CA GOV 2021 - 2022 megathread

[Pericles]

How did Newsom handle Covid? The summer spike reflects badly on his response, but I haven't looked into it.

[Pericles]

It's good to see the soft on Covid crowd didn't even get a moral victory. While Gavin Newsom is still a HP personally for breaking his own rules, he did a good job as Governor for imposing those rules in the first place and saving lives.

[Pericles]

In theory, it could've been worse for the GOP. If there's any solace for the GOP, it's that Newsom hasn't gained from Biden. Still, no one can deny that this was a heavily disappointing result for the GOP. Period, end of story.

Seems as like for 2022, California Republicans probably shouldn't be worried much about trying to make inroads in many places so much as they should be worried about trying to retain what they already have.

To be fair, there are some seats like CA-10 and maybe CA-45 and CA-49 where if Republicans had put up a strong candidate and campaign in 2020 that could have flipped it. Of course redistricting will change what these seats look like but generally a Biden single digits seat is winnable for them even if they didn't seize the opportunity in 2020.

We do need to wait for the full results to see how Newsom did in the swing districts, and it may be that stuff like this intensifies bad trends for Republicans and reduces split-ticket voting.

[Pericles]

It's not a big underperformnace though so can easily be explained by Newsom being weaker than Biden, it being a recall election and many other possible factors. So Republicans are probably winning but it's silly to act like this election proves it, it's virtually irrelevant to the 2022 midterms.

[Pericles]

Just ignore US exit polls, they're all junk.

[Pericles]

Any data on the margins by congressional district? That might be the only useful information to come from this huge waste of time and money.

[Pericles]

Are there some up to date 2018-2021 swing maps? Those would be interesting because it looks like the margins are exactly tge same so the trends would be very clear.