Almost five months after an effort led by the California Republican Party to recall Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and a month of mail voting, in-person voting for the recall election finally closed on Tuesday. Less than an hour later, The Associated Press called the race against the recall for Newsom, and with 74 percent of the vote in, 64 percent of voters voted against recalling Newsom. Just 36 percent of voters voted in support of the recall.
With most of the vote now in, it is clear Newsom will firmly hold his seat until at least the end of next year, when he will be up for reelection next November. The resounding victory — a 28-point margin — for Newsom was a major turnover from just a few weeks ago. Up until early August, polling data indicated the race would be within a single percentage point. In early August, the race was a virtual tie.
Newsom’s main opponent, Republican Larry Elder, a conservative radio talk-show host, conceded defeat shortly after along with the California GOP.
Newsom’s victory rivals the margin in which President Joe Biden won the state by in 2020 (29 percent) and outperforms the margin by which Newsom himself won the governorship in 2018 (24 percent). It is also more than President Barack Obama’s victories in the state in both 2008 and 2012. This is an exceedingly surprising result considering this election was held in an off-year with around 41 percent turnout as of writing (81 percent of all registered votes or 71 percent of all eligible voters turned out in California in the 2020 election).
In this election, voters voted on two questions: whether or not to recall Newsom, and if he is recalled, who to replace him with. Democrats had urged voters to leave the second question blank. This was because the party had convinced most big-name Democrats to avoid running for fear that a likable name could have caused some blue-leaning voters to vote to recall Newsom and replace him with a Democrat they liked better. As such, while 9.26 million people voted on the first question, just 5 million people (most of them Republicans) voted in the second question, allowing Elder to capture 47 percent of the vote among those who voted in the second question.
To think that this race was ever competitive in deep-blue California might seem crazy today, but in August, resentment against Newsom was quite high. COVID-19 frustrations, along with perceived hypocrisy of Newsom dining maskless at an upscale Napa Valley restaurant after he had ordered strict pandemic restrictions resulted in the recall effort gaining steam.
National Democrats, fearing a loss in California, a key bastion of Democratic votes, ramped up efforts to rally behind Newsom. Big-name Democrats, including Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, went to California to campaign for him. In his ads, Newsom attacked Elder’s positions on mask and vaccine mandates and framed the recall as a “life or death” choice for voters.
Elder had campaigned on repealing Newsom’s order for all state employees and health care workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and he has also repeatedly spoken out in opposition of vaccines for young people and mask-wearing. These views likely contributed to his demise in this election, as Democrats were quick to point them out to voters. His views also allowed Democrats to tie him closely for former President Donald Trump, who had peddled these theories while in office.
This messaging worked — of the California voters who said COVID-19 was the most important issue pressing the United States right now, Newsom won 80 percent of those votes. And with the state being the only one advancing out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s criteria for being a “high” COVID-19 transmission state, it is looking good for Newsom on this front. Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said that voters had “rejected the Republican Party’s denial of the pandemic sweeping our country” and their “disproved conspiracy theories about our elections.”
In recent days, anti-abortion laws passed in states such as Texas was also a driving factor in mobilizing the state’s huge Democratic base.
These recent developments helped Democrats avert what they feared could be a turnout disaster leading to a successful recall. Turnout is typically low in an off-year election, and amid a pandemic, most of the energy for this election had come from the Republicans, which had cosponsored this recall effort. But successful mobilization efforts on the Democrats’ part helped them avoid a potentially catastrophic election. Had Elder won the race, it would have emboldened national Republicans at set the stage for a major red wave in 2022.
Democrats’ get-out-the-vote effort seems to have succeeded in many parts of the state. Newsom won Orange County, a formerly Republican bastion in the Los Angeles metropolitan area that had voted solidly for Republicans until 2016. when Hillary Clinton managed to flip the county and Newsom barely winning the county in 2018 by 0.2 percentage points. He also won all of the state’s Democratic strongholds in the Bay Area and Southern California by large margins. Most of the Republican support fame from the Central Valley and Northern California, which are mainly rural areas dominated by agriculture.
This election was also helpful to Democratic strategists in more ways than one. It helped to start up a vote-mobilization effort that could be used ahead of the midterms ahead of 2022. But more importantly, it showed how tying Republicans to Trump could be that turnout booster to muster the Democrats’ base out to vote even when Trump was not on the ballot — something that is now being done by Democrats in Virginia’s upcoming gubernatorial election later this November.
Despite Elder’s loss in this election, it was anything but a loss for Elder. He had gained national attention in just two months’ time, and he had dramatically outperformed expectations in the second question on the recall. The Los Angeles Times even called Elder the “de-facto” leader of the California GOP and described him as being in an extremely good position for a future run for office, whether that be nationally or in California.
What wasn’t good, however, was the colossal waste of time and money this election cost. Estimates had put the cost of the recall at at least $276 million, and most estimates are pointing to a figure of upward of $300 million. This election proved that there was a pressing need to overhaul California’s broken recall petition rules. Currently, just 12 percent of voters who voted in the last election for the position being recalled need to sign a petition to recall a governor, and no reason has to be provided.
California Assemblyman Marc Berman, the chair of the Assembly Committee on elections, called out the recall rules for being “undemocratic” and, along with state Sen. Steve Glazer, announced efforts to begin looking into overhauling the state’s recall system, including a list of reasons to constitute what counts as a recallable offense”. The pair pointed out how the money could be better spent on climate change, housing, homelessness, education, forest fires, and more.
The last (and only) time a recall effort made it to an election was in 2003, when voters successfully replaced Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear. We said yes to women’s constitutional right to decide,” said Newsom to a group of supporters after the race was called on Tuesday night.
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