While maintaining a marked edge in legislative representation across the state, California Democrats notched a different but familiar distinction against Republicans in the 2016 election cycle, new data showed. Consistent with the results of previous races since the implementation of the so-called “jungle primary” law, Democrats spent far more in intra-party primary races than did GOP candidates. The pattern also held in contests for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

High-cost competition

Under the current primary system, all registered voters can participate in a single “open” primary including all candidates regardless of party identification. The top two vote winners then square off in a general run-off election. Last year, according to tabulations made by Forward Observer, Democrats spent a total of $91,518,355 on 23 same-party races – 11 in the state Assembly, five in the state Senate and seven in the House, for an average of $3,979,059 per race. That compared starkly to the $2,784,596 spent by Republicans over four same-party races for state Assembly seats, an average of just $696,149. 

Fundraising among the two parties reflected the lopsided totals. Altogether, the Democrat candidates contending for the 11 Assembly seats “raised $49.4 million including independent expenditures, for an average of approximately $4.5 million per race,” Forward Observer noted. 

Among Democrats vying for one of the five same-party state Senate seats up for grabs last year, “candidates raised $23.3 million including independent expenditures, for an average of approximately $4.6 million per race,” while those pursuing one of the seven same-party races for seats in the House of Representatives “raised $33.9 million including independent expenditures, for an average of $2.7 million per race.” 

Unexpected consequences

For Democrats, therefore, the cost of winning seats has climbed steadily under the nonpartisan blanket primary system passed as Proposition 14 by California voters in 2010 – increasing by about $3 million from 2012 to 2014, then by more than $37 million from 2014 to 2016.

“Since the first implementation of Prop. 14 in the 2012 election cycle, there have been a total of 80 same-party races in California for seats in the state Senate, Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives – 60 races between Democrats and 20 between Republicans,” the Forward Observer report summarized. “In total, Democrats have spent a total of $197.4 million on same-party races since Prop. 14 first went into effect in 2012, compared to $34.5 million spent by Republicans. Democrats have thus spent $5.72 on same-party races for every dollar spent or raised by Republicans.”

Prop. 14 was billed as a way to help ensure greater quality and competition among candidates without regard to party affiliation and, implicitly, with a mitigating effect on large campaign war chests. But for Democrats, the new system has had the more pronounced effect on pitting party members against one another at cost – neither clearing the field for dominant candidates who can win clean or uncontested victories on the cheap, nor giving upstart or insurgent candidates a clear opportunity to shift power away from established or establishment-backed contenders. “In nine of the 28 same-party races in 2012 election cycle, the second-place primary finisher won in the general election,” the report noted. “In six of the 25 races same-party races in the 2014 election cycle, the second primary finisher won.” Showing a similarly disproportionate ratio, second-placers scored general election victories in just six of the 2016 cycle’s 27 same-party races.

In fact, over the past three election cycles, primary winners have fared better and better on the whole against their second-place rivals, whether despite their increased campaign fundraising and spending or because of it. The ratio of victorious second-placers decreased from nearly a third to about a fourth to just over a fifth. 

New figures on the November 2016 election cycle showed that Golden State Democrats continued to shell out substantial sums to compete with one another for elective office. Numbers taken from the California Secretary of State, and verified with Cal-Access campaign records, illustrate how the state’s blanket primary system, which pits the top two first-round vote-getters against one another in general elections regardless of party, has changed election dynamics.

“In the 2016 election cycle, Democrats raised or spent $91.5 million on same-party races – a 69 percent increase from 2014 when Democrats spent $54.3 million,” according to Forward Observer, which gathered and analyzed the data. “The average budget for a same-party race between Democrats was $3.97 million in the 2016 cycle, up 32 percent since 2014.”

For the state GOP, by contrast, blanket primaries have had an increasingly milder effect. “Republicans raised or spent $2.78 million on same party races in 2016, a decline of approximately 80 percent since 2014 when Republicans spent $13.85 million,” Forward Observer added. “Notably, there were no same-party races between two Republicans in either the state Senate or the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016.”

