Press release from the Humboldt County Office of Education:

Crystal Fennell, a 6th – 8th grade English Language Arts teacher at Stanwood A. Murphy Elementary School in the Scotia Union School District, has been named the 2026-27 Humboldt County Teacher of the Year by the Humboldt County Superintendent of Schools, Michael Davies-Hughes.

”Crystal Fennell shows what great teaching looks like,” said Davies-Hughes. “She builds strong connections with students, creates a classroom where students feel they belong, and uses stories and community to help them learn. She cares deeply about her students and helps them grow every day. She is a wonderful choice for Humboldt County Teacher of the Year.”

Fennell, who has been teaching thirteen years, was one of five educators honored by the Humboldt County Office of Education with the Excellence in Teaching Award in May. The Excellence in Teaching Award recognizes classroom teachers from Transitional Kindergarten through 12th grade who have been identified as exemplary by their colleagues, students or school communities. Honorees must have a minimum of five years teaching experience.

“I grew up believing in the power of relationships, storytelling, and community, and those values continue to guide my work in the classroom,” said Fennell. “Receiving Teacher of the Year is an incredible honor, and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from and grow with my students every day.”

Amy Gossien, Superintendent/Principal of Scotia School District, was thrilled to see Fennell honored with the award.

“What truly sets Crystal apart is her genuine passion for teaching and learning,” Gossien said. “She approaches her work with enthusiasm, creativity, and a genuine desire to make a positive impact on the lives of her students. Crystal goes beyond merely imparting knowledge; she instills a love of learning that extends far beyond the classroom.”

As the Humboldt County Teacher of the Year, Fennell now has the opportunity to be considered for the California State Teacher of the Year, traditionally announced in October.

For more information regarding awards programs visit www.hcoe.org/awards

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Facebook post from Caltrans District 1:

HEADS UP, RIO DELL: Starting Monday morning (6/8), crews plan to begin shifting U.S. 101 northbound traffic over to the southbound Eel River Bridge as part of the Eel River Bridge Seismic Retrofit Project. CHP will be present, so please slow down for the safety of our contractors and crews.

This project has progressed over the years as the northbound bridge in Rio Dell was identified as having seismic vulnerabilities. The project includes seismic retrofit work, replacing portions of the bridge structure, and improving the bridge approach so this key North Coast connection is better prepared for the long haul.

Travelers should expect lane closures and slowdowns in the area while traffic is shifted and crews continue work. Construction is anticipated to continue in phases through 2030, so thanks for slowing down, staying alert, and giving crews room to work safely.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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When is a minimum wage hike of more than $11 per hour actually a pay cut?

That question has dominated the debate over a current California housing bill that has riven the state’s two most powerful construction worker unions and many state legislative Democrats reluctant to get on the wrong side of either group.

Assembly Bill 1751, authored by Fullerton Democrat Sharon Quirk-Silva, would kick aside regulatory barriers to building townhouses — tightly clustered, multistory homes. In exchange for this fast-tracked approval process, townhouse developers would be required to pay their workers at least $28 per hour.

That’s a significant pay bump over the statewide minimum wage of $16.90.

But the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from what might seem like an unexpected source: The State Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization that represents electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers and other skilled construction trade unions.

The trades — as the council is colloquially known — argue that the new wage floor could have the paradoxical side-effect of driving down the “prevailing wages” enjoyed by many of their members. Prevailing wages are mandatory minimum pay rates for publicly-funded or supported construction projects, which include many affordable housing developments and other projects propelled forward by recent state law in California. State and federal regulators set prevailing rates based on surveys of the most common wages in each field and geographic area. Because union pay scales can cover hundreds of similarly employed workers, those union-level wages often set the prevailing wage.

In a testy debate on the Assembly floor earlier this month, Quirk-Silva stressed — repeatedly — that the bill would in no way affect the state-set wage rates.

“It does not replace prevailing wage,” she said. “It does not undercut prevailing wage. This bill leaves prevailing wage exactly where it stands in current law.”

The trades aren’t buying it, noting that the federal government sets its own rates for federally-supported projects. But the group’s bigger beef may boil down to precedent.

