Newsom Crushes Recall, But Where Does California Go From Here?

CALIFORNIA — In the end, it wasn't even close.

Just two months after polls showed California Gov. Gavin Newsom on the losing end of a recall election, the governor emerged with a historic victory, a massive war chest and a mandate from voters.

Newsom on Tuesday outperformed his 2018 election as Democratic voters turned out in droves to stave off the prospect of right-wing leadership in the bluest of states.

Newsom's campaign used the GOP's leading recall contender, Larry Elder, as a Trumpist foil to scare liberal voters about everything from the pandemic to abortion rights to control of the U.S. Senate should a new governor be in the position to appoint a replacement for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 88. It worked.

Incomplete returns Wednesday showed him headed toward a landslide win, with about 64 percent of the vote.

But the recall raised several questions that will be answered in the days to come.

• How will millions of disaffected recall supporters react to defeat and Republican claims of voter fraud?
• And does California have the appetite for recall reform after more than $300 million was spent on a recall election that turned into a blowout?

Turning The Tide

Two factors turned the tide for Newsom. A poll in early August showed him in danger of getting the boot and Elder emerging as his successor. Newsom's previously apathetic base became an army of motivated voters.

Elder, wildly popular with California supporters of former President Donald Trump, was viewed as an extremist by many liberals. He came to the race with conservative-libertarian principles that were out of step with many of the state’s left-leaning voters.

Elder supports Trump, is critical of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, has spoken in opposition to the minimum wage and promised to erase state vaccine and mask mandates that Newsom has insisted save lives.

An ominous four-word message issued by Newsom’s campaign on the morning of Aug. 5 served as the shock Democrats needed to take seriously a recall election that could remove him from office: “This recall is close.”

The race is “close enough to start thinking about what it’d be like if we had a Republican governor in California. Sorry to put the thought in your head, but it’s true,” Newsom's campaign said.

A major lesson of Newsom’s decisive win is “you can wake up the base,” Newsom strategist Sean Clegg said this week. “The base may start out asleep, ... but you can wake up the base.”

High voter turnout worked in Newsom's favor. With votes still being tallied, he appeared to outperform his own record in the 2018 election across several key counties. He exceeded President Joe Biden's margin of victory in California in 2020 in several counties. And populous counties historically key to Republican victories — including Orange, Riverside and San Diego — came out against the recall Tuesday.

Elder won, by far, the most votes among 46 replacement candidates with 46.9 percent of the vote.

"Thank you for rejecting this recall," Newsom said, declaring victory at the John L. Burton California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento just moments after the race was called by The Associated Press.

Acknowledging Defeat

Elder, acknowledged his defeat to a crowd of supporters at an Orange County ballroom Tuesday night.

“Let’s be gracious in defeat,” he said. “We may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war.”

His speech stirred speculation about what's next for Elder and millions of recall supporters, who spent months turning a longshot recall effort into a viable threat in a state that hadn't elected a Republican to statewide office in 15 years.

Republicans hoped for proof that frustrations over months of pandemic precautions would drive voters away from Democrats. They also searched for evidence that voters were tired of liberal leadership. Democrats have controlled every level of government in California for more than a decade, a period marked by a housing crisis and the increasingly damaging effects of climate change.

Republicans won back four U.S. House seats last year, the success that leaders hoped indicated revived signs of life.

Earlier in the week, Elder claimed that the election could be riddled with fraud before the votes were tallied. Trump predicted the election would be rigged, and California GOP operatives threatened to sue should the recall fail.

"I think about, just in the last few days, a former president put out that this election was rigged," Newsom said in his victory speech. "Democracy is not a football. You don't throw it around. It's more like an antique vase. You can drop it and smash it in a million different pieces. We may have defeated Trump, but Trumpism is not dead in this country.”

Newsom's ouster would have sent shockwaves across the nation, putting the most liberal state in the nation under conservative leadership. Instead, his landslide victory could serve as blueprint for a winning strategy for Democrats going into the midterm elections in 2022.

'We Said Yes'

"I want to focus on what we said yes to as a state," Newsom said. "We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people's right to vote without fear of fake fraud or voter suppression. We said yes to women's fundamental constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body, her fate and her future.

"We said yes to diversity. We said yes to inclusion. ... We said yes to all those things that we hold dear as Californians, and I would argue as Americans — economic justice, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice. ... All of those things were on the ballot this evening, and so I'm humbled and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians who exercised their fundamental right to vote and expressed themselves so overwhelmingly by rejecting the division, by rejecting the cynicism."

As the polls closed, nearly 10 million voters — or 44 percent of registered voters — had already mailed in their ballots. Turnout exceeded that of the 2003 recall that ushered in former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as the 2014 gubernatorial election.

Real-Time Results

The below widget shows results as they roll in. Click the toggle to see data for a specific county, and be sure to keep refreshing your page for the latest. (Click here if you are having trouble viewing the table.)

The end of the recall election was unlikely to be the end of the story, however. Elder — backed by Trump and Republican Party leaders — began alleging voter fraud as soon as Newsom surged in the polls this month.

Though there is no evidence of voter fraud, they have threatened lawsuits and independent investigations into what they alleged are voting irregularities.

The strategy had California Republicans trying to contain a fire of their own making as voting drew to a close. They had to persuade their voters to turn out Tuesday even as party leaders promoted unsubstantiated claims that the race was rigged or compromised by misconduct.