Contributing to the discrepancy, Republicans in California have simply run against one another with less frequency than Democrats. Since the 2012 elections, when the blanket primary system began, only 20 of 79 total intraparty races – including those for seats in the Assembly, the state Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives – pitted one Republican candidate against another. The 59 Democrat-on-Democrat races notched over the relatively brief time period have added up: “In total, Democrats have spent a total of $195 million on same-party races since Prop. 14 first went into effect in 2012 compared to $31.3 million spent by Republicans,” Forward Observer concluded. “In other words, Democrats have spent $6.24 on same-party races for every dollar spent or raised by Republicans.”

A wedge effect

The news underscored indications earlier this year that California Democrats could be polarizing on some issues as a result of the party’s statewide dominance and tough competition for limited leadership positions. “Another effect of the [blanket primary] system, harder to quantify but possibly more serious, has been a sharpening differences between the more moderate and more progressive wings of the party, sparking sometimes thorny disagreements that could have been softened had all candidates vying for office run against Republican opponents,” as CalWatchdog previously reported. “In some cases, such as Kamala Harris’ race against Loretta Sanchez, the challenger was too weak to force a bruising battle over political agendas. In others, however, a more moderate non-incumbent drew a clear line on policy and was rewarded at the ballot box.”

“Last year, for instance, Orinda Mayor Steve Glazer – a former aide to Gov. Jerry Brown who pitted himself against the BART strike and won support from Chuck Reed, the ex-San Jose Mayor spearheading public pension reform – bested Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, the far more liberal Democrat who initially had been widely expected to win the race to replace outgoing state Senator Mark DeSaulnier.”

National impact

Nationally, divided Democrats have sometimes replicated the pattern. “Former Vice President Joe Biden, beloved by the Democratic base, had the audacity to endorse Barack Obama’s labor secretary, Tom Perez, to become Democratic National Committee chairman,” as Dan Morain wrote at the Sacramento Bee. “Sen. Bernie Sanders, who supports the more liberal Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, denounced Biden’s move as representing the ‘failed status-quo approach.'” But while Sanders made a big cameo during November’s elections, getting involved in the state initiative process, it’s unlikely he or other national party figures will try to tip the scales one way or the other in a close race scenario between two state-level California Democrats vying for the same office.

Still, the next big test of Democrats’ fundraising fortunes in a head-to-head matchup has been teed up for spring, when the special election will be held to replace new state Attorney General and outgoing Rep. Xavier Becerra in Congress. “At this point, 17 Democrats, two Republicans and one Green-party candidate will appear on the April 4 special-primary ballot,” Jim Geraghty observed at National Review. Assuming no contender wins a majority of votes on that day, the runoff election has been slated for June 6.

This year, “Democrats raised or spent a total of $90.8 million on same-party races — a 67 percent increase from 2014 when Democrats spent $54.3 million,” according to the study, citing data from the California Secretary of State, California Fair Political Practices Commission and Federal Election Commission, and issued this week by Forward Observer. “The average budget for a same-party race between Democrats was $3.95 million in the 2016 cycle, up 30.7 percent since 2014,” the last year in the Congressional election cycle. 

That means Democrats are now spending massive sums of money against other Democrats in political races due to the passive of Proposition 14, the California top-two primary law which went into effect in 2012. 

Those figures struck a sharp contrast to spending for similarly situated candidates in the California GOP, which spent far less over the same two-year period. Those state Republicans “raised or spent $2.76 million on same party races in 2016,” Forward Observer observed. “This is a sharp decline (approximately 84 percent) in spending on same-party races since 2014, when Republicans spent $17.2 million.” One key to the big divergence between Democrats and Republicans, the report noted, was the lack of any Republican-on-Republican competition for a seat in the state Senate or the U.S. House of Representatives.  

