California’s Democratic Statehouse Hopefuls Are Stuck in a Trump Rut

The sudden and scandalous exit of Eric Swalwell from the gubernatorial race creates a new opportunity for a field of candidates that has so far done little to inspire voters.

Reporters love a race with a tidy narrative. You can take your pick of tales and tropes: There’s the old guard and the new face (Cuomo-Mamdani), the bomb thrower and the problem solver (Crockett-Talarico), or the Trump loyalist and the principled conservative (Paxton-Cornyn). Without the structure of a narrative, we’re a bit lost—which is probably why nobody was paying much attention to the gubernatorial race out here in California. That is, up until this weekend, when suddenly everyone’s heads swung in the direction of the Golden State, on the back of an all-too-familiar political narrative: the crash and burn of a front-runner’s campaign amid a torrid sex scandal finally brought to light after swirling rumors became stomach-turning allegations.

Representative Eric Swalwell’s career-ending news cycle began with a Friday night news dump and concluded with his Sunday night departure from the race. Suddenly, the support he had previously garnered was back in play, leaving his Democratic rivals to pursue the spoils. But before Swalwell’s disturbing history of alleged sexual assault came to light, those rivals had combined to make the gubernatorial race a torpid affair. Prior to Swalwell’s flameout, this group of campaigners were perhaps best regarded as a field of stumblers who were running the risk of handing the governor’s mansion to a Republican. The front-runner’s departure changes very little: This is a largely unexceptional field—a hodgepodge of recycled political names, neck and neck and neck in a competition to get their hands on the nation’s most powerful anti-Trump pulpit. 

The more you read the news, the more it begins to feel that’s all they were running for—America’s Next Top Trump Antagonist. The vacuum was filled by the doom narrative: What if Democrats shit the bed so badly in California’s chaotic jungle primary that they surrender California to a MAGA Republican? There are still simply too many Democrats running; they’re crowding each other out. With Swalwell in the race, it was a three-way tie in a jungle primary. Without him, who knows? For months, the California Democratic Party has been publicly begging low-polling candidates to stop deluding themselves, setting an arbitrary drop-out deadline of April 15 and releasing a poll showing the race’s two Republicans eclipsing the bumbling field of Democrats. 

Swalwell’s sudden disappearance may have changed the field, but it has not changed the race. Over the next few weeks, you can expect every campaign to make a feverish grab for Swalwell’s supporters. You should not, however, expect many former Swalwell supporters to jump feverishly aboard a new campaign. Allison Gill, the California-based political influencer known online as Mueller, She Wrote, says she was leaning toward Swalwell before the allegations but added that “I think a lot of Californians were simply looking to vote for Eric Swalwell because he was polling way ahead of everyone else, and they wanted to guarantee that we had a........

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