Dems Avert Disaster in California, GOP Avoids Shutout in Governor's Race
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're engaged in an epic battle. It looks like voters will have a real choice.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If there really was going to be an enormous blue wave, a lot of people did expect it to happen in California.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a good night for Democrats. The likelihood is they will not get locked out of any targeted seats.</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We always proudly stand for the national anthem.</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The president plans on making the NFL and patriotism an issue throughout the 2018 midterm campaign.</s>LEBRON JAMES, PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER, CLEVELAND CAVALIERS: It's typical of him. No one wants an invite anyways.</s>BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It looked like I was saying I didn't apologize. And I was mad at me.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would have wanted him to say, "I'm never going to stop apologizing," and then be that great example.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are not going to see him campaigning at the level we have seen him do in previous election cycles.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We will be getting to the developments on all of those stories, none of which are going away.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A lot of bloodshot eyes in California. And this time it's because of the election. Right?</s>CAMEROTA: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It's Wednesday, June 6, 6 a.m. here in New York. And we do begin with breaking primary news. Democrats appear to have averted sudden death in the most consequential primaries of the season thus far. The votes are still being counted. It is very early in California. But Democrats appear confident that they will have candidates in every competitive congressional district as they try to recapture the House in November. California has this so-called "jungle primary," where the top two vote getters, regardless of their party, advance to a run-off in November.</s>BERMAN: It could take days to know exactly which Democrats will face off against the Republican nominees in the House district. But still, the Democrats are singing "California Dreaming," "Going to California, "Hotel California." You pick the song, they're singing it. Republicans are kind of humming a little bit, too, this morning. They avoided a shutout in the state's governor's race. Businessman John Cox, who was backed by President Trump, he came in second, so he will challenge the Democratic lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom this fall. All kinds of races to cover for you this morning on this huge election morn. Let's begin with CNN's Miguel Marquez, live in Los Angeles with the latest results -- Miguel.</s>MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The real song, John, here is "Who is No. 2? It's all about the No. 2 in this sort of weird "jungle primary" that California has. As you said, Republicans were very concerned they were going to have nobody at the top of the ticket across the state. Now they have the possibility for two. The -- John Cox, the business man, will face Gavin Newsom, former San Francisco mayor, for the governorship. And in the Senate race, Dianne Feinstein, it's not clear who she will face, whether it will be somebody from her left, Kevin de Leon, or Jim Bradley, a businessman from Orange County. The other concern that Democrats here had, they were targeting ten different districts of Republican, trying to flip those seats. Seven of them are seats where -- where -- Republicans where Hillary Clinton won those districts. They were concerned they were going to get locked out of one, two, possibly three. It looks like, in all of those districts, that Democrats will be No. 2 in all of them. There are two that are still somewhat of a question. Number -- District 10, Jeff Denham, the Republican, will face either Josh Harder or Ted Howze. And in the 48th, there are two Democrats and a Republican vying for that No. 2 spot. All of this could take some time to figure out, because in one case, 188,000 were left off the voter rolls in Los Angeles County, so they had to fill out paper ballots. Those had to be counted. And mail-in ballots. People could walk up on election day and even mail them in on election day. Those will take time to count. So we may see this -- a couple of these races that may be days, if not weeks, before we know the final answer. Back to you guys.</s>BERMAN: All right. Miguel Marquez, in Los Angeles. We were discussing if "Who is No. 2" was actually a song. We'll wait for Miguel to come back to us and sing a few bars of that.</s>CAMEROTA: And sing some of that, yes.</s>BERMAN: Let's bring in CNN senior political analyst Ron Brownstein and CNN political analyst John Avlon. And Ron, I want to start with you. You live in California. Democrats are going to hate what I'm about to say. But deep down inside, they know it's true. The headline this morning is "Democrats didn't blow it," though they came awfully close.</s>RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: No, it was a good night overall for Democrats across the country. I mean, you go from east to west. I mean, they got the candidates they wanted in New Jersey, every race, which has the potential to flip as many as four seats. They had record turnout in Iowa. And then in California, as you say, they averted disaster in this top two primary system, which isn't really accurately called a primary at all. It's this kind of very chaotic hybrid between a primary and a general election. And there was a real risk in as many as three seats that Hillary Clinton carried in Orange County, which had been reliably Republicans for decades, where Ronald Reagan got his start but which voted for Clinton in 2016, the first Democrat to carry it in 80 years. It was a real risk in three districts there that Democrats would have been shut out. Instead, it certainly appears they're going to be on the ballot in all of those is and all of the others. And you know, the Democratic congressional campaign committee gets a lot of grief from party activists for when it does intervene and when it doesn't intervene. But in this cases, they threw the kitchen sink at trying to avoid disaster, and it appears they did it. By the way, they got the candidates they wanted in those seats.