Jungle primaries

Intraparty fights between Democrats attracted more outside spending this year. $339,000 went “to support Assemblywoman Nora Campos, D-San Jose, who is running against state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, in the 15th Senate District,” as the Sacramento Bee reported earlier this year, while “several hundred thousand dollars” went to “help former Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra or oppose the incumbent, Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, D-San Fernando, in Los Angeles County’s 39th Assembly District.”

“And in the Inland Empire, a campaign committee funded by the grocery workers union has spent $75,000 to support Eloise Gomez Reyes, the Democrat running to unseat Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernardino, in the 47th Assembly District.”

For Democrats, the shifting political sands have complicated what was seen by some as an implicit advantage in the so-called “jungle primary” system California voters ushered in six years ago through Proposition 14. That initiative inserted a constitutional amendment to afford Californians a single, nonpartisan primary election, pitting the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, against one another in the general election. But instead of making candidates’ lives easier — and the Democratic party’s — Prop. 14 has appeared to have cost them, demanding higher expenditures. “Democrats have spent a total of $194.2 million on same-party races since Prop. 14 first went into effect in 2012,” Forward Observer concluded. “Republicans have spent $34.5 million over the same period. Thus, for every dollar spent or raised by Republicans, $5.64 was raised or spent by Democrats.”

Ideological Fights Within the Democratic Party

Another effect of the new system, harder to quantify but possibly more serious, has been a sharpening differences between the more moderate and more progressive wings of the party, sparking sometimes thorny disagreements that could have been soften had all candidates vying for office run against Republican opponents. In some cases, such as Kamala Harris’ race against Loretta Sanchez, the challenger was too weak to force a bruising battle over political agendas. In others, however, a more moderate non-incumbent drew a clear line on policy and was rewarded at the ballot box. Last year, for instance, Orinda Mayor Steve Glazer — a former aide to Gov. Jerry Brown who pitted himself against the BART strike and won support from Chuck Reed, the ex-San Jose Mayor spearheading public pension reform — bested Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, the far more liberal Democrat who initially had been widely expected to win the race to replace outgoing state Senator Mark DeSaulnier. 

Over staunch opposition on his right, Gov. Jerry Brown signed several new climate bills into law, aiming to keep California on the regulatory trajectory first set during former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration. 

That suite of laws, “in which polluters pay to offset emissions under a declining cap, is on tenuous footing amid litigation and uncertainty in the Legislature,” the Sacramento Bee noted. The idea of a new set of rules, “negotiated by Brown and legislative leaders last month, was significant to many moderate Democrats who viewed spending in their districts as critical to buttress a state climate program that has faced heavy resistance from industry,” the paper added. 

Complex divisions

Some Democrats with that stance have worried that national and statewide populist sentiment could pose an especially sharp threat to their political fortunes this election year. Complicating the ideological picture still further, “many lawmakers representing low-income communities of color made themselves a force in the state’s climate change debate after complaints that existing policies weren’t doing enough to benefit the districts they represent,” as the Los Angeles Times noted. 

But Democrats further to the left did not want to back down, or be seen as backing down, to industry interests. At the same time, however, their own interests have not shifted measurably closer to Gov. Brown’s, which have wound up at loggerheads with party members to his left over allocations to projects such as the state’s bullet train. With talks moving slowly, “Brown negotiated the spending plan with top Democratic legislative leaders Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Paramount and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles,” according to KPBS. “It was approved on the last day of the legislative session, Aug. 31.”

Big ticket

Environmental activists and policymakers embracing their cause had to scramble to craft the fresh scheme in a way that seemed to ensure it could survive a spirited fight during the legislative process. “The new plan, outlined in SB32, involves increasing renewable energy use, putting more electric cars on the road, improving energy efficiency, and curbing emissions from key industries,” NPR reported. “Brown signed another bill, AB197, that gives lawmakers more oversight of regulators and provides aid to low-income or minority communities located near polluting facilities such as oil refineries and factories.” All told, the package amounted to some $900 million in outlays sourced from the state’s cap-and-trade revenues. “The money represents two-thirds of the available funding from California’s carbon-emission fee,” noted KPBS.