For years, the building trades have battled any legislation aimed at easing regulations on the construction of new housing unless it also included pro-union guarantees. Those are either union-level prevailing wage pay requirements or, in more recent years, even more restrictive “skilled and trained” rules that require developers to hire apprenticeship program graduates, the vast majority of whom are union members.

Quirk-Silva’s townhouse streamlining bill introduces a new standard: a minimum wage far lower than what most trades members already make.

Making a meager minimum wage hike the new bone that pro-housing bills throw to construction workers would “signify the new norm,” said Chris Hannan, president of the Trades Council. “When you start a trend of doing a minimum wage, then that becomes the new go-to.”

The trades and carpenters, at it again

Standing on the other side of the debate, supporting the new wage standard, are California’s unionized carpenters.

The trades battling the carpenters is a familiar face-off in Sacramento. This isn’t even the first time the groups have publicly locked horns over this specific wage proposal.

Last summer, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and longtime ally of the carpenters, inserted residential construction worker minimum wage of between $28 and $40 per hour into a budget bill in the final hours of the fiscal year. Aside from high-rise construction developments where the use of steel and concrete tend to draw more specialized workers, unions represent relatively few laborers who build California homes, the carpenters argued at the time. The new wage standard would be a modest corrective for those non-union laborers whose current wage floor is the state minimum wage.

For years, carpenters union leaders have argued that improving working standards for low-wage workers presents an “organizing opportunity” for the union.

The trades were apoplectic. Dozens of union members crowded in the budget bill hearing to decry what they saw as an anti-union reversal of state labor policy. One representative likened the measure to “Jim Crow” laws. Many labor-friendly Democrats on the committee recoiled; the proposal was shelved.

This year, the idea has been given a bit more time for debate, though the trades and some lawmakers have still complained of a process they see as rushed.

When Quirk-Silva’s bill was introduced in early February, it focused solely on townhouse regulations. The wage language was added only in time for its second committee hearing in late April. (Quirk-Silva’s staff declined to make her available for an interview to explain that delay or discuss the bill in general, citing personal family matters. On the Assembly floor, she explained the late addition in part by noting “severe health issues” among staff and family members.)

Since then the entirety of the legislative debate has been focused on the wage issue.

That itself is a notable development: The bill exempts the construction of townhomes from both environmental review and the jurisdiction of elected local city councils and planning boards. Just a few years ago, such a proposal would have made for a capitol-shaking, headline-grabbing fight. But a year after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law exempting most urban housing developments from environmental litigation, the land-use implications appear to be an afterthought.

At an Assembly floor vote last month, San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward referred to the minimum wage issue as the “900 pound gorilla.” He, like many Democrats who spoke on the bill, said that he supported the legislation in general, but that he remained wary of the “unresolved” questions about how the new wage rate would affect existing labor standards.

The bill needed 41 out of 80 “yes” votes to move onto the Senate. It passed with just 47.

Hike or pay cut?

Quirk-Silva’s office tried to get around the prevailing wage fight early on.

Prevailing wages are required of publicly funded works, including many affordable housing projects. They are set by the California Department of Industrial Relations, which sets its rates based on the most common wage for each job type in each region of the state.

Quirk-Silva’s bill specifically bars the state department from taking the new $28 per hour townhome wages into account when running those calculations, lest a glut of townhome builders inadvertently bring down the wages owed to union roofers and plumbers.

The trades aren’t satisfied with that concession. That’s because the federal government conducts its own wage surveys and set its own prevailing wage for federally-funded infrastructure projects.

The current federal prevailing wage required for a residential roofer in Sacramento, for example, is $46.73 per hour plus benefits. That number is based on the most common wage paid for that job in the area or — if no single rate is paid to at least 30% of the workers in the survey — on the regional average.

“The federal government won’t give a rat’s ass about what this bill says,” Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for Trades-affiliated unions, said at the bill’s April hearing. “And they will set the prevailing wage rate for all the crafts at $28.”

