Quote:
Originally Posted by AllTheCheese
I have vague feeling of deja vu, so sorry if I'm making anybody repeat themselves, but from the outsider's perspective, my thinking on it is this.
Let's consider a conservative D incumbent in CA. You have the top two primary. The odds of an incumbent coming in 3rd or worse are close to 0. It's hard enough for one person to draw more votes than an incumbent, let alone two.
Now the top two vote getters proceed to the general. If it's the conservative D incumbent and a Republican, the D incumbent wins by party identification and incumbency advantage. If it's the conservative D incumbent and a progressive challenger, then all the Republicans vote for the incumbent and he or she can win with only 40% of the D vote. It seems like the system naturally entrenches conservative D power.
Without addressing hypotheticals, we have examples in practice we can look at to see if that's what's playing out:
- Eric Swalwell (who I think gets enough press in this forum that most prob know who he is?) made it to Congress by defeating Pete Stark, a 20-term incumbent D, in the general election
- Ro Khanna made it to Congress in a similar way by defeating 8-term incumbent D Mike Honda