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

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

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103 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    Making popcorn by the bucket load while waiting for the various lawsuits regarding the stolen election!Report

  2. Chip Daniels says:

    Chalk up another loss to the cult of Savvy, people like Nate Silver who gravely warned that the Democrats were Doing It Wrong and only by taking his advice could they hope to win.

    What seems happened is that when it was just a general referendum on “Are you happy or would you like to change course” Newsom was in trouble but when it became “Would you like Larry Elder as Governor” the sentiment changed drastically.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      Yes. But is this not politics 101?

      I don’t know what Silver said, but basically Newsom was smart to make it Newsom vs. Elder rather than Newsom vs. the French Laundry.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Marchmaine says:

        I don’t think it would have mattered if it was Newsom v. French Laundry. California is a Democratic majority state and significantly so. Recall won in a few sparsely populated rural counties in the central valley and northeast. It did not win in old Republican strongholds of Orange County, San Diego County, and the Imperial Valley.

        I don’t know why it is so hard for so many people to understand this unless it is some kind of cognitive dissonance to protect them from the idea that there are lots of states where Democratic politicians are popular and their voters are the majority. Neewsome’s approval was never underwater. On COVID, 45 percent of voters thought he enacted the correct safety measures, 32 percent thought it was too strict, and 18 percent not strict enough. The too strict crowd was out numbered.Report

        • Marchmaine in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Can’t say I followed very closely, but the general campaign of simple malaise had some traction and the polls were indeed close… until the Stupidity of First Past the Post made it clear that Elder was viable, perhaps likely replacement.

          For Political Science, if Californians would agree, I”d like to re-run the experiment with Ranked Choice voting, or even better a run-off. For science.

          But even with the numbers you cite: 45% agree he enacted the right safety measures… of that 45% how many also thought they should apply to him?

          As I say, I’m not the least bit surprised by the outcome, but I think it weird that we can ignore actual events and rhetoric and framing and all the things politicians do and react to as part of a foregone conclusion.Report

        • Philip H in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          (I)t is some kind of cognitive dissonance to protect them from the idea that there are lots of states where Democratic politicians are popular and their voters are the majority.

          Exactly this. My neighbors are often gobsmacked that Democrats actually exist and have things to say. They really can’t grok it. Hence one of many reasons the deep red states are where they are.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    Time Miller at the Bulwark: https://www.thebulwark.com/newsom-is-up-big-in-california-heres-why-pundits-got-fooled-again/

    “The insurgent campaigns of Jaime Harrison (South Carolina) and Amy McGrath (Kentucky) and John James (twice in Michigan) all reverted to the mean in the same exact way that Larry Elder and the Republican recall effort have in California. They were each representing a minority party in their states and got swept up in the buzz and backing that was coming from supporters who reside in other states, where their party is actually popular.”

    California is a Democratic state. It is more Democratic than it was in 2003. No Republican has won a state-wide office in a decade, maybe more. The jungle primary often means a general election could be between two Democrats. This happened during Feinstein’s last Senate election where Kevin De Leon was the challenger in the primary and general. He mainly got Republican votes by the way.

    The thing is that even as California has gotten more liberal, California Republicans have become just as extreme and cray cray as the rest of the national GOP. A California Republican politician probably has more in common with right-wing nut from Alabama or Mississippi than with a California Democrat. The tweet you highlighted is wrong. Larry Elder could not have focused on Newsom because the whole point of the recall was that California Republicans were angry at Newsom for being a Democrat and having the Democratic response to the pandemic and climate change. It turns out that the rest of California likes Newsom’s Democratic response to the pandemic and climate change because the overwhelming majority of California is Democratic.

    The exit polling showed that the biggest concern for voters was the pandemic. The majority of Californians think that the GOP response to the pandemic is insane and medically illiterate. Larry Elder believed in the Republican response to COVID and climate change because he is a Republican.

    I admit there was a time I panicked that he could pull it off but I was wrong to panic.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      No Republican has won a state-wide office in a decade, maybe more.

      Is California better today than it was a decade ago?Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

        100 percent!!!

