In this edition: California's three recall elections, the politicking around Afghanistan's collapse, and a special election to watch in yuppie country.
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SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — The Sept. 14 recall election here will determine whether Gov. Gavin Newsom serves out his term, or a more conservative candidate replaces him.
Who's the Republican nominee? The party didn't endorse one. Who's the Democratic alternative to Newsom? His party didn't officially field one, arguing that voters should fill out the first part of their ballot — “no” on the recall — and ignore the second part, which selects a replacement.
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“Please don't argue about the second part of the ballot,” Carl DeMaio, founder of the conservative pro-recall group Reform California, said at a volunteer training session here Sunday. “It doesn't matter. Anyone will be better than gruesome Newsom in Sacramento.”
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In the past few days, as voters began to receive absentee ballots, California's $276 million recall election has evolved into three simultaneous campaigns, talking past each other. Democrats are running a referendum on the state's coronavirus strategy, including mask mandates in schools and vaccine requirements for health-care workers. Republicans are holding a primary, which has seen pro-Trump libertarian pundit Larry Elder surge by appealing to the party's base, stumping at a church that defied last year's pandemic lockdown and questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. The third group, activists who wanted the recall in the first place, is focusing on the state's long-term crises — housing costs, homelessness, climate change — to urge a “yes” vote and hope for the best.
Democrats make up nearly half of the state's 22 million registered voters, roughly twice the number of Republicans or nonpartisans — more than enough to win every statewide race here since 2010. Newsom's party has branded the election as a “Republican recall” that never should have happened, and only did because a judge approved a three-month extension for the recall campaigners to get signatures, because of the pandemic. At Saturday stops in east Los Angeles, Newsom focused repeatedly on Elder, arguing that voters had a binary choice; Los Angeles City Council member Kevin de León, turning to the Spanish-language cameras, called the election a coup attempt.
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“Respectfully, there's one candidate out the other side,” Newsom said Saturday when asked by a reporter why Democrats kept ignoring the little-known Democratic alternatives and the slightly better-known Republicans on the recall ballot. “That's Larry Elder.”
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The “just vote no” message has worried some Democrats, who've watched a series of impossible-looking right-wing victories become inevitable — the 2003 recall, the 2008 passage of a same-sex marriage ban here and Donald Trump's 2016 victories. Hillary Clinton's campaign saw an advantage in Trump's 2015 rise, hoping that his embrace of far-right ideas would discredit the GOP. There's a whiff of this in California now, as Newsom's own advertising focuses on Elder and ignores less conservative candidates like former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who are gasping for airtime. (Faulconer and two rivals will debate twice this week, but Elder's skipping out.)
Newsom's bet, supported by public and private polling, is that most Californians don't want to replace him, and that his partisans can overwhelm Republicans if they are reminded to turn in their ballots. He tapped familiar California Democratic strategists to run his campaign, and brought Tim Tagaris, a veteran of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns, to build a digital strategy to find volunteers and get them to text voters about returning their ballots, sending a million of those messages by this week, and getting 220,000 people to donate to Newsom's campaign, already well-funded by labor groups.
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“It's an extraordinary outpouring, in a small amount of time, that's scaled really quickly,” said Tagaris.
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The recall campaigns are more diffuse, which helped them during the signature-gathering period and, for much of the campaign, denied Newsom a clear target. (While he's attacked Trump on the trail, the ex-president has not commented on the recall.) DeMaio's group is operating separately from Recall Gavin, which has nothing to do with the California GOP, which has little to do with the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine mandate protests that have energized Newsom's opponents.
“Unfortunately, there's a lot of faking going on in politics,” DeMaio said in an interview, saying that the GOP's infrastructure for turning out “yes” votes was too rickety. “I still question whether they want the recall to prevail.”
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Conservative enthusiasm has still outpaced liberal enthusiasm, with Democrats struggling to match their usual margins with Latino voters — hence the relentless focus on what Newsom calls “Trumpism.” Polling from CBS News, released Sunday, found that Californians who voted for Trump in 2020 were more intent on voting than Biden voters by 20 points, which produced a narrow four-point lead for the “no” campaign.
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Republicans are energized; the new Democratic strategy is to turn that energy against them by changing the election's stakes. This month, Newsom issued new vaccination guidelines for education employees and a new mandate for health-care workers, requiring them all to get coronavirus vaccinations. Republicans, who have voters' ears on some issues — homelessness, gas prices and crime — are on the wrong side of this one in California. Polling has found roughly two-thirds of Californians supportive of the selective vaccination mandates, and around as many supportive of mask mandates for in-person schooling, which is beginning as the recall ends. The policy dispute runs through everything: Democrats and labor unions require their canvassers to get vaccinated before they hit the doors, while Republicans don't.
