A gubernatorial debate set to be hosted on Tuesday, March 24, by the University of Southern California was canceled less than 24 hours beforehand over a dispute regarding the qualifying criteria for candidates. With current California Gov. Gavin Newsom term-limited, a crowded race to succeed him has emerged, featuring over 60 declared candidates ahead of the June 2 primary.
The qualifying formula, developed by USC political science Professor Christian Grose, combined polling and fundraising data while also taking into consideration the length of time a candidate had been in the race. Having been put together without any knowledge of the candidates it would encompass, Grose handed over the formula to USC to be applied. Consequently, two of the leading Republican candidates and four of the eight most prominent Democratic candidates qualified to face off on Tuesday night. Yet, just a few days prior to the highly anticipated event, the four non-qualifying Democratic candidates began to publicly denounce the debate and its formula, calling on the six participants to withdraw. The reason behind their dissatisfaction: those six participants are all white and the excluded four are all people of color.
Betty Yee, a former state controller who did not qualify for the debate, said, “We are a minority-majority state, and the idea that the four candidates of color are not going to be on the stage to bring those perspectives, to really speak to those communities, is really not doing right by the voters.” Yee has consistently polled at no more than two percent according to a handful of the most recent polls.
Xavier Becerra, former state Attorney General and another non-qualifier, compared the debate to “the days when he [his father] would encounter signs posted outside establishments that read ‘No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans Allowed’” in a letter to USC President Beong-Soon Kim. Becerra has sat in the range of three to five percent in recent polls.
Hours before the debate’s cancellation, Democratic state legislative leaders wrote a letter to USC demanding all ten candidates be included in the debate. However, because USC was unable to reach an agreement with its co-sponsor, KABC-TV Los Angeles, it was forced to cancel the debate, a decision that undoubtedly harmed California voters more than anyone else.
The whole debacle is just another instance of identity politics triumphing over meritocracy, as objective facts were dismissed for being inconvenient to certain candidates. Grose crafted the formula “without knowing who would benefit and who would not,” and then gave the results to the organizers to decide whom to include. Yet, despite this fact, cries of discrimination still managed to emerge among the critics.
On top of that, the day before the planned debate, dozens of professors from USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, and many more elite academic institutions signed onto a letter defending Grose’s formula, claiming that “The controversy does not arise from a flawed method. It arises because a defensible, objective method produced results that certain candidates and campaigns do not prefer.”
In reality, the six qualifying candidates’ white race had nothing to do with their inclusion in the debate and everything to do with California voters expressing their support for those candidates through polls and financial donations. As is public knowledge, the four excluded candidates have not managed to garner significant traction with their campaigns based on widely accepted metrics. That alone is why they were not invited to participate.
However, this move by certain Democrats is not anything new. Their efforts to promote equality can, at times, lead to differing standards or expectations for racial and ethnic minorities, while criticism is countered with accusations of prejudice or bias. Take the contentious debate over voter-ID laws, for example. The SAVE America Act is intended to safeguard our elections and ensure that only United States citizens are voting, and not aliens. However, despite the bill being completely race-neutral and favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans, Democrats in D.C. have repeatedly invoked claims of racism to shut down debates over the topic. Two months ago on MS Now, in response to being confronted with a Pew Research poll showing that 95 percent of Republicans but also 71 percent of Democrats supported requiring photo identification to vote, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the SAVE Act “Jim Crow 2.0.” By invoking Jim Crow, Schumer was referencing an era of legalized segregation in which poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were commonly employed to disenfranchise Black voters in the American South from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the mid-1960s.
California Democrats must decide if they wish to continue down this rabbit hole or return to discussing the most pressing issues of the state. While their attention has been consumed by this fiasco rather than by the debate stage, California continues to struggle with sky-high gas prices, exploding homelessness, and fiscal mismanagement, among many other issues seen under the current state leadership.
If this trend continues, Democratic candidates may be completely out of luck since the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election. Right now, two of the three consistent poll leaders are Republicans, potentially setting up a Republican-only general election in a predominantly blue state.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