        Troll grading: D minus.Report

      • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

        Extra stimulus check, expanded EITC, expanded paid family leave, actual strong EO’s on getting rid of zero-emission vehicles, and hey, 21% GDP growth in the past decade.

        The housing crisis sucks, but a political genius would have issues fixing that and even then, there are good pro-housing bills being passed in the past few years.

        So, yes.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:

          GDP growth?

          Well! Now we’re talking! I guess I was myopically asking about QOL stuff.

          As I said, I don’t live there. The only information I have is as an outsider.Report

          • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:

            I mean, the main QOL issue in California is the housing issue, and there’s no magic bullet there, since a majority of California’s population, among voters in both parties, like the fact their home values are rising.

            Plus, it’s not like Elder or the GOP had legitimate ideas about the housing issues, and the reasonable Republican in the race, Falcouner, had basically the same YIMBY views on housing that Newsom does, except having a Republican in the Governor’s mansion, pushing YIMBY laws, would’ve only hurt the YIMBY cause.Report

            • North in reply to Jesse says:

              Yeah I’m inclined to agree with you here. If you look at Cali, waved a magic wand and converted hundreds of thousands of single family home tracts into midrises then a huge amount of the problems Cali is cited for just evaporate. Traffic, homelessness, rent costs, inequality, a whole mountain of all their biggest problems just vanish. It’s all downstream from housing. Heck, probably would help their budget issues too.Report

              • Philip H in reply to North says:

                I’d buy it as long as you make sure the magic expands transit opportunities in those midrises.Report

              • North in reply to Philip H says:

                You’d probably not need magic to do that. Once they were there it’d be fishin childs’ play, and a good idea, to provide transit. Even if you didn’t, though, it’d still help a lot because absent that housing those people would otherwise be commuting for hours in from more affordable far flung locales.Report

            • Saul Degraw in reply to Jesse says:

              In positive news being a YIMBY politician is starting to be a plus (at least in the Bay Area) and there has been some pro-housing legislation that has been enacted.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                When is it expected to result in housing?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                And its getting results-

                California expands Project Homekey, housing homeless
                https://www.kron4.com/news/california/california-expands-project-homekey-housing-homeless/

                She accepted the offer and took residence in one of 6,000 new units built statewide over the past year as part of Project Homekey. The program started in June 2020 is repurposing vacant hotels, motels and other unused properties as permanent supportive housing.

                Homekey is the lynchpin of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $12 billion plan to combat homelessness in the nation’s most populous state. California has an estimated 161,000 unhoused people, more than a quarter of the nationwide total of 580,000, according to the the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Newsom signed the funding bill July 19, calling it the “largest single investment in providing support for the most vulnerable in American history.”

                Newsom’s office said $800 million — most of it federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act money — was spent on Homekey in 2020 to provide shelter for 8,200 people. Now the administration plans to go even bigger: California will spend $5.8 billion of state and federal funds over two years to expand the program and create an estimated 42,000 housing units.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                $800 million — most of it federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act money — was spent on Homekey in 2020 to provide shelter for 8,200 people

                So lemme bust out my calculator.

                $800,000,000 divided by 8,200 people is…

                ~$97,000/person.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                Yes. That’s a very efficient number.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                $100K to house someone for a year is an efficient number by some measurements.

                By others, it’d pay for a house. Like, outright.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                Maybe where you live.

                What Homekey is doing is remodeling existing motels into permanent housing for the people who, in many cases, have mental and physical disabilities.

                To construct and maintain support for this demographic is astronomically expensive.

                $100K is a bargain. It costs about $350K to construct market rate apartments.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Do the market rate apartments only house one person?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                Do market rate apartments offer counseling services?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Generally, no.

                I guess we’re back to whether $97,000 per person is a lot for one year of housing/counseling services.

                It’s a bargain, I guess.

                I hope that it’s easy to scale up to 42,000 units.

                If $800,000,000 paid for housing for 8,200 people, you’d think that it’d be no trouble to help about 60,000 folks with the 42,000 units for the $5.8 billion. For one year. (Plus counseling.)Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                It isn’t per year.

