Like the state itself, California’s recall election law is profoundly weird.
It occasionally gives the beleaguered taxpayers a chance to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on quixotic attempts to install a governor who is only favored by minority of the voters.
Of course, as a Republican, I’m all for it. If you can actually get it to work.
But the law conceptually makes sense for a completely different universe from the one we inhabit. In a world where voters just “vote for the person” without regard for party, you can sort of see the logic.
Step 1: Ask voters if they want to remove the existing governor. If yes, move on to:
Step 2: Ask voters who is the best person to replace him.
In that alternate reality Gavin Newsom would surely be recalled. He is smarmy to the extreme, flouts his own pandemic rules, and before the recall had coalesced around Larry Elder, was polling around just 50% in the recall race.
This of course set him up to be defeated by a Republican who could win, say, 40%. Because that makes sense. But whatever, I would take it.
But recall proponents were not able to keep the race focused on Gavin’s personal failings, and the vote once more became a proxy for Democrats’ favorite issue, Donald J. Trump:
“I’m going to make this as simple as I can,” Joe Biden told Californians in the waning days of the race. “You either keep Gavin Newsom as your governor or you’ll get Donald Trump. It’s not a joke.”
It’s an utterly infallible strategy in a state where Trump lost by nearly 30 points (not-coincidentally pretty much the same as how Gavin’s margin is shaping up.)
In his victory speech, Newsom emphasized that the vote wasn’t really about him or the recall at all, but about national culture war issues like abortion and social justice:
It’s clear that the ability to transcend partisan divides through personal charisma and political talent is rapidly vanishing in America. Socially moderate, technocratic blue-state Republicans like Charlie Baker and red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin are a dying breed, and have been successful only by proudly rejecting much of what their own parties stand for.
Gavin Newsom could have been an ax-murderer once the race was framed as a traditional D-versus-R battle for the soul of the state, rather than as a referendum on him personally, especially with Dianne Feinstein’s senate seat potentially hanging in the balance.
It’s much easier to win races this way, by simply attaching yourself to a national agenda, rather than by trying to get people to like you. Especially if you’re someone like Gavin Newsom, who looks like a vampire and doesn’t know how to go out to dinner for less than about $800.
The recall had a shot because, for just a moment, normal people’s shared, visceral dislike for someone completely unlikable almost broke through the partisan bickering that consumes our political life.
It sure would be nice to live in the world where that could have been enough.