The trades “have a case” in this argument, said Kevin Duncan, an economist at Colorado State University Pueblo who has studied prevailing wage policy’s effect on construction costs. Imagine a smaller market with a relatively low unionization rate. If the bill uncorked a geyser of contractors paying all their low-wage workers exactly $28 per hour, “that would be the prevailing rate — and with zero benefits,” he said.

Backers of the bill dispute that, saying such a specific outcome is unlikely given how many contractors are likely to use this specific townhouse bill. They also argue that vanishingly few residential roofers do federal public works jobs in Sacramento — or anywhere in California — so changes in the federal prevailing wage for residential projects aren’t likely to affect many workers anyway. Instead, most roofers are non-union on privately-funded projects and many are being paid less than $28 per hour, said Danny Curtin, director of the California Council of Carpenters.

To say that raising those wages “will actually bring everybody else’s wages down, defies comprehension,” he said at the hearing.

PREVIOUSLY:

• ELECTION NIGHT FINAL: Despite a (Probably) Large Number of Votes Left to Count, Mary Burke and Audrey Hanks are Certain Shoo-Ins 

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Press release from the Humboldt County Elections Office:

Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes and the Humboldt County Office of Elections is committed to keeping voters informed about ballot processing and election results reporting for the June 2, 2026 Statewide Direct Primary Election and is providing the following update:

There are 84,944 registered voters in Humboldt County who were mailed ballots for the election on June 2. Out of these ballots, as of midday on Thursday, June 4, the Elections Office has received and processed 19,370 ballots and has approximately 21,151 ballots left to process.

Ballot Type	Number of Unprocessed Ballots
Provisional	286
Vote-By-Mail	20,823
Ballots from Voting Locations	42

Election Results Reporting

Election results updates will be released twice a week, beginning Friday, June 5 at 5 p.m. Additional updates are anticipated to be released around 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday each week until the election is certified.

The election’s canvass period began Thursday, June 4, and provides a 30-day window after Election Day to ensure all legal votes are counted accurately. During this time, the Elections Office verifies voter eligibility, confirms mail-in ballot signatures, processes provisional and conditional ballots and conducts the manual tally of one percent of all precincts.

All valid vote-by-mail ballots will be counted regardless of the outcome or closeness of any race if they are postmarked by Tuesday, June 2 and arrive by Tuesday, June 9.

For more information on ballot processing or election results reporting, please contact the Humboldt County Office of Elections at 707-445-7481 or email humboldt_elections@co.humboldt.ca.us.

About the Humboldt County Office of Elections

The Humboldt County Office of Elections is dedicated to conducting fair, accurate and transparent elections, ensuring the voice of the community is heard and that electoral integrity is maintained. The Elections Office is committed to upholding the democratic process, providing reliable information and maintaining an open line of communication with the public. For more information, visit humboldtgov.org/elections.

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No one with even a passing familiarity with the work of Duane Flatmo would be surprised by the curiosities strewn around the Eureka home he shares with his fellow-artist wife, Micki Dyson Flatmo.

Over here: a pair of shrunken heads hanging from a length of twine. In the living room: a coffee table assembled from loose bolts, old can openers and other scrap metal. Perched on a cluttered shelf: three technicolor head sculptures sprouting haphazard eyeballs, noses, ears and teeth. 

The centerpiece on the dining room table is a crank-operated miniature of El Pulpo Mecanico, the giant, fire-spewing, steampunk kinetic octopus that, with its successor, El Pulpo Magnifico, became a sensation at the annual Burning Man festival. A star in its own right, El Pulpo has appeared on “The Simpsons” and late night TV and been tattooed into the flesh of multiple fans.

On Monday, Flatmo offered the Outpost a tour of his home before sitting down for a long conversation about his life, his art and the upcoming celebration of his nearly 50 years of contributions to the Humboldt County community. The June 13 party, which will be held beneath his own massive mural on the Arkley Center for the Performing Arts, will double as the official dedication of Duane Flatmo Alley, which the Eureka City Council unanimously agreed to rename in his honor.

In the tiny backyard shed that served as Flatmo’s former art studio — the space where he created countless posters and logos for the likes of Lost Coast Brewery, FoxFarm Soils and KHSU — he picked up a few old canvases and described his technique for using meticulously hand-cut stencils and an airbrush to create his distinctive cartoon-Cubist paintings.

