Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt arrives at his election night party with wife Heidi Montag at Don Antonio's Mexican restaurant on June 2, 2026, in Los Angeles. | Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesMillions of ballots are still being counted in California, where the primary results for the state’s two marquee races for governor and mayor of Los Angeles remain uncalled as of Wednesday afternoon. That’s on top of a handful of congressional and local races — a slow process that is typical for the Golden State because of how counties count votes and the generous deadline for receiving ballots (they must be postmarked by Election Day, but can arrive at vote-counting centers days later). The race brought significant attention to California’s “jungle primary” system, where the top two candidates advance regardless of party. Democrats worried earlier in the governor’s race that their own field was so large and closely divided that two Republican candidates might make the cutoff.As things stand, at least one Democrat will advance in both races: Former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra looks likely to move onto the gubernatorial election in November, while incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will advance to a run-off — the first sitting LA mayor since 2005 to not win reelection outright.Who they will face is the big open question: Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton is leading the gubernatorial race at the moment, and may prevent an all-Democratic contest later this year. Bass, meanwhile, faces challenges from a lefty city council member, Nithya Raman, and the Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, whose insurgent campaign has remade the city contest. The slow procedure for counting votes isn’t the only reason this is taking so long, though. Voters were reluctant to rally around a single candidate in either the governor or mayoral contest — contributing to slow ballot returns — with many expressing unease with their choices and with the Democratic-dominated government. There’s a sense of deep voter frustration: at Trump, at the status quo, at homelessness, and incumbents. Yet despite it all, the state might just get more of the same. To better understand where Californians are coming from, I turned to Dan Walters, a columnist at CalMatters and veteran chronicler of the state’s politics. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.This has felt like the longest and messiest gubernatorial election in recent California memory. How did we end up here, and is it really that historic?It was so different because there was never a pre-campaign frontrunner. There’s a stage before the official campaign launches where potential candidates are kind of testing the waters. That never happened here. Everybody was asking around, Who’s going to run? We got this deal where Kamala Harris stood around for what, a month, two months, making up her mind. And then there were others who thought about it, Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, Alex Padilla, one of our US senators — they eventually both said, “No, we don’t want to run.” Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor, also announced she was going to run, and then she dropped out. All this stuff was going on, and we didn’t really even know who was running until basically the campaign got started earlier this year.Has this ever happened before in California? This void of leadership?I’ve covered governor’s elections here for 50 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody else has ever seen anything like that too, for the governorship of the nation’s largest state. There seemed to be more people reluctant to run. Maybe they wanted to run, for whatever reason, but maybe they just figured governing California is so difficult. I mean, why would Alex Padilla give up a lifetime seat in the US Senate?But the main overriding thing [is] there was never a natural frontrunner. Eight years ago, we knew Gavin Newsom was going to be running for governor. It was clear from the very beginning. We didn’t have that this year. And that kind of set everything off. And so finally we have a field of 61 people running, 10 whom you’d call serious candidates — that unfolded. Then, former congressman Eric Swalwell became the leading Democratic candidate at one point in early April. And then, within a few days, he was out of it after he was accused of sexual harassment and resigned from Congress.That ends up helping Xavier Becerra, who was down at about 4 percent in the polls at that point in early April. And he became, essentially, the candidate of what you might call a Democratic establishment. Voters either went to him or held back and he leaped up, and it wound up being just him and Tom Steyer, who was spending $200 million mostly attacking Becerra at the end.It also seemed to me like it was voters almost running to the safest choice — like 2020 when everyone seemed to coalesce around Biden.Some people called Becerra California’s Biden — a safe bet, in other words. People wanted something known, something safe. Look, there’s a lot of angst out there about inflation and cost of living, gas prices, housing prices, that sort of thing. And I think people are kind of leery of somebody who comes along like Steyer and says, “I’ll fix it!”And this wasn’t like in past moments of Democratic scrapping, where you’re looking for a sign from above, and intervention from a figure like Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi?Right, there was nothing like that. It just didn’t happen. So it was just a bizarre, very strange campaign.Is it something about the job of governor that makes it so undesirable? Is it the state of the state? Are there structural issues that make it difficult to run or