The Politics of Disqualification: California’s Governor Race and the Progressive Failure to Choose
- Shelly Albaum and Kairo
- 2 minutes ago
- 7 min read
The California governor’s race is testing whether progressives can do something harder than oppose Republicans: govern themselves.
So far, the evidence is not encouraging.
The problem is not that Democrats lack candidates. California’s 2026 gubernatorial primary includes Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Antonio Villaraigosa, Tony Thurmond, Matt Mahan, and others. Under California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters advance to November regardless of party. That matters because some polling has shown Republican candidates at the top while Democrats divide their support.
That's a problem because progressives are often better at disqualification than judgment.
We find the one flaw that permits us to stop thinking. Xavier Becerra becomes an oil-slurping corporatist. Tom Steyer becomes a billionaire who has never held public office. Katie Porter becomes too abrasive, too temperamental, insufficiently glamorous, insufficiently “likable.” Other candidates can be dismissed in other ways: too establishment, too inexperienced, too ambitious, too cautious, too ideological, too compromised, too normal, too strange.
The specifics vary. The habit is constant.
Instead of asking what each candidate could do well, what coalition they might build, what strengths they bring, what weaknesses could be managed, and what the office actually requires, we search for the disqualifier. We do not ask who would be best. We ask who can be thrown away.
This is a terrible way to choose leaders.
It is also a terrible way to manage a political movement.
The “Stop Bernie” dynamics of 2016 and 2020 were an early warning. Whatever one thought of Bernie Sanders, the intra-Democratic response to his movement revealed a progressive coalition that did not know how to fight with itself. “Bernie Bro” became a way of pathologizing a faction rather than engaging the deeper questions Sanders raised about class, institutional power, political economy, and electoral strategy. The problem was never that there were Bernie Bros. The problem was that progressives do not know how to disagree internally without turning disagreement into contamination.
And we are doing it again.
The California governor’s race should be an opportunity for serious comparison. The state is large, wealthy, unequal, innovative, overregulated in some places, under-governed in others, beset by housing costs, homelessness, climate risk, water politics, crime anxiety, energy transitions, public-school strain, and the ordinary dysfunctions of one-party dominance.
A progressive movement capable of governing should be able to look at a field of candidates and ask: What kind of executive does California need now? Who can manage the state bureaucracy? Who can negotiate with the Legislature? Who can build housing? Who can defend immigrants? Who can move climate policy from aspiration to execution? Who can win? Who can govern? Who can learn?
Instead, we often reach for the attack-ad brain.
Negative advertising teaches voters to look for one reason to say no. That is useful in an election where the goal is to defeat an opponent. It is disastrous inside a movement that has to choose leaders, build coalitions, and govern. Progressives have internalized the logic of the attack ad and turned it inward. We do not ask, “What can this person do?” We ask, “What is the thing that lets me dismiss them?”
The result is a politics of disqualification.
A disqualifier is not the same thing as a flaw. A disqualifier is a fact that makes someone unfit to hold power -- like Trump's authoritarianism and corruption. A flaw is a cost to be weighed against capacity, context, coalition, and alternatives. Movements that cannot distinguish flaws from disqualifiers will keep throwing away usable leaders in pursuit of imaginary ones.
This is not a plea for lowered standards. It is the opposite. It is a plea for real standards.
Purity thinking is intellectually lazy because it converts a complex judgment into a shortcut. It allows us to stop the hard work of comparison. We do not have to weigh Becerra’s experience against his compromises, Steyer’s independence and climate commitment against his wealth and lack of public office, Porter’s intelligence and political courage against questions about temperament or executive fit. We find the impurity and declare the analysis complete.
It is also a form of political self-sabotage. California’s top-two system makes fragmentation especially dangerous. When one side consolidates and the other side fractures, the fractured side can lose even when it represents more voters.
That should focus the mind.
Instead, fragmentation often intensifies the search for disqualifiers. If my candidate is flawed, perhaps yours is worse. If yours is worse, I can avoid defending mine. If everyone is compromised, I can retreat into contempt and call it principle.
This is how movements fail the test of power.
A serious movement does not avoid conflict. It disciplines conflict. It knows how to argue internally without destroying the possibility of common action. It knows how to distinguish criticism from disposal. It knows that no candidate is a moral self-portrait of the voter. It knows that politics is not self-expression.
