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With just weeks until California voters cast ballots for the next governor in the primary, five candidates are clustered atop the polling, each with at least 10 percent but less than 20 percent support among the electorate. A sixth candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, is at 5 percent and has been gaining visibility in recent weeks. More than a quarter of the electorate has yet to make up its mind.

In a closed primary system, the Democrats and Republicans each choose their candidates in the primaries, and those candidates face off in the general election in November. But since 2012, the first election cycle after California voters passed Proposition 14 in 2010, the state has had what is known as a “jungle primary.” In such a system, all the candidates are thrown into a single primary in which all registered voters can vote, and only the top two then proceed to a general election runoff.

At the time that California passed this election reform, only Louisiana and Washington State ran a similar primary process, though in Louisiana’s system, if a candidate gets more than 50 percent there is no runoff election. Proponents argued their system was the way of the future because it would force candidates to hew to the middle to woo independent voters, and that once its success was apparent, other states would adopt it en masse.

That hasn’t happened. In fact, since 2010, only Massachusetts has flirted with adopting such a system — although its proponents are careful to argue it isn’t actually a “jungle primary.” (In reality, the Massachusetts proposal is largely the same as that in California — but proponents are seeking to distance themselves from the messy consequences of California’s system.)

The reason other states haven’t emulated the California system is fairly straightforward: It turns out it’s a really bad way to choose political candidates. Championed in 2010 by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who argued it would “give power back to the people,” and a coalition of business groups and other organizations that predicted that such a system would reduce polarization and attract centrist candidates who could appeal to independent voters who might typically sit out closed primaries, the jungle primary has instead locked in place some of the worst, least-representative tendencies in U.S. politics.

Zohran Mamdani’s........

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