“It’s a matter of life and death,” a narrator says in the Newsom campaign's latest ad. The screen displays Elder and Trump together, each giving a thumbs-up. “The top Republican candidate? He peddled deadly conspiracy theories and would eliminate vaccine mandates on day one.”
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Inside the GOP's battle for the second ballot question, Newsom's mandate for health-care workers is deeply unpopular. There's no path to victory, for Elder or for a rival, that allows support for a vaccination or mask mandate. Republican voters don't want it. At his weekend stops, Newsom tried to tease that out, telling The Trailer that he was not concerned about a backlash to the mandates hurting him in September.
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“I'm never going to convince people who don't believe in climate science or health science. I'm not. People on his side of the aisle are comparing face coverings to the Holocaust,” Newsom said, once again referring to Elder. “I think Californians are just not, with all due respect, looking for our scientific guidance from the governors of Texas and Florida.”
Asked about the ad, Elder spokeswoman Ying Ma criticized Newsom's “dictatorial covid edicts,” adding that “unions representing firefighters, front-line workers, and working class men and women Newsom does not care about vehemently oppose vaccine mandates that he and his billionaire friends love.”
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Hours later, an anti-vaccination rally outside of Los Angeles City Hall displayed exactly what Democrats want to run against: speaker after speaker repeating debunked claims about the vaccination campaign, and far-right agitators attacking a reporter while another group started a street brawl. Elder didn't show up; Sarah Stephens, a contender who said she was inspired to run after the Jan. 6 insurrection, did. Newsom's opponents think they can win an up-or-down vote on his record. Not everyone on their side is helping.
Reading list
“Embattled California Gov. Newsom, facing recall election, says it’s time for Democrats to wake up,” by Dan Balz
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The turnout game in California's snap election.
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“How Nina Turner lost her election,” by Daniel Marans
A comprehensive look at the mistakes the left made in northeast Ohio.
“Booming Latino populations are helping GOP states like Texas gain new seats in Congress,” by Colby Itkowitz and Harry Stevens
Republicans get to draw the maps, but the growth's been in urban counties.
“Candidates for Virginia governor take opposite positions on mask and vaccine mandates,” by Gregory S. Schneider and Laura Vozzella
It's not just Newsom: Terry McAuliffe is another Democrat trying to turn an election into a vaccine referendum.
“Growing GOP calls for chairwoman's resignation following sex trafficking indictment against top donor,” by Kim Hyatt
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An out-of-nowhere disaster in a swing state.
The Afghanistan factor
Not everything is a campaign story.
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It's too soon to say how the Taliban's recapture of power in Afghanistan will be processed by voters who have 15 months to go until a federal election. It's too soon to talk about the impacts of a withdrawal effort that, as this newsletter goes out, is not over and has already led to several deaths. Even if evacuations proceed safely this week, there'll be investigations into how the Biden administration miscalculated the Afghan military's strength and left so many Americans and visa-eligible Afghans stranded.
It's not too soon for politics, though, and we're seeing a few arguments and tactics worth following, as the popular conventional wisdom — that it was time to leave the country, and there probably wouldn't be a quick Taliban victory — gets shredded by reality.
Calls for resignation. There haven't been too many, and there's no unified Republican message. Take Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who tweeted that it may be time to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Biden from office. He didn't add to that in his longer statement on the crisis, and while 14 House Republicans had signed a letter demanding Biden take a cognitive test, they didn't repeat that in the first days of the crisis.
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The most prominent Republican voice calling for Biden to resign was, of course, his predecessor, who sent out multiple statements urging Biden to go, insisting that he wasn't elected fairly, and insisting that he wouldn't have let the Taliban sweep to power so fast. It's not usual for Donald Trump to speak without Republicans amplifying him. What's the difference now? Trump cut a deal with the Taliban, with the support of nearly every Republican, and the more hawkish wing of the party was pushed into near-irrelevance during his presidency. You more commonly see Republicans demand a plan from Biden than suggest a particular military response.
The refugee “invasion.” The liberal national security establishment has scorched the Biden White House for not working faster to bring Afghans who worked with the United States to America. Opponents of a larger refugee resettlement have acted just as quickly, warning that Democrats might want to bring desperate Afghans here for base political reasons.
“Joe Biden wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently,” Turning Point USA's leader Charlie Kirk told listeners of his podcast this week. “We're playing checkers. They're playing chess.”
Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, whose media profile has made him one of the GOP's best-known nationalist candidates, did not make the same electoral argument as Kirk.
“While many of the Afghanistan people are good people, there are bad ones too who do not like Americans or our Western way of life,” Vance said in a statement. “Resettling them in the United States so that our country becomes a refugee camp is not the answer.”