                Put aside your tribal identity for a bit, and you may discover that the hated Democrats are actually doing a good thing.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I guess I’m misunderstanding what is meant by “temporary effort”.

                Do I think that they’re actually doing a good thing? Yes! They are!

                For $100,000 per person.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

                Is that $97K the annual cost over, say, 10 years, or simply the one time cost of converting a hotel into housing and getting it all setup? If we look at this next year, does the cost of running the hotel & providing on-site services drop significantly?

                Also, look at the success rate 5 years from now? Does the hotel + on-site services help get folks clean & sober, or help folks get training and jobs so they can leave the shelter? Or is a rotating door of failure?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I’m just looking at it like this:

                Newsom’s office said $800 million — most of it federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act money — was spent on Homekey in 2020 to provide shelter for 8,200 people.

                I’m reading that as if it were saying that, in 2020, $800,000,000 was spent on Homekey to provide shelter for 8,200 people.

                The essay includes this line:

                Eventually Perez will be presented with housing vouchers that will allow her to rent a subsidized apartment.

                So that seems to indicate that she will be moving out and someone else will be moving in.

                I don’t know how much of the cost is a one-time cost. I don’t know how much of the cost is poured into counselling.

                I just did some “open calculator in Google” math and divided $800,000,000 by 8,200.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

                Sure, so you need to look at the cost over time, and look at how well it works to get folks back on their feet.

                If that $97K gets a person back to financial independence, then it’s a good thing. I mean, I haven’t checked lately, but isn’t that what the DOD pays for one toilet seat?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Oh, if we’re comparing it to the DOD, I’m pretty sure that California is doing great.

                (Especially since that toilet seat is now in the hands of the Taliban.)Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                A coupla things;

                Full disclosure, I have recently changed jobs and am now heading up a design-build division of a construction company, where my major focus is on our participation in the Homekey program.

                The way it works is that a private design-builder purchases a motel and, at their own expense, converts it.

                The builder earns their money back through the rents; So far, just like any private sector operation.

                The new part of this equation is that the tenants aren’t private sector people; they are people who generally need rent supplements, counseling and treatment.
                So the facility has a permanent operator who provides not just normal maintenance and management, but counseling and even minor medical treatment .

                So the figures quoted are the costs for the initial setup and construction. The cities themselves are responsible for the long term operational subsidies.

                If anyone wants to compare these numbers to something, the only rational comparison is to the status quo which is astronomically more.

                For example, it costs nearly a thousand dollars a day to incarcerate a homeless person; More than that if they need any sort of medical care.
                The cost of lower property values is rarely calculated, but i happen to know of a specific property which has an encampment of some twenty homeless people on its sidewalk. The value of this property has dropped by several million.
                This works out to oh, lets say, around a couple hundred thousand dollars of cost, per homeless person.

                So all in all, $100K to set up a homeless person with a home and counseling service is the cheapest option.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                So yeah, this is the initial cost, which I expect to be more than the yearly operating cost.

                Personally, I love this idea of buying up old hotels and converting them. I know King County is doing this and I think it’s probably one of the best uses of limited resources we have, certainly way better than building new shelters.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                What makes homelessness such a hard lift is that there are no easy or cheap answers.
                The status quo is expensive and any conceivable solution is also expensive.
                The very nature of homelessness is that these people are generally very needy- Needy of medical help, psychiatric help, and just generally life skills.
                And they have the agency to either succeed or fail which frustrates our best intentions.

                And ignoring them only makes the price tag go up.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Agreed. The way I see it, these folks need lots of services, but not actually a lot in the way of shelter. And by that, I mean they just need a warm, safe place to sleep, wash up, etc; and if we can get them that, a lot of them, once warm and safe, will stabilize and accept help. Efforts to provide creature comforts more than a warm bed and a shower are largely wasted. This is why I love the hotel conversion idea, it’s nothing fancy, but it’s warm, has indoor plumbing, and hopefully gets enough of them to stay put long enough to get them the help they need.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Jaybird says:

        There’s a pandemic now, but on the other hand the internet is much taster.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      “No Republican has won a state-wide office in a decade, maybe more. ”

      If Jaybird is a Republican, then Newsom and Pelosi are definitely Republicans.Report

    • JS in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Hmm. How did the last round of polls match the results?

