Gavin Newsom has unabashedly been one of the worst governors in the country. As of December of last year, about 371 people were fleeing California each day, California has a homeless population of 161,000 (which is a quarter of all America’s homeless population), and California ranks as the third most expensive state in the country to live in according to CNBC. None of this has been alleviated by Newsom as he continues to follow the same left wing economic agenda that caused California’s troubles. This is reason enough to get rid of Newsom. His general incompetence combined with his disregard for his own Covid-19 restrictions make him unfit to run the most populous state in the union. But can the recall election actually dethrone him? Hypothetically it could if 50.0000000000000001% of voters decide to vote YES on the recall today, but this is incredibly unlikely. I’ll explain why below.
First, even though the polling in early August had the recall election polling within the margin of error, Newsom’s ability to turn the election into a national campaign has seemingly changed the nature of the race in his favor. Tim Miller over at The Bulwark pointed out this morning that while the polling for likely voters earlier last month showed a close election, the polling among registered voters was much more favorable tp Newsom. Here’s Tim Miller explaining this:
:
A recent Cal Berkeley poll stopped some hearts in Sacramento when its top-line showed 47 percent of likely voters supporting the recall with 50 percent opposed. Tight as a tick! But the same poll among all registered voters showed a massive gap with only 36 percent supporting the recall—just 2 percent more than voted for Trump in the state.
A CoreDecision poll showed a similar gap with 43 percent of “definite” voters supporting the recall but just 39 percent of all voters. Among definite voters Newsom had a 50 percent favorable rating while among all voters it was 60 percent.
So that creates a considerable amount of slack for Newsom heading into September. . . . We have seen over the last few years a number of examples of races such as this where the political class gets hot and bothered by some close polls a month out before the lackadaisical incumbent campaign and electorate reengages and political gravity re-establishes itself (McConnell in 2014 & ’20, Northam in ’17, Cruz in 2018, Graham in 2020 come to mind).
Basically Democrats and left-leaning independents still outnumber Republicans by 20% or more, and all Newsom had to do was make them realize he was going to get replaced by someone who could appoint a Republican to Dianne Feinstein’s seat if she were to croak.
Second and lastly, the mail-in ballot data backs up Tim Miller’s predictions. As of yesterday, 37% of the 22 million registered voters in California had returned their ballots. Of those 37%, 52% of them were Democrats, and the other 48% were independents and Republicans. Now, this would seem like a fairly close election and even winnable if independents really broke towards Republicans and if Republicans are able to pull some disaffected Democrats their way, however, that is really not the case. Democrats make up 47% of registered voters in California, Republicans make up about 25% and everyone else makes up about 28% of registered voters. In order for Republicans to win this recall, Democrats would virtually have to not show up and Independents would have to break uniformly in favor of recalling Newsom. This is highly unlikely given current trends. In 2018 and 2020, Democrats at the top of the ticket get roughly 60% of the vote. If we extrapolate registered voter data, this means about half of registered independents vote for Democrats and about half vote for Republicans. This is effectively an insurmountable feat. Even if someone wants to point out that Democrats only made up 52% of early voting numbers and therefore Republicans just have to really turn out on Election Day to win, they would have lump every independent in with Republicans of which is just incredibly unlikely to happen especially given recent polling. Recent polling has the election at about where every election since 2012 has been which is about a 60-40 split. Maybe Newsom hatred transcends partisanship some, but it would have to transcend it by about 11%. If Gavin survives, some Republicans will likely howl at the moon about voter fraud, but I can assure there will not be voter fraud at the levels needed to produce a 60-40 split. This is not to say that no voter fraud exists. A few days ago, some voters at a San Fernando Charter school were told that they had already voted when they in fact had not. They wer
e allowed to eventually vote, but the question is, were their previous “votes” a computer glitch, or did someone cast a vote for them? There is no way to know, but this is an isolated incident and does not seem to have been a problem elsewhere. If the election comes down to a point or two, then maybe Republicans would investigate for fraud, but if it’s a blowout like it appears, no amount of fraud would have produced that result. Republicans can complain about voter fraud all they want, but it is just going to make it harder for them to win elections in the future and could potentially cause another Jan 6 situation where, despite no evidence, people think their votes do not matter. If Republicans cannot accept electoral defeats in California, there’s no way of convincing them that losing an election does not necessarily mean fraud. It 99 times out of 100 means you just lost which is sadly probably going to be the outcome of today.