How does this play out? How many refugees does the Biden administration want to accept? The comparisons between the fall of Kabul and the fall of Saigon 46 years ago are helpful here. In 1975, Gallup's polling found just 36 percent of Americans in favor of resettling Vietnamese refugees in the United States, just 40 percent willing to support humanitarian aid and only 15 percent in favor of new military support for the South Vietnamese. But there is no indication that played a substantial role in the 1976 presidential election.
Polling found widespread support for leaving Afghanistan, but the idea of Afghans fleeing for safe harbor in the United States hasn't been tested yet.
Ad watch
Stop the Republican Recall of Governor Newsom, “Vaccine Contrast.” When mail-in ballots began going out last week, the Democrats' anti-recall campaign ran ads featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), urging partisans to vote “no” before Sept. 14. This ad marks a shift, from pure partisanship to a warning of how Republicans would govern, quoting GOP candidate Larry Elder's pledge to undo any mask or vaccination mandates in place if he takes office.
Elder for Governor, “School Choice.” Elder has raised the most money of any Republican candidate running in the recall election and has invested in two straight-to-camera TV spots: A quick biography, and this look at one of the issues he's talked about for years. “I benefited from schools, the quality of which allowed me to go from South Central to the Ivy League,” he says. “That route is now foreclosed because the quality of the schools has declined.”
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Poll watch
“Do you see the decision to get vaccinated or not as a …” (CBS News/YouGov, 1,856 California adults)
Personal health choice: 31%
Public health responsibility: 27%
Both: 42%
As we reported higher up, California Democrats are building their campaign to save Gov. Gavin Newsom from recall on the popular vaccination mandates he put into place this month. YouGov asked a series of questions about vaccination requirements, finding all of them largely supported by an electorate that was closely divided on the recall. Less than a third of Californians say vaccination should be a “personal health choice,” the description embraced by vaccine skeptics and Republicans opposed to mandates for various reasons.
“In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?” (Ipsos, 1,002 adults)
Public health, disease, and illness: 17%
Economy, unemployment, and jobs: 16%
Environment and climate: 11%
Health care system: 10%
Immigration: 9%
Crime or corruption: 8%
Inequality and discrimination: 5%
Morality: 4%
Education: 3%
Terrorism and extremism: 1%
Energy issues: 1%
War and foreign conflicts: 1%
We're days away from comprehensive polling on the Afghanistan debacle, and this poll was taken before the Taliban's final advance. It's a snapshot of what voters were thinking about before this past weekend: basically, not Afghanistan. While other pollsters ask about this in different ways, “terrorism” had fallen off as a worry in polling years ago, no matter who was president. Immigration and the economy were the top issues for self-identified Republicans when the weekend started, followed by crime. Just 4 percent of Republicans listed either “terrorism and extremism” or “war and foreign conflicts” as top issues, compared with just 1 percent of Democrats. That's our baseline for the next edition of the poll, this weekend.
Special elections
Voters in Connecticut's 36th state Senate district are filling that swing seat today, determining whether Democrats will hold onto their veto-proof supermajority in Hartford and testing the GOP's ability to win back suburbanites they lost during the Trump presidency. No seat has changed parties in any special election this year, for Congress or for state legislatures; this race presents Republicans with an unusually good chance to pull it off.
The district, which contains all of Greenwich and most of Darien and Stamford, had been Republican turf for decades: Wealthy suburbs full of commuters who work in New York City. It began shifting during Barack Obama's presidency, and zoomed left under Donald Trump's. In 2018, Democrat Alex Kasser flipped it by fewer than 600 votes. In 2020, Trump got just 37 percent of the vote, losing every town in the district and dragging down GOP nominee Ryan Fazio, who fell more than 1,500 votes short of taking the seat back for his party.
But Fazio ran far ahead of Trump, and filed to run in the special election prompted by Kasser's resignation this summer. Democrats wound up with a new problem: John Blankley, who had been the unsuccessful 2016 Democratic nominee for the seat, filed to run as an independent. After realizing that Democrats were going to nominate gun safety advocate Alexis Gevanter, Blankley insisted he could win the election by appealing to centrist voters unsatisfied with the major parties.
“I have discovered while out on the trail getting signatures, that independent voters want a voice,” Blankley told the Greenwich Time last month, saying he had personally rebuffed Democrats who asked him not to run.
Republicans had no such split: Fazio defeated two GOP rivals, including a onetime Trump nominee for ambassador to Chile, but quickly unified the party around a tax-cutting message and emphasized his endorsements from local police unions. “Let's bring people together across the aisle to cut taxes, reduce the cost of health care and electricity,” he said at a candidate debate with both rivals. “Let's support our local police and reduce crime in our most vulnerable neighborhoods.”
