California Democrats and the Chaos of Their Own Making

There is a special kind of political irony reserved for the party that lectures the rest of the country about democracy, expertise, and the rule of competent governance — and then proceeds to detonate its own primary from the inside. California Democrats are currently living that irony in real time, and a ghost from the party’s recent past has decided to pour a little gasoline on the fire.

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Gray Davis — recalled by his own constituents in 2003 in one of the most humiliating electoral repudiations in modern American history — has re-emerged to offer unsolicited wisdom about the 2026 governor’s race. His advice? Candidates being pressured by party leaders to drop out should stay in and ignore the pleading.

Davis knows this territory personally. When asked about California Democratic Party leaders urging low-polling candidates to withdraw, Davis was blunt: “Tons and tons of people asked me to drop out,” he said, adding that the pressure “was fuel for the fire,” and that he ultimately won the 1998 primary “pretty handsomely.” The implication, delivered with the authority of a man who survived similar turbulence, is that the party apparatus doesn’t always know best.

He’s not wrong about his own history. But the fact that Gray Davis — a man whose governorship ended not in retirement but in a humiliating recall vote — is now the elder statesman being consulted for inspiration should tell California Democrats something about the depth of their problem.

A Party Holding Every Lever, Controlling Nothing

Democrats have run California for years, but in a nationally critical election the party is being confronted by the limits of its own power: the race for governor is out of control. Barely a month before the start of mail-in voting, Democratic leaders are openly dreading the possible loss of a statewide election for the first time in two decades. This is the same party that controls every statewide office, dominates the state legislature, and outnumbers registered Republicans nearly two-to-one. The machine is enormous. It simply cannot find the ignition.

The contest has degenerated into finger-pointing over debate eligibility, identity politics and 2025 ballot counting — issues distant from voters struggling with the soaring cost of gas and groceries. A major debate had to be scrapped after the selection criteria produced a stage featuring six white candidates, provoking accusations of racial discrimination from candidates of color who were excluded. The University of Southern California, where the event was to be held, pulled the plug, saying the controversy had become a distraction. One might charitably call it a preview of Democratic governance more broadly: well-intentioned systems producing absurd results, followed by recriminations and cancellations.

Meanwhile, the California Democratic Party chair called on candidates who “do not have a viable path” to the general election to drop out of the state’s crowded gubernatorial race. And the candidates, by and large, are ignoring him.

The Structural Trap Democrats Built for Themselves

The mechanics of California’s top-two primary system — a product of the state’s progressive ballot-initiative culture — are now threatening to swallow the very party that most benefits from California’s political dominance. While California is heavily Democratic, the fragmented Democratic field in this year’s top-two primary could allow two Republicans to advance to the general election. The fear is not theoretical. It is statistical. A recent Emerson College poll found Republican Steve Hilton leading the entire field at 17%, followed by Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Chad Bianco both at 14%. With more than twenty Democratic candidates splitting their party’s vote into single-digit slivers, the math is merciless.

With eight major Democratic candidates splitting the liberal vote, both Republican candidates — former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — could come in first and second in the June 2 primary and move on to the November ballot. A Republican governor of California. The state that produced Kamala Harris, gave Gavin Newsom a national stage, and has spent the better part of two decades treating itself as the moral and political opposite of everything Donald Trump represents — potentially governed by a Republican because Democrats couldn’t stop running against each other.

One veteran Democratic consultant, when asked how the party reasserts control, offered a response that was as honest as it was damning: “I have no idea and anybody who tells you they do, they don’t know either.”

The Gray Davis Problem

Into this mess strides Gray Davis, a man whose own governorship serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of technocratic Democratic governance. Davis was a competent administrator in a narrow sense — methodical, well-funded, politically connected. He was also so deeply unpopular by 2003 that California voters took the extraordinary step of removing him from office mid-term, replacing him with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a recall election that became an international spectacle.

Davis’s advice to current candidates — stay in, ignore party pressure, bet on yourself — contains a grain of personal truth. He was polling third in 1998 and came back to win. But the lesson being drawn from this is wildly misapplied to 2026. In 1998, there was no top-two primary system. The structural stakes were different. Today, every additional Democratic candidate who stays in the race isn’t demonstrating Davisian grit; they are statistically carving into the party’s aggregate share and increasing the probability of a Republican sweep of the top two primary spots.

What Davis is really offering is the oldest of political medicines: personal vanity dressed up as principle. The candidates who are polling at 2 and 3 percent don’t believe they are Gray Davis circa 1998. They believe they deserve to be heard, deserve their moment, deserve the platform. And the Democratic Party, having spent years telling every constituency group that their voice is valid and their identity is irreplaceable, is now reaping exactly what it has sown. You cannot spend two decades building a coalition held together by the premise that everyone’s candidacy matters — and then be surprised when everyone’s candidacy matters more to them than the party’s survival.

What California Voters Actually Want

While the Democratic field debates debate formats and trades accusations of racial exclusion, the voters they are ostensibly courting have a rather different set of priorities. The economy is the top issue for 37 percent of California voters. Housing affordability ranks second at 22 percent. Gas, groceries, rent — the grinding material concerns of ordinary life in a state that has become extraordinarily expensive under decades of Democratic management. The debate about which candidates deserved a podium registers as, in the words of one political scientist, “almost absurd, given what’s facing us.”

This is the California that Democrats have actually built: a state where housing costs have made home ownership a fantasy for working families, where the homeless population camps visibly in the shadow of gleaming progressive institutions, where the cost of electricity is among the highest in the nation, and where the political class is consumed with the process of its own self-governance rather than the lived experience of those it governs. The party’s answer to public frustration is not substantive policy reform — it is a plea for candidates to exit a race so that the remaining Democrats can fight more effectively over who will continue the same policies.

The Republicans’ Unusual Moment

It is worth pausing to note what Republicans have actually accomplished to reach this moment. They have not had a statewide win in California since 2006. Republicans have not held statewide office since 2011. The road back to relevance in the nation’s most populous state has been long and largely discouraging. And yet polls show Hilton and Bianco remaining neck-and-neck at or near the top of the pack — not because Republicans have suddenly become wildly popular in California, but because the Democratic Party is doing the work for them.

California Republicans have an unusual shot of claiming an upset victory in the governor’s race this year — not through persuasion or coalition-building of their own, but through the fragmentation of a progressive movement that has never fully reconciled its competing factions. Every identity group, every ideological wing, every political generation of the California Democratic Party has its preferred candidate in this race. The result is not a coalition. It is a firing squad arranged in a circle.

The proper conservative response to this spectacle is not triumphalism — the November general election would remain an uphill climb for any Republican in California even if both advance. But it is entirely appropriate to note that this disorder is not an accident. It is the logical consequence of a political philosophy that has spent years elevating group identity over shared purpose, and process over results. When every voice must be centered, no voice leads. When every candidacy is valid, the ballot becomes chaos.

The Book of Proverbs observes that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — a wisdom that requires no theological commitment to appreciate. California’s Democrats have built the most powerful one-party apparatus in the American states. They are now discovering that power without discipline is not governance. It is just noise. And Gray Davis, the man who proved you can win a primary and still be thrown out by the people you were elected to serve, may be exactly the prophet this moment deserves.