In his current art studio, inside the house, Flatmo fingered through a tangle of custom medals hanging from a hook. The awards were bestowed upon him during his many years of participation in Humboldt County’s Kinetic Sculpture Race (aka the Kinetic Grand Championship). Many of the medals were crafted by that event’s “glorious” founder, the late sculptor Hobart Brown. 

Flatmo has recently begun looking at such things from a new vantage point, wondering what will become of it after he’s gone.

“You start looking at this stuff and you go, ‘What’s gonna happen to all that stuff?’” he said. “It’s weird. You collect all these things. Every year at Burning Man I have a box full of stuff that people gave me which I thought was really unique, and now it’s just sitting there in a box. It’s like photos; where are they all gonna go when you’re — .” 

He left the question unfinished. “That’s the way I’ve been thinking lately.” 

Flatmo is dealing with what he describes as “disturbing health issues,” preferring not to linger on the details or the prognosis. Four years ago he underwent a liver transplant. Now, that new organ has been compromised and will likely get the better of him.

Temperamentally, though, Flatmo remains the upbeat goofball so many people love. He lights up recalling his various adventures, like the time in 2004 when he, Micki and some friends took monster art trucks to China. His gap-toothed grin flashed as he played a live track from his rock band Spudgun, which performed at bars, parties and the Redwood Run motorcycle rally back in the day, opening for the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Company and 38 Special.

When the tour of his home was complete, we sat down for the actual interview. Flatmo, dressed in his casual outfit of a hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and cadet cap, leaned back in a cushy armchair. As he talked, the light from his sun-drenched backyard danced across the lenses of his horn rimmed glasses.

Young Duane.

Born in Santa Monica in 1957, Flatmo and his three siblings (one older brother plus a younger brother and sister) later moved to Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County, where a high school art teacher, John O’Hare, channeled his burgeoning art skills into practical applications such as lettering for sign-making. 

“He told me you can go to any town and just start looking for old signs that need to be repainted, [say], ‘I’ll paint that for five hundred bucks’ and get some quick cash in your pocket,” Flatmo recalled.

When he moved to Humboldt County in 1977, it struck him as “a place you can get away with things,” like erecting a wooden plane sculpture in the mudflats of Humboldt Bay. 

An early indication of Flatmo’s impish sense of humor: He built the plane nose-down, as if it had crashed after takeoff from the nearby Murray Field Airport. Soon after it was installed, the sculpture was torn apart by angry pilots, who viewed it as bad luck, according to a 2006 story in the North Coast Journal.

Periodically during the interview, Flatmo got reflective.

“All my life I’ve told my mom, ‘Mom, I’m just here temporarily.’ I feel like I’ve been allowed to be here, and all I want to do is the right thing and the good things, and do things that leave the place better after you leave, you know? I always wanted to do that. And she always wanted me to have kids.”

He never did. Not biologically, anyway. But for a dozen years, Flatmo mentored young artists through the Rural Burl Mural Bureau, the celebrated community art program that pairs professional artists with local youth (ages 14 to 24) to design and paint large-scale public murals. He thumbed through a stack of photos from the ‘90s showing him with his teenage charges, splattered with paint, as they work on various murals.

As he flipped through the stack of photos, he recalled students’ names and details from their lives — the big guy whose dad was abusing him at home; the kid who smeared acrylic paint into the spikes of his mohawk; the teens who introduced him to the music of Beck and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Several of the murals Flatmo and his students created, like the trio of alley dogs on F Street between Fourth and Fifth (pictured in progress above), can still be spotted around Eureka. Others, including a huge work on what’s now the George Petersen Insurance building that showed local community members helping each other after a large earthquake, have been covered up. 

“And this faded,” Flatmo said looking at another photo. “Nobody keeps these up; they’ve gotta keep up these murals.”

Eureka now has more than 50 large-scale murals, with more being created every year through the Eureka Street Art Festival and other initiatives. But Flatmo said that when he first got to town, there were only two: wavy imagery by artist Randy Spicer on a local waterbed store and the big sperm whale mother and calf on A Street at Fourth.