      I’m still curious of the 2016/2020 polling issues are “republicans are increasingly hard to poll” or “Trump voters are hard to poll”.

      I’m leaning towards the latter, as it fits the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections best in my mind — Trump inspires a lot of people to vote for him that don’t normally vote, don’t answer polls, and pollsters aren’t skilled at finding. They show up, vote for Trump, and then vote R down-ticket.

      But…if he’s not on the ballot, they don’t seem to show up. Period. Even if Trump is stumping for the candidate. Trump personally motivates them, not the GOP.Report

      • North in reply to JS says:

        From your lip to God(ess?)’s ear because if that is true Trump may well destroy the GOP as it is currently constituted.Report

        • Philip H in reply to North says:

          this is a main reason why the GOP is doubling down on gerrymandering and voter suppression, They need to drive down Democratic and Independent participation in off years so their lack luster turnout still prevails.Report

          • North in reply to Philip H says:

            Suppression is one subject but gerrymandering is a ticklish subject because if you miscalculate your gerrymanders then a slight surge in opposition turnout can swamp your levees and turn a gerrymandered majority into a blowout loss.Report

            • JS in reply to North says:

              That’s unfortunately not as true as you might think.

              Now back 30 years ago? Absolutely.

              With modern computing and analysis systems you can squeeze more seats out of a state, all with a 5 to 7 point buffer, than you could squeeze out in 2000 with a 2 point buffer.

              It’ll even throw in 10 years of projected demographic and voter movement changes so you know what seats will start losing their edge when as the decade wears on.

              Worse yet, you can stagger it — you can set a minimum number at +9, then squeeze more out at +5. So you’d need to see a +10 wave to lose your state House majority, for instance, but you’d keep it with a +8 — and the trade-off is you might have one or two seats that flip a lot.

              Better data, better computers, better analysis engines. It first started in 2010 with REDMAP, but bluntly this isn’t your father’s gerrymandering.Report

              • North in reply to JS says:

                Ick, thanks for the informative but depressing correction.Report

              • JS in reply to North says:

                The 2010 redistricting should have been a wake-up call — and was, among at least political scientists.

                REDMAP was used to amazing effect by the GOP, and we’re still dealing with it — and I’m fairly certain it’s gotten better since 2010, not worse.

                What was it — Wisconsin, I think, where GOP candidates got 40ish% of the vote – -and a super-majority in the State House.

                A 5 to 10 point loss that translated into a supermajority. That’s how good REDMAP is.Report

  4. Saul Degraw says:

    It also turns out that California’s response to the pandemic is much better than those of red states: https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/California-now-1-of-only-3-states-to-exit-CDC-s-16459110.php

    “California no longer has “high” community levels of coronavirus transmission, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an achievement a top state health official credited to broad vaccination uptake and public compliance with restrictions such as mask-wearing.

    The state is now the only one in the country to reach the “substantial” tier of the agency’s risk chart, for the first time since the rapid spread of the delta coronavirus variant brought the summer COVID-19 surge, state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said Tuesday.”Report

  5. Saul Degraw says:

    https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/does-the-gop-really-want-to-do-this

    “Yes, this is what we should have expected from such a heavily Democratic state, but it might have been (much) closer if the vote had been a straight up-or-down referendum on Newsom himself. Instead, it became a referendum on “the abyss.”

    The abyss, of course, was Trumpism.

    This seems a point worth pondering, as the GOP contemplates lashing itself even more tightly to the Orange Man-Child of Mar-a-Lago.

    The California fiasco will probably not be enough to prompt the sort of introspection that Republicans so desperately need. But as 2024 looms, it provides one more reason for Republicans to ask themselves: Do they really want to do this again?

    The great political mystery of our time has been the refusal of the GOP to take the many off-ramps from Trumpism.

