What California’s Recall Election Says About America
We did not meet at the French Laundry.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor who faces a recall election on September 14, hasn’t been back to the extravagantly expensive Napa Valley restaurant since he dined there with lobbyists last year in violation of his own COVID-19 restrictions. We met instead at a café in a nonprofit bookstore in the Mission District—much more on message.
Newsom had just made the first stop on his Delta-constrained campaign to persuade Californians to vote no on the recall. He’d spoken with volunteers who had been helpfully positioned for the media at five tables along the sidewalk. He’d scolded reporters at a press conference, reminding them that the recall effort was funded by right-wing Republicans who—according to Newsom—completely misunderstood what makes California great. He’d tried for Jed Bartlet–style lines in his aging Sam Seaborn body. At the café, he quickly ate a banana and slurped the top of his coffee. He’d dropped his breakfast on the floor before I arrived. More bad luck, he said.
“I was always that lucky one, too,” he said, shaking his head. “Just the whole damn thing flipped on me.”
How did things go sideways for a governor who three years ago won his first term by the biggest margin in California history? The recall vote shouldn’t be close. It shouldn’t even feel close. Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in California, and the state is home to nearly as many Democratic-leaning independents as Republicans. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by almost as many votes here last November as there are people in Wisconsin. But aside from a few scattered campaign events and an Elizabeth Warren TV ad for Newsom in heavy rotation on local news, there’s almost no sign that a recall election is coming.
But with less than a month to go before September’s extra Election Day, Newsom told me he feels as though he’s fighting not only for his own political existence, but on his 10-year-old son for not wearing a mask. He overheard his 11-year-old daughter tell her brother, “You’re going to lose the recall for Daddy.” “You did wrong,” Newsom said he told his son later. He has since pulled his children from the not-always-masking camp they were attending, wary of another COVID-hypocrisy scandal. The recall effort started as a protest against Newsom’s positions on immigration and the death penalty, and was propelled by Trump-inspired (a radio call-in show, hosted by recall organizers, called “Friday Night at the French Laundry,” for example). And it exploded because of wider frustration with Newsom’s handling of the pandemic. How this ends depends on how many of California’s 22 million registered voters fill out recall ballots mailed to them earlier this month. In theory, recalls are supposed to be distilled democracy, a way for voters to change their minds and hold their leaders accountable in the long periods between regularly scheduled elections. Many don’t realize, though, that the ballot contains two separate questions: first, yes or no on the recall, and then, in case a majority votes to recall Newsom, a ballot that does not include the governor’s name but does include 46 others. Newsom noted, he could receive 49.9 percent of the vote, lose the recall, and be replaced by a governor elected with 14 percent of the vote. This is the way democracy could play out in the largest state in the union—home to 40 million people—and the fifth-largest economy in the world.
