The Newsom recall effort was not in vain

by Richard Schulman

Republicans shouldn’t be discouraged by the failure of the vote to recall California governor Gavin Newsom. While it is well known that Democratic registrations in the state show almost twice as many Democrats as Republicans, Republicans and independents taken together slightly outnumber registered Democrats. The possibility of a successful recall therefore hinged on independents strongly supporting the recall and a Democratic electorate sufficiently unhappy with Governor Newsom’s reign to not bother voting.

During the summer, polls showed that the recall effort had a chance of succeeding. After the race was over, given the landslide vote in Newsom’s favor, some blamed pollsters for having done a bad job of polling, but that’s incorrect. The recall could have succeeded had the national Democrat establishment remained as complacent as its leaders were until the polls brought home to them the danger they were in. They suddenly realized that the national progressive agenda would be in peril if Newsom were defeated. When they read the mid-summer polls and learned of widespread dissatisfaction with Newsom even among the party base, the party leaders panicked, and they had good reason to do so.

California has the largest Hispanic population in the US and the second largest percentage-wise (39.4%). Polling prior to the election showed that approximately half of Hispanics supported the recall even though they had strongly supported Newsom in 2018. Meanwhile, Hispanic leaders were coming out strongly against the cost of green policies.

Some of Newsom’s efforts to reverse the drift against him backfired. In July, fearful of the recall succeeding and realizing that out-of-control homelessness was a major complaint against him, he promised $12 bn. to combat homelessness and said that all those who wanted to avail themselves of the California dream would be taken care of. Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, as reported by Yahoo News, could scarcely believe what he heard. “As a private citizen, I support the [Newsom] recall…. When he invites the rest of the nation’s homeless to California, that is the death wish.”

Party leaders panic

So what happened between summer and the September 14 election several months later? Once Newsom’s peril became evident, the national Democratic Party mobilized its huge financial, celebrity, media, and trade union resources to change the subject from California’s ills and Newsom’s failure in addressing them — to a theme that would elicit a visceral tribal response from Democrats – the threat of a California coup by a Trump-controlled Republican party that didn’t care about Covid. The subject was successfully changed from Newsom’s failures to Democrats vs. Republicans – with Larry Elder portrayed as the second coming of Donald Trump and his stolen 2020 election narrative.

This was noted by the National Review, which wrote that “one thing could have recalled Gavin Newsom: A race entirely about Gavin Newsom…. All of that changed in the last few weeks…. [I]t changed when the lead opponent became Larry Elder.” Despite Elder’s admirable “multi-decade message of repudiating victimhood, of an opportunity society, of school choice, of a more aspirational mindset for minorities,” the moment “Larry Elder entered the race, the race became about Larry Elder — not Gavin Newsom…. This recall effort had to be about Gavin Newsom, and a high-profile opponent forced the attention to the opponent and off of Newsom.”

The Wall Street Journal had a slightly different take: “Democrats will have a hard time keeping their Congressional majorities in 2022. But they think they may have found the political strategy for doing so: Wrap Donald Trump around the GOP’s neck. That strategy worked Tuesday for California Gov. Gavin Newsom…. Mr. Elder is a thoughtful man who made his way out of a tough corner of Los Angeles. But Mr. Newsom had more than $50 million to distort Mr. Elder’s views and claim he was a front man for Mr. Trump. The left tried to scare Democrats to the polls by running against Covid policies in Florida, the new Texas abortion law, and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Mr. Elder probably made a mistake in calling for rollback of Mr. Newsom’s vaccine mandates for nursing-home and state employees, which are popular in the left-leaning state. Mr. Elder’s argument about progressive ill-governance never had a chance to break through.”

The pro-Trump web publication American Greatness understandably stressed Covid, not Trump, as the negative in the recall effort: “Newsom faced a legitimate threat as recently as two months ago, when a UC Berkeley poll found the “yes” vote was within the margin of error among likely voters. But it wasn’t so much a question of Newsom’s popularity as it was voter motivation. If enough Democratic voters didn’t bother to vote, there was a credible chance Newsom’s term could be cut short. Besides, nobody was really paying attention in July. Two months and $70 million later, people were paying attention.…It appears the election really was a referendum on Newsom’s hypocritical COVID-19 policies. And those hypocritical policies won in a landslide. This is simply a fact that pro-freedom Californians will need to reckon with: vaccine mandates and mask requirements are very popular in the Golden State.”

Reasons for Republican optimism

Meanwhile, Californians who voted to keep Newsom in office will be able to savor the fruits of their victory in continued forest fires, smoke-filled air, water shortages, expensive housing, homelessness, high taxes, crowded highways in poor repair, long commutes, expensive brownout-prone electricity, crime, bad schools, small business bankruptcies, and the flight of residents to nicer states in which to live and work.

At some point, California’s working and middle classes will notice that the Democratic Party, especially in California, has become the party of the rich and has little to offer them but mandates, taxes, handouts, and a declining standard of living. If Republican leaders remain undiscouraged and persist in organizing the state’s aggrieved majority with common sense proposals to reverse the state’s malfunctions, the electoral support of the majority will come back to them sooner rather than later.