    They could have put the petulant, disgraced, defeated one-term president firmly in the rearview mirror — but, instead, they have embraced their hostage status with an obsequiousness that makes the Stockholm Syndrome seem quaint.”Report

    • Philip H in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      The great political mystery of our time has been the refusal of the GOP to take the many off-ramps from Trumpism.

      Saul, I expect better of you. Trump was the culmination of over 40 years of work by Republicans to fashion a base, a narrative, and a judiciary that would cement minority rule nationally by conservative, allegedly Christian White Men. Trump certainly advanced that to an extreme, but more importantly he gave the base, and Republican politicians, cover to finally be open about what their objective is. You can even see this in the posting on Larry campaign website yesterday (or the day before) of an essay questioning whether the election was stolen.

      Republican politicians cling to Trump because they believe he will help them achieve their real goals. Pretending otherwise is beneath you.Report

    • JS in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      it’s because Trump drove record turnout for them, and they’re drowning.

      The pickle is that Trump also drove record turnout AGAINST them, so they’re trying really quietly to sort of…shift those Trump voters over to the GOP.

      But turning against Trump would anger those voters.

      Problem is, of course, too many of their grifters find imitating Trump to be a money-maker, an attention grabber, and it plays VERY well with the base.

      Abbot in Texas has gone full Trump, because he’s terrified of losing a primary against Allen West. I can promise you he’d really prefer NOT to do that, but he’s got to get through that primary first. So he’s tossing out Trump-style red meat by the barrel because he has no choice if he wants to win his primary.

      He’s not making himself any more popular in Texas (quite the opposite, as a lot of Texans are still angry about the winter freeze, among other things), but that’s the price he’s paying to make himself popular with the voters who matter — his primary voters. He’s betting the least popular Republican in Texas can still beat the most popular Dem (and Ted Cruz says he’s right).Report

  6. Marchmaine says:

    But seriously, a recall vote in CA is boring… are we going to have a post about Gen. Miley?Report

  7. Saul Degraw says:

    Meanwhile in red states, Idaho is rationing care and so is Alaska. TN is denying care. There was a story of an Alabama man that died after being turned away from dozens of hospitals for his cardiac condition because the ICU beds were overflowing with COVID patients.

    Yet it is Democrats that have to worry, eh? The GOP is literally killing its own voters.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/15/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/Report

    • Philip H in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Mississippi has the highest case load (and I think the highest death rate) in the nation. And the grumbling is mostly about the governors lack of push back on the President’s most recent Executive orders and mandates. Care rationing is coming.

      Yet I assure you that next year all three of our Trumpublican Congressmen, and Senator Wicker, will be reelected by healthy margins. The number of deaths of Republican voters is not moving a single needle here.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Philip H says:

        I tend to dismiss the idea that the Republican party is becoming a “death cult” as unserious. But when I hear things like this I hesitate.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to Burt Likko says:

          “They were all in love with dying, they were drinking from a fountain, that was pouring like an avalanche, coming down a mountain.”Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Burt Likko says:

          “Death cult” may be overstating it, but the phrase captures a very important reality, which is that conventional political analysis doesn’t explain their behavior, but viewing them through the lens of a grievance cult does.

          In conventional political analysis, farmers and working class people should hate Trump.
          But in the grievance cult, economic pain is a small sacrifice so long as the hated enemy suffers worse.

          Conventional political analysis says that the “conservative” party should view the military and police with respect and admiration. Yet this fails to explain their attacks on the Capitol Police or General Milley or the Gold Star families, or the slurring of soldiers as losers.

          Conventional analysis doesn’t explain why they despise some corporations and speak bitterly about “elites” yet also demand to shower them with tax cuts.

          Grievance explains this- all the organs of society- from police and military to churches and academia- are to be loyal to the aggrieved group. Any that are not loyal are cast out and become one with the hated enemy.Report

          • MAD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

            So, um, like, this is Trump.
            He’s not the conservative party.
            He’s the dude who got the smartest people and the dumbest people to vote for him.
            More people voted for Obama/Trump than did McCain/Trump.

            Trump is far more the conventional “Big Man” than he is anything conservative. That’s why so many more black people voted for Trump in the last election.
            It’s why MexicanAmericans love the dude.