While working at Sears (first in draperies, then hardware and eventually the display department), Flatmo took an art class at College of the Redwoods that taught him a lot about cartooning and graphics. He was doing sign-making work on the side, and his big breakthrough came when the owners of Bucksport Sporting Goods hired him to redo the lettering on the building. They asked if he also did murals.

“I had learned them in high school — how to do grids — and I go, ‘Oh yeah, I could do that,” Flatmo recalled. “And so that was my first job.”

Painted in 1984, the Buskport mural is based on an L.W. Duke painting of 19th century frontiersmen. (Flatmo later added a man standing off to the side, looking up at the mural, with his shadow creating the optical illusion of three dimensions.) Los Bagels owner Dennis Rael drove past while Flatmo was painting it and asked him to create the multicultural panorama that still adorns the wall across from his Arcata bagel shop. Next came the old-timey service station scene on Finnegan & Nason Auto Supply in Henderson Center. 

“So they slowly started snowballing,” Flatmo said. 

As for the inspiration behind his kinetic sculptures — from the googly-eyed crustacean The Crawdudes to the 11-eyeballed mutant Extreme Makeover to flame-throwing metallic beasts such as Tin Pan Dragon and El Pulpo — Flatmo traces his inspiration to a few different sources. There was Mad magazine (particularly the work of cartoonist Jack Davis) as well as Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist/inventor known for drawing elaborate chain-reaction contraptions. Also: the Southern California amusement parks he visited as a kid. 

Captivated by the double-corkscrew roller coaster that debuted at Knott’s Berry Farm in 1975, young Flatmo went home and, with the help of some friends, built his own Rube Goldberg machine from materials in his parents’ garage: a wheelbarrow, shovels, bowling balls, etc.

In high school he built more kinetic displays, including one in which a marble rolled down a track and triggered a mechanism that lifted a little soldier by the noose around his neck while making a Nazi officer’s arm rise in salute.

“My mom and dad were a little embarrassed I think,” Flatmo recalled with a chuckle, “because there were demons and clowns and weird shit all through this thing. But they were intricate things. They were not the kind of obvious thing where it goes there, there and then the scoop picks it up. They were scenes that were happening.”

As a youngster, he also carved wood with a pocket knife. Flatmo hopped out of his armchair and walked into his studio to show a couple of examples. He held up a handrail knob with a crudely carved frowny face, red lips and hair of purple yarn. He also pointed out a wooden spoon with a stack of human heads carved into the handle.

Other items in his studio quickly grabbed his attention: the Duane bobblehead created by local artist Kati Texas; the signed illustration of El Pulpo by Simpsons animator David Silverman (a regular Burning Man attendee); a framed Mickey Rat drawn for him personally by cartoonist Robert Armstrong, whom Flatmo met via R. Crumb.

Flatmo met Micki in the late ’70s. She was designing advertising and window displays for Bistrins department stores, and one day she walked into Promotional Arts, the t-shirt company where Flatmo worked on silk-screening, painting and shirt designs. 

“You know when you see someone and you’re like, ‘Oh, my god, I want to know that person! Look at that smiling face!’” Flatmo said. “She looked great, and she wanted some signs printed.”

The two were both married to other people at the time, but they wound up working together. About six months after each of their marriages eventually fell apart, they met up with each other in Old Town Eureka.

“We got some roller skates. She met me down there. We skated all around; it was brand new asphalt,” Flatmo recalled. “And we started seeing each other.”

They shared their first kiss on a bridge near the present-day Hikshari Trail after a wave had extinguished their beach bonfire. More than four decades later, the couple regularly attends Burning Man together and, at home, they’re avid fans of the TV reality show “Survivor.”

Back in the living room, Flatmo’s thoughts returned to the student artists he mentored through the Rural Burl Mural Bureau. Over the 12 years that he taught, he figures he worked with 80 to 100 kids. 

“That’s the other thing about what I’ve been thinking about lately, too, is you want to do everything to help the next generation go forward,” Flatmo said.

