Dude, when’s my primary? or Nobody knows anything about anything when it comes to local elections.

Everyone seems pretty jazzed about California moving its presidential primary to March 2020, and I guess it’s worth a little buzz. We’re a big state, with a lot of votes — and a lot of money. We also boast the most eclectic mix of industry, ethnicity, and geography of any state in the nation.

And because the Democratic Party awards its delegates proportionally in the Golden State, there’s an outside chance that candidates still standing on Super Tuesday will pay us a little more than the usual lip service we get with our standard “last in the nation” June primary.

We’ve played this electoral shell game before, but I’ll get to that later. Because there’s a question I keep asking of election officials, consultants, and other campaign professionals, and nobody seems to know the answer…

Lost in all the hype around California’s presidential primary is the status of local nonpartisan elections. I’m talking essentially about races for city councils, boards of supervisors, and special districts. These races typically feature young and/or first-time candidates, who already face a mountain of phone calls and fundraising and door knocking and doubt as they embark on their political careers.

Presidential campaigns are geared toward January and early primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. For them, the date of the California primary is essentially irrelevant. If they don’t have a good showing in any of those early states, they won’t be around to worry about Super Tuesday.

Most local candidates don’t have the bandwidth to plan for a fluctuating election date. Yet here we are, 13 months from Super Tuesday, and nobody seems to know if local elections will be held that day or three months later in June. And when I say “nobody”, I mean the people who should know.

A recent phone call to Candidate Services at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters led to a conversation with an attorney in the California Secretary of State’s Elections Division and text messages to a consultant for the Assembly Elections Committee and a deputy ROV — all of whom offered conflicting takes; some of whom have yet to reply at all.

Mediocre customer service aside, this comedy of errors serves as a stark reminder that our elections officials are still struggling to perform their basic charge of managing the most sacred trust of the covenant that is America.

And since I can’t get a straight answer, I’m advising local candidates to plan for March and adjust to June. Three extra months at the end of a campaign would be like a gift from the goddess. But there’s no way to adjust if you lose three months of your game plan.

This is especially true for San José City Council candidates, who are already hamstrung by a limited fundraising window that kicks off six months before Election Day. Not to mention that you need to be knocking doors at least nine months out to have an effective field campaign.

And that’s not the only unintended consequence of California moving up.

I know everybody’s suffering from Trump-inflicted ADHD, but campaign veterans might recall that California moved its presidential primary to Super Tuesday back in 2008.

By the time the race came to us, the Democrats had already whittled things down to Obama and Clinton. And because Hillary started with a 30-point edge in California, we barely saw either candidate. Although I did get to (almost) meet Michelle! #swoon

And of course, both parties treated us like a piggy bank. Ho hum.

But another byproduct of that move was that local nonpartisan primaries were still held in June, with abysmal turnout.

If you need some perspective on the efficacy of that decision, just ask current Assemblymember Ash Kalra, who came up short of 50% of the vote in the San José District 2 City Council primary and was forced into a November runoff — against a candidate who had dropped out and endorsed him before the June election!

I can only hope the powers that be agree that the best approach is a fully consolidated primary in March 2020. But I’m not holding my breath. And candidates shouldn’t either.