Gavin Newsom was always going to win re-election this year by a big margin.

It doesn’t matter how incompetent he is; it comes down to basic math. Nearly half of the state’s voters are registered Democrats, around a quarter are Republican. Registered whatevers tend to vote for their party, because that’s how it goes. Throw in some union money, wait three seconds until the Republican says something really dumb and off-putting to moderates and minorities and there you go, easy Democratic victory. One plus one is two.

But now, Newsom is going to win even more easily, since the Republicans have basically thrown in the towel this cycle on the gubernatorial race.

Which, I mean, is fair enough. Why waste money on a definite loser when there are more winnable races out there?

I guess it’s not the biggest loss.

We won’t get John Cox blowing way too much money on a losing effort and campaigning with a bear.

We won’t get Kevin Faulconer being the Never-Trumper-turned-Trump-voter who wonders why he has no constituency.

We won’t get Larry Elder being called a White supremacist by smug liberals who get off on hating Black conservatives specifically.

According to Politico, none of them are running this time.

There will be some Republicans running, including  Northern California Republican Brian Dahle. The only thing I remember about him is that he got elected to the state Senate a few years ago because he was the favored choice of the firefighters’ unions, police unions and prison guard union. His whole campaign consisted of calling Kevin Kiley, who was also in the running, a “former staffer” of Kamala Harris because he worked as a deputy attorney general while Harris was state attorney general. Unfortunately for Dahle, the prison guards’ union is already in bed with Newsom, so he won’t even get that this time.

So, to that candidacy I say, “Meh.”

Non-Republican Michael Shellenberger, who last year endorsed Faulconer for governor, is apparently in the running. Shellenberger is an author and activist who I’ve heard quite a few times now on some of the podcasts I subscribe to — including Jonah Goldberg’s “The Remnant,” “The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie” and “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Shellenberger has interesting things to say about how horribly California has failed on homelessness, about the sad irony of progressive California being a national leader in poverty and inequality, and the absurdity of turning away from nuclear energy amid what environmental activists claim is an existential emergency in climate change.

But interesting ideas alone don’t get people elected and the status quo in California is maintained by a well-funded political machine backed by well-funded special interest groups with every incentive to keep things as they are.

This also isn’t Shellenberger’s first run for governor — he placed 9th in the 2018 primary, with 0.5% of the vote.

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It’s not a revelation that statewide offices in California are the domain of the Democrats. It’s been that way for a while now. Nor is it any revelation that, while Californians aren’t as lefty as people think — they’ve voted down split roll, affirmative action, rent control, a big school bond and death penalty abolition in recent years — the GOP brand is absolute trash in California.

But it is remarkable that California, home to one of the most powerful economies on the planet, has such abysmal political competition.

The lack of competition is only to the detriment of Californians in the long-run, since the status quo has no incentive to govern responsibly. They can send out tens of billions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment checks, oversee a K-12 system that scores worse than most of the rest of the country on standardized tests, keep large segments of the state in poverty and skew budget priorities toward special interest considerations — since the system isn’t working to hold them accountable.

Oh well.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].