GOP candidates for California governor, Sheriff Chad Bianco (left) and Steve Hilton (right). Sheriff Chad Bianco (Photo by Milka Soko, Contributing Photographer) Steve Hilton (Photo by Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
This Christmas, let’s gift California an insurance policy.
No, not an insurance policy for our homes — those are too expensive, if you can find one in the first place. Instead, let’s get an insurance policy to protect California against Trump and his acolytes.
To secure the policy, the legislature must pass a bill to allow write-in candidates to run in our November elections.
That may seem small. But it could be huge next year, because of the volatile combination of California’s top-two election system and a wide-open 2026 race for governor.
Since 2011, California has had a voter-approved, nonpartisan system that puts all candidates of all parties on the same ballot in a first-round election. Next year’s first-round election is in June.
Then the top two candidates, regardless of party, advance to the November elections. And it’s only two candidates. Write-in candidates cannot join the ballot.
Opinions differ on whether the top-two has fulfilled its promise of producing more moderate elected officials. But it definitely has produced some anti-democratic results.
Especially when the majority party has too many candidates in a race, and the minority party has just two. In these cases, the majority party candidates can split up the vote into small shares, allowing the two minority party candidates to finish first and second — thus locking the party most people support out of the runoff. Such a “lockout” of the majority party has happened four times, most recently in 2022 in a Republican state Senate district, where two Democrats squeezed through in a field with six Republicans.
The 2026 governor’s race is starting to shape up the same way.
At this moment, eight Democrats with professional, resourced campaigns are running for governor, while only two Republicans with professional campaigns are running: commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.
Both are strong Trump supporters — a fact which constitutes an emergency in light of polling showing that the two Republicans could finish first and second.
How? Hilton and Bianco could evenly divide the 40% of the vote that is Republican, ending up with about 20% each. Meanwhile, the little-known Democrats could, divide the 60% of the vote that goes Democratic in seven ways, with the leading contenders only registering the teens.
Four polls taken this fall have shown one of the Republicans leading, with the other Republican within a few points of second place.
Which is why California needs that insurance policy, to prevent our next governor from being aligned with Trump.
Allowing write-in candidates in the November election is the obvious solution. If the two Trumpists advance, Democrats and independents could back a write-in candidate as an alternative.
This isn’t a crazy idea. More than 40 states permit write-in candidates in some form. California allows them for all elections other than November “general” elections. And, as noted by Ballot Access News, Washington state, the only other state with top-two, has write-in space on all ballots.
All it would take to make this insurance policy a reality would be for Democrats in the legislature to pass a bill with a two-thirds majority — allowing it to take effect immediately.
Republicans would cry foul, but they’d be wrong. Write-in candidates exist precisely as insurance policies against election systems that produce perverse results. Take Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who was her state’s most popular politician but lost the 2010 Republican primary to a right-winger. She ran as a write-in in November — and won the seat she still holds.
Allowing write-ins would offer nice insurance for now. A smarter long-term plan would be to eliminate the top-two system altogether via constitutional amendment. Then, if we want to protect democracy, we must adopt a system of proportional representation, giving parties seats matching their vote percentage.
That would be an insurance policy even State Farm couldn’t cancel.
Joe Mathews is the Connecting California columnist for Zócalo Public Square and founder-publisher of Democracy Local.
Originally published at Joe Mathews