Californians to decide the fate of Governor Gavin Newsom
If Gavin Newsom is brought down it will be devastating for the Democrats, especially in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Biden’s vaccine mandate.
‘Everything is on the line,” Barack Obama told his 130 million Twitter follows last week, joining the throng of big-name Democrats enthusiastically barracking for California’s beleaguered Governor, Gavin Newsom, ahead of Tuesday’s recall election, the fourth in US history.
“Your vote could be the difference between protecting our kids or putting them at risk; helping Californians recover or taking us backwards,” the former president said, reflecting the Democrats’ push to cast the vote as a referendum on Covid-19 management, as Republican states battle fresh outbreaks.
California, where 67 per cent of the population aged 12 and up is fully vaccinated, is still losing more than 100 lives a day to the virus, a 28 per cent increase over the past fortnight.
The recall vote will be the first major poll in the wake of Joe Biden’s rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan, widely seen as a humiliating disaster, and also comes a week after the President’s controversial new vaccine mandate for 100 million American workers, which has divided states, businesses and even Democrats.
“I voted Democrat my whole life, I was about bodily autonomy, freedom of choice, legalising marijuana and gay marriage; it’s been a pathological cycle of fear over Covid with Newsom that we need to get out of,” says Peter Chacra, 36, a San Diego solar technology engineer, who’s voted to recall Newsom.
Who runs California, economically, socially, and politically the most powerful US state, always matters but an upset on Tuesday would be devastating for Democrats in Washington, where the ruling party controls the congress with only a one-seat majority.
Larry Elder, the Republican frontrunner to replace Newsom, has promised to substitute a Republican for Democrat senator Dianne Feinstein, 88 — a prerogative of US governors — should the elderly stalwart retire. Such a move would mean Republicans retake control of the 50-50 Senate, ending President Biden’s legislative agenda.
‘New Kennedys’
Democratic heavies Vice-President Kamala Harris, a former California senator, and senator Elizabeth Warren have been campaigning in the Golden State in recent weeks, curtain-raisers for President Biden’s arrival for Newsom’s final rally in Long Beach on Tuesday AEST.
Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor dubbed one of the “new Kennedys” by Harper’s Bazaar when he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s current girlfriend, is fighting to avoid being the second US governor to be recalled.
In 2003 former Democrat governor Gray Davis, a few months into his second term, was ousted by a recall vote, replaced by actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state’s last Republican governor.
Newsom’s own movie star looks have failed to inoculate the first-term governor against a small-business community enraged by the nation’s longest lockdown, gig workers, and Republicans who’ve smelt vulnerability.
“If you’re going to tax people at a high rate, destroy small businesses, put hardworking blue-collar people on the street, and then brag about your $80bn budget surplus, I find that offensive,” says Ram Duriseti, a 51-year-old emergency room physician living in the Bay Area.
Newsom’s critics have furnished an exhaustive list of reasons to dump him, from high taxation, arbitrary rule, poor forest fire management, homelessness and unworkable industrial relations, persuasive enough to have attracted 2.1 million signatures, 600,000 more than needed under state law to trigger a recall vote.
“He’s the epitome of his hypocrisy, all ‘do as I say not as I do’,” says Lydia Olson, a full-time Uber driver in the San Francisco Bay area, bristling at the Governor’s decision to cut public servants’ pay by 10 per cent but exempt his own.
“And then there’s the French Laundry,” she exclaims, recounting what’s become – almost everyone I spoke to in California brought it up – Newsom’s signature blunder, being photographed at a high-end restaurant in Napa last November with pharmaceutical executives without a mask, flouting his own rules.
After weeks of steadily narrowing, the polls have drifted in Newsom’s favour: 56 per cent of voters oppose the recall motion, and 42 per cent are in favour, according to the latest average of credible statewide polls published by Nate Silver. But it’s not so simple where voting isn’t compulsory.