On hand for Brown’s signing ceremony in Fresno, Republican Mayor Ashley Swearengin touted the prospect of statewide infrastructure construction associated with Brown’s environmental agenda, which would include the long-simmering high-speed rail effort. With success, “Swearengin added, the Valley will see a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years,” the Business Journal noted.

Lingering resistance

But business, energy and conservative groups, which had struggled to turn the tide against the bills, quickly vented their frustration. “Taken together, SB32 and AB197 impose severe caps on the emission of greenhouse gases in California, without requiring the regulatory agencies to give any consideration to the impacts on our economy, disruptions in everyone’s daily lives or the fact that California’s population will grow almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2030,” said Allan Zaremberg, California Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, in a statement. 

Under Zaremberg’s leadership, the organization has spearheaded litigation targeting the current cap-and-trade regime. “A state appellate court is considering a challenge by the California Chamber of Commerce, which argues the fee is a tax that needed support from two-thirds of the Assembly and Senate in order to be valid,” KPBS recalled. “Republicans have in the past said it’s irresponsible to spend money generated from a fee being challenged in court.”

The executive board of the California Democratic Party has endorsed recreational marijuana, throwing its support behind the ballot measure that has won the support of Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Meeting recently in Long Beach, the board voted in favor of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, which “would legalize holding up to an ounce of weed for those older than 21” without any medical allowance or qualification, LA Weekly observed. “If it passes, cannabis could be grown, produced and sold under strict regulations already headed for the medical marijuana market. And it would tax cultivation and sales at a rate of 15 percent.”

“The Dems join the ACLU, the NAACP of California and national NORML in endorsing AUMA. Last month the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, the nation’s largest local Democratic Party group, endorsed the initiative.”

On pot, many California Democrats have remained further to the left, or libertarian, than party leaders nationwide. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., supported recreational marijuana in his home state as well as the Golden State. At a rally in San Jose, Sanders — “the only presidential candidate to call for descheduling marijuana under federal law,” as MerryJane.com observed, told crowds, “If I lived in California, I would vote ‘yes’ to legalize marijuana.”

But even in California, many Democrats have been slow to move toward recreational marijuana. At a recent pro-legalization event, “Newsom reminded the audience that even though all of California’s elected statewide officials are Democrats, he is the only one that supports legalization,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Newsom said that while polling has been strong in recent weeks, including a Public Policy Institute of California survey last month that found 60 percent support for legalization, there are rumors every day of a deep-pocketed donor popping up for the opposition.”

Quiet ambivalence

Recreational pot advocates have identified several minor issues where state Democrats’ interests have not fully aligned with those of the legalization movement. “There are only a few parts of the initiative that have Democrats worried — one being the potential for increase in accidents involving cannabis in the states of Colorado and Washington, who have both had legal marijuana programs running for a couple of years now,” according to Marijuana Times.

The day after she secured a first-place finish in the primary election to replace outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer, Attorney General Kamala Harris specifically cited the safety issue in qualifying her stance on the ballot initiative. “I am not opposed to legalizing marijuana, but there are some details we need to figure out, including how we are going to test impairment when one is under the influence of marijuana,” she said, according to the Chronicle.

What’s more, as the Marijuana Times added, “individual cities and counties will have the option to opt out of the commercial end of legalization. By not allowing cannabis sales and cultivation, these areas will leave people legally allowed to possess cannabis but no way to purchase it without going to the next city or county over.” (In another sign of hesitance among top California Democrats, Sen. Dianne Feinstein chose not to side with the majority in a banking committee vote to approve banking access for the marijuana business. She was the only Democrat to do so, as Marijuana.com noted.) 

California cities have also recognized the opportunity to add municipal taxes atop what the state will take from marijuana sales. In San Diego, City Councilman Mark Kersey led the council “toward placing a measure on the November ballot that would impose an 8 percent tax on gross receipts from recreational marijuana sales to pay for increased city costs, starting with police,” as U-T San Diego reported. “The council would be able to increase the tax as high as 15 percent but not tax medical marijuana sales.”

