California's top-two primary just stranded nearly 43% of voters in the 40th Congressional District without a candidate who represents them — and the people who built the system admit it was never going to work as advertised.

In the redrawn 40th District, covering inland Orange County and parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, Democratic candidates collectively won 42.9% of the primary vote. But because California's top-two system only advances the two highest vote-getters regardless of party, two Republicans — Reps. Ken Calvert and Young Kim — will be the only names on the November ballot. Every Democrat who showed up is now "orphaned," forced to choose between two Republicans or stay home.

This isn't an accident. It's the design.

Californians approved the top-two primary system more than a decade ago, sold on the promise that it would be a moderating force — that orphaned voters would pick the least partisan candidate. Paul Mitchell, the Democratic redistricting expert who devised California's new congressional map under Proposition 50, told the Los Angeles Times that in reality, "it doesn't work that way."

Mitchell's own analysis shows that in intraparty matchups, 35% or more of orphaned voters simply abstain from voting in that race. He found undervoting among orphaned voters in every intraparty race for a state Senate seat in 2024. Those who do vote often decide based on what Mitchell called "tertiary things" — race, gender, whether a candidate seems local or like a Washington insider. "Traditionally, it isn't so much about somebody being more moderate," Mitchell said, because voters can't reliably tell the difference between a moderate and a conservative in the opposing party.

So the system doesn't moderate politics. It suppresses participation and hands power to whoever the party apparatus already anointed.

The 40th District lays this bare. Esther Kim Varet, a Democratic art gallery owner who placed third in the primary, has been fielding questions from "depressed" liberals wondering whom to support. She's told supporters to back Young Kim — not on principle, but as a strategic play to force more Republican spending and potentially oust Calvert, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and has funded what she called Trump's war in Iran. That's not democracy. That's voters gaming a rigged table.

Meanwhile, the same establishment instinct plays out inside the Democratic Party wherever populists threaten the chain of command. POLITICO reports that Michigan has become ground zero for the Democratic Party's ideological war, with progressive Abdul El-Sayed holding a double-digit lead over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in their Senate primary. El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, represents exactly the kind of insurgent energy that party establishments fear. Jeff Weaver, a progressive strategist, put it bluntly: "The same people who are carping about electability have lost the White House twice to Trump."

The establishment's response to El-Sayed's rise tells you everything. Adrienne Elrod, a longtime Democratic strategist and former Kamala Harris campaign adviser, warned that if El-Sayed wins, "the hyper-progressive socialist movement has percolated into one of the most crucial general election states" — as if the voters choosing him are a problem to be managed rather than citizens exercising their franchise.

That's the same instinct behind California's top-two: manage the voters, channel them, and if they won't be channeled, narrow their choices until it doesn't matter. The founders drafted a republic built on the consent of the governed. California built a system where the governed pick between two people they didn't consent to — or nothing at all.

The question isn't whether orphaned voters will be "strategic" in November. The question is why we tolerate a system designed to make their votes meaningless in the first place.