Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at a rally against the state’s gubernatorial recall election, September 12, 2021, in Sun Valley, California.
Today, Gavin Newsom will beat back a recall election and remain governor of California, and it doesn’t look like it will be particularly close. For the sake of the state and as a signal to national Democrats, though, that cannot be the end of the story.
American democracy has become polluted with circumstances where one party can win control of the executive branch without a majority of voters, or use our system’s multiple veto points and idiosyncrasies to block majorities in Congress from setting policy. In a country with a high barrier for constitutional amendments, or a state with unified Republican control and the wherewithal to draw gerrymandered maps that maintain it, this becomes a frustrating and intractable problem.
But California isn’t like that. Democrats have massive registration advantages and a supermajority in the legislature. They don’t have to settle for an absurdity like the recall rules we’ve become so familiar with over the past couple of months.
Therefore, when this recall ends, state Democrats should not move on without enacting fundamental changes to how direct democracy works in the nation’s most populous state.
They were fortunate to survive this round. Initially, it looked like the trajectory of the pandemic and the schedule of the recall would put the question of Newsom’s governorship before voters several months into a lifted public-health crisis, reopened schools and businesses, and a robust economic boom, aided by a flood of COVID relief directed by Newsom and the Democratic legislature. But the delta variant laid waste to those plans, dispelling Californians’ mistaken beliefs that the pandemic was behind them.
At that point, Newsom was in trouble, however briefly. But one event changed the trajectory of the election: a state judge ruled that Larry Elder could remain on the recall ballot, after Secretary of State Shirley Weber had disqualified him for submitting incomplete tax forms. Without Elder, the race might have continued to be a sleepy affair, with apathetic or unaware voters sleepwalking through the threat, and low turnout leading to a shock result.
Tools like the recall are loaded guns, waiting to be pulled out to create a result unwanted by a majority of the people.
Instead, Elder provided a focal point to a Newsom campaign that was flailing a bit. Its first recall ad, back in April, featured pictures of Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich (!) to depict the recall as a project of the Republican establishment. The messaging made no real sense. But once Elder, with his deep well of controversial comments and hard-right ideology, entered the fray, it made it very easy for Newsom’s handlers to essentially put Trump back on the ballot, and frame the election entirely around the consequences of an Elder victory.
Negative partisanship works, and the combination of scare headlines and relentless messaging on Elder proved to be the effective end of the recall threat. (Newsom also happened to have a good ground game; local Democratic and allied groups canvassed, called, and texted up and down the state, including to my phone and home.)
But what has worked local Democrats into a lather is the structure of the recall itself. As you probably know, the ballot has two questions: should Newsom be recalled, and then who should replace him. Because Newsom’s team intimidated any Democrat from offering themselves as a replacement, at least one-third of today’s voters won’t have filled out the second question. (Full disclosure: I went with one of the Greens.) Elder, thanks in part to Newsom singling him out as his only opponent, will win that second question in a landslide. But he will come up millions of votes short of the number voting no on the recall.
Still, we could have easily had a situation where Newsom garnered millions more votes than Elder and still was removed from office. This thought has driven Democrats to distraction, recalling electoral outcomes like those of 2000 and 2016, when Republicans took the White House despite winning fewer votes than their Democratic opponents. (The 2003 recall of Gray Davis almost went that route, incidentally; Davis lost the recall question by more than ten points, but because of drop-off voters, his four million supporters who voted no came to almost as many as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 4.2 million voters on the second question.)
This has left Democrats wondering how they can prevent such a travesty from ever happening. There are a few complicating factors, however.
First, recall elections, a legacy of turn-of-the-20th-century populist governor Hiram Johnson, were established by the ballot, not the legislature, so you’d have to go back to the ballot to change or eliminate them. Second, I take no pleasure in telling you that Californians like their direct-democracy tools and pretty much always have. Even in the wake of an initiative system hijacked by big business and a recall used as a last-resort option for Republicans to win offices they cannot win otherwise, the latest poll shows 75 percent support for keeping recalls as an option.
However, voters are receptive to changes to that system, and recall fatigue could be a reason why. In the next 12 months, I may have to vote in three separate recall elections: the Newsom recall, one for my city councilmember, and another for my district attorney. The ease with which recalls can make the ballot (forcing states and cities to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on elections) and the illogical rules they are conducted under is creating an opening for change.
In a survey released yesterday, UC Berkeley polled five ideas for changes to the recall system. Sadly, the one with the most support was to hold a runoff election if the recall succeeds but no replacement candidate gets a majority. In other words, Californians want to have another election after the first election. Sigh.
Not polled is the most obvious idea: If a recall of a governor is successful, the lieutenant governor should take their place. That’s what would happen if a governor were impeached or died in office. Lieutenant governors are separately elected in California, not on the same ticket with the governor. California lieutenant governors have precious few duties, and there’s little reason for that office even to exist other than replacing a removed governor. If it discourages conservatives from mounting a gubernatorial recall, because they cannot fairly win a lieutenant governor election, so be it.
You could also raise the signature threshold for qualifying a recall for the ballot, from the current 12 percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election to 25 percent. (This got 55 percent support in the Berkeley poll.) You could limit the reason for recalls to “illegal or unethical conduct” (60 percent support in the poll), though that’s an amorphous concept. You could ban paid signature gatherers, requiring recall petitions to be circulated by genuine grassroots supporters.
But these reforms should not be limited to the recall system. Our initiative system needs a lot of work, too. In the 2020 election, the majority of the initiatives on the ballot were questions put before voters in the previous one or two elections. That should be disallowed; how about no repeat initiatives in a 12-year span? Bans on signature gatherers and a higher qualification threshold could apply to initiatives and referenda. All initiatives should get a review of their constitutionality before voters decide on them. And if over 60 percent of the legislature agreed to a law, it shouldn’t be eligible for a referendum. If you don’t like what the legislators did, vote them out in the next election.
California has been here before. We used to have a supermajority threshold to pass a state budget. This allowed Republicans to hijack the process and hold out for ideological concessions. This crippled the state so much during the Great Recession that it had to issue IOUs instead of dollars to pay state employees and vendors.
Instead of just accepting this as an unchangeable rule, progressives forced through a majority-vote budget ballot measure. (We’re still working on the two-thirds threshold for taxes.) All that minority-party leverage was gone. Undemocratic rules can be fixed; they do not have to endure forever.
But that requires some determination. It would be very easy for state Democrats to walk away after defeating the recall, and go “back to normal.” But tools like the recall are loaded guns, waiting to be pulled out to create a result unwanted by a majority of the people. Just as Democrats in the U.S. Senate shouldn’t allow a minority of its members to routinely take the chamber hostage, Democrats in California shouldn’t allow outdated and nonsensical rules to continue to exist.
