CA GOV 2021 - 2022 megathread

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This comes as a surprise to me, because it suggests that Faulconer thinks that he can win, or at least that making an attempt would be worth his while. That's not to say that he has an actual chance, but it will at least lead me to adjust my priors regarding the state of the race.

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Ok, now there's literally nothing to worry about even on the off-chance that Newsom is recalled, because not only does Grenell obviously have 0 chance, but he'd win enough MAGA people to guarantee a split among the remotely-open-to-a-Republican vote.

Only Republicans will be voting for a replacement, so vote splitting shouldn't matter; there won't be a Democrat to benefit, since no serious Democrat will run.

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Ok, now there's literally nothing to worry about even on the off-chance that Newsom is recalled, because not only does Grenell obviously have 0 chance, but he'd win enough MAGA people to guarantee a split among the remotely-open-to-a-Republican vote.

Only Republicans will be voting for a replacement, so vote splitting shouldn't matter; there won't be a Democrat to benefit, since no serious Democrat will run.

You expecting Democrats to vote No on Recall and simply leave the replacement question blank? Because I'm sure as hell voting for a Democrat even while voting No

Yes, that is exactly what is going to happen. Consider why Cruz Bustamante didn't win in 2003.

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This isn't necessarily apropos of anything, but I thought I'd share my thoughts on the situation as it stands.

The difference between Gavin Newsom and Gray Davis is obviously that Newsom is popular and Davis wasn't, but beyond that there's a big difference between the two in their relationships to the Democratic Party. Davis was boned when Bustamante entered the race, but that was possible because his position in the party wasn't secure; in particular, he wasn't close with the Willie Brown machine. Newsom, by contrast, is the Willie Brown machine. 45% of California voters are registered Democrats, and Gavin Newsom owns the Democratic Party. He's not going to face any opposition on that front.

That said, even if the recall effort had gotten help from left opposition, it would be boned by timing. Six months ago, if you squinted really hard, you could maybe see a situation where the pandemic got worse and Newsom was facing real opposition to his handling from both ends of the spectrum. Now vaccinations are proceeding at a rapid pace and Newsom has announced that the color-coded tiers for counties will be gone in June and there's a general sense (justified or not) that California has done really well over the course of the pandemic. The French Laundry incident isn't the sort of thing that voters care about if they approve of the government's record. Newsom won 62% in 2018 and it's entirely reasonable to think that No on recall will get 60% this year.

Kevin Faulconer's issue that he keeps coming back to is that schools should be open, but the issue is that schools are already opening, and whenever the election happens remote schooling is likely to be a thing of the past. More generally the issue is that nobody cares. In one sense the setup of the recall election is appealing for a Republican candidate; since the election is quite literally a referendum on Newsom, voters are thinking about Newsom and not whether they're willing to vote for a Republican. Unfortunately for Faulconer, in order for that to work he has to at least get past the other recall candidates, and it's not clear whether anyone outside San Diego has even heard of him. John Cox, who lost by a massive margin in 2018, is not seen by anyone as a credible future governor, but his presence certainly poses difficulty for Faulconer in getting attention and votes. The likes of Caitlyn Jenner are worse for him; if the story is whether Caitlyn Jenner can be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, nobody is going to notice that Kevin Faulconer is trying to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In one sense it doesn't matter since this seems right now like an unwinnable race, but a poor performance for Faulconer this year would make it difficult for him to present himself as a credible candidate for 2022. California Republicans are perpetually in trouble (hence their reliance on self-funders), and having two gubernatorial elections in two years will certainly stretch them thin. If Republicans are all focused on this year, it's hard to say who'll be left for next year. My dark horse prediction is that the 2022 general election will pit Gavin Newsom against Chamath Palihapitiya.

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By the fall, I fully expect the recall to morph from an anti-lockdown campaign to a typical CA GOP campaign we've seen over the last decade; High taxes, nanny state, increased homelessness, increased crime, anti-immigration, etc. You know, a lot of the original reasons behind the recall when it started pre-lockdown.

