Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
California Gov. Gavin Newsom addresses reporters last night after beating back the recall attempt that aimed to remove him from office, at Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, California.
The votes that are still coming in (and will be coming in for a while) in yesterday’s California recall election pretty much match those in the last round of pre-election polling, which showed Gov. Gavin Newsom retaining his post by a little more than a 60-40 margin, approximately the margin by which almost all Democrats running statewide in California win. That’s not just because the state is home to a more liberal electorate than that of the nation as a whole, but also because it’s long been home to a Republican Party that has refused to adapt to the state’s leftward tilt.
As the Los Angeles Times’ John Myers pointed out yesterday, there are now 6.6 million more voters in California than there were in 2003, when another Democratic governor, Gray Davis, lost his recall. And while there are now 3.5 million more registered Democrats in the state than there were in 2003, the number of Republicans is actually lower today than it was then.
Just as the majority of California Republicans were Goldwaterites before Goldwater, so today nearly all of them are Trumpians—before, during, and after Trump’s presidency. Until the 1960s, the state Republican Party boasted a moderate wing, but as the John Birch Society took root on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and as Ronald Reagan convinced California party members that Medicare signaled a descent into socialism, that moderate wing grew steadily smaller.
For a time, this tilt to the right was electorally sustainable in the Golden State, but not always. In 1967, the liberal Democratic state controller, Alan Cranston, was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate, but the thought of going up against popular incumbent Tom Kuchel, an avowedly liberal Republican, was daunting. Only when Cranston realized that Kuchel would actually lose the Republican primary to a right-wing demagogue named Max Rafferty did Cranston enter the race, which he won handily. Cranston went on to represent California in the Senate for more than 20 years.
California has long been home to a Republican Party that has refused to adapt to the state’s leftward tilt.
Since the 1980s, California has gone through a greater demographic transformation than any other state. Today, it is the least white of any state, save Hawaii. As the Democratic Party embraced the newcomers of color who transformed the state’s racial and political profile, Republicans grew more nativist and more conservative. Not surprisingly, while Democrats and Democratic-tilting independents now constitute about 60 percent of the state’s electorate, as yesterday’s balloting again confirmed, registered Republicans now make up less than a quarter of state voters.
An even modestly sentient party might decide to take positions that appealed to at least some voters outside its true-believer base. Instead, the California GOP has gone down the same rathole as the rest of the Trumpified horde. Indeed, GOP alternative candidate Larry Elder, who dominated the field on the now-irrelevant question of who would replace Newsom, was being hailed last night as the leader of the state’s Republicans, even though, with about two-thirds of the vote counted, the number of people who voted to keep Newsom in office exceeds the number who voted to put Elder in by a tidy 3.5 million.
Elder, of course, was God’s gift to Newsom: a right-wing talk radio jock who opposed reproductive freedom, the minimum wage, climate mitigation, and mask and vaccine mandates. But it wasn’t just Elder: All the leading Republican candidates, save only former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer (who ended up with just 9 percent of the vote to Elder’s 45 percent), took the same positions. One question on the Edison exit poll asked voters if they supported or opposed requiring children to wear masks at school. While a heavy majority of state voters supported the mask mandate, fully 96 percent of the people who voted yes on recall opposed it—the most lopsided answer to any of the poll’s questions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is today’s Republican Party. And that is also why the recall became for the Democrats the electoral equivalent of the out-of-town previews of a Broadway show, where the show’s writers, composers, and directors find out which parts work and which fall flat. Newsom ran against Elder and his ilk by highlighting their opposition: to anti-COVID mandates, to choice, to science, to facts. Elder made flesh of the Trumpian word; countless Republican candidates in next year’s midterms will doubtless do the same, for which Democrats in swing states and swing districts will make them pay as much as Elder did. Newsom’s campaign, in short, provided the Democrats with a road map for the midterms, and surely confirmed the White House’s belief that President Biden’s support for vaccine mandates is an electoral winner.
The exit polls didn’t deviate much from the picture the 2020 polls provided of the presidential vote. Now as then, college-educated whites ended up in the Democrats’ corner. The one troubling particular for Democrats was Newsom’s narrow lead among Latino men, who voted no on the recall by a bare 53 percent to 47 percent margin. There will be some swing House districts next year where numbers like that will elect a Republican.
A closing note on the recall itself. Recalls, initiatives, and referenda all became a part of the California electoral landscape in 1911, when a Republican progressive, Hiram Johnson, became governor and presented them to state voters, who elected to enshrine them in the state Constitution. The reason that the progressives hatched these alternative means of lawmaking was that the state legislature had, for many years, been the well-paid subsidiary of the state’s most powerful corporation, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Circumventing the legislature by going directly to the people, the progressives believed, was the way they could loosen the hold that big money had over the legislature and, thereby, the state.
What the progressives, bless them, couldn’t foresee is that by the 1980s, big money would dominate the “direct democracy” of initiatives and referenda even more than it dominated the legislature. The more than $200 million that Uber, Lyft, and their ilk spent on hornswoggling California voters last year into thinking they were helping those companies’ drivers by voting for Proposition 22, when in fact they were permitting the companies to keep on underpaying them, was just one of many instances in which big money has played the voters for suckers.
One result of yesterday’s recall, besides laying out how Democrats can win in 2022, will likely be a reform of the recall process, beginning with requiring a whole lot more voters than are currently required to sign the petitions putting a recall on the ballot. But that should only begin the reforms to what has become the state’s dollar-driven direct democracy. There are, Lord knows, checks and balances to the legislative process; we could use a few more of them to diminish the more than occasional nuttiness of the state’s electoral alternatives. Down to and including this year’s recall.
