Marie Alvarado-Gil was elected to the California Senate in 2022.
She won as a Democrat in a Republican district. How was this possible? No Republican was on the ballot.
Why? Because California uses a top-two primary system, in which the two top vote-getters advance to the general election, and the Republican vote was divided up among six candidates, so the two Democrats on the primary ballot came out on top (see details here).
Then, in the November 2022 election, Alvarado-Gil bested her Democratic opponent, even though he got more votes than her in the primary.
In August 2024, Alvarado-Gil switched parties, declaring the Democrats don’t “align with her values” (watch video below). It’s a politically smart move, because she’d probably lose any re-election bid running as a Democrat against a Republican in a district where the Democratic candidates got a combined total of 40.8% of the vote in the last election (the 2022 primary) where Republicans and Democrats were on the same ballot.
But did she perpetrate a fraud on the district’s Democratic voters? It’s often said that party-switchers “betrayed” the voters who elected them. And in today’s polarized and tribal politics, more people than ever before vote for the party rather than the individual candidate. State legislators also strongly tend to vote as party blocs.
And if Alvarado-Gil’s beef with the Democrats is they don’t share her values, then it’s likely she really was a Republican all along, because it’s unlikely her “values” changed in just two years. This suggests she’s a Republican who snuck into the Senate by posing as a Democrat.
But wait. Let’s say she had run as a Republican in 2022. In that case, with only one Democrat on the primary ballot, a Democrat and a Republican instead of two Democrats would’ve advanced to the general election ballot, and the Republican certainly would’ve won.
So it’s really a Republican who Alvarado-Gil robbed of a seat by posing as a Democrat. If she’d run as a Republican, the other Democrat would’ve got much of her vote, and her chances of making the November ballot would’ve been diminished by competing against six other Republicans. So, in effect, she’s a line-cutter who jumped ahead of other Republicans in the line by pretending to be a Democrat and then switching to Republican after winning the seat with a sneaky ploy.
She didn’t so much betray Democratic voters as defraud Republican voters. That’s a problem for the district’s Republicans to deal with in the next primary if she runs for re-election. They might prefer to elect a real Republican than someone who’s either a political turncoat or plays games to get an advantage over her fellow Republicans.