This is exactly right. Newsom's team is going to spend all its time tying the recall to the Republican Party, and I think consequently you'll keep seeing visuals like this:

https://twitter.com/lara_korte/status/1381644603703521280

There is absolutely not going to be sufficiently unified messaging on the Yes side to drown this out, because this is what the true believers really feel. Unfortunately for the recall it's noxious to most Californians.

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Given how fractured the republican field is, I think the one serious democrat running in the recall will get an all county sweep with pluraities or majorities in every country.

There is no serious Democrat currently running in the recall, and there won't be. Gavin Newsom will not be on the same ballot as Doug Ose and Kevin Faulconer and John Cox and Caitlyn Jenner and all the other occupants of the clown car; there will be one question on the ballot asking whether to recall Newsom, and another asking whom to replace him with.

Caitlyn Jenner is not a serious candidate and will not get any meaningful share of the vote. That being said, if I were a California voter (I'm registered in Georgia although I'm currently physically in California), I would vote no on recall and for Caitlyn Jenner, since that would be the most embarrassing choice to Republicans.

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Given how fractured the republican field is, I think the one serious democrat running in the recall will get an all county sweep with pluraities or majorities in every country.

There is no serious Democrat currently running in the recall, and there won't be. Gavin Newsom will not be on the same ballot as Doug Ose and Kevin Faulconer and John Cox and Caitlyn Jenner and all the other occupants of the clown car; there will be one question on the ballot asking whether to recall Newsom, and another asking whom to replace him with.

Caitlyn Jenner is not a serious candidate and will not get any meaningful share of the vote. That being said, if I were a California voter (I'm registered in Georgia although I'm currently physically in California), I would vote no on recall and for Caitlyn Jenner, since that would be the most embarrassing choice to Republicans.

I'm sure the democrats are going to send out one serious canidate, telling people just to vote no on the recall leaves room for disaster.

They absolutely will not. Cruz Bustamante's slogan of "no on recall, yes on Bustamante" in 2003 was generally regarded as disastrous and will not be repeated.

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Am I the only one baffled by how much press Jenner is getting? I’ve gotten like three alerts about her from CNN this week

The "campaign" is designed solely for the benefit of the national media; press statements regularly get sent out when only people in the East are awake, and California media then covers things that real candidates are doing instead. It's not surprising that the national media would gravitate to a celebrity joke campaign.

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Am I the only one baffled by how much press Jenner is getting? I’ve gotten like three alerts about her from CNN this week

The "campaign" is designed solely for the benefit of the national media; press statements regularly get sent out when only people in the East are awake, and California media then covers things that real candidates are doing instead. It's not surprising that the national media would gravitate to a celebrity joke campaign.

I made this point before, and I'm making it again now. Every time I look at this thread it's someone (usually someone not from California) posting about the Caitlyn Jenner "campaign", which nobody actually in California is talking about. Out of the ten posts on this page above this one, eight are about Caitlyn Jenner and the other two are by olawakandi.

I know the actual election might seem boring, but people have brought up the possibility of mass power outages having some effect on the race. It'd be nice if people were interested in discussing that or really anything else actually relevant to this election instead of this barely-related sideshow.

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While I'm quoting my previous posts on this thread, I would also like to point out that I was right about this:

Given how fractured the republican field is, I think the one serious democrat running in the recall will get an all county sweep with pluraities or majorities in every country.

There is no serious Democrat currently running in the recall, and there won't be. Gavin Newsom will not be on the same ballot as Doug Ose and Kevin Faulconer and John Cox and Caitlyn Jenner and all the other occupants of the clown car; there will be one question on the ballot asking whether to recall Newsom, and another asking whom to replace him with.

Caitlyn Jenner is not a serious candidate and will not get any meaningful share of the vote. That being said, if I were a California voter (I'm registered in Georgia although I'm currently physically in California), I would vote no on recall and for Caitlyn Jenner, since that would be the most embarrassing choice to Republicans.

