It’s recall day in California, and by just about all accounts — including their own — Republicans are headed for defeat.
Top GOP contender Larry Elder’s campaign is already bogusly blaming his loss (which hasn’t actually happened yet) on voter fraud. Former president Donald Trump has also preemptively and wrongly blamed the loss on fraud, apparently having learned no lessons from the Georgia Senate runoffs about what message that might send to would-be GOP voters.
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The idea that Republicans would fall short in California, of course, isn’t terribly surprising. It’s a blue state. But it’s also a blue state in which they proactively picked this fight. And the margin by which they lose could wind up being historically significant (with the caveat that polls can be unreliable, especially in unusual races like this one).
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will face Republican front-runner Larry Elder on Sept. 14 in the state’s first recall election since 2003. (James Cornsilk/The Washington Post)
The latest polls in the race have shown Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) extending his lead. While it looked close for a time — based largely but not exclusively upon one outlier poll that showed him losing — the latest surveys show the recall effort with around 40 or 41 percent of the vote. (The effort would need to gain a majority to recall Newsom, at which point voters would choose between a vast array of alternatives led by Elder, with no big-name Democrats in the field.)
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If the recall effort winds up with around 40 percent of the vote, it would be one of the least-successful such efforts in history.
Over the past 100 years, starting with the successful recall of North Dakota Gov. Lynn Frazier in 1921, at least 40 recalls targeting either statewide officials or state legislators have made the ballot in the relatively few states that allow them. A little more than half of them succeeded, either by recalling the lawmaker or forcing their resignation.
Among those that failed, though, a strong majority came at least somewhat close, garnering between 41 and 50 percent of the vote. Only seven — 17.5 percent of these recall efforts — failed to crest with at least 40 percent of the vote.
Here’s a look at how those recalls panned out:
The expected loss is also in line to be the biggest among the relatively few efforts to recall a governor. Both Frazier and California Gov. Gray Davis (a Democrat who was replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger) were successfully recalled. Another effort targeting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) in 2012 failed but garnered 46 percent of the vote.
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That last effort was largely viewed as a cautionary tale when it comes to such recall votes. Democrats were incensed over Walker rolling back collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions. The previous year, they came up just shy of taking over the state Senate in a spate of recalls, and they pressed forward with trying to unseat Walker and his lieutenant governor. They ultimately failed in a manner that actually appeared to strengthen Walker, who went on to also win reelection in 2014 and even lead some early polls for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
It’s not clear that even a resounding win by Newsom would elevate him in a similar way, nor would it necessarily be a setback on a specific issue in the way that the Walker recall was a setback for unions. (Indeed, Republicans have never really enunciated a specific and consistent reason for recalling Newsom, who is and has been pretty popular throughout the process.) But it would certainly reflect upon the GOP’s strategic know-how in the sense that it proactively put this on the ballot and, even considering it’s a tough state, might come up well short.
Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg summed it up nicely.
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“If the California GOP were a strong & serious party it would’ve worked to clear field of the rabble & rabble-rousers and put all its weight behind a competent & conventional candidate like [former San Diego mayor Kevin] Faulconer,” Goldberg said. “Would’ve kept Newsom the issue and laid foundation for rebuilding GOP.”
Instead, the GOP effectively allowed the race to be defined as being between a fringe figure like Elder, who would otherwise never be a contender statewide in California, and Newsom, who was able to make the race into a choice rather than the kind of referendum that recalls are supposed to be.
We’ll see Tuesday night (or, perhaps more likely, shortly thereafter) just how poorly conceived and executed the whole thing was.