June 22, 2018
The two Iranian-American candidates in the California primary elections for Congress did very poorly June 5.
In the hot race challenging incumbent Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in Orange County, Kia Hamadanchy barely registered. He came in last of the six candidates with just 1.7 percent. He ran as a Democrat.
Hamadanchy previously worked on the Washington staffs of two Democratic senators, neither from California. He said he decided to run for Congress the day that President Trump announced his ban on visas for Iranians and other majority-Muslims countries.
Up north in San Francisco, Ryan Khojasteh joined six people in challenging House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. Khojasteh, who is a law student, ended up in fifth place among the seven candidates. But he was in last place among the Democratic challengers.
Although Pelosi is targeted nationally by Republicans as a flaming leftist, she was challenged in her home district for not being leftist enough. But she still got 69 percent of the vote in the seven-person race.
California is one of just a few states that use an “open primary” system, which is sometimes called a “jungle primary.” There is no Republican or Democratic primary. All candidates run in a single primary and the top two finishers then face each other in the November general election.
The usual party primaries drive Republican candidates to the right and Democratic candidates to the left to appeal to their party’s base. The open primary system was designed to encourage candidates to appeal to the center, and that is usually what happens. The result, however, is that occasionally two Democrats or two Republicans end up facing each other in November.
Despite Pelosi’s very liberal district, that is not what happened there this year. Second place in the primary went to the sole Republican candidate, who drew all of 10 percent of the vote.