I'm sure the democrats are going to send out one serious canidate, telling people just to vote no on the recall leaves room for disaster.

They absolutely will not. Cruz Bustamante's slogan of "no on recall, yes on Bustamante" in 2003 was generally regarded as disastrous and will not be repeated.

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I don't know why the legislature simply did not refuse to fund this recall based on the grounds that it is too expensive. If Republicans in GOP states can ignore Medicaid expansion that voted approved then California Democrats could have pulled the plug on the recall for fiscal reasons.

There's no such "fiscal reasons" so drastic to circumvent the CA constitution. Besides, the legislature's fingerprints already are all over the process, specifically to speed it up.

We live in an era where elected officials don't need real reasons to circumvent anything. Like I said if Republicans can ignore Medicaid expansion, Democrats could have ignored this recall and let the GOP cry about it.

Newsom cancels regularly-scheduled 2022 election on the grounds that "it's too expensive" and "I'm gonna win anyway."

Not even the same thing, but you mentioning that a regularly scheduled election is right around the corner proves that this recall is unnecessary. $200 million is far too much to spend on a frivolous rehash of the presidential race (and that is exactly what this is). Republicans having a mental breakdown over not being in control is not a valid reason for a recall and Democrats should have had the guts to refuse to fund it.

Yeah, I don't think that you'll find much support for your view that the government of California should have ignored the state constitution and illegally refused to hold an election.

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Issa writing that letter indicates that there's serious concern about the viability of the Faulconer campaign, which fits with what the race looks like to me. I'm not exactly the target audience of Republican campaign material, but I wouldn't even know Faulconer was in the race if I weren't the sort of person who posts on this forum. All Cox has really had in this campaign is the bear stunt, but Faulconer has had nothing at all. I wouldn't necessarily read too much into polling numbers even now, but his numbers are atrocious. It's debatable if anyone outside San Diego knows he's running, and nobody seems to care. If I had to guess at this point, my guess would be that Cox will win the recall vote based on name recognition.

The timing of this whole thing has been lousy for Faulconer. I haven't looked at his fundraising, but I can't imagine the numbers are good. He's not a billionaire, so in order to run a credible campaign he needed to rely on donations from others; unfortunately for him, there's no way that the California Republican Party can scrounge up enough money to run a competitive campaign in both 2021 and 2022. His best bet was to challenge Newsom next year, but once this recall came along to drain the pockets of his potential 2022 donors, he had no real choice but to throw his hat into the ring. If he were to pull out a first-place finish after all this, it'd make him the Republican nominee next year if he wanted it, but I think an embarrassing showing (the likely outcome) will kill his 2022 campaign before it starts.

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Agreed. What could be on option is to resign and have Kounalakis as caretaker until the 2022 election in which both run for their previous positions.

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Please don't post contextless videos, nobody is going to watch them.

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Very few posters here seem to have any understanding of the actual dynamics of this race. I'll share my thoughts as someone who has so far been pretty consistently correct about what people would do.

1. Any comparison to 2003 immediately runs into the problem that Gray Davis was very unpopular in 2003 and Gavin Newsom is not. People predicting a map that looks just like 2003 for some reason would be well served to think about this.

2. TML two pages ago correctly pointed out that the polls that have everyone aflutter don't make any sense if you take them as indications of reality. Polls say all sorts of things before people pay attention to an election. All summer I've been spending about ten hours a week riding my bicycle around Santa Clara County; in that time, I've seen exactly once any indication that there was an election on at all (a "RECALL NEWSOM" sign in the window of a house in Santa Clara). I've seen exactly one ad on television related to the election (an ad with a message from Elizabeth Warren). If you're smart you can figure out what that indicates.

