I was thirteen or fourteen when I learned how little choice a person can have.
I grew up in the Los Angeles Harbor Area partly with my grandparents at the height of the crack epidemic, surrounded by gangs and the life that came with them. Nobody handed me a rulebook, but I knew the rules. I knew who I was supposed to hate and who I owed loyalty to.
I knew that deviation outside the prescribed choices wasn’t a matter of social awkwardness. It could be a matter of life and death. If you were from one neighborhood, you couldn’t just socialize with people from a different one. I lost someone (he was murdered) because he had a relationship with a young woman whose brothers were from a rival territory.
The rules reached into other friendships too. I had a few Black friends in class, but those friendships couldn’t extend past the school gate. On the street, racial lines were drawn by prison gangs on both sides and enforced on the streets by whoever answered to them.
I am not one to glamourize gang life, but I must be honest: for a lost kid, that system offered something I badly needed. Structure. Belonging. A clear answer to the question of who I was.
Then two things cracked it open. The first was my grandfather, who until then had quietly been a source of stability and love, a refuge from my crazy parents. While he had never done much to correct me or put me in line, he recognized that I was standing at the edge of the abyss after my friend was killed and knew he had to step in.
He sat me down and told me about our Chicano history. One story stood out from the treasure trove of information he shared. He told me that in the 1940s, when he proudly dressed in the Zoot Suit fashion, he had fought hard not to live by the internal systems of violence and oppression plaguing our people.
He did his best to break free of the stereotypes people held about us. Then he said the thing that agitated me into a state of existential crisis: He said that many people assume on meeting us that we are “stupid Mexicans.” He said he spent his whole life proving them wrong, yet here I was trying my hardest to prove them right!
The second was even harder to deal with. I was beginning to realize I was gay. In a culture that prized strength and masculinity above almost everything, there was no version of the group with room for me. Being who I was and staying inside were mutually exclusive.
I got out. I had one privilege to cash in on—my parents lived in South Orange County, so I moved in with them and dealt with the dysfunction that had driven me to my grandparents’ home in the first place. Completely away from the systems and culture of the barrio, the life that once felt like shelter was easier to see for what it was: oppressive, controlling, and short-sighted.
I am not saying that political parties are gangs. But they run on many of the same instincts: they tell people who their side is, tell them who to distrust, and make leaving costly. Those instincts serve a purpose when you're new and need a map. The trouble starts when the system punishes you for outgrowing it. That's what I think about when I hear the campaign to repeal California's Top Two primary.
The Guardians Return
An initiative headed for the 2028 ballot would repeal California's Top Two primary, the system voters adopted in 2010 that puts every candidate on one ballot and lets every voter, of any party or none, choose among them. In its place, each party would once again pick its own nominee, and each party would decide who gets to help.
An unusual alliance backs the repeal: a veteran Democratic strategist on one side, Republican activist Carl DeMaio on the other. They agree on almost nothing except this: the voters need supervision. Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant described the people who run this kind of operation. He called them guardians. They kindly take charge of others' thinking, then warn them how dangerous it would be to walk alone. Enlightenment, Kant wrote, is humanity's exit from a self-imposed immaturity. The guardians' job is to keep that exit looking scary.
That is the emotional logic of the repeal campaign. The voters, we're told, might make a mess. Two Democrats might face off in November. Two Republicans might. This spring, party insiders panicked that a split Democratic field could hand the governor's race to two Republicans. It didn't happen. California sorted itself out, as grown-ups tend to do. But the panic was enough to send the guardians reaching for the old rules.
Who Gets Sent Back to the Kids' Table?
Here's what “the old rules” mean in practice. Under party primaries, the parties decide whether voters who aren't registered with them may participate. Some will let independents in. Some won't. Either way, it becomes a privilege granted by the party, not a right held by the voter.
And the people most likely to lose that right aren't random. Roughly 30 percent of California's Latino voters are registered with no party. Asian American voters register independent at even higher rates. Researchers at USC found that closed primaries have large demobilizing effects on Latino and Asian American voters precisely because they register independent more often than white voters, and that the effect follows them into November.
Think about that. A young Latina in the Central Valley who refuses to let either party define her, which is exactly the kind of independence we claim to admire, would be told she's chosen her way out of the room where the real decision is made. In most California districts, the primary is the decision. November is merely the ceremony. That's the street you're not supposed to cross. Register as yourself, and you lose your voice.
The Family's Best Argument
The repeal's defenders aren’t completely devoid of logic. Parties, they say, are private associations. The Supreme Court agreed in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000): a party has a right to decide who chooses its nominees. If I insist on voting in a party I won't join, aren't I the one crashing someone else's family dinner? It's a fair question, and it's easy to answer.
If parties want to be private clubs, they're welcome to pick their leaders at their own expense. But a California primary isn't a club meeting. The state runs it, on public ballots, paid for by every taxpayer, including the independents who'd be locked out. And in a safe district, the person it produces isn't a club officer. It's a member of Congress, a state senator, someone who will govern the rest of us.
Put plainly: a group can set its own rules for who belongs. It can't make the whole neighborhood pay for its decisions and then tell the neighborhood it has no say. Frankly, that is as gangster as it gets.
Since When Does California Go Backward?
California didn't stumble into its distrust of party bosses. In 1911, voters armed themselves with the initiative, the referendum and the recall. Two years later, Progressive reformers let candidates seek more than one party's nomination, a system called cross-filing. In 1946, Governor Earl Warren, a Republican, won both the Republican and the Democratic primaries, taking 52 percent of the Democratic vote. I don't romanticize that era. The same Progressive moment that trusted voters with direct democracy also produced the 1913 Alien Land Law, which kept Asian immigrants from owning land. And cross-filing became a shield for incumbents, who could run in the other party's primary without showing their own label. Democrats abolished it in 1959, and they had their reasons.
Top Two is a different animal: every candidate's party preference is printed on the ballot. Voters see the label. They're simply free to look past it. What I take from that history isn't a list of heroes. It's an instinct: Californians have decided again and again that power belongs closer to the voter than to the party. Repeal isn't a return to some founding tradition. It's a return to the system California spent a century moving away from. Everything about it is anti-Californian.
Top Two Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling
While I offer a passionate defense of our Top Two system, I want to make it clear I don't do so because I think it's perfect. It’s not. It hasn't fixed our skewed June electorate, which remains older and whiter than November's. It can squeeze voters down to two choices that leave many out in the cold. What I want is more choice, not less: let the top four or five candidates advance, and let voters rank them, as Alaska does. Heck, we should even ask whether other “crazy” ideas, such as proportional representation, might work here. That's the direction a grown-up democracy moves. Top Two is the floor, a step in the journey; it’s not the promised land. Repeal would knock out the floor and be a major step backward.
Shawn Griffiths
My grandfather didn't make my choice for me. He reminded me I had one and trusted me to use it. The parties could learn something from him. California's voters grew up a long time ago. It's time the guardians noticed.
About the Author and Disclaimer
Rey David López-Calderón is a longtime reform advocate, former executive director of California Common Cause, and currently a strategic advisor to the Independent Voter Project, which opposes the repeal of California's Top Two primary and is a co-publisher of IVN.