            To talk about all the “Old Conservatives” as if they have relevance… well, they were willing to vote for Mitt Romney. Uniparty is Uniparty, and you’ll cry when they win next time because they put an R behind their name. Sad, so sad.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I was just talking about how 20 years ago, when New York was attacked, the country cried out “they’re attacking all of us!”. Previously, I’ve noted that when New York was suffering under coronavirus, the right didn’t gloat, not even those who thought (I assumed crazily) that Cuomo’s policies were killing the elderly. The world was decent back then. Things turned indecent right about the time that conservative states started seeing increases in coronavirus. It was like clockwork.Report

  8. Burt Likko says:

    Re: the final two paragraphs of the OP.

    The California GOP will continue to push further and further right because everyone who sees a slow, grinding, initially unsuccessful but building on past improvements sort of path back to appealing to persuadable moderates has been purged from the ranks of the party’s leadership and replaced with True Believers. There is no one left there who thinks the path to power is through the middle. These folks have been telling themselves for a generation that their mission is to offer voters a choice, not a compromise. These are the slogans they actually use with one another at their conventions and gatherings; I know because I used to be part of them.

    They are, in fact, completely out of ideas. If they somehow got power the only thing they’d think to do with it would be to take the state government apart and cut taxes. They’d tell themselves that would be enough. 1982’s solutions to 2022’s problems is what they’ll offer next year. And as we saw yesterday, the voters are NOT impressed.

    I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if Gavin Newsom’s general election opponent in 2022 were a Democrat running to the incumbent’s left. Maybe 1 in 3 that happens? Depends on how awful the sacrificial lamb they find turns our to be. (N.b., said sacrificial lamb, maybe Michelle Steele or whoever they got elected to the State Board of Equalization, would be an absolute lock in a place like Tennessee; they just can’t seem to understand that California is not Alabama.) If that does happen, it’ll be a a tall milepost on the polarization path chosen by the Zombie Reagan / Trump crew at the Cal-GOP’s Executive Committee along their preferred and ideologically comfortable road to complete irrelevance.Report

  9. Douglas Hayden says:

    As much as everyone’s riding on Nate Silver today, this -was- a close race a few weeks back! The biggest story no one seems to be talking about is how Dems remain engaged because they’re scared out of their pants by GOP candidates. I’m open to the argument that had the party rallied behind Faulconer they might have pulled it off, or at least made it close, but the base demanded anti-vax wingnut Elder and now here we are.

    My magic 8-ball’s still cloudy with regards to ’22 but if the GOP keeps handing these anxiety freebies to the Dems, they’re not going to have a good time.Report

  10. This is a ridiculously low bar, but we should thank Larry Elder for bucking the GOP trend by conceding after he’d obviously lost.Report

    • I have no idea. What percentage of Americans know the name of a fancy French restaurant in the city/area where they live?Report

      • Omar Barnes in reply to Michael Cain says:

        Most Americans live in a place where there isn’t a fancy French Restaurant within 20 miles. Hell, I live in a city, and we don’t have a fancy French Restaurant. Our last one burned to the ground over ten years ago, and was never rebuilt. (We do French Cuisine. We call them Belgian Bistros, and they serve good dark beer.)Report

  11. Chip Daniels says:

    Newsom signs legislation effectively ending single family zoning, and increasing density:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-limits-single-family-home-zoning-11631840086?mod=djemalertNEWS
    California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed legislation allowing the construction of duplexes on most properties with one home, a severe curtailing of single-family zoning in a state struggling with some of the nation’s highest housing prices.

    The legislation, a long-sought goal for proponents of more housing construction, also makes it easier to divide existing lots into two, potentially providing the opportunity for four homes to be built where one was previously allowed.Report

  12. Nate Silver’s final polling results:
    Keep. 57.3%
    Remove 41.5%

    Most recent results I can find online:
    Keep. 6,698,131 63.5%
    Remove 3,856,169. 36.5%
    An estimated 84% of votes have been counted.

    This is interesting, because since 2016 Silver’s polling has usually been off in the other direction, i.e. crazies declining to identify as such.Report