3. It can't be overstated the extent to which every candidate in the field is viewed as a joke candidate. I've been told that the talk show host is known to people in the Los Angeles area who listened to right-wing talk radio ten or fifteen years ago. Most of the electorate is not that. I've never heard of him. John Cox was creamed and immediately forgotten three years ago; if people have to be reminded of him now, the thing that will jog their memory is the bear stunt, which did not exactly make him seem like a credible candidate. Nobody outside San Diego knows who Kevin Faulconer is. The remaining candidates are somehow all even worse. There's a reason that the California Republican Party was unable to unite behind a candidate, in spite of all the incentives for them to do so. In 2003 there were multiple credible candidates; now there are none.

4. The numbers on the second question will look even sillier because of the number of Democrats who will not vote. Plenty will not vote because all the candidates are so awful, plenty will not vote because the Democratic Party is actively encouraging people not to cast a vote on the second question, and plenty will not understand that they can cast a vote on the second question even if they vote no on the first question.

5. Whatever landlord has been polling well on the second question will not get any significant number of votes in the actual election. On these polls, he is the only Democrat listed and respondents are being pushed to answer the second question regardless of their response to the first question; neither of those points reflect what the actual election will be like. Remember in Georgia last year when Lieberman and Tarver were consistently being polled and there was real fear that Lieberman votes would push Warnock out of the runoff? Then the election happened and they were both crushed by a random Democrat with a black name. That should serve as a learning experience.

I know the thought of a shock successful recall is really exciting, especially to the blue avatars here, but they should think about whether this actually makes any sense.

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I saw the following post yesterday from an older person I'm acquainted with online:

Have you guys seen the recall ballot?

what a cluster! I was looking around for Newsom’s name and filled in "yes," which actually means in favor of the recall! I’m glad that I didn’t send it right off (because I wanted to stare at the absurdity of it all for a bit…and then saw a news item on the constitutionality of it, which led to me reviewing it again, fortunately).

The point here is not that Democratic voters are going to get confused and vote en masse to recall (I do not think that will happen); the point is that people do not know what this election is about or why it is happening. Posters on this forum should take this into account when they forecast the race rather than assuming that all voters have perfect knowledge or know who Larry Elder is.

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Nearly 600K ballots have been returned in California already.

Total ballots returned = 578,191
Democrats 334,389 (57.8%)
Ind/Other 128,372 (22.2%)
Republicans 115,430 (20.0%)

https://www.dropbox.com/transfer/AAAAAGsEIwg3FoQZQ0tj5RiXoG5qV9Wr381D1YX38USpHR1C0sb7FTA

Update for the next page

Total ballots returned = 1,076,724
Dems 604,981 (56.2%)
Reps 236,038 (21.9%)
Ind/Other 236,002 (21.9%)

Is this good or bad that the Democratic share decreases with each update? From which areas are these votes coming in? I guess the total number is still way, way too small for any estimation how this might go. I still struggle to see how Newsom loses, though the polls aren't that great.

These numbers don't indicate anything at all, and trying to get anything from them at this point amounts to haruspicy. Don't worry about it.

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What's the deal with Elder? The guy doesn't have any real qualifications for the job and reading his political positions on Wikipedia page tells me that he's a far-right nutjob. He'd not represent a majority of Californians.

Yes, that's correct. What are you trying to understand?

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Former CA Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D) endorses Elder.

"Yes, I'm a Democrat. But the recall of Newsom is not about political party. It’s about Newsom. Larry Elder for governor."

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14lGYWA-HVg1pNhLLnEoxAWCHdUMwc4Bf/view

The recall is as much about political party as the olympics are about sports and nationalism

People are strongly underestimating how much this race is about region. The California Democratic Party is really two parties, with the North extremely dominant, and the recall is the only chance the South has right now at reclaiming some power. Some would put up with three years of a useless Republican Governor to get that.

