Sacramento, California: On a single day last November, two events helped set the course for just the second recall election against a governor in California history: Governor Gavin Newsom at one of the nation’s most expensive restaurants. Dine with friends and lobbyists. He urged Californians to stay home, while those who wanted him removed won four more months to qualify for the ballot.
Photos from the dinner without a mask showed the Democratic governor going against what he had been urging for months to combat the coronavirus: don’t gather in groups, keep your distance, wear a mask. Newsom was out of touch with the idea that this was happening at the French Laundry where the cheapest meal is $350. The dinner turned up the heat in the fledgling recall, and the extra time allowed it to reach a full boil.
By March, organizers had more than the 1.5 million signatures needed to vote to remove the Democratic governor for the first time in the nation’s largest blue state.
“With the French laundry incident, with the greater climate of COVID and the economic disaster, we had a perfect storm with the judge’s decision,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California.
The final decision of the voters will be taken next Tuesday. Most voters will need to mark “yes” more than a year before Newsom’s term ends.
If they do, they can choose from a list of 46 replacement candidates, many of whom are unknown but some are recognized, including conservative talk show host Larry Elder and former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulkner. Reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is also running but has failed to gain traction.
Because so many people are running, the winner will likely become the next governor of the country’s most populous state, receiving 25% or less of the vote. This is a far cry from the landslide that hit Newsom’s office in 2018.
In California, a state where ballot initiatives flourish, several governors have faced recall drives as part of a century-old reform that created a mechanism for voters to remove them mid-term. But only one other effort tapped into the dismay enough to vote: Voters recalled Democratic Governor Gray Davis over an energy crisis in 2003 and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last California Republican to win across the state. .
The defeat for Newsom, 53, would be a shocking turning point in his relatively lucrative political career and would almost certainly install a Republican governor in the nation’s main laboratory for progressive policies. According to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, a modest majority approve of their handling of the job, which also shows the recall failed.
The results will be dissected for clues about how voters are feeling in the 2022 midterm elections, when Congress and more than half the regime are about to seize control.
The outcome of this election is going to be the fuel for the 2022 term,” Romero said.
Amateur political organizer Orin Heatley initiated the recall in February 2020, before the coronavirus became an outright public health crisis in the United States. He was upset by Newsom’s support for illegal immigrants and other liberal policies in the country.
By the time they started collecting signatures, the coronavirus had dominated.
Newsom was the first governor to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, and when he dined at the French Laundry eight months later, the state went through the reopening and closure of whipsaws, allowing small-business owners, schoolchildren Parents and others were overwhelmed. and confused.
California was facing a surge in infections and hospitalizations, and Newsom’s administration was urging people not to gather in more than three homes. While Napa County, where the French Laundry is located, allowed outdoor dining and limited indoor seating, the dinner party brought together a dozen people from more than three households.
The news of the November 6 dinner came a week later on Friday, when Newsom had no public appearances. In a statement, he said he and his wife followed the restaurant’s health protocols and took safety precautions “but they should have behaved better and not attended dinner.” When he appeared in public that Monday, Newsom said it was an outdoor restaurant “but admitted he made a big mistake.”
The next day, a Los Angeles TV station obtained cellphone photos questioning whether dinner was out. The photos show the table set back in a space along three walls and open with a sliding glass door on one side. Newsom and the other guests sat close together and were not wearing masks.
Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager for the pro-recall group Rescue California, said this reinforced the statement that Newsom says one thing and does another. It also coincides with the image Newsom’s opponents have pushed that he is an out-of-touch politician.
The French Laundry was an incredible boost to the effort,” said Dunsmore.
The recall campaign similarly tagged Newsom as elitist when his children returned to class in person at a private school, while most public school students stuck with virtual learning.
Ace Smith, Newsom’s longtime political adviser, disputes the importance of dinner at the recall march for the ballot. He sees the presidential election, also that November, as an important marker, adding that the loss of Donald Trump sparked fresh anger for the recall campaign to seize. In California, 6 million people voted for Trump.
He realized that he had bottled up this intense anger among the Trump base, and the trick is that he only needs a fraction of the Trump base to make this thing eligible” for the ballot, Smith said.
Neither explanation mattered, nor did the organizers win four more months to pitch to the electorate. A judge granted additional time because the coronavirus stopped collecting traditional in-person signatures outside shops or at farmers markets.
Newsom’s team never appealed the judge’s decision, a move widely seen as a tactical mistake. The then foreign minister, Alex Padilla, said the organizers of the recall were showing no signs of a serious campaign.
The judge sided with the recall organizers in a provisional ruling, and neither side made it final for arguments in court on November 6.
The two main recall committees raised nearly $2 million in November and December, five times more than the first attempt, and eventually collected 1.7 million valid signatures.
Newsom launched his “Stop the Republican Recall” campaign in March, a few weeks before the signature gathering ended, portraying the effort as one driven by pro-Trump extremists. He described the state’s response to the pandemic and the economic fallout. central theme of his campaign.
The highly infectious Delta version roared back to his initial message from California, “And in the final weeks before the election, he is warning that the election is a matter of life and death before the electorate.”
Elder is the target of much of the attention of Democrats. They warn that the conservative talk radio host will withdraw the mask and vaccine mandate and reverse progress on liberal issues.
It is part of a calculation by Newsom’s team to convert the withdrawal from a referendum on the governor and his actions into a choice between Democratic and Republican values.
If you sit down and let it be a referendum on the person in the office, no matter how good or how positive they are, you’re always at a disadvantage because you’re playing the defense,” Smith said. Have to be in a place, very simply, where we are committing crimes.”
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See AP’s full coverage of the California recall election: https://apnews.com/hub/california-recall
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
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