With California the final battleground in his insurgent campaign to beat Hillary Clinton for the Democrats’ nomination for president, Sen. Bernie Sanders has pulled out the stops, barnstorming the state and demanding a final televised debate, which Clinton has now declined, as his team’s lawyers filed suit in the hopes of pulling in as many new voters as they can.

Last minute schemes

The lawsuit, “alleging widespread confusion over California’s presidential primary rules,” asked a judge to push voter registration “past Monday’s deadline until the day of the state’s primary election on June 7,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “At issue is whether voters understand the rules for the presidential primary, which differ from those governing other elections in California.”

Campaign lawyers also requested that the judge “require state elections officials to conduct a broad public awareness campaign about the voting rules before May 31, the deadline for requesting a ballot by mail,” the paper added. 

Angling for one more shot at contrasting himself to Clinton before a wide audience, Sanders signed off on a televised event that Clinton, so far, has shied away from. “Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said the Vermont senator has accepted an invitation from Fox News to debate ‘with the understanding that we can reach mutual agreement on the debate moderators, the format and other details,'” as The Hill reported. “Weaver said both campaigns in January agreed to hold a debate in May in California, adding that the Clinton campaign has ‘balked at keeping that pledge.'”

Scrambling for votes 

Beyond the high stakes raised by the increasingly acrimonious partisan split between Clinton and Sanders supporters, the state primary’s significance has been increased by the potential role to be played in shaping the campaign’s final stages by California’s significant chunk of voters expressing no party preference. Recent research has shown “a spike with registrations for independents, another group than leans to the senator” along with younger voters, ABC News reported. “However, a wrinkle in the state’s vote-by-mail rules could undercut that support with independents.”

“More than half of California voters are expected to vote by mail. But independent voters must ask local election officials to send them a presidential ballot with their state ballot. So far, 2.1 million independents have been sent vote-by-mail ballots. But most were sent to voters without a presidential ballot, according to Paul Mitchell with Political Data.”

That news had Sanders allies questioning whether the Democrats’ so-called “open primary” system was really in effect in California — giving Clinton an edge despite her relative lack of a presence in the Golden State this season. “Mrs. Clinton, a known and popular quantity who won California in 2008, has spent far less time in the state than Mr. Sanders. The Vermont senator and underdog has flooded California with rallies, commercials and organizers, hoping an upset win can help him convince superdelegates that he is the candidate best poised to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump in the fall,” the New York Times noted. “While Mr. Sanders’s path appears mathematically impossible, his continued fight has meant the Clinton campaign has had to invest limited resources in the remaining primary states, rather than fully pivoting to the general election battleground states.”

The long game

With the Democrats positioned to grant Sanders and his supporters a significant degree of influence at their nominating convention, regardless of the primary season’s outcome, Sanders himself has shown a willingness to temper his attacks in California, which ramped up as his campaign’s longevity began to upset establishment expectations. “At a rally in Vista in northern San Diego County, Sanders put the brakes on his customary criticism of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton,” as the Los Angeles Times observed. “He omitted his usual criticism of her for not backing a $15-per-hour national minimum wage, and for failing to join him in support of a carbon tax to fight climate change. In only one paragraph [of his remarks], he dispensed with his criticism of her for allowing super PACs to raise money for her benefit and for taking donations from Wall Street employees.”

A flawed frontrunner

But Clinton’s confidence has now edged well ahead of Sanders’. Other California polls have given her a bigger lead. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll put Clinton ahead by 12 — although, as Sanders supporters might note, that result actually pegged Clinton lower than a KABC/SurveyUSA poll conducted on April 4; as Inquisitr observed, that survey showed Sanders trailing by a daunting 14 points. Adding to Sanders’ woes, his recent losing streak has continued, almost unbroken, right up to California.

