Your June 2 Primary Election Guide: Here's what's happening across California and throughout the country today.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/2026/06/02/your-june-2-primary-election-guide/


Tiffany Valencia, a Riverside County resident, fills out a primary election ballot during a “Barbeque, Beer and Ballots” event, May 9, 2026, in Corona, Caliornia. Credit: Caroline Brehman/AP Photo

Today is one of the bigger primary days on the calendar so far in the 2026 midterms, with six states including the nation’s largest going to the polls. It’s hard to keep track of all the story lines, especially with the California governor’s race sucking up so much of the attention. So I wanted to look below the topline and across the country at the key story lines. But first, a final word or two on that governor’s race. There are a couple of factors that you should have in mind as returns come in. First, there are 61 candidates, spread over two pages on the ballot. It looks daunting to low-information voters. It can be hard to find a preferred candidate, and hard to know where the gubernatorial candidates stop and where candidates for other offices start. I fully expect nontrivial ballot spoilation, where voters accidentally choose two candidates for governor, or just skip it altogether. That could matter if the race for second place is as tight as it looks.

Second, Democrats held their ballots to a significant degree while they assessed how to strategically affect the outcome, only to flood the vote over the weekend. Vote totals are now ranging above 2022 or 2018. But the late flurry of Democratic votes means that the early tallies on election night are likely to favor Steve Hilton. Every time there’s a California election, pundits make snap judgments about turnout and results even though millions of legal ballots will be uncounted by the time the night is through. Remember, nobody is actually “ahead” or “behind” as votes are being counted, the full result just isn’t in yet. Sit tight, we’re going to be here a while. And now, on to a sampling of the rest of the races:

CA-07: The Matsui family has controlled this Sacramento-area seat since 1979, with Doris Matsui, an internment camp survivor, running for and winning the seat in 2005 after her husband Bob died in office. Matsui will be 82 in September, and this year she has an opponent half her age: Mai Vang, a daughter of Hmong refugees and a city councilor in Sacramento. This is a classic generational battle, but Vang is also more progressive, having been endorsed by the state Working Families Party, as well as just more active than the reliably liberal but relatively inert Matsui.

Matsui loaned her own campaign $1.4 million, a first for her. She’s also put in a “red box” on her campaign website information about Zachariah Wooden, whom she calls the leading Republican in the race but who has raised no money. Matsui’s campaign says this is intended to draw a contrast, but it’s clearly a tactic to get super PACs to elevate Wooden so she can avoid a race against Vang in the fall. Sure enough, Wooden has received about $120,000 in outside spending from something called “Inclusion PAC,” about which little information is available, as well as $200,000 in “opposition” spending from another relatively unknown PAC, Rising Tide Collective.

snip