About half of likely voters say they haven’t decided how to vote yet or wouldn’t vote for any of the replacement candidates on the recall ballot, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.
California is solidly Democrat, but motivated Republicans might be more likely to vote.
“It’s a bet on propensity,” says Steve Haro, a veteran Democrat strategist and principal at Mehlman and Castagnetti, arguing the recall was a low-cost way for Republicans to destabilise the Governor.
“It’s a colossal waste of time and taxpayer dimes because the state is now stuck footing the bill for a frivolous election that should not have been triggered,” Haro tells The Australian, referring to a $276m estimate for the total state and county costs for running the recall election.
Under California’s recall rules, a new governor could be elected with a tiny number of votes.
The ballot has two separate questions, of which voters can answer either or both.
Should Newsom be recalled? And who should replace him, with a list of 46 hopefuls including Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender former gold medal-winning decathlete, and Larry Elder, a black American conservative talk-show host, to pick from.
A simple majority in favour of a yes vote would see Newsom replaced by the candidate who obtained the most votes, even if that were a piddling figure in a state of 40 million people.
‘Not a coup’
Shannon Hile, 39, a volunteer for one of the Republican contenders, Kevin Kiley, bristles at the idea Republicans were behind the recall.
“We made our own signs, bought our own banners; they didn’t back us one bit, it’s ridiculous they call this a Republican coup. They didn’t even join in until we had enough signatures,” she adds.
“Everyone has their own reasons for signing; I’m a single mum and I was unable to work because I have a small child,” she adds.
California has had the longest, strictest lockdown among US states, lasting with varying degrees of severity from March 2020 to June 2021. And, unlike other states, Newsom still hasn’t ended a state of emergency order that allows him to govern by decree.
“I’ve been in snow, rain, smoke; Covid held us back too, actually at some point we thought Newsom was shutting us down for so long to slow down the campaign,” Hile says.
Almost 18 months since the pandemic began, more than 5 per cent of California’s schools are still fully remote, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s school tracker, a higher share than in any other US state.
At the 38 per cent of schools that have reintroduced face-to-face teaching five days a week, children over the age of two are still required to socially distance and wear a mask, even outside.
A perceived war on gig workers has put the Governor at odds with gig workers too. California passed “assembly Bill 5” in January 2020, which reclassified millions of independent contractors across California as “employees” in a radical rewrite of the state’s industrial relations laws. Employers had to prove, with documentation, their contractors were not employees.
Tech giants Uber and Lyft later won exemptions for their drivers and delivery workers, but for thousands of other gig workers it meant unemployment in a state with a jobless rate of 7.6 per cent, more than two percentage points above the national average.
Recall votes aren’t new to California, where they are easier to trigger than other states owing to progressive reforms going back to the early 1910s. But, while Schwarzenegger himself has drawn parallels between his own 2003 contest and Newsom’s present political predicament, the state has grown only more staunchly Democratic since then.
Republican Elder
After Jenner’s campaign fizzled – “it feels a bit comical, is this really serious?” says Duriseti – Elder became the de facto Republican frontrunner, eclipsing the more traditional Republican 36-year-old California assemblyman Kiley, who wrote a 200-page book in January outlining the case against Newsom.
Dubbed the “black face of white supremacy” by a Los Angeles Times columnist in August, Elder has been cast as a Trump-supporting extremist, despite a platform of reopening schools and curbing the state’s notoriously high levels of homelessness and crime.
“I love Trump but at the same time, at this point, it’s a good thing he’s letting California get on with it. We want everyone to look at this with clear eyes,” says Republican volunteer Hile.
The former president did weigh in a few days later though, suggesting the verdict would be “rigged”. “Millions of millions of ballots will make this just another giant election scam,” he said in a short statement on Monday afternoon (ET), remarks that have pleased the Newsom camp.
Leading Democrats, including Governor Newsom, failed to condemn a white woman wearing a gorilla mask who threw an egg at Elder as he campaigned near Venice Beach in Los Angeles last week.