In the wake of his big losses Tuesday, Sanders conceded that he’d now have to focus on merely influencing the party’s agenda. “The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast.”

But despite Clinton’s clear edge, her campaign has been dogged by stubborn disadvantages it has shown little sign of being able to overcome. In addition to difficulties on likability and trust, Clinton has been beaten repeatedly by Sanders among younger voters — a coveted demographic headed into the general election. As the Times suggested, “perhaps the most persistent aspect of the Democratic presidential contest” has been “most younger voters going to Sanders, in large part because they are drawn to his uncompromisingly liberal ideology, and most older voters going to Clinton because of her determination and deep experience in politics.” Even so, it is Sanders who Clinton has portrayed as too far to the right, especially on guns, casting his calls for a left-wing political revolution as merely impractical, not ideologically extreme. For his part, Sanders has depicted Clinton as too corrupt to exercise sound judgment, rather than too centrist to suffice.

Looking for champions

Meanwhile, Sanders’ longstanding gripe against the Democrats’ nominating process, which built in so-called superdelegates to hedge against the prospect of an unelectable insurgent candidate, also began to give way under the pressure of unfavorable delegate math. As Slate recently reported, Sanders’ campaign manager struggled to tout possible wins in California and Pennsylvania without appearing to need them, pivoting instead, in an MSNBC interview, to talk of battling for superdelegates.

“It’s hard to tell whether all this bluster from the Sanders campaign about fighting to flip superdelegates through the convention is serious, or just a way to motivate supporters to keep the faith,” the site surmised. “‘At this point, yes, absolutely,’ the Sanders campaign plans to take it to the convention. Maybe at a later point — say, once primary season is wrapped up on June 7 — the campaign will have changed its mind.” Now, with the nomination all but out of reach, swinging superdelegates would offer Sanders the prospect of more leverage over the party platform. “For Sanders backers, the overwhelming support for Clinton among party leaders is just another sign of how worried the Democratic elite is about the surprisingly strong response voters — especially young voters — have had to the 74-year-old Vermont senator’s call for a revolution that will profoundly change the country’s political and economic systems,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted.

After a string of failures in several central valley campaigns, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has come in for scorn by increasingly independent party members seeking to take their fortunes into their own hands.

In one stinging example, Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, “trounced Democrats for two cycles in the 21st Congressional District despite the party’s 16 percentage point edge over Republicans among registered voters,” the Los Angeles Times noted. “Prominent locals told the Fresno Bee in December that part of the blame fell on the DCCC for micromanaging failed 2014 candidate Amanda Renteria’s campaign.”

Looking for an edge

But more established candidates have worked to push back against the insurgents. Some California Democrats facing primary competition have sought — and landed — so-called “pre-endorsements,” a robust signal of party support. “During a pre-endorsement conference meeting in San Bernardino, Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, Assembly candidate Sabrina Cervantes and congressional candidate Tim Sheridan all got more than 70 percent of the votes needed to get their endorsements placed on the consent calendar for the state party convention scheduled for Feb. 26 through 28 in San Jose,” the Press-Enterprise reported.

“The Brown/Reyes contest is getting statewide attention because Brown, who is considered part of the Assembly’s moderate Democratic caucus, is being challenged by Reyes, a liberal Democrat.”

In another closely watched intraparty tussle, Lou Vince’s upstart bid to unseat Rep. Steve Knight, R-Lancaster, has divided national Democrats from Golden Staters. As the Los Angeles reported, “a member of the Democratic Party in Washington and two members of Congress, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional Delegation,” relayed to Vince their desire to see him yield the primary race to Bryan Caforio, an attorney who has proven to be more of a fundraising powerhouse.

Instead, of dropping out, however, Vince proceeded to win pre-endorsement by party activists with more than 80 percent of the vote, “making him the strong favorite to get the California Democratic Party’s backing at its convention next month. Caforio’s campaign will have to file a formal objection if it wants to bring the endorsement to the convention floor,” the Times added.

