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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

California's Top-Two Primary: Where are the same-party runoffs?

The results of California's top-two primary election are in. As I mentioned the other day, the rules of this primary created the possibility for the runoff candidates to be of the same political party. That ended up happening in six eight Congressional races, 13 18 Assembly races, and one two state Senate races. My guess was that these same-party runoffs would predominately occur in the more polarized districts, where you have either lots of Democrats or lots of Republicans. What actually happened?

Below is a histogram showing the Democratic share of two-party voter registration in all 173 Congressional, Assembly, and state Senate races. The large greenish distribution shows all the districts. The red distribution shows just the districts in which Republicans will face each other in a runoff, and the blue shows the districts where Democrats will face other Democrats.

The not-terribly-surprising result is that the same-party runoffs are concentrated in the more ideologically extreme districts. All the Democrat-on-Democrat contests will take place in districts where Democrats make up at least 64% of major party registrants. Conversely, with the exception of the CD31 contest in San Bernardino County, the Republican-on-Republican contests are happening in districts where Democrats represent 44% of major party registrants or less. The more moderate districts (yes, California has lots of those!) will feature both a Republican and a Democrat this November.

It is notable that only four eight of the 20 28 same-party contests will feature Republicans, and all of them are in the Assembly. I don't know if this means that the GOP was more effective in concentrating support around a party favorite, if they had fewer high quality candidates running, or if it was just a coincidence. But I hope to have more on this in the near future.

Update: Alert reader Eric McGhee noticed some missing cases that weren't mentioned in the Sacramento Bee article above, so I've updated the graph and post with the new information.

2 comments:

  1. For comparison's sake, you might also include the eight unopposed Democrats as well as the four Democrats and one Republicans who are facing No Preference candidates in November.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If the Republicans only vote Republican, and the Democrat on Democrat, how does one become President if only 2 parties vote?

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    ReplyDelete

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