This part by itself is laughably naïve. Why would any candidate who wants to run agree to not run? Would this conference have been open to the public and press?
Also, please note that in April the leading D candidate dropped out due to scandal, thus leaving the race wide open, and at that point Becerra was 4th among D candidates.
This is a non-solution in search of a problem. The complaint was that now Dems have to vote for a strategic candidate instead of one they want. How is that made anything but worse by a backroom deal like you are proposing?
Again, I’m not proposing a “backroom deal.” People seem to be reacting as if I am suggesting that the candidates all get together and agree who will be the nominee. That’s ridiculous, and not at all what I am suggesting.
I don’t see why people wouldn’t agree that, if the math is clear that they will ALL lose, that they pivot, and at least have a plan for how to do that depending on the emergent circumstances: something like, if there is a 50% or greater chance that there are two Republicans in the top two (including margin of error), anyone polling below 5% will drop out and endorse someone polling above 10%. Apparently, this is silly and impossible, so I give up.
I’m not sure why you’re getting so much push-back on this. If it’s strictly by numbers—using some average of polls that all candidates agree are credible—then it’s merely a matter of ‘when this benchmark is reached, this is what we do.’
Some of the lower-polling candidates might grumble. But how could they defend failing to keep the ballot from being ‘all-Republicans’?
It’s not as though impossible-to-agree standards are being posited. It’s not as if anyone would be saying anything fuzzy and amorphous like ‘if you know you can’t win then you must drop out’—instead, they’d be acting based on hard, cold numbers (to which they’d agreed in advance).
The thing is, they all believe they can win. That’s why they got into the race in the first place. Yes, that means some of them are delusional, but that’s par for the course for politicians.
It appears that more people are making their final decisions in the race. Bianco, Porter and Mahan have all been going down in the polls over the past week, and Hilton, Becerra and Steyer have continued to rise. The difference between Becerra and Steyer is now 3.6 points; Becerra is virtually tied with Hilton. 5 days until the end of the primary.
The final day before the election, Becerra has jumped ahead of Hilton. Steyer is still growing as well, but remains 1.9% to 2.6% behind Hilton. Not conclusive, of course, as these are all well within the margins of error.
According to one of the polling sources, Steyer has outspent the nearest spending candidate (Mahan) by a factor of 12. For that reason alone, I hope he doesn’t make it into the general election.
p.s. I won’t be watching results on TV, I never do, I prefer to wake up Wednesday morning to a complete surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.
Well, only 57% of votes cast, but that is the way the numbers are running. It is quite possible that Becerra will have more votes than Hilton in the end of the primary count.
Which order the top two are in doesn’t really matter, though, because either way, those two are the general-election candidates, and in California, any Democrat will beat any Republican.
What would matter is who’s in second versus third, especially if it ended up with the two Democrats in the top two slots. The current numbers make that look unlikely, but I also know that there’s reason to expect earlier returns to not be representative of the full count.