“Whatever your views on abortion, it properly terrorises the average Californian Democrat and, frankly, the average Californian moderate Republican,” says Duriseti, referring to Texas’s recent, highly controversial move to outlaw abortion after six weeks.
Kevin Paffrath, a 29-year-old real estate broker and the only Democrat brave enough to put his name on the ballot, says Elder’s candidacy has been a godsend for Newsom.
“He was just talking about Republicans taking your voting rights, which was boring; now they’ve got someone who they can paint as extreme,” he says.
Donald Trump weighed in on Moday afternoon (ET), saying in a statement: “Millions and millions of mail-in ballots will make this just another giant election scam, no different, but less blatant, than the 2020 presidential election scam!” Coming less than 24 hours before Californians head to the polls to render their verdict on Newsom in a special election, the former president’s comments could depress Republican turnout and further boost the Democratic incumbent’s prospects.
“Republicans have never had a coherent message,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic operative in California. “They have never made a coherent and simple case for why a Democratic governor elected in a landslide in an overwhelmingly Democratic state should be recalled and replaced by a conservative Republican. That’s a tough case to make and they failed spectacularly at making it.”
The bulk of experts believe Newsom will win.
“The Dems have practised holding power in that state for a long time, gerrymandered, and have built advantages that can’t be understated,” says one veteran Democrat adviser in DC.
“At the same time, the Republican fundraising apparatus has fallen apart and the Republican political class just moved out of California,” he adds, preferring not to be named.
The state that catapulted Ronald Reagan, governor from 1967 to 1975, to national fame has become progressively more and more Democrat.
“Basically, it started to shift after “prop 187” was passed in 1994, a measure that prohibited undocumented immigrants from being able to use public schools, and that enraged a lot of people,” Haro explains.
Newsom is a smart politician, a survivor, and glamorous in a state famous for Hollywood, and he’s not running against an Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“Even if Elder won, the state legislature, 75 per cent Democrat, wouldn’t let him govern properly, waiting until the next governor election in 2022,” says Paffrath.
About seven million Californians have voted already via mail-in ballot; 34 per cent of them from Democrats and 30 per cent from Republicans. Whether enough of the 22 per cent of ballots sent in by independents are angry with Newsom remains to be seen.
Olson, who ferries Californians around for work daily, is quietly optimistic.
“September 14th can’t come soon enough, I say to them, and there’s a lot of appreciative chuckling,” she says.
McGowan throws Weinstein grenade at Democrats
By Staff Reporters
It’s known as an “October surprise”, when a bombshell allegation emerges ahead of a November US presidential election. And although it’s September, and these are the final days before an election that concerns the state of California mostly, it’s as you might expect from the home of Hollywood – a surprise has unfolded like a late-season twist in an HBO Max series.
Two days before Tuesday’s deadline for Californians to decide whether to recall Governor
Gavin Newsom – ostensibly a backlash over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic but taking stock, to some extent, of the Democrats’ tumultuous first 10 months in the White House – allegations have been levelled against his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
Former actor and #MeToo campaigner Rose McGowan has accused the Governor’s wife of trying to suppress McGowan’s sexual assault claims against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
On Sunday, McGowan aired the claims at a press conference in Los Angeles with Republican frontrunner Larry Elder, whom she endorsed as “the better man”. Declaring she was “no longer a Democrat”, McGowan said that in 2017 Newsom phoned to ask that she drop her claims against Weinstein. “Gavin Newsom, you’re facing a recall because you’re a fraud, just like your wife,” McGowan reportedly told the rally. The Newsom camp has branded the “desperate” allegations as “outrageous and false” .
Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and actor, has four children with the Governor.
It’s hard to say whether McGowan’s intervention will matter much. More than a third of California’s active registered voters had reportedly cast their ballots by Saturday. While most pundits say Newsom should win comfortably, the outcome of the election depends on Democrat voters turning out to support the Governor.