Cara Brown McCormick
There is a particular kind of political irony at work when the leaders of both major parties agree that a reform should be undone. It usually means the reform is working, just not for them.
In California, that reform is the nonpartisan open primary, known as Top Two. Voters approved it in June 2010 as Proposition 14, over the objections of insiders from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
It replaced the state's closed partisan primaries with a single ballot open to every candidate and every voter. The top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation.
Steve Peace
The measure passed with 54% of the vote, and what has happened to the California Legislature in the years since amounts to the most dramatic demographic transformation of any state legislature in modern American history.
A review of demographic data from the California State Library shows that in the 2009-10 session, the last elected entirely under the old closed-primary system, the legislature was 73%male. Women held 33 of 120 seats.
In statehouses across the country, men dominated by similar margins.
Sixteen years later, women hold 59 seats out of 120 seats in the California Legislature, a 79% increase. The body is just shy of gender parity for the first time in state history.
The state Senate is already split evenly between men and women: women hold a 21-to-19 majority. Across the country, women hold roughly a third of state legislative seats. California is now one legislator away from half.
The shift under Top Two in who governs Sacramento extends well beyond gender.
In 2009, the legislature was 62% white, in a state where people of color already constituted a majority of the population. Today, that disparity has reversed. The number of white legislators has declined from 74 to 53.
People of color have gone from holding 37% of seats to 55%.
Hispanic legislators account for much of that growth, rising from 27 seats to 40, or from 22% of the body to a full third. Asian Pacific Islander legislators increased from 8% to 12% of legislators.
African American women went from 2 seats to 7.
The single most striking number in the Top Two before-and-after data, though, belongs to Latina women. In 2009, they held 8 seats. Today they hold 25.
One in five California legislators is now a Latina woman.
White men, who held 56 seats before Top Two, now hold just 33, a 41% decline. For decades, they were the default governing class in Sacramento. No longer.
It is important to note that Top Two was part of a broader set of reforms, including independent redistricting, adopted around the same time, that took the drawing of district lines out of the hands of incumbent politicians.
Together, these two changes fundamentally altered who could run for office and who could win.
The old closed primary system concentrated power in the hands of a small number of highly ideological voters who turned out for low-profile partisan primaries. Those electorates tended to reward incumbency, party loyalty, and insider connections. They were not inclined to take chances on newcomers, and the candidates they produced reflected that conservatism.
Top Two opened the process to all voters, including the nearly 7 million Californians now registered with no party preference or minor parties, who make up 30 percent of the state's electorate. That broader, more representative pool of voters has, year after year, made different choices.
It is against this backdrop that the current push to repeal Top Two should be understood.
Shawn Griffiths
Democratic political operative Steve Maviglio filed a repeal initiative on May 8, motivated by the manufactured and false premise that two Republicans would advance in the 2026 governor's race.
He is not alone. Former state Republican Party chair Ron Nehring has endorsed the repeal. So has MAGA-backed Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who has pledged his organization's resources to the effort.
Maviglio, along with the CADEM and the California Republican Party, have all opposed Top Two since its inception.
Maybe that is because Top Two was never designed to serve the parties. It was never meant to serve up one Republican and one Democrat. It wasn’t created to pump out more so-called “moderates" or to give favor to anyone with a particular ideology.
Top Two was designed to serve voters. It is a voter nominated system and NOT a party nominated system.
And the parties and operatives that fought the measure in 2010 and have resented it ever since are not bad people, they are just insiders trying to reclaim control of the nominating process.
But Democratic insiders, in particular, should consider what they would be reclaiming.
IVN Editorial Board
The system they want to restore produced a legislature that was nearly three-quarters male, nearly two-thirds white, and where people of color held barely more than a third of the seats despite being a majority of the state's population.
The system they want to repeal produced a legislature where women hold 49% of seats, people of color hold 55%, and Latinos have reached a third of the body for the first time.
A return to closed primaries would shut out the millions of independent voters whose participation helped make these results possible. It would hand the nominating power back to the narrow partisan interests that, for decades, produced a legislature that looked nothing like the state.
California's legislature today looks more like California than at any point in the state's 175-year history. That did not happen under the old rules. It happened under Top Two and independent redistricting.
And the fact that both parties want to go back is not an argument for doing so. It is the strongest argument against it.