[4] California currently uses the nonpartisan blanket primary in its elections, where candidates regardless of party, including multiple nominees from a single party, contest the ballot and the candidates with the two highest numbers of votes are entered into a general election.
[5] Some municipalities, such as San Francisco and Berkeley, have opted to use instant-runoff voting for local elections.
For the next few decades after the Civil War, California was a Republican-leaning but a very competitive state in presidential elections, as in voted for the nationwide winner all but thrice between statehood and 1912, with the exceptions of 1880, 1884, and 1912.
Six of the state's first seven governors were Democrats; during subsequent decades, control of the governorship frequently shifted between the two parties.
Coastal California, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, is mostly Democratic-leaning.
In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Democrats won all of California's coastal counties except for Del Norte.
In 2024, The New York Times wrote that California was undergoing a "wave of corruption", as multiple local politicians had been embroiled on corruption scandals where they accepted bribes and favors from political connected businesses and organizations.
[9] In a decade, 576 public officials in California were convicted on federal corruption charges.
Additionally, the state constitution establishes mandatory funding levels for some agencies, programs and institutions.
This issue came to the forefront when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature attempted to cut spending to close the state's multibillion-dollar budget deficits during the 2000s.