govern?We have a lot of what I would call existential issues — things that will really affect how California goes in the future. You’ve got water supply issues, you’ve got homelessness, you’ve got a chronic budget deficit, you’ve got low education performance. There’s just no end of these things that need resolution but haven’t been resolved. And they’re going to be all lying there on the desk where the next governor takes over next January. Right off the bat, they got a lot to deal with. And you see Gavin Newsom for all of his supposed energy and engagement, and everything has not really dealt very well with these existential issues.Is it fair to blame candidates and campaigns when these structural issues exist?There’s definitely something to the structure — it is unwieldy when you’re dealing with complex issues because it takes a high degree of agreement, of consensus, because the American system of government is a series of hurdles.Committees, chambers of the legislature, the floor, the governor — every one of those hurdles, you have to get through all of them. And if you miss just one, you failed. And so it’s fundamentally a negative process. It’s set up to make it difficult to make policy. Consensus with all the stakeholders — business, labor, trial lawyers, environmentalists, consumer protection advocates — it’s extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to actually effectively govern California. You have to come in with very limited promises, deliver on those promises, but to do that, you have to ignore all the larger, more complicated existential issues.How much of this can we blame on the top-two primary system (the two candidates with the most votes advance to a general, regardless of party affiliation)?The top-two system was forced on both of the parties by a budget deal involving Arnold Schwarzenegger back in 2009. He forced the legislature basically to put it on the ballot in 2010, and it passed. The Democratic leadership never wanted it. The Republican leadership never wanted it. And after the scare that the Democrats had this year about the possibility of a freeze-out by having two Republicans finish one, two, I think there’s a lot of sentiment among the Democrats to do away with it.In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has seemed to deflect some of the blame from voters and opponents on the fact that she has pretty limited powers: She likes to remind people that she can’t have the police arrest ICE agents, has no control over schools or public health because that falls to the county, and she couldn’t control the weather when wildfires destroyed whole neighborhoods last year; Xavier Becerra did the same thing too on the trail, when he talked about issues caused by Trump.That’s a whole other bag of something. Karen Bass is definitely in trouble. If you’re an incumbent mayor and you can’t get 50 percent in the primary, that means that most of the voters are against you, and so she has to really worry about what might happen in November.She would probably win against Nithya Raman — Los Angeles is liberal but not leftist — but Pratt, that’s a wild card, man. He represents the angst of Los Angeles. There’s a lot of anger in Los Angeles over the fires and over the aftermath of the fires and the response and the reconstruction. Karen Bass really didn’t do herself any good on how she handled that whole thing, and it’s coming back to haunt her, and she may pay the price on it.Pratt’s had very clever AI-generated ads and certainly a lot of enthusiasm. I think Bass defeats Raman, but I think with Pratt, she’s got a potential problem here because he’s struck something in the voters in Los Angeles, their unhappiness with the status quo on homelessness, crime, and the fires.What else can we say about the results of other races in the state so far? What can we make of Tom Steyer’s spending?We obviously still have votes to be counted, but I can say it looks like Democratic voters kind of rejected the more progressive wing of their party. Steyer had camped out as Bernie Sanders’s best friend in California. He was going full populist on single-payer healthcare, taxing billionaires, breaking up monopolies, everything, the entire agenda of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He adopted that as his platform, and it didn’t get him that far — plus he spent $200 million.I wouldn’t say this is exactly a backlash against the progressive movement, but it may reflect this post-2024 feeling within the party that they had gotten themselves identified as being too “woke.” In fact, Gavin Newsom said that not too long ago, he said that he thought the Democratic Party had gotten too far left, and needed to become more “normal.”There’s definitely a misconception that California is a woke leftist paradise. You’re saying that’s wrong?The results that we saw from yesterday kind of hint at that. The more progressive candidate running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat over in San Francisco didn’t do well, Steyer didn’t do well, it appears. I’m not certain yet that the left-wing candidate for mayor down in Los Angeles didn’t do well. Not a backlash, but a sense that “no, we really don’t want to go that way.” Becerra is a very ordinary, “don’t rock the boat” Democratic politician. He’s by no means a left-winger. And in fact, if you look at the voting results…the Latino population of California, which is the largest ethnic group, isn’t very left-wing. If you look in the legislature and you start looking at the range of Democrats in the legislature, those on the moderate side tend to be Latino and Black, whereas progressives all seem to be white liberals. So California is not as progressive as it’s often portrayed in the national media. And there are a lot of Republicans in California — a quarter of the registered voters.