Primary-season unease has in part been fueled by Democrats’ desire to wrest back their legislative supermajority. But at the same time, tilting away from candidates supported most heavily by the party’s activist base could end up exacerbating frustrations in Sacramento.” With a restored supermajority, Dan Walters noted at the Sacramento Bee, Democrats “could have raised taxes and placed constitutional amendments on the ballot, but their leaders were reluctant to do either. Meanwhile, business interests were busily electing pro-business moderate Democrats, which turned out to be a much more important factor in what happened, or didn’t happen, on legislation, particularly in 2015. The moderate bloc stymied the legislative agendas of liberal groups that business opposed.”

Off script

The dynamic has lent a somewhat surreal quality to the higher-profile struggles playing out in the party. In the San Fernando Valley, Walters noted, former Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra is hard at work trying to exact electoral revenge against Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, who defeated him in 2014, while outgoing Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins has mounted a challenge in San Diego to state Sen. Marty Block.

For Democrats, campaign finance has added to the topsy-turvy feel of the season. Although the party came out far ahead in final tallies of money raised in 2015, as the Los Angeles Times reported, moderate Democrats brought in more cash from the oil industry than did Republicans, according to the Daily Democrat:

“A band of self-described moderate Assembly Democrats led by former Assemblyman Henry Perea, who recently resigned to work for a pharmaceutical trade association, were instrumental in the oil companies’ victory. According to their campaign finance statements, the companies wrote checks to nearly 30 Assembly Democrats in the second half of 2015.”

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Accustomed to languishing at the tail end of the party primary calendar — a dispiriting position for a state that has long been treated as an ATM for East Coast candidates seeking national office — Californians have awoken this year to the prospect of much greater influence on selecting Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

“It’s totally conceivable that both the Democratic and Republican primaries could stretch on for months,” as the Los Angeles Daily News surmised. “Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are locked in a tight Democratic race that no one imagined a few months ago. And three or four strong GOP candidates in a still-crowded field could easily emerge from the battles of Iowa and New Hampshire as front-runner Donald Trump continues to amaze and confuse most political observers.”

Wild cards

But analysts, keenly aware that the fluid race could also result in a surprise consolidation of the fields, suggested “waiting at least a few weeks before getting too excited,” according to the Daily News.

“By then, we’ll know if Sanders is able to upset Clinton in Iowa and whether Ted Cruz managed to wrest any [more] victories away from Trump ahead of Super Tuesday on March 1, when voters in 11 (12 for Republicans) mostly Southern states will cast ballots.”

Even more importantly, for Republicans, the national GOP jiggered its rules for apportioning delegates in a way that could work to extend uncertainty well into the primary calendar. The Republican National Committee has required all states holding Republican primaries in the first half of March to “award delegates proportionally to candidates who clear a certain threshold,” as the Los Angeles Times reported, “between 5 percent and 20 percent of the vote.” That means that key votes, including all the Super Tuesday primaries, won’t offer campaigning Republicans the chance of scoring any winner-take-all prizes.

“Why is this change so important? Because nearly half the national delegates will be selected during this two-week window. Proportional representation suggests split outcomes in most, if not all, of these key Republican primaries.”

Opinion remains divided, however, on the question of which sort of Republican candidate is most likely to cash in on California’s primary. Some analysts portrayed Golden State Republicans as more likely to advantage candidates mustering a relatively more diverse coalition. “Early voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa get all the fanfare, but their populations are anything but representative of the nation’s diversity,” suggested San Jose State University professor emeritus in the Times. “Republican voters in California — a true cross section of the party’s electorate — will deliver a long overdue reality check of the GOP’s true values.”

But the conservative grassroots, more in tune with the insurgent candidates leading in the early states, has envisioned a different scenario. John Berry, media coordinator for the Redlands Tea Party Patriots, told the Press-Enterprise that party activists could play kingmaker. “We’d get to flex our Tea Party muscle,” he said, putting Donald Trump or Ted Cruz ahead over a “token establishment guy.”

