• CA-16: California will host its first-ever three-way House race of the top-two era this fall after final tallies showed two candidates finishing in an astonishing tie for second place.
While media outlets declared former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo the first-place finisher a week after the March 5 primary for California's open 16th District, Assemblyman Evan Low and Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian traded leads as small as a single vote over the ensuing month. (All are Democrats.)
But after county officials certified returns on Thursday, both Low and Simitian wound up with exactly 30,249 votes. California does not conduct automatic recounts but instead requires candidates to request them—and pay for them. But neither Simitian nor Low has the incentive to ask for one lest they fall behind, and given the expense—likely several hundred thousand dollars—Liccardo has little reason to want one either.
The end result is a remarkable turn of events that upends the pattern that California voters have grown used to ever since they approved the creation of a top-two primary in 2010. Under that system, which was first put in place the following election cycle, all candidates from all parties run on the same primary ballot, and the two leading vote-getters—regardless of party—advance to the general election.
Lawmakers also passed a bill clarifying that, in the event of a deadlock between runners-up, breaking the tie by a drawing of lots was forbidden. Instead, both candidates would move on to the next round of voting.
That had only ever happened once before since 2012, in circumstances that were both less striking and lower-stakes. In 2016, Democrat Autumn Burke was unopposed when she sought reelection to the state Assembly in a safely blue district in the Los Angeles area, capturing 99.9% of the vote in the primary. But a pair of write-in candidates, Republican Tony Leal and Libertarian Baron Bruno, each snagged 32 votes, sending all three contenders to a November face-off.
There wasn't much drama in the fall, though: Burke crushed Leal in a 77-17 landslide while Bruno took just 6% of the vote. This time, however, the competition will be fierce.
The 16th District is a compact constituency just south of San Francisco that takes in a swath of Silicon Valley, including Palo Alto (the home of Stanford University) and parts of San Jose. It's also heavily Democratic turf: President Joe Biden carried it by a 75-22 margin, according to data from Daily Kos Elections, and Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo last faced a Republican opponent in 2018.
But with Eshoo retiring, the race to succeed her is as wide open as can be, and handicapping this unprecedented contest will pose a unique challenge. Liccardo, who finished with 21.1% of the vote, has generally been regarded by local observers as the most moderate of the bunch; San Jose Inside's Barry Holtzclaw recently described him as having "strong ties to Silicon Valley tech and real estate firms."
Simitian has also been described as a moderate, but his most important asset may be that Eshoo endorsed him as her preferred successor earlier this year. (Eshoo is the only Armenian American in Congress, a heritage she shares with Simitian.)
Low, by contrast, has cut a profile as the most liberal candidate in the race, earning an endorsement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Low, who is of Chinese descent, was the youngest Asian American ever elected to the Assembly when he first won office a decade ago, and he would be the first LGBTQ+ member of Congress from the Bay Area.
It may be tempting to conclude that Liccardo and Simitian will split a similar pool of voters, but elections rarely fall out along neat ideological lines, and even attempts to label these candidates will likely break down as the November election gets fought on a wide variety of fronts. We can be sure, though, that all three of these Democrats will run well-funded campaigns—and that California will experience a race the likes of which it has never seen before.