California Gov. Gavin Newsom has won a historic election that made him fight for his political life. In a referendum on the governor’s leadership through the pandemic, voters flatly rejected the decision to replace him with a Republican Trumpist.
The Associated Press projected the results about 45 minutes after the polls closed on Tuesday night. Newsom’s most popular challenger was Larry Elder, a right-wing radio host who made comparisons to the former president and tried to sow unfounded doubts about the election process.
Newsom did not hold any surveillance party or any election night celebration. Instead, he took a somber tone by speaking to reporters Tuesday night, saying, “Tonight I am humiliated, grateful, but resolute.”
Speaking in Sacramento, Newsom said that when they voted no on the Republican-led withdrawal, Californians said “Yes to science, we said yes to vaccines.”
“I am humiliated and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians who exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Newsom said, “and they express themselves so overwhelmingly by rejecting division, rejecting cynicism.”
While margins are expected to shrink as more votes are counted, Tuesday night’s results showed that Californians appeared to oppose the recovery effort in greater numbers than some experts initially expected. . With about 60% of the ballots counted, the “no” on the question of whether to remember Newsom was advanced by a margin of two to one.
Although the race was called by the AP on Tuesday night, the vote count is not yet final and election officials have 30 days to count all the ballots.
As a Democratic governor of a deep blue state, the governor was in the peculiar position of having to defend his seat after the recovery effort gained momentum amid the worst of the pandemic, fueled by frustrations with the pandemic. closure of schools and companies.
Requests for government withdrawal are very common in California, but only another such withdrawal has reached the ballot in state history.
Newsom initially dismissed the withdrawal election as a costly distraction, in fact, it could cost the state about $ 300 million or more. But Democrats set off at full speed in late summer as polls indicated that apathetic and angry voters could cost him his position at the head of the most populous U.S. state.
In the run-up to the election, Newsom, which struggled to follow the wrong steps and connect with young progressive voters, reformulated the withdrawal as a referendum on Trumpism, which fine-tuned Elder. Noting that Elder had promised to revoke the mask and vaccine warrants “before taking my first cup of tea” if he was sworn in as governor, Newsom characterized the election as a “matter of life or death.”
The day before the Sept. 14 voting deadline, Joe Biden campaigned alongside Newsom, telling voters that “the eyes of the nation are set on California.”
“It’s a bit remarkable that Newsom could adopt the Covid issue, which could have been a fatal weakness for him and was able to turn him into a considerable force,” said Dan Schnur, a policy professor who has advised the Republican candidates.
For many voters, a “no” vote turned out to be less of a support for Newsom and more a rejection of Elder and other Republicans. Newsom “didn’t allow us to become a Florida or a Texas,” said Tim Otto, a bookstore owner in Stockton, California, referring to states whose rulers have blocked or fought mask requirements and vaccine.
Elder spent election night in Costa Mesa, California, where his party guests watched Fox News on the big screens and danced to live music by Phil Crosby (Bing’s grandson) and his six-man band. He admitted defeat Tuesday night.
Among early voters, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one, although the gap was expected to narrow election day, with a larger proportion of Republicans voting on Election Day. Polls that had initially placed Elder at a surprising distance from Newsom began to expand before election day. As his chances of victory dwindled, Elder began to follow in Trump’s footsteps by spreading conspiracy theories to falsely suggest that the election was against him.
The results will have national reverberations. For Democrats across the country, Newsom’s victory has averted a crisis of confidence. “Democrats running in other parts of the country next year would do well to study Newsom’s playbook very carefully,” Schnur said, noting that the governor’s ability to find an aluminum foil in Elder it is largely what helped him energize voters.
The race has given Elder, an element already popular in the right-wing media, a more prominent national stage. “I have now become a political force here in California,” he said in a recent radio interview, on KMJ Now radio. “I’m not going to leave the stage.” His electoral misinformation, which has been amplified by Trump and his allies, has generated a sense of mistrust of the U.S. election among conservative and right-wing voters.
Newsom’s other Republican challenges included former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulkner, businessman John Cox – who also lost to Newsom in 2018 – and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner.
The governor, who was elected by historic margins nearly three years ago, worked throughout the withdrawal campaign to live through the erroneous steps of the pandemic era. Parents felt frustrated when public schools remained closed in California for much longer than in other states. Under Newsom, the state’s unemployment department struggled with significant arrears and paid an estimated $ 31 billion in fraudulent claims. The governor also faced harsh criticism over the state’s slow initial deployment of vaccines and its ineffective registration site. A dinner laden with lobbies and bad weather at the Michelin-starred French laundry restaurant amid the state wave of Covid-19 gave ammunition to his opponents against him.
After surviving the retirement, Newsom will serve one more year before being re-elected. “If he had survived by a small margin, it is very likely that another Democrat would have come out against him from the left next year,” Schnur said. “But given a landslide like this, it’s very hard to see that happen.”
A Newsom explosion will also “increase Newsom’s political strength and aspirations in the future,” said Mindy Romer, founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a nonpartisan research organization.
The only other government withdrawal that was voted for across the state was in 2003, when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger ousted Democrat Gray Davis. But Newsom continued to be more popular than Davis did, despite his mistakes.
Withdrawal support was higher in some parts of the central agricultural valley of California and in the north of the country. These areas have always been more conservative and have been centers of resistance against mask requirements and pandemic restrictions over the past year.
Ultimately, a major consequence of this year’s withdrawal in California could be a rethinking of the withdrawal process itself. In a poll released Monday by the Los Angeles Times-sponsored UC Berkeley Institute for Government Studies, 75% of registered voters said they wanted to maintain their right to remove a statewide official through an election. of withdrawal. But most voters also proposed reforms, such as increasing the number of petition signatures needed to trigger the withdrawal and requiring reminders to give a reason for wanting to dismiss an official such as illegal or unethical conduct.