Today is Election Day. Today is NOT Election Results day. Elections officials have 30 days to process and verify all ballots received. CA election results will be finalized by October 22. View result updates here: https://t.co/wDWEgUFd1c #VoteSafeCA #2021CARecall pic.twitter.com/4NRZkjnM7Y
— CA SOS Vote (@CASOSvote) September 14, 2021

Elder has said he believed “there might very well be shenanigans, as there were in the 2020 election.” His campaign website has a link to a “Stop CA Fraud” website, where people can report suspicious voting activity or sign a petition demanding a special legislative session to investigate an election that isn’t even over. The language was lifted from a petition circulated to help Trump's effort to overturn the results of last year's presidential election.

On Monday, Trump, issued a statement saying, "Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn't rigged?"

Recall candidate and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer pushed back against the false claims of voter fraud Tuesday night, saying he had no doubts about the integrity of the election.

“Claiming voter fraud without evidence suppresses the vote and harms our democracy,” Faulconer told the Los Angeles Times.

GOP Messaging May Have Suppressed Turnout

It’s a message that fired up the conservative base, but it could also have led some voters to sit out a "rigged" election or refrain from taking advantage of mail-in voting. Republican Party officials were encouraging everyone to vote while also promoting a narrative that California's election security can't be trusted.

Long Beach voter Terry Sweeney voted in person Tuesday, even though she suspected the election was rigged. Sweeney said the general election was rigged and believed the recall election will be riddled with fraud. As proof, she said she and most people she talks to favor the recall, and yet Newsom could still prevail.

“You can vote one way and have a majority of people you ask .. .saying, ‘No, I don’t like him.' I don’t want him here,” she said.

Sweeney said she worried that Newsom will be emboldened by his victory instead of humbled by a recall movement fueled by millions of dissatisfied voters.

If he retains his seat, Sweeney said, “He’s going to say, ‘Well, look what I’m doing. Now I see the errors of my ways.’ But he’s still going to go out and have those $1,000 dinners. He’s still going to go out and have his cronies paid off. He’s still going to do what he’s going to do behind everyone’s back.”

Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney and the national committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California, said she made a video with her husband showing how they cast ballots by mail and urged everyone to do the same.

But Dhillon added that she could not say whether California's election is be safe and secure, detailing numerous problems that she said she and a team of attorneys monitoring the election have witnessed.

“There will be a lot of questions and potentially litigation after this election about this sloppy-at-best treatment of people’s ballots and their right to vote,” Dhillon said. “I think people have to get out there and vote. We have to document problems, and we have to litigate those problems.”

Much of the GOP criticism of California’s elections has focused on the wide use of mail-in ballots, which have been automatically sent to all active registered voters for state elections since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. An overwhelming majority of California voters cast ballots by mail even before the pandemic, and no widespread voter fraud issues have surfaced.

The recall was always a long shot in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 and where the GOP hasn't won a statewide election since 2006. But Republicans' turn to conspiracy theories and baseless fraud claims to explain a loss that polls had indicated was coming for months shows the party won't walk away from those suspicions. That led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trump's defeat.

Notably, Elder seemed to try to climb down from the inflammatory election allegations Tuesday night, but many worry it's too late to put out the fire. For the second major election in a row, leading Republicans are claiming fraud, and millions of voters doubt the integrity of the election process.

Many Californians worry about what could happen in their state.

“This is going to be the second election in a row where there are going to be aggressive, emotional charges of voter fraud,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “I cannot see a positive out of it."

Pandemic Drove Voters

At voting centers on Tuesday, recall supporters said election fraud was a concern, but voters on both sides of the issue said the pandemic is what drove them to vote in the recall.

Julie Castle, a Long Beach resident, told Patch she just recovered from a bout of COVID-19 despite being vaccinated. To her, it’s imperative that Newsom stays in office to help California navigate the remainder of the pandemic.

“I just think that he has done what he said he’s going to do, and I think the main problem is this COVID situation,” she said. “It’s no joke. People think it’s no big deal, but people my age and younger are dying all the time, and I just think he’s doing the right thing for California.”

Amanda Thomas, a Republican Long Beach resident, said she voted for the recall in part because of Newsom’s heavy-handed approach to the pandemic.

“How he handled our situation wasn’t the greatest,” she said of the pandemic. “I don’t think there’s really anything that he could do to change or at least change my mind. He’s had over a year to help, and he hasn’t.”

Peyton Beeli, 20, said she was voting to keep Newsom in office but admitted that the first-term governor could do more to connect and relate with voters.

'Try To Be A Little More Genuine'

“To me, he just seems a bit disingenuous,” she said, referencing Newsom’s disastrous trip to the French Laundry restaurant during some of the direst months of the pandemic. “Some of the things he does just rubs me the wrong way. It’s kind of like he popped out of a politician machine,” she said. “Maybe try to be a little more genuine; maybe show people that he actually cares about California, like, local Californians, instead of his own career.”

Ultimately, Beeli said she’d still rather have him in office than a Republican. The thought of a conservative administration in California frightened her, she said. “Republican leadership in California is never something that I’ve experienced. I’m a young voter,” she said, adding, “I wouldn’t necessarily say I’d be willing to give it a chance.”

“I would be a little scared,” she said. “My roommate is from Dallas, and to see what’s going on in Texas, like, the abortion ban and everything ... ."

Beeli hoped the recall election was a wake-up call for Democrats who may be apathetic about the political climate in the state.

“I would hope it’s kind of a moment saying, ‘Maybe Democrats in California aren’t as safe as we thought,’” Beeli said. “It’s time to maybe make more of an effort to appeal to voters more than just assuming that California is a blue state and will forever be.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.