How many people want the second most powerful executive job in American politics? Does anybody? With the conclusion of Gavin Newsom’s final term as California governor this year, the seat, in this fall’s election, stands as open as a downtown parking spot. Passersby with timing and a certain derring-do have measured their odds and eyed their paths. The governorship of California is one of the great prizes in politics, and not just because the state is crucial to the United States’ economic dominance. On its own, it would be the world’s fourth-largest economy; industries under the governor’s tent include tech, entertainment, agriculture, and the automotive market. In matters of trade and talent, California is the nation’s main gateway to Asia. The governorship has organizing influence at home. Whoever is elected will be required to make more than three thousand political appointments, many with judicial consequence. The President of the United States appoints about four thousand, and can’t drive his own car.

One might expect the road to such an office to be strewn with bodies. It is—but many of them are very much alive and hoping for the role. A defining feature of this spring’s primary has been an unholy bottleneck of applicants. The California ballot is nineteen inches long, and lists sixty-one candidates for governor. It looks like the menu at Mels. The majority of the contenders are not associated with California politics in the national eye, and some are not associated with much of anything at all. “If they formed a support group, they could call it Candidates Anonymous,” the Los Angeles Times’ political columnist Mark Z. Barabak lamented early last year. (Those were hopeful days; the pool has since grown.) Yet, with the clock to Tuesday’s election running down, a startling number continue to have prospects, or at least the prospect of prospects, as they pass hurdles to the sound of no applause. None of the kingmakers in California Democratic politics—Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, the current senators, the former Vice-President—has issued an endorsement for a standing candidate, a silence perceived as an extension of the if-you-can’t-say-anything-nice rule and, no duh, an unpropitious sign. In April, the New York Times described the race as a “mad scramble”; by May, it had revised the diagnosis to a “hot mess.” “The whole spectacle has taken on the feel of a bad reality show,” the columnist Michelle Cottle wrote. The difference is that even bad reality shows typically inaugurate a star.