Two points:

a) In the past it has been true that northern politicians (and San Francisco politicians in particular) have dominated the Democratic Party, but my feeling is that this is changing. During his short time as governor so far, Gavin Newsom has managed to make three appointments to elective statewide positions: Alex Padilla as senator, Shirley Weber as secretary of state, and Rob Bonta as attorney general. Padilla and Weber are both from Southern California; what got them their positions was not where in the state they are from but rather their personal loyalty to Gavin Newsom. Newsom has been working to reorganize state politics so it revolves around him in particular rather than a San Francisco clique in general.

b) This is all inside-baseball stuff that voters don't care about. If voters in Southern California were worried about their lack of power in Sacramento, then Antonio Villaraigosa's gubernatorial campaign wouldn't have fallen flat on its face. Voters who are voting to recall are doing so because they support Republicans or dislike Gavin Newsom personally, not because they would rather have any southerner as governor than any northerner.

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Newsom will prevail, but his political future is over at the same time. He will never be president. NEVER.

Even before COVID, he was never gonna be president. NEVER.

Why? He's too slick? I always saw him as someone who was positioning to be the new Bill Clinton/Tony Blair....slick, affable, and charming, but for some reasons it never aligned....

I always liked Newsom and never really understood the dislike for him, though I'd assume he'd lack a national base of support and that he has some brand as an elitist. What he should do or should already have done is setting more signature legislative coals to tackle problems like homelessness. Seems like he should do more of that and build up a brand to become a viable national candidate.

Newsom was likely always eying running for the presidency down the line, and Democratic insiders likely always viewed him as a rising star, but you can forget about that now! Whether you like, hate, or simply tolerate him; it's pretty obvious his tenure as Governor has been disappointing, and especially with the recall, ruined any prospects he might have had.

I don't think that there's ever been any chance of his being president (the most similar politician I can think of is Andrew Cuomo), but the idea that a frivolous recall that he could well win by a huge margin suggests that his time in office has been some kind of failure is ridiculous.

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How many ads for candidates in the recall are people seeing? Granted, I imagine that Republican candidates might not find it cost-efficient to spend in the Bay Area media market, but literally every television ad I've seen has been against the recall.

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Let's remember that he required national Democratic Party help to defeat a MEMBER OF THE GREEN PARTY in a runoff for Mayor of San Francisco.

This is not really in any way an accurate reading of San Francisco municipal politics.

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Let's remember that he required national Democratic Party help to defeat a MEMBER OF THE GREEN PARTY in a runoff for Mayor of San Francisco.

This is not really in any way an accurate reading of San Francisco municipal politics.

I remember this election. National Democrats pulled out the stops because they didn't want to suffer an embarassment in Nancy Pelosi's backyard. If you're the pick of the Democratic Party establishment in the area and need help to win a Mayor of San Francisco election - including from S.F. Republicans - there should be serious questions asked about your skill level as a politician. And then setting that aside, he later became the Democratic Party pick to be Governor of California.

I also remember that election. Nancy Pelosi has never "needed help" because all of her congressional elections have been partisan elections, which municipal elections in California are not. I don't like Gavin Newsom and don't think that his takeover of the Democratic Party has been a good thing, but that's not any reason to mischaracterize what actually happened.

Newsom was not the Democratic Party candidate; he was the candidate of the municipal right wing (the Willie Brown machine), and Matt Gonzalez was the candidate from the municipal left wing who made it out of the first round to face him. Mapping national partisan politics onto a nonpartisan election is not only wrong in a literal sense, but it also completely obscures the dynamics of the actual race.

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I cannot think of any less insightful discussion than two blue avatars arguing about Asian-American representation; fortunately, it's also not at all relevant to this thread, so maybe take it somewhere else.

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I’ve noticed a lot of big name more liberal democrats such as Bernie sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the unpopular Kamala Harris doing quite a bit of campaigning.

Is that just because it’s California the most liberal state in the country? For example let’s say this recall was for the Arizona governorship . Would democrats still have Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and Harris campaign for the democrat nominee?

It sure seems like you've already come up with an answer to your question.