Dan Walters: In California’s one-party system, political family feuds fill competitive vacuum

Aristotle is said to have coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum” — or “horror vacui” in Latin — as a principle in the physical world. However it applies equally well to politics, particularly in a one-party state such as California.

For many decades, the state’s politics were marked by competition between the two major parties.

California was largely a Republican state for its first century, but after World War II, as its population expanded rapidly, Democrats gained parity.

For several decades, voters switched back and forth, sometimes favoring Republicans in high-profile contests for president, governor and U.S. senator but often switching to Democrats.

Eventually, for several reasons, Republican strength waned, and today Democrats hold all statewide offices, own presidential electoral votes and have supermajorities in the Legislature and congressional delegation.

One-party dominance creates a vacuum, so in the absence of inter-party competition, Democrats have developed factions or quasi-parties defined by ideology, gender, ethnicity, personality or, sometimes, geography. The fault lines are often exploited by interest group lobbyists.

What’s true in the Capitol is also true elsewhere in the state, as an incident in Los Angeles two years ago demonstrates.

Out of the blue, an audio recording of four prominent Latino political figures surfaced. They were discussing how Latinos could displace Black politicians and become more powerful. It was a touchy subject, and the conversation included racist remarks not only about Black figures but Jewish, Armenian, Indigenous and gay people as well.

Nury Martinez, president of the Los Angeles City Council, immediately resigned her position and eventually left the council. Council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León retained their seats, but all three were formally censured. The fourth person in the room, Los Angeles County Labor Federation president Ron Herrera, also resigned.

The incident brought public attention to long-simmering ethnic friction, triggered by the rapid growth of the county’s Latino residents vis-a-vis its relatively tiny Black population.

Four hundred miles to the north, San Francisco’s politicians, Democrats all, duel incessantly over the mayoralty, seats in the Legislature and Congress and spots on the city’s 11-member Board of Supervisors.

Mayor London Breed, who has positioned herself as a moderate in the notoriously left-leaning city, faces what seems to be an uphill reelection campaign this year, with homelessness and a spike in street crime the driving issues.

Meanwhile, what’s been described as a shadow campaign is underway over who will succeed Nancy Pelosi, the long-serving speaker of the House of Representatives.

State Sen. Scott Wiener clearly wants to claim the seat whenever Pelosi steps down, but Wiener supporters believe that she is trying to anoint her daughter, Christine, thus continuing a tradition.

Pelosi won a special election in 1987 after Sala Burton, who had inherited the seat from her husband, Phil Burton, named Pelosi as her successor. The San Francisco Standard’s summary: “From publicly spurning Wiener’s AI safety bill in the state Senate to endorsing progressives on the Board of Supervisors, it’s all a game of 3D chess engineered by a Democrat so powerful she dissuaded a sitting president from seeking reelection, the whisperers say.”

Fragmentation is not confined to Democrats. The Voice of San Diego website has published a highly detailed account of political backstabbing within San Diego County’s Republican Party, centered on Carl DeMaio, a talk show host and former city council member now vying with another Republican for a seat in the state Assembly.

DeMaio failed to get the county GOP endorsement because of a long-running feud with police groups over pension benefits, and there’s now open warfare within the local Republican organization.

Once again, nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of two-party competition feuds erupt within the parties themselves.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. His commentary comes via CalMatters.org, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more, go to calmatters.org/commentary.