The state Democratic Party and the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have spent tens of millions of dollars on Tuesday’s primaries alone. Their biggest top-two challenges are in the SoCal seats held by Republican Representatives Dana Rohrabacher, Darrell Issa, and Ed Royce. Issa and Royce are retiring, while Rohrabacher is considered one of the most vulnerable GOP incumbents in the country—if Democrats can get a candidate to the final round of voting. Rohrabacher is known as perhaps the most Russia-friendly member of Congress. His ties to the Kremlin have come under new scrutiny since the 2016 election, including a report that in 2012 the FBI warned Rohrabacher that Vladimir Putin’s government was trying to recruit him as an intelligence source. Complicating matters in the Rohrabacher race is the fact that the DCCC and the state party are backing rival candidates.

Bauman told me he had persuaded “six or seven” Democratic candidates to drop out of the congressional races, even though a few of their names will still appear on Tuesday’s ballot. Democrats are targeting as many as nine GOP-held House seats in California, and Bauman told me the suggestion that Democrats would get shut out of many of them was “overhyped and overblown.”

Yet he said he’s bracing for at least a couple of disappointments. When I asked him if he was confident Democrats would advance candidates in all of the key races next week, Bauman quickly replied: “Absolutely not. I am not confident.”

“I am confident,” he said, “that if we do our job right, we won’t get shut out of many of them. Surely we will get cut out of at least a couple of them, I would imagine.”

In the statewide races, the top-two system has led to some unusual tactics. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic lieutenant governor who is the frontrunner in the governor’s race, has rankled some in his party by trying to elevate a Republican opponent, John Cox, over former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Newsom has argued that a general election between him and Villaraigosa would be unnecessarily divisive for Democrats, but officials like Bauman believe keeping a Republican off the top of the ticket would help in down-ballot races, because it would depress turnout among rank-and-file GOP voters.

The L.A. Times/USC poll found that just 10 percent of California voters want a closed primary system, in which only registered Democrats or Republicans could vote in primaries for their respective parties.* Both Bauman and Palzer said they would support open primaries as long as each party could nominate their own candidates for the general election. “That certainly opens it up to those who don’t choose to affiliate,” Bauman said. “I could see going that route.”

Advocates of ranked-choice voting, which is used in municipal elections in San Francisco and Oakland, are also trying to take advantage of dissatisfaction with the current statewide system. They want to incorporate ranked preferences into the top-two primary. They say that would allow people to vote strategically in a way that would reduce the chances of a major party being shut out. Another proposal is to expand top-two to top-four, so that voters could narrow a large field of candidates in a primary while still having more choices in the general election.