As for California Democrats, a quirk of their state party’s primary rules has upped the stakes for Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. As the Sacramento Bee noted, the California Democratic Party, has allowed independent voters to cast votes in its primary for over a decade. “If the heated contest between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont continues past earlier primary states, California’s independent voters would be a significant target for both Democratic campaigns leading up to June 7,” observed the Bee.

A mixed bag

Californians haven’t always had to worry about bringing up the rear of the parties’ primary seasons. But under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, their experiment with an early debut in the race went awry. “Candidates did come to California, and they did talk about issues pertinent to the state, such as clean energy and immigration. But 33 states moved their primary to Feb. 5 or earlier, weakening California’s influence,” the Press-Enterprise recalled. And shifting the timetable “cost the state $97 million at a time when California’s finances were strained,” the paper added, noting that the state’s presidential primary slipped back to June in 2011.

Fighting over the spoils

With an election year on the way, Democrats jockeying for power in Sacramento have found themselves in fractious intra-party competitions. “Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, faulted by some for not controlling her moderate faction, is being forced out of her seat by term limits but doesn’t want to retire, so she is challenging Sen. Marty Block’s bid for a second term in San Diego,” as Dan Walters observed at the Sacramento Bee. “Atkins says Block had promised to retire after one term and cede the Senate seat to her, but he denies it. The stage is thus set for what is likely to be an expensive and nasty duel between two conventionally liberal Democrats.” Another drama has centered around Raul Bocanegra’s establishment-backed effort to wrest back his seat from insurgent Patty Lopez, Walters added.

On budgeting, meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown’s unwillingness to capitulate to Democrats’ demands for greater largesse was thrown into a striking new light by the news that California’s balance sheet is $1 billion stronger than projected this fiscal year. “The surplus suggests Brown was indeed conservative during budget negotiations,” according to Capital Public Radio. “The governor insisted on using lower revenue estimates, while legislative Democrats had pushed for some limited additional spending.”

Republicans, whose idea of fiscal discipline tends to go well beyond Brown’s own, see Democrats’ power struggle over spending as a double-edged sword. Giving too much credit or support to Brown would weaken the already anemic state GOP, while undermining him would fuel an insurgency from the Left. But in a telling signal of how Republican officials sought to resolve the dilemma, the party has pointedly withdrawn itself from races where business-friendly or Brown-allied Democrats faced a matchup against more liberal or union-funded challengers. Speculation has built that the pattern could effectively repeat itself in the campaign to replace outgoing U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer. Thanks to California’s new primary system, “it just may happen that no Republican survives next June’s Top Two primary, letting Harris and Sanchez split the larger Democratic vote and duke it out in the fall,” according to the Californian. “To prevent that, two of the Republicans will have to drop out long before that primary.”

Unions divided

Even without the added pressure of GOP machinations, organized labor, a powerful Democratic constituency, has found itself fractured in the Golden State. California, the state with the most lower-wage employees, has been at the forefront of activists’ successful movement to boost minimum wages in the absence of federal legislation. But now, that effort has been imperiled by its own strength.

“The SEIU mega-local UHW, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has long been campaigning for a 2016 ballot measure for a $15 minimum and has already gathered the requisite number of signatures to get it on the ballot,” the American Prospect reported, drawing the support of Democrats like Lt. Gov Gavin Newsom and the mayors of party strongholds like Oakland and San Francisco. Yet the dominance of Democrats and labor has produced internal competition. The SEIU California State Council rolled out a measure of its own “that would also raise the minimum to $15 while expanding access to paid sick leave for home-care workers.”

“The competing measures are the latest skirmish in the running battle between the UHW leaders and the leaders of the national union, joined by other state SEIU honchos, over questions of SEIU’s strategy and structure,” the Prospect noted. “The skirmish has higher-wage advocates worried that two competing measures will diminish state voters’ considerable support (68 percent in the Field Poll) for a $15 minimum wage, so much so that both measures could go down to defeat.”