Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
California Gov. Gavin Newsom wears a mask during a visit to a COVID-19 vaccination center, March 10, 2021, in South Gate, California.
Early this week, opponents of California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced they had acquired enough signatures to trigger a recall election. According to a recent count, they’ve gotten two million people to sign up with a week still to go until the March 17 deadline. That should have them comfortably beyond the 1.5 million recall threshold, given that, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office, roughly 83 percent of the earlier batch of signatures were considered valid.
For the first time since 2003, California will stage a special election that will determine the fate of its Democratic governor. Gubernatorial recalls are rare and successful recalls are rarer—there have been only nine such attempts in the state’s 170-year history, and just two have succeeded. Still, given the sheer volume of signatures, it’s clear that this campaign is a legitimate threat to Newsom’s post. Already, national Democrats, including Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are circling the wagons in defense of the governor, who has not infrequently sparred with progressives on things like fracking and health care.
He’s not the only state executive in hot water. Calls for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign or face impeachment have grown louder within the state’s Democratic Party in recent weeks, as evidence of his cover-up of nursing home COVID deaths has emerged and numerous women—six as of Wednesday—have come forward to allege they were the subject of sexually inappropriate behavior from the governor. That’s compounded the already scandalous revelation of the liability shield he gave to the executives of the companies that own the state’s nursing homes. Cuomo provided them with legal immunity to wrongful death and injury lawsuits related to the pandemic, after thousands of New Yorkers had died in their facilities.
And even in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is facing calls to resign from the state’s Democrats in the wake of his calamitous mismanagement of February’s statewide blackouts, which left some three million Texans without power and water and resulted in at least 16 deaths. The more plausible threat Abbott faces would be a primary challenge from his own Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who has won a reputation as a much more vocal anti-masker than Abbott. A challenge from Patrick looks more and more likely.
All that means that three of the country’s four largest states by population (and its three most economically influential states as well) are now in the midst of crises of confidence in their governors. If just one of these states were experiencing calls for the governor’s impeachment or resignation, it would be out of the ordinary. Having three governors on the chopping block is without recent precedent.
The coronavirus was long expected to trigger a crisis in state government. Because the CARES Act provisioned nothing in terms of state and local aid, and its late-2020 refresh also sent no relief to states and localities, states were expected to face massive revenue shortfalls which would lead to budget cutbacks, massive public-employee layoffs, and harsh curtailing of education and health care spending.
As The New York Times recently reported, however, the crisis in state budgets didn’t manifest as expected. Some states, including California, ended up collecting more in state tax revenue in 2020 than the year prior. (California has the most progressive income tax of any state, and is also home to more billionaires than any state. As billionaires have cleaned up during the pandemic, the state’s coffers swelled accordingly.) Other states posted only modest shortfalls—New York came in 4 percent beneath 2019, while Texas came in 10 percent low. But according to JPMorgan, revenues in 2020 were “virtually flat” compared to the year prior, outside of outliers Alaska, Oregon, and Wyoming. This may paint a rosier picture than reality, given that even increases in revenue may not cover COVID-related costs, but it’s surprising all the same.
So while state budgets are not in the apocalyptic condition they were forecast to be in a year ago, the chaos that the coronavirus sowed has shown up in other ways. Because the burden of pandemic policy decision-making was kicked to the states by the Trump administration, and because that administration did not provide the resources necessary to underwrite much-needed lockdowns, popular outrage toward state executives surged. Shutdown and reopening decisions were made seemingly at random as governors tried to placate various constituencies.
As the challenges to the three governors mounted, they all responded by altering their coronavirus policies.
Of course, each gubernatorial crisis has its own particular, coronavirus-independent features. Andrew Cuomo’s alleged misconduct with various female aides began years before the pandemic, and though his most prominent accuser, Charlotte Bennett, said in a CBS News interview that Cuomo was emboldened in his impropriety by the power and prominence that accrued to him from his nationally televised coronavirus addresses, his behavior clearly precedes the virus. Calls for Abbott to resign came largely in the wake of the governor’s profound inaction in the face of the state’s widespread grid failure during a recent winter storm. California Republicans have used Newsom’s dining at Michelin-starred Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry as an opportunistic wedge to condemn his lockdown policies and just about everything else he’s done as governor, hoping to claw back some power in Sacramento, where they’ve become all but irrelevant in recent years.
Still, as the challenges to the three governors mounted, they all responded by altering their coronavirus policies. In California, Newsom revoked a stay-at-home order in late January, when caseloads remained extremely high, right as the recall effort was ramping up, and reinstated indoor dining in late February, one week after the recall campaign hit 1.5 million signatures. In New York, Cuomo announced the reopening of movie theaters just a few days following Bennett’s accusation, shortly after having reopened indoor dining, even though New York City case numbers remained stubbornly high. Seemingly every accusation since has been followed by a reopening announcement of some sort. And Abbott, in the aftermath of the blackout, announced that he was calling off all restrictions in Texas: no masks, no closures.
The absence of any real federal mitigation strategy throughout 2020 likely hurt Donald Trump’s re-election chances; deferring that responsibility to states, unequipped to shoulder the financial burden and the controversy associated with it, has spread that political cost to the state level as well.
Now, of course, all three governors are hoping that they can ride out their positions long enough for the arrival of a post-pandemic economic boom, which could be enough to win some forgiveness in the eyes of voters. Given the huge Democratic majority in California’s electorate, Newsom is expected to survive a recall election, though boosting Democratic turnout in a contest in which only the Republican recallers are energized may prove a challenge. All three governors are up for re-election in 2022, when, according to a number of newly sanguine forecasts, the economy should be growing rapidly, and the vaccination campaign should be complete.
It still remains to be seen whether all three will even make it to 2022, or seek re-election at that time. It’s possible that, in a rapid recovery, all will be forgiven; help is finally on the way thanks to the generous state aid provisions in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which is expected to be signed into law on Friday. But it’s possible, too, that there could be significant turnover, a delayed impact of a failed federal strategy, and assistance that came too late.
