A long-simmering warning from within Democrat ranks about Californias top two primary system has finally erupted into open revolt, as one party strategist moves to dismantle the very mechanism that helped cement progressive dominance in the state.
According to RedState, Democrat strategist Steven Maviglio, who cautioned as early as April 2025 that his party could be completely shut out of the 2026 gubernatorial general election, has now filed a ballot initiative to repeal Californias top two primary. Maviglio fears a scenario in which voters are forced to choose between two Republicans for governor, admitting to the New York Times, The fear of having to vote for Steve Hilton or Chad Bianco sent a shiver up my spine.
For conservatives who have endured years of one-party rule in Sacramento, that shiver sounds more like poetic justice than a crisis. Many Republican and right-leaning voters remember being boxed out of meaningful choices long before Democrats discovered any problem with the system, facing U.S. Senate ballots in 2016 and 2018 that offered only Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein, Kevin de Leon, Kamala Harris, and Loretta Sanchez.
The top two primary, implemented in 2012 and sold as a reform to empower moderates and independents, has in practice entrenched Democrat power and marginalized conservative voices. While there have been a few rare contests featuring two Republicanssuch as the race between nowstate Sen. Tony Strickland and nowformer Rep. Steve Knightthe numbers tell the real story: 100 Democrat vs. Democrat state legislative races compared to just 26 Republican vs. Republican.
At the statewide level, the imbalance is even more glaring, with seven all-Democrat general election contests and not a single race in which two Republicans advanced. Now that the same rules that punished conservatives for over a decade might finally inconvenience Democrats, party leaders are suddenly decrying the system as unfair and undemocratic.
Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat, complained, This years gubernatorial primary has put the spotlight on the undemocratic top-two primary. The notion that Democrats could wake up to two Republicans on the November ballot, or that Republicans could have the choice of only two Democrats, is unfathomable.
Yet this supposedly unfathomable outcome is precisely what conservatives have been forced to accept for years, as statewide offices like Lieutenant Governor, Insurance Commissioner, and Superintendent of Public Instruction repeatedly featured only Democrats on the November ballot. The reform was championed not by the grassroots but by establishment figurestwo squishy Republicans, former Sen. Abel Maldonado and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with the California Chamber of Commercewho pushed it through via a 2010 ballot initiative that passed with 54 percent of the vote.
Ironically, labor unions, which once joined grassroots Republicans in opposing top two, now appear poised to back Maviglios repeal effort. California Federation of Labor Unions president Lorena Gonzalez acknowledged the risk to her own party, stating, Voters understood that a Democrat could get eliminated from even being in the top two. That has really opened up peoples eyes to what could happen.
What is changing in California is not principle but political self-interest, as Democrats scramble to fix a system they were happy to exploit while it locked out Republicans and conservative voters. If Maviglios initiative succeeds, it will not be because the left suddenly discovered a love of genuine voter choice, but because the same rules they imposed on others now threaten their own grip on power in President Trumps second term, when voters are increasingly skeptical of one-party rule and progressive overreach.
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