bizarre

Could California's Proposition 13 undermine the Democrats' chances to retake the US House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections? Let's hope not, but it's possible.

The polls have closed in California, and the outcome is not yet certain, but the state's "jungle primary" could mean voters in some swing Congressional districts have no Democrats on their ballots in November. So why do we even have a jungle primary in California?

Bizarrely, we can thank Prop 13. Yes, that voter-approved initiative, which famously froze property taxes and likely has a role in the state's current housing affordability crisis, also required a two-thirds vote to approve any state budget that increased taxes.

Flash back to the summer of 2009: Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor. The economy was in free-fall. Barack Obama was just sworn into office months ago, but the stimulus was only getting underway. California's state budget was swimming in red ink, forcing some difficult choices in cutting spending and increasing taxes. And State lawmakers were in safely-gerrymandered seats, offering little incentive to break with party ranks (the state's redistricting laws had only just been changed to eliminate gerrymandering by the legislature, and those impacts were not yet felt).

Enter State Senator Abel Maldonado. In the State Senate, Democrats needed a single GOP vote to pass the budget bill to cross the Prop 13-mandated two-thirds threshold. Maldonado was from a rare evenly-partisan district, and his over-riding concern was being able to emerge relatively unscathed from the primary in order to win in a general election. So, in order to provide his vote for the budget bill, he asked for one thing: a Statewide ballot measure to create a "jungle primary" system.

In exchange for Senator Maldonado's vote on the budget, Democrats did agree to put a ballot measure before the voters in the following fall 2010 election. That measure, Prop 14, passed 53-47. And, thus, the jungle primary was born.

So, if Democrats fail to break into the top two tonight in any of the Republican-held Congressional seats in California House Districts won in 2016 by Hillary Clinton, we can all thank Prop 13, Senator Maldonado, and a State legislature desperate to pass a single year's budget nine years ago.