</s>JOHN AVLON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes. Yes. But Ron --</s>BROWNSTEIN: So you're set up for some very competitive races in the fall.</s>AVLON: Ron, I think there's a lot -- been a lot of angst on the part of party activists about the top two primary.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Right.</s>AVLON: The reality is, you do have representative turnouts. You've got a Republican in the second seat -- second place running against Newsom. John Cox, significant in that sense. You'll have competitive general election races. And what's most significant, the reason the top two is actually a representative result, even though it makes party operatives anxious, is that independent voters now are the second largest registered party in California.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Yes.</s>AVLON: Ahead of Republicans. They got to participate this time around. So that's a good thing. You've got high enthusiasm, a turnout --</s>BROWNSTEIN: That's right.</s>AVLON: A lot of competitive general races across the country. And I agree with Ron, though, that fundamentally, it looks like Democrats have gotten a lot of the candidates they want in these open and swing seats.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Not to --</s>CAMEROTA: Is the jungle primary unique, Ron, just to California?</s>BROWNSTEIN: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: Because it's this, like, you know, sort of death match, and people were thinking that it could have gone really differently. It's just an election. It could have gone really differently. Does California only do this?</s>BROWNSTEIN: Washington does it, too, as I understand it. It's not exactly -- by the way, it's not correct to call it a jungle primary, because a jungle primary technically is if anybody gets to 50 percent in the primary, that election is over. California really is a top two. And I don't even like calling it a primary, because it has -- it can have the consequence of a general election. And there's a big debate. First of all, turnout was not high. It has been dropping in California. And then -- and then second point, independent voters did not participate, at least in the mail-in, in big numbers. I mean, the question of the top two primary is, you can end up in a situation, as I think in the end you probably will, for example, in the Senate race two times in a row where millions of people in the state who are Republicans will not have anyone to vote for, you know, who reflects their views in a general election. I mean, the question is whether there are ways to bring -- open, allow independents to participate. Because as John notes, they are now the second biggest category in California. Are there ways to allow them to participate without having the potential of a quarter of the voters, potentially, deciding the general election for which party will hold House seats or the Senate seat. That just seems to -- there's a lot of anxiety in California.</s>BERMAN: Let the record show Ron Brownstein just said the jungle primary in California, neither a jungle nor a primary. So --</s>BROWNSTEIN: Neither one. Neither one.</s>BERMAN: So misnomer. Guys, if we can cycle through, I just want to see the boards right now for the three most closely watched races. It was 39, 49 and 48. That was Ed Royce's seat. He's retired. Dana Rohrabacher's seat, he's running for reelection, facing you know, all kinds of questions about his feelings toward Russia. And then California 49 is generalized. And this is 39. This is the Ed Royce seat. You can see -- you know, look, you do the math there. It's about evenly split. But clearly, a Democrat, at this point, it looks like will go through. And then we also have 48 and 49. I'm not going to talk about those, but we can show people how close it is in what's going on there. And again, the reason this matters as much as it does -- and Miguel Marquez mentioned it, seven districts in California that Hillary Clinton, she won that congressional district but currently a Republican serves as the member of the House. Democrats need 23 nationally to take over the House. If they could get those seven districts in California, that gets them a lot of the way there. And this morning, as we all wake up, they're no worse off than they were yesterday in that quest.</s>AVLON: But I think, actually, significantly better. I mean, Hillary Clinton doing as well as she did in conservative Orange County was extraordinary, historically. But now, all these seats are incredibly in play. The states have become more polarized, particularly California. And so these safe Republican seats that were drawn to be safe, and have historically been Republican, no longer a sure thing for Republicans. If they can pick off these seven seats, they are almost a third of the way to the number they need to hit. And as Ron noted earlier, New Jersey, also really significant in terms of the candidates Democrats got and Republican seats that have been trending left that could be very much in play.</s>CAMEROTA: Go ahead, Ron.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Two points real -- two points. First, as I said, Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to win Orange County since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. And she did it, because the county is being reshaped by the two same forces that are making other suburban areas around the major metros more Democratic. It's growing more diverse. It is no longer majority white. And white-collar whites are voting more Democratic. So those forces are real. On the other hand, as the people who study California elections will tell you, she is the only Democrat to carry any of these congressional races in any statewide race in the last several years. So it's -- it is still a challenge. But they got -- the Democrats got the candidates, strong candidates in all three of those. And that could be a big part. Not only New York and not only California and New Jersey; Illinois, New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania. A lot of the ground Democrats have to cover can be won in blue states in November.</s>CAMEROTA: OK. We'll have much more dissection as the results as they come in and throughout the morning. Thank you both very much. So President Trump celebrated without the Philadelphia Eagles and then escalated his feud with the NFL. Why this controversy is not going away any time soon.</s>BERMAN: Without the Eagles and without all the words to "God Bless America."</s>CAMEROTA: That's true, that's true, as well. So we'll sing them. We'll see.