About Last Night: Gavin Newsom’s Comfy California Recall Edition

SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the San Francisco West Bay Approach Bay Bridge official opening, Friday, April 11, 2008 .Photo by SJayWalsh, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

After engaging in a protracted legal fight for no reason other than just to have it, and months of media hype surrounding it, the California recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom ended in a 30 point blowout.

Sacramento Bee:

The election was the culmination of a series of events that couldn’t have been predicted back in 2018, when Newsom was elected by a double-digit margin to lead the Golden State.

Newsom always drew ire from conservatives who opposed his liberal policies. The recall petition lists many of the highest-profile actions he took as governor at the beginning of his term, including placing a moratorium on the death penalty, as reasons to remove him from office. But it wasn’t until the once-in-a-century pandemic took hold in California that Newsom’s fortunes began to shift. In the early days, he immersed himself in the details of the coronavirus, giving what he sometimes acknowledged were “long-winded” daily press conferences on the state’s efforts to buy masks for nurses and secure nasal swabs from the Trump administration. As hospitals across the country in New York were becoming overwhelmed, Newsom took an aggressive approach to keep COVID-19 rates low in California, becoming the first governor to shutter his state’s economy to slow the virus’ spread and “flatten the curve” of infection.

Longstanding problems in the state persisted, including California’s visible homeless population, its high costs of living and worsening fires and droughts. The state’s faulty unemployment system left thousands of out-of-work residents desperately waiting for checks that became mired in massive backlogs and delays. A turning point came in November, when Newsom was caught dining maskless for a lobbyist’s birthday party at the French Laundry restaurant in Wine Country, even as he urged other Californians to avoid gathering with their families for the holidays. People began to argue California should be more like Florida, where life continued much as it had before the pandemic, without the mask regulations and distancing requirements. By the end of the campaign, Newsom was arguing that it would be dangerous to turn California into another Florida, where more people were dying per capita of the coronavirus.

The movement to recall Newsom gathered steam and became defined by the governor’s COVID-19 actions. The same month that Newsom attended the maskless dinner, recall proponents were granted 120 more days to gather signatures just as they were about to run out of time. Those additional months proved crucial, and in March 2021, a year after the pandemic began, they turned in enough signatures to trigger a special election. The recall effort should have been a long-shot in a state as blue as California, where Democrats constitute the largest share of registered voters. But conservative enthusiasm for the recall and liberal apathy about the election put Newsom in a tight spot in the weeks leading up to Election Day. For most of August, polls showed the race essentially neck and neck.

Newsom used those close polls in campaign pleas to supporters, warning that a Republican out of step with most Californians’ beliefs would likely be elected if the recall succeeded. In recent weeks, as the delta variant of the coronavirus drove up COVID-19 rates in California and around the country, Newsom focused his campaign on the virus, arguing his policies to mandate masks and vaccines for some workers are keeping the state safe. He contrasted his policies with those proposed by the candidates leading in the race to replace him, all of whom have said they would end mask and vaccine mandates for health care workers and school employees.

Leaning into the policy decisions that drove so many to sign the recall petition in the first place appeared to work for Newsom. Recent polls showed public sentiment break against the recall as Election Day approached. Voters were asked to decide two questions: Should be recalled? And who should replace him if he’s removed from office? Forty-six candidates filed to appear on the ballot in an effort to take his place.

Elder consistently led the pack of replacement candidates to replace the governor. Paffrath, who offers financial advice in YouTube videos, trailed Elder in most polls, as did top Republican candidates, including former Faulconer, Rocklin Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, businessman John Cox and reality TV personality Caitlyn Jenner. Elder’s devoted following, which he amassed over a decades-long career on the radio, poured millions of dollars into his campaign and showed up in droves at churches, where he hosted campaign events in the weeks leading up to the recall.

But his emergence as the frontrunner in the race did as much to energize liberals as it did conservatives.

Or, as our friend Joe Cunningham concisely put it:

Larry Elder believed the media hype that this race was about him, and he fought the battle on the Democrats’ terms. He could have kept the focus on Newsom, but allowed it to be the Larry Elder Show Runs For Governor.

— Joe Cunningham (@JoePCunningham) September 15, 2021

The election number nerds will dig through the data breakdown and opinionators will spend words and characters drawing conclusions from this race to fit whatever the next news cycle going is, but there is really only one takeaway from the California recall: The Golden State is still the bluest in the country and that isn’t changing anytime soon.

The comparison to the last California recall shows how much has changed, and stayed the same, in America’s most populist state. The recall of Gray Davis in 2003 was successful because of a couple of factors. The Democratic Party used a questionable and ultimately failed strategy of promoting both “vote no” but also to vote “yes” on replacing Davis with Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante. The result was a mixed message that didn’t resonate. Davis, in the words of our friend, OT contributor, and California native Genya Coulter, had the “charisma of a Crisco sandwich” on top of the other issues that were driving the recall. Most importantly, there was the ultimate beneficiary of that California recall in one Arnold Schwarzenegger. Star power aside, he ran as a reformist centrist and had a functional California Republican Party to work with. The 2021 California recall had neither of those things, and if you had to prove the State of California has a functional GOP to a Grand Jury, I’m not sure you could secure an indictment.

Larry Elder’s numbers on question two are irrelevant, made moot by the 2-to-1 ratio of question one. The California GOP — such as it is — will have to decide if it wants to continue its decline and marginalization while chasing national media attention and fundraising, or if it wants to retool and develop some kind of “California Republican” identity that can be competitive in the state.

Since there is more money and attention in the former, bet on that course of action for the foreseeable future. Which means continued irrelevance when it comes to the latter. In the end, the word for both the GOP in California and the 2021 California recall can both be summed up in that one term: non-competitive.