by Jerry Cayford

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project was a large-scale, eight-year investigation of the causes of America’s poor recovery from the Great Recession. Its final report, A Recovery Squandered: The State of U.S. Competitiveness 2019, looks at many factors that combine to determine the health of a society and its economy. The finding that connects their project to California’s primary is this: “the most important reason the United States has made so little progress during the long expansion [is]: deep dysfunction in our political system” (17).

California’s nonpartisan top-two primary system is a reform-that-is-really-half-a-reform of American states’ usual dysfunctional system. In top-two voting, all candidates compete in a single, nonpartisan primary, and only the top two qualify for the general election. This half-reform avoids giving voters a realistic choice outside the top two parties and, as we will see in the HBS report, thereby preserves the dysfunction of our politics. The full reform needed is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections” (26), in which the top five candidates advance from the nonpartisan primary, and voters then choose among them in the general election by ranked choice (aka instant runoff voting). One of the HBS report’s authors, Katherine Gehl, expands on this reform in a 2023 article, “The Case for the Five in Final Five Voting.” Read more »