About That HUGE Shift in California

spoiler alert: it's kind of not

A Democratic state senator in California just switched parties, turned into a Republican, and said that the Democratic Party has become too radical for her and she doesn’t recognize it anymore. This, the newspapers say, could be a big deal — a sign that the state as a whole is moving right.

Sample analysis from that piece, calling the change a “significant party moment” and talking about the ways it might “rewrite” the state’s future:

“This is a significant moment that neither party should dismiss,” said Mike Madrid, a Sacramento-based political consultant and the author of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming America.” (I helped edit and write Madrid’s book).

“Democrats are losing working-class voters and Republicans can use to rewrite a better future,” Madrid said. “We’ll see which party is listening.”

The party switch also landed Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil on Fox News, where the discussion about the “gutsy move” was again about ideological alignment — California shifting rightward.

At best, this is a maybe. It’s true that Alvarado-Gil is an outlier in California’s batshit crazy Democratic Party, a moderate in a state that doesn’t have many. She has a 100% rating from the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which verges on being downright bizarre for a Democratic legislator, and a 0% rating from the Sierra Club.

Alvarado-Gil has been carefully absent during votes on the most nakedly insane anti-family legislation from the Scott Wiener-Corey Jackson sexy-12-year-olds wing of her party. That “wing” is about 95% of the party in California, but it’s noteworthy that she’s not a part of it. Here she is skipping AB 665, the much-derided “kidnapping bill” that allows the state to send children to residential care facilities for alleged mental health support without parental consent; here she is being absent for AB 1955, the pedo-friendly bill forcing schools to keep sexual discussions with children a secret from parents. But she didn’t vote against those bills, which would be meaningful.

Remarkably, she did actually stand up and vote no against dimwitted Assemblyman Corey Jackson’s repellent AB 1078, a guarantee that children in K-12 schools will have access to sexually explicit curricular material. Democrats were really proud of that one, because book bans that keep eight year-olds from learning about the hotness of anal sex are very backward and repressive. We’re not going back!

However much Senator Alvarado-Gil’s party shift means that the Democratic Party has moved too far left for her, though, here’s the piece of information that puts her move in its proper context. California has open primaries, rather than party primaries, for state offices. So the top two vote-getters run in the general election, and we have general elections that are blue-on-blue and red-on-red. Alvarado-Gil beat a Democrat to win her seat two years ago, but only because the California GOP is breathtakingly stupid and inept. Look at the primary election results from 2022 — and weep:

A Democrat won SD-4 because, in an open primary, two Democrats split 40% of the vote, and six — SIX! — Republicans split 60% of the vote, sending two Democrats to the general election as the top vote-getters. This is the district, before and after the 2020 redistricting (from Ballotpedia, already linked above):

That old district — brushing against deep blue Sacramento, running up through the college town of Chico, and including a bunch of fairly red rural areas and the hella-red town of Red Bluff — was reddish-purple, while the new and distinctly rural SD-4 also runs up against Merced, a college town, and…well, this will sound familiar, but it’s pretty red, bleeding to reddish-purple. It’s odd and disturbing that highly rural Inyo and Mono counties are trending blue, but that’s a story for another time.

So a Democratic state senator is looking down the road to 2026, when she has to hold her seat, in a district that’s probably destined to hover at a little over 60% Republican, having won 18.7% of the primary vote in the election cycle that brought her to office. It’s a seat that a Democrat shouldn’t ever win, so the Democratic incumbent is going to run for re-election as a “Republican.”

Which means that the ideological shift is almost certainly being overrated, and practical political maneuvers are driving the bus. If California ever sees a blue-to-red shift, this won’t be the place where the start of the change will be clear.