Gevanter has run as a stalwart supporter of Gov. Ned Lamont's agenda; the Democratic chief executive, who won narrowly in 2018 on his second try for the job, has become broadly popular because of his handling of the pandemic in a state that had one of the worst early outbreaks. Losing the seat to Fazio wouldn't imperil the party's agenda in Hartford, but it would give Republicans the year's first blue-to-red flip, and during the worst week of Joe Biden's presidency.
2024 watch
Potential GOP presidential candidates who aren’t Donald Trump continue to find reasons to be in early-voting primary states. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who joined Nevada’s Adam Laxalt at his annual Basque Fry on Saturday, will join Rep. Marjorie Miller-Meeks of Iowa next month for her inaugural “tailgate celebration.”
In Nevada, Cotton made news, announcing that Laxalt would run for U.S. Senate next year, though the former state attorney general hadn’t filed paperwork yet. “There’s some campaign finance rules against it,” said Cotton. “But what do I care about some stupid rules like that?”
Cotton’s speech didn’t touch much on the situation in Afghanistan, focusing at length on “critical race theory” and how Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), like nearly every Democrat in the Senate, had opposed an amendment that would have barred federal funds for any educational institution that “promotes” CRT.
On Aug. 31, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head to New Hampshire for a school choice summit organized by the Club for Growth, and joined by former education secretary Betsy DeVos — who, unlike Pompeo, left the Trump administration in early 2021, after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Audit watch
The 2020 election wasn’t particularly close in Washington state. The Trump campaign didn’t seriously compete for it, and wound up with 39 percent of the vote. Gov. Jay Inslee, who briefly ran for president, won a third term easily — a 13-point margin over Loren Culp, a conservative former police chief. At the same time, voters reelected Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state who’d defended their all-mail voting system from Trump-led attacks.
Wyman did not attend this past weekend’s A.U.D.I.T. meeting in Snohomish, at which conservative Republican state legislators argued that something went wrong last year and it needed to be looked into. State Rep. Robert Sutherland, who’d attended MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “cybersecurity summit” just days before — and the Arizona audit before that — called the meeting to collect allegations of election fraud.
“We have a mountain of evidence indicating voter irregularities,” Sutherland said. “You know how we get proof, Mr. ‘Press?’ By doing a full forensic audit of our election system!”
Anyone looking for new information would have come away disappointed. Seth Keshel, a former army captain who has insisted that high vote totals for Biden last year simply don’t make sense, gave a PowerPoint version of his research that relied on innuendo and some missing data.
He focused on Snohomish County, asking what could explain a jump in votes for Biden in 2020. In 2004, George W. Bush won 134,317 votes to 156,468 for Democratic nominee John F. Kerry. In 2008, Democrats surged, with Barack Obama winning 187,294 votes to 126,722 for John McCain. In 2012, he spotted a suburban boost for Mitt Romney, who won 133,016 votes as Obama won 188,516. In 2016, both major party nominees ran behind that: 185,227 votes for Hillary Clinton, 128,255 votes for Donald Trump.
“They’re stuck, three elections in a row,” Keshel told his audience, referring to the Democrats. He flashed a new slide, showing Trump with 166,248 votes in 2020, suggested that a fair analysis would put Biden at 200,000 votes, then made the reveal: 256,728 votes for Biden, which to him could reveal that Democrats were “stuffing” ballots.
What had actually happened? First, Keshel ignored the third party vote altogether; it fell from 41,252 in 2016 to just 15,560 in 2020, largely to Democrats’ benefit. (Polling consistently found voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton in 2016 breaking for Biden in 2020.)
Second, Biden’s improvement in the county wasn’t all that different from his gains in suburban counties anywhere else. Trump improved on his 2016 performance by 30 percentage points; Biden improved on Hillary Clinton by 39 points. Across the state, Trump improved on his 2016 margin in 14 counties, while Biden ran ahead of Clinton’s numbers in the other 25 counties.
Why delve into this? The impact of Lindell's summit is ongoing, with an investigation in Colorado into a Republican who may have broken the law to obtain voting machine data and bring it to him. But the quest for evidence of “ballot-stuffing” in 2020's high turnout also cuts against a new report from the federal Election Assistance Commission, which studied how election officials handled the last election's unprecedented surge of mail ballots.
The conclusion: Just 1 percent of mail ballots were rejected, the same rate that they were nixed in the 2016 election, despite the use of mail ballots more than doubling from year to year and turnout growing in every state. It was a triumph of election workers and their year-long promotion of how absentee balloting worked, which prevented even more voters from spoiling their ballots in an unfamiliar process. They succeeded, and their success is now fodder for fabricated accusations.
Countdown
… 28 days until California's recall election
… 77 days until elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and primaries in Florida’s 20th Congressional District
… 147 days until the election in Florida's 20th Congressional District