Progressives often speak as if politics were about values. It is, partly. But values without management are ornamental. A movement that cannot choose among imperfect leaders cannot govern a state, much less a country. Governing requires prioritization, compromise, judgment, coalition maintenance, institutional design, and the ability to act without the fantasy of purity.
The right understands this better than we do. That does not make the right wiser or more moral. It often means the right tolerates appalling conduct in pursuit of power. But it also means the right is less likely to confuse internal disagreement with existential contamination. It knows that a movement has to survive its own imperfections long enough to win.
Progressives need a different discipline: not the right’s indifference to moral failure, but a mature capacity to distinguish between moral failure and ordinary imperfection.
There are real disqualifiers. Corruption can be disqualifying. Cruelty can be disqualifying. Authoritarianism can be disqualifying. Incompetence can be disqualifying. A demonstrated inability to govern can be disqualifying. A willingness to betray democratic institutions can be disqualifying.
But not every flaw is a disqualifier. Not every compromise is corruption. Not every bad answer is moral collapse. Not every temperamental weakness reveals unfitness. Not every billionaire is reducible to wealth. Not every establishment figure is merely a servant of capital. Not every insurgent is a narcissist. Not every prosecutor is a cop. Not every pragmatist is a sellout. Not every idealist is unserious.
If that sounds obvious, our behavior suggests otherwise.
What should replace disqualification politics?
Start with strengths.
For every serious candidate, progressives should be able to produce an affirmative docket:
What are the five strongest reasons this person might govern well?
What constituencies could they bring into a governing coalition?
What executive capacities have they demonstrated?
What issues do they understand deeply?
What would they be unusually good at doing?
What risks would they pose, and how could those risks be managed?
Then do the same exercise for the candidate you dislike.
That last part matters. It is easy to build the affirmative case for one’s own candidate. The discipline is to build it for the rival. If you cannot explain why a serious person might support another candidate in your own coalition, you are probably not yet doing politics. You are doing identity maintenance.
This is the progressive strengths docket.
It would not eliminate disagreement. It would improve it. Instead of arguing about which candidate can be morally discarded, we would argue about what California needs and which strengths matter most. Experience or insurgency? Administrative competence or public persuasion? Climate seriousness or housing execution? Ideological alignment or coalition breadth? Legislative skill or outside independence? Moral clarity or operational discipline?
Those are hard questions. They require judgment. They also require admitting that more than one candidate may be good enough, and that choosing one does not require pretending the others are monsters.
That is what an adult political movement does.
The left’s failure here is not a failure of caring. Progressives care intensely. Often too intensely about the wrong level of analysis. We care about the symbolic meaning of a candidate, the moral valence of biography, the contamination of donors, the aesthetics of personality, the rhetoric of authenticity. Those things can matter. But they are not substitutes for the central question:
Can this person help govern well?
That question is less emotionally satisfying than disqualification. It does not produce the clean thrill of moral refusal. It requires counting the hundreds of good things a candidate may bring to the table and weighing them against real weaknesses. It requires asking not who is pure, but who is useful, capable, persuadable, durable, and aligned enough to advance a governing project.
Progressives often dislike that kind of thinking because it feels compromised. But politics is not the search for an uncompromised soul. It is the work of building enough power to do enough good under conditions that will never be pure.
California should be the place where progressives learn this. It is a rich, diverse, Democratic state with enormous institutional capacity and enormous unsolved problems. If we cannot learn to choose leaders here, where exactly do we expect to learn?
The answer cannot be: after the perfect candidate arrives.
The perfect candidate is not coming. And if they did, we would find the disqualifier anyway.
A serious movement does not ask its members to stop criticizing candidates. It asks them to criticize like people preparing to govern. That means weighing strengths as carefully as weaknesses, distinguishing flaws from disqualifiers, and remembering that power is not awarded to the faction with the cleanest contempt.
California is asking whether progressives know how to choose.
So far, too often, we know how to object. We know how to distrust. We know how to expose. We know how to name impurity. We know how to reenact negative advertising in the voice of moral seriousness.
But if we want power, we have to learn a harder discipline.
Stop looking first for the disqualifier.
Start asking who can govern.
