What you need to know about the California election and Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom’s work is underway much earlier than I expected.

The California Democrat is facing a September 14 special election that could make him the third governor in U.S. history to be removed from office by a retirement.

Democrats have long maintained close and reliable control of California’s state political leadership. But while Republican voters outnumber nearly 2-1 in the state, the withdrawal effort has not only qualified for the vote, but has become a legitimate threat for Newsom, thanks to much of the coronavirus pandemic.

Here’s what you need to know about the choice of voters in America’s largest state by population and GDP:

All registered voters in California can participate in next week’s special election. Votes have been emailed to all active registered voters.

The ballots have two parts. The first simply asks if Newsom should be removed as governor. If more than 50% vote “yes,” it will be the end of the road for Newsom.

The second part of the vote asks which candidate Newsom should succeed. If the governor is remembered, the alternate candidate who receives the most votes will be elected for the remainder of Newsom’s term, which will end on January 2, 2023.

Voters can fill out only a portion of the ballot, if they wish. They can also select a replacement candidate, even if they vote against remembering Newsom.

Opponents of Newsom gathered the nearly 1.5 million signatures needed to activate the withdrawal election. This threshold was equal to 12% of the votes cast in the previous 2018 government elections.

The petition had been approved in June 2020 and its sponsors were originally given a deadline of November 17 last year to collect signatures. But they received a four-month extension due to the impact of the pandemic on their efforts.

This extra time proved crucial. The signatures began pouring in in late 2020, after photos of Newsom appearing eating without masks with lobbyists at the famous and extravagant expensive restaurant, The French Laundry.

At the time, Newsom and the state government were advising Californians to disguise themselves and follow the rules of social distancing as Covid cases began to escalate.

Newsom apologized for attending the dinner, saying he “made a mistake” and acknowledged that “it contradicted the spirit of what I’m preaching all the time.”

But the reaction again focused on the withdrawal election in Covid, even though the pandemic was not mentioned in the original request.

Rather, it refers to homelessness, high taxes, and other issues that conservatives have long included among their top criticisms in California. The petition, filed in February 2020 by Orrin Heatlie, a retired sheriff’s sergeant, was the sixth attempt to remember Newsom, which opened in 2019.

But the recovery campaign website now puts The French Laundry incident on the list of reasons to remove Newsom.

There are 46 challengers running to eliminate Newsom. Like the memory of 2003 that made Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of the state, this year’s election has exposed a wide variety of personalities.

Of the 24 Republican candidates for the vote, talk radio presenter Larry Elder has become the clear leader of this group.

Elder, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, reportedly raised more than $ 13 million, eliminating most of the rivals he remembered, while still far behind the tens of millions earned by opponents of Newsom’s ouster.

Other Republican candidates include John Cox, who has traveled to the event campaign with a live Kodiak bear at the helm, and Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and reality TV personality.

Among the nine Democrats are Hollywood actor Patrick Kilpatrick and YouTube millionaire Kevin Paffrath, as well as a college student, a free speech advocate and a “cannabis policy advisor” who is asking Californians to vote against remembering Newsom.

Also participating are two members of the Green Party, a member of the Libertarian Party and 10 non-affiliated candidates.

With just a few days to go before the election, Newsom seems increasingly likely to stay in his seat.

For most of last month, polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight showed that voters were in favor of keeping Newsom as governor, but only by a slight margin.

More recent polls show the preference to keep Newsom outperforms the option to eliminate it by more than 10 points, according to the average of FiveThirtyEight polls.

Meanwhile, betting markets show that the recovery effort lost much of its steam over the past month. Newsom’s chances of staying in power are at their highest point since early July.

Attempts to remove elected officials are not uncommon in California; in fact, there have been 179 since 1913.

But a small fraction of these petitions garnered enough signatures to provoke a vote, and in only six cases has the official in question been effectively recalled.

Only one governor, the unpopular Democrat Gray Davis, has ever been remembered in California. In that 2003 special election, 135 candidates contested Davis’ work, including a comic book, a porn star, and others who had never run for office.

Davis was eventually replaced by Republican Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and megastar action film champion, who enjoyed universal name recognition.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to campaign for Newsom this week in California.

A loss of Newsom to the withdrawal could have major consequences for Democrats across the country, beyond the shame and discouragement of losing control of an intense blue state a year before the midterm elections.

The control of the US Senate could be at stake at some point.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 88, has held her seat since 1992. The oldest senator in the United States, her health has come under increasing scrutiny. But he stated in March that he still intended to fulfill the rest of his current term, which ends in early 2025.

If Feinstein leaves office early, the governor will appoint his successor. If Newsom is replaced by a Republican, that governor could appoint a Republican to fill the Senate vacancy.

This could bring down the meager democratic majority in the Senate, where the two parties split between 50 and 50 and the vice-president exercises the tiebreaker vote. Without this meager advantage, Democrats ’hopes of passing key parts of Biden’s ambitious agenda would likely be out of reach.

Republicans want to have the first U.S. Senate seat in California since John Seymour in the early 1990s.

“They’re afraid he’ll replace her with a Republican one, which he would surely do and it would be an earthquake in Washington, DC,” Elder, the GOP leader, said on another Conservative radio show.