So the Bluesky candidate narrowly lost their primary election yesterday to a normal candidate and honestly I seriously don’t give a fuck. Let the local populace choose their party’s nominee and leave me out of it. I don’t give a shit about congressional primaries. There’s still a ton of attention online because they were the super online candidate, so good luck avoiding it. That said, I have to note something, because this is a blog and noting something is what we do. With 35,642 out of 121,354 votes in as this blog post publishes, the eventual nominee won just 29.4% of the vote. Hardly a mandate!
There were 15 candidates—8 if you only count those who pulled over 1% of the vote. Voters got to pick one, and the one with the most votes wins the nomination. What a ridiculous way of choosing a nominee with so many candidates. But of course, as you probably know, it’s the way it’s done mostly everywhere in this country. With a limited selection of candidates, such as your standard general election, it makes sense just by virtue of it being simplest. Two candidates (usually), pick one. Winner usually gets close to 50% of the vote or more. But when you have 15 to choose from? Anybody’s guess. (It’s also the one easiest path for an unorthodox candidate to squeak by with a plurality but that’s neither here nor there.) It’s a crappy way to select a candidate for a general election, when they will want the biggest backing of the party in their district!
Which brings me to California, home to a lot of great (sarcastic, derogatory) political ideas, the smartest (stupidest, derogatory) of which is their primary. Instead of party primaries, they throw everybody from all the parties into one universal primary (at this point “primary” is starting to lose it’s definition), with the top two vote earners going on to a general election. This is the most supremely and genuinely stupid voting system possibly in existence.
Primaries are for the parties to determine their nominees, who then battle it out in the general election. This much is known. This much is accepted. Sure, our Founding Fathers didn’t want parties to exist in their new experiment, but they were also idealists who suffered from a lot of blind spots and other awful ideas*. Who could have foreseen that in a democracy, parties based on region, political priorities, race, etc. would form just because it’s the natural way politics is done, especially in a democracy? Anyways, parties exist, and will always exist: deal with it.
Instead, California’s gubernatorial election process operates as if they didn’t exist, while they very much exist. So what happens when eight Democrats line up for the “nomination” (lol) against just two Republicans? Simple math, really. The eight Democrats split their votes, leaving the two Republicans t0 potentially take the top two spots. This isn’t just conjecture or a thing that could happen in a random good year for Republicans. This is the current state of the polls in March 2026, a year that will otherwise be catastrophic for the Republican Party. I mean, look at this shit. Good chance Californians get to choose between two of the worst people in the state—a sheriff or a “commentator”—to be their next governor.
We have a lot of things we need to fix, but jesus christ, it’s time to fix our election systems. I’ve mentioned that I favor ranked choice voting before, and I still think it’s the most practical way forward, at least in primary elections. And parties need to run their own goddamned primaries and states should get their shitty ideas out of them.
*seriously, who thought the vice president should be the runner up of the presidential election was a good idea
