In order to hold onto his job, Newsom — first elected in 2018 — needs a majority of voters to have voted “no” on the first ballot question about whether they want to oust him. Newsom’s operation has largely been a turnout, rather than a persuasion, campaign. With registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans in the state by nearly 2 to 1, his biggest hurdle has been getting them engaged in an off-year election amid the disruptions of the pandemic. There were good signs for Newsom on that front in recent days, with Democrats casting pre-election ballots at a higher rate than their registration in the state, but Republicans have been counting on their voters showing up on Election Day to vote in person.
Those quirky recall rules have helped Newsom paint Elder as a viable threat to this deep blue state.
Biden called Elder a “clone of Donald Trump” Monday night, casting the California election as a mission to once again defeat the former Republican President he unseated last fall and protect “California from Trump Republicans trying to block us from beating this pandemic.”
“You either keep Gavin Newsom as your governor,” Biden said, “or you’ll get Donald Trump.”
Newsom paints ‘life or death’ choice
Newsom leaned into the differences between his and Elder’s approaches to stop the spread of Covid-19, which many California strategists say tilted the race in Newsom’s favor in the final weeks.
Newsom adviser Sean Clegg told reporters Monday night that the surge of the Delta variant was a “turning point” for the campaign.
“What Delta brought into clear, clear focus was what the stakes are in this election when one party has basically become an anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-public health party,” Clegg said.
Partisanship is not a perfect predictor of voter behavior in this election, but in that same survey, 90% of likely Democratic voters said they wanted to keep Newsom and 7% said they would vote to recall him. Among likely Republican voters, 82% favored recalling Newsom and 17% said they were opposed to the recall. Independent voters were more split: 44% said they favored the recall and 49% were against it.
Once unlikely recall effort gained steam with Covid frustrations
When Newsom was elected with more than 60% of the vote in 2018, it would have seemed inconceivable that an effort to oust him would succeed in a state where Democrats have such a significant voter registration advantage and hold every statewide office. But the push to recall Newsom — which was launched early last year by a group of conservative activists who didn’t like his record on taxes, the death penalty, immigration and the state’s homelessness crisis — gained momentum late last year amid rising frustrations about his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Under the California Constitution, recall proponents were required to gather 1,495,709 valid signatures from voters to qualify the recall for the ballot — a figure equivalent to 12% of the votes cast in the prior gubernatorial election. Their efforts were bolstered by a California judge’s decision in November to extend the deadline for collecting those signatures by four months.
In an unforced error, Newsom attended the unmasked birthday dinner of a lobbyist friend at an elite Napa Valley restaurant at a time when he was urging Californians to stay home and avoid gatherings with large groups outside their households. His critics charged him with hypocrisy, and he apologized, but the national attention to what he called “a bad mistake” likely led many more voters to sign the signature petitions.
As the state was ramping up its Covid-19 vaccination program earlier this year, Newsom was still trying to swat away questions about what his team had framed as an attempted Republican takeover of state government by Trump loyalists. But there were some danger signs for Newsom. Polls repeatedly reflected high enthusiasm among Republican voters for recalling him, but relatively low interest in the election from Democratic voters, many of whom were not even aware of the recall.
Though the pro-recall forces turned in all their signatures in March, the gears of the state bureaucracy moved slowly and the September 14 date for the special election was not set until July.
Democrats and their many allied groups scrambled to educate voters about the unusual date of the election and the two-question ballot. In the end, Newsom raised more than $71 million through the committee that he created to fight the recall, which has no fundraising limits, far outpacing his rivals and the pro-recall campaigns.
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