If California’s race for governor is a stress test for democracy, it’s failing.

The California Democratic Party watched the governor’s race this week with some relief – which it has not yet earned.

Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra is currently in first place ahead of Republican Steve Hilton. And billionaire progressive Tom Steyer was trailing behind in third in the latest count.

It’s clear Democrats will get at least one candidate through to the November election, so the nightmare scenario – that two Republicans would advance in the nation’s bluest state – disappears.

But before anyone congratulates themselves, they should be honest about how we got here.

The once-leading Democrat, Eric Swalwell, exited after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including one allegation now under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney.

The timing may or may not have been coincidental, but election campaigners have long known that a well-timed scandalous disclosure can do what campaign ads cannot. Whether the allegations were timed to surface by a political actor or simply by the time it took for journalists to corroborate rumors, the effect was the same: The frontrunner collapsed, the field scrambled and California Democrats narrowly avoided a political catastrophe.

That is not a system working. It is a system in which the mechanisms for sorting candidates – relatively low-turnout primaries, fragmented fields, outsized spending – produces chaos and outcomes that should not require luck to avoid.

The winner of the gubernatorial primary likely will claim the nomination with somewhere around 25 percent of the vote. In relatively low turnout primaries, where about two in 10 eligible voters typically participate, that works out to be the active preference of perhaps one in 22 eligible Californians. That’s a remarkably thin mandate to call democratic

“Dodging bullets is not a governance strategy.”.

The structural problem runs deeper than this race. California’s legislature, like most, answers to its donor ecosystem and its most activated partisan base – not to the majority of Californians who face a housing crisis, a utility monopoly, a school funding shortfall and wildfire risks. These problems do not go unsolved because solutions are unknown. They go unsolved because the incentive structure facing legislators does not reward solving them.

What moves disengaged voters, who are the overwhelming majority in primaries, is not just a better process. The deeper problem is not the ballot – it is the collapse of the organized civic life that once connected voters to the institutions that govern them. Rebuilding that infrastructure is not a workaround, it is the most important work we can be doing today, not just for California but for America.

California dodged a bullet. It usually does. But dodging bullets is not a governance strategy, and the relief of this particular escape should not substitute for the structural reform and civic empowerment the state still needs.

DANIEL WOLF, founder of Democracy Counts, wrote this article for CalMatters, where it first appeared.