That appears to be a goal he’s already achieved. He received a Father’s Day card one year from a group of former students, and he recalled another one telling him that he’d been a better dad to him than his own father. Another former student, Lucas Thornton, has become an accomplished muralist in his own right. 

Flatmo believes that creating public art can be transformative for young people. 

“You see the kids out painting now in a group project, and everybody that comes up and gives them a good thumbs up, it just lifts their spirits and they feel like they can take on the world,” he said. “Some people don’t get that all through their life.”

Flatmo’s artwork has transformed Humboldt County, not just through the murals you see every time you go to Pierson’s Building Center, the Arkley Center, the Eureka Co-Op and so many other spots. The playfully anarchic character of his creations has been entwined with the community’s own identity. His influence can be felt at every Kinetic Sculpture weekend, seen at each new street art festival and found on product labels in every local grocery store.

Some people, in the later stages of life, might feel pride or even arrogance at such achievements. Flatmo expressed only gratitude.

“One of the things I think about is how lucky I’ve been,” he said. “I started off at Sears doing butcher paper signs for grocery stores, you know, ‘Hamburger 59 cents a pound,’ and you keep building and building and building. I’ve been blessed so much, the way my life’s worked, that I can’t complain about anything. So at the end, you can really be bitter and sad or you can just … I’m just trying to be my normal self as long as I can and stay upbeat and do the right stuff, you know, do the right thing.” 

A couple minutes later, he stood up and walked back into his studio, where he fired up his computer and searched through files until he found a playlist of old live Spudgun tracks. He clicked on one and pressed play on a jaunty rockabilly tune with a walking bass line and jangly electric guitar. 

“That’s me singing,” he said as the vocals came in, a lyric that mentions going back home, getting out of the city and seeing his pretty. “I wrote this coming back to Humboldt,” he said. 

He leaned way back in his chair, nodded his head to the beat for a few bars and smiled. As the harmonica solo kicked in, Flatmo said, “We loved getting people dancing. We were a dance band.”

If you’d like to dance with Duane Flatmo and his 30-foot-tall, flame-throwing mecha-octopus, then clear your calendar for the evening of Saturday, June 13, from 7 to 10 p.m. The “Duane Flatmo Alley” street sign dedication will be a public celebration, complete with food trucks, music and face-warming geysers of tentacle flame.

Flatmo called earlier today to make sure this story plugs the event. “If you’ve never seen El Pulpo fire off, this is a good time to come out and see it,” he said.

More info below:

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CORRECTION: This post was modified to correct a couple of photo captions that had misidentified locations. The Outpost regrets the errors.

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For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election.

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost two-to-one, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two.

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair.

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks during an event at the Sutter Club hosted by the Sacramento Press Club on Nov. 17, 2023. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November.

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans.

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule.

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There may be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top.

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November.

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on “things not related to governance,” like gender or race.

In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election.

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing may be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa.

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge.

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

‘In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen.’
— Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College

With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair.

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries.

“The fact that there are any (same-party general elections) is simply undemocratic,” Maviglio said. “People have the choice between only one party, like they’re in the Soviet Union?”

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive.

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don’t have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting.

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member.

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project launched a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It’s very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we’ve seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

###

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

Post from the Sequoia Park Zoo Facebook page:

“Bamboo, plz!” | Photo: Sequoia Park Zoo

Local friends, do you have bamboo growing in your garden?  

You might be able to donate it to feed Saffron and the Zoo’s other leaf-loving animal friends!

Bamboo donations must be:
 Organic!
 Freshly-cut!
 Three feet in length (or more) with leaves!

Bamboo donors must check in at the Zoo ticket booth upon arrival. New donors will be asked to complete a donation form. Bamboo is accepted at the discretion of Zoo staff, Tuesday-Sunday from 10am-3pm.

Questions? Contact zooinfo@eurekaca.gov or call (707) 441-4229.

 Fun Fact: Sequoia Park Zoo cares for over 100 bamboo plants on-grounds! Because red pandas can eat several pounds of bamboo every day, having supplemental community donations gives our plants time to replenish, increases the variety of bamboo species available to our animals, and offers guests an innovative way to “recycle” green waste.