In Oklahoma, activists are seeking to eliminate the state’s current primary-election system and replace it with a “top two” system like that used in California. Under the proposal, all candidates from all parties would be placed on a single ballot with all voters participating, and the two candidates receiving the most votes would advance to the November general election.

Advocates of the “top two” system say it leads to more political moderation among elected officials.

In November 2024, when officials with Oklahoma United announced they were launching an initiative petition to adopt the “top two” election system in Oklahoma, one spokesperson said it would encourage “candidates to appeal to a broader constituency” instead of focusing “solely on their party’s base.”

The results of the Aug. 5 Seattle mayoral race, conducted under a “top two” primary system, suggest otherwise.

Among the eight candidates on the ballot, the top two finishers were Katie Wilson and incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell. Wilson and Harrell both ran on a platform of Trump-bashing, tax increases, and radicalism on issues such as transgenderism and illegal immigration.

On her campaign website, Wilson, who received the most votes in the “top two” primary, vows to “Trump-proof” Seattle by, in part, preserving Seattle’s “status as a sanctuary city” that protects illegal immigrants from deportation efforts. She also called for reviewing the city’s data collection and storage practices “to ensure we are not at risk of sharing data with Federal immigration agencies,” such as those working for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

“Seattle can’t be a true sanctuary city if ICE can access data about you through City policies and programs that could have been better designed,” Wilson’s campaign website states.

Wilson also called for requiring Seattle police to “stop and identify individuals in plain clothes who claim to be federal ICE agents.”

Her platform includes defending access to “gender-affirming care for Seattle residents,” a reference to sex-change surgeries and the provision of cross-sex hormones.

Wilson said the city should “do more to support community groups that are helping LGBTQ and particularly trans people to navigate the challenging housing and job markets in our high-cost city,” and that city officials must “ensure that Seattle has shelters that are welcoming and safe for queer and trans people, who are overrepresented among the homeless population.”

When it comes to taxes, Wilson supports imposing a local capital gains tax that would be added on top of an existing state capital gains tax. She complains that property taxes collections are not increasing in “pace with inflation,” and supports a “statewide tax on intangible property like stocks and bonds” as well as a “Land Value Tax as an alternative option to the property tax.” Wilson also wants to impose a “vacancy tax” on properties that are not currently rented out for residential or commercial use. Wilson also says that an “excise tax on professional services can generate significant revenue while correcting for a loophole in our sales tax, which exempts many of these services. Currently, if you hire a plumber you pay sales tax, but if you hire a lawyer you don’t.”

She also wants to impose a local estate tax and a digital advertising tax.

Harrell, the incumbent Seattle mayor, brags on his campaign website of fighting the Trump administration in court on issues such as transgenderism.

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The policy declared that the federal government would use “clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”

Trump’s order noted, “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.”

On his campaign website, Harrell brags that the City of Seattle has sued Trump to roll back the order barring men from women’s bathrooms, as well as suing the Trump administration over its crackdown on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs.

“When Trump unlawfully tries to withhold critical federal funding by attacking access to opportunity and our LGBTQ+ community, we will pursue every avenue to protect our people and our priorities,” Harrell said in a press release announcing the lawsuits.

Under Harrell’s leadership, the City of Seattle has also joined a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s crackdown on “sanctuary cities.”

Harrell has also called for increasing by 50 percent a city tax on certain businesses’ revenue.

The results of this year’s Seattle mayoral primary—which produced a general election pitting two largely identical candidates against one another—were not unusual for races conducted under a “top two” primary system.

Where it has been used, the “top two” system routinely limits voters’ November choices to two members of the same political party.

Had the “top two” system been in place in Oklahoma in 2018, voters’ November choice for governor would have been limited to two Democrats with no Republican or independent candidates on the ballot.

In Oklahoma’s 2018 gubernatorial race, there were 10 candidates who filed to run as Republicans and two who filed to run as Democrats. In the June 2018 primary, 452,606 Oklahomans cast a vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidate compared to just 395,494 votes cast for a Democrat.

But under a “top two” primary, the November ballot that year would have pitted Democrat Drew Edmondson against Democrat Connie Johnson with no Republican option. Because the Republican vote was split 10 ways in the primary, no GOP candidate received more votes than the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary.

Oklahoma proponents of a “top two” primary also claim it will boost voter participation. But the Seattle mayoral election drew a turnout of less than 19 percent on Aug. 5.