gets a Two-Party Race

Just before midnight on June 5, Tony Krvaric struts around the lobby of the posh U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego wearing a red “Make California Great Again” hat and a big smile. “It’s a new day and a fresh start for California,” he says, beaming. That’s because John Cox, the Republican candidate for governor, had just given what amounts to a victory speech to an overwhelmingly older, white crowd. Although Cox finished more than 250,000 votes behind Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, he trounced the Democrats’ next-strongest candidate, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. That means that under the state’s top-two primary system, Cox moves on to face Newsom in the November general election.

For a state that’s seen as the epicenter of the Trump resistance movement, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Until a few months ago, Californians had been preparing for a Democrat vs. Democrat face-off between Newsom and Villaraigosa to lead the country’s biggest, and arguably most liberal, state. That contest would have forced the Democrats into a debate about what the party stands for in the Age of Trump. Voters would have chosen either the liberal values of Newsom, who as mayor of San Francisco in the mid-2000s made a name for himself as a champion of gay marriage, and has campaigned for universal health care, or the more moderate pragmatism of Villaraigosa, who positioned himself as a fiscal conservative and hoped to carry the support of Latinos, the state’s biggest ethnic group.