San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pandemic, after fueling recall, could save Newsom
MODESTO — When Don Doud voted for Gavin Newsom to become California’s governor in 2018, he didn’t know much about the former San Francisco mayor and lieutenant governor except that he was a fellow Democrat.
That changed in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, as Newsom’s daily
news conferences Road to the recall: became appointment Fourth in an occasional viewing for series on key issues Doud, 75, a retired for voters who will
teacher from Modesto decide Sept. 14 whether — just as they to remove Gov.
did for many other Gavin Newsom from
Californians. office. More coverage
Navigating the at sfchronicle.com/
once-in-a-century recall.
crisis, the governor struck Doud as responsible and capable. So a year later, with Newsom’s strict pandemic response fueling a campaign to remove him from office before the end of his first term, there was no question Doud would oppose it.
“He did the right things. He tried to influ
“He did the right things. He tried to influence people to take the pandemic seriously,” Doud said during a double-masked visit to the county library in downtown Modesto on a recent Wednesday afternoon. “I’ve been pretty happy with him.”
California voters are returning their mail ballots for the Sept. 14 recall election as the state grapples with a resurgent fourth wave of the coronavirus that has again pushed hospitals to capacity in some rural areas. But an issue that once seemed like it could be Newsom’s biggest liability is suddenly looking like the thing that could save his governorship.
In the final weeks of the recall contest, Newsom is leaning into his role as the man behind a new round of mask mandates and vaccine requirements, despite the criticism they have generated from the Republican candidates seeking to replace him.
While leading contenders promise to overturn his orders and even block local public health officials from adopting their own, Newsom’s closing message for Democratic voters is a dire picture of the alternative if he is removed from office.
In an ad released last month by his campaign, a woman gravely intones that the election is a “matter of life and death.” And during a news conference last week in Oakland, Newsom warned that California could turn into Florida or Texas without him, invoking two rival states with a diametrically opposed approach to the pandemic where the rate of new coronavirus cases is currently several times higher.
“There is no more consequential decision to the health and safety of the people of California than voting no on the Republican-backed recall,” Newsom
said.
Interviews with nearly two dozen voters in Stanislaus County underlined the deep divide over Newsom’s pandemic response and underscored the potential wisdom in his strategy of emphasizing it.
The Central Valley county of more than half a million residents is more politically moderate than much of the state; there are nearly as many Republicans registered to vote as Democrats, and Newsom narrowly lost the governor’s race there in 2018, by fewer than than 3,000 votes.
Yet the Democrats that The Chronicle spoke to were almost unanimous in citing Newsom’s leadership during the pandemic as the reason that they would vote to keep him in office. Republican voters, who strongly disliked Newsom and overwhelmingly favored recalling him, shared a laundry list of complaints about the governor, but his pandemic response rarely rose to the top.
Cindy de Visser, 60, who has an almond farm in Oakdale, is most frustrated by the high taxes and regulations that she blames for shutting down local
dairies and pushing her friends to move to Idaho and Texas. She said she wouldn’t mind if she saw progress, but the roads are terrible.
“Where is all that money going?” she said as she shopped in downtown Oakdale on a sweltering morning. “I just want someone new to come in and fix it.”
A moderate Republican, de Visser said she is OK with some of the public health mandates, like requiring masks in schools if it means children can return for in-person instruction. But having already gotten COVID-19 and the vaccine, she is tired of the restrictions and ready for people to take more responsibility for their own health.
“If I have to put on a mask again, it’s going to be difficult,” she said. “I feel like the state of California has more control over my own life than I do.” Newsom has always been a divisive politician — an avatar of elitist San Francisco progressivism who seems to uniquely irritate conservatives — but the split in public opinion grew into a chasm during the pandemic.
While the governor received
national praise for instituting the first statewide stay-at-home order in the country, his public health measures also inspired turbulent protests at the State Capitol, where he was compared to Hitler, and breathed life into a nascent recall petition.
That effort caught fire in November, after The Chronicle reported that Newsom had attended a birthday party for a friend at the fancy French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley, in violation of his own rules about limiting mixing between households. The dinner — a symbol for many of the governor’s hypocrisy and overreach — continues to figure prominently in the campaigns of recall supporters.
For months, as the election inched closer and victory over the coronavirus slipped out of California’s grasp, Newsom
tiptoed toward new public health regulations that risked snowballing into a political fracas, including a mask mandate for schools and a requirement for state workers to get vaccinated or regularly tested.
But a CBS News poll last month demonstrated why, despite vocal denunciations from some corners, the Newsom campaign now believes playing up his pandemic response could be a boon for the governor.
The poll found that 60% of California voters think Newsom is doing a very good or somewhat good job handling the coronavirus outbreak, including 87% of Democrats and 56% of independents. Nearly 70% of voters approved of mandatory vaccinations for health care workers, something Newsom ordered last month.
While returning a book to the
library in Modesto, Jeanine Oliver-Nomof applauded the mask mandate for schools as “not too damn much to ask” and a recent vaccine requirement for school employees as a benefit for the greater good.
“Can’t we think about each other?” said Oliver-Nomof, 63, who retired from teaching fifth grade in nearby Waterford last year after the pandemic sent classes online.
Oliver-Nomof said she is impressed with how Newsom stepped up at the beginning of the pandemic, especially compared with what she considered a lack of leadership from thenPresident Donald Trump, and the governor’s response improved her view of him.
“Do I think he should have gone to Napa and had that dinner? No. It was stupid. It was stupid,” she said. “But that’s the only thing I’m shaking my head about.”
Approval figures lag significantly among Republicans. In the CBS News poll, only 27% said Newsom is doing a good job
with the pandemic and more than half disapproved of vaccine requirements for health care workers, as well as private businesses adopting them for employees and customers.
The top Republican candidates in the recall are maneuvering carefully through the sentiment. Nearly all have publicly shared that they are vaccinated but believe it should be a personal choice. Front-runner Larry Elder, a conservative radio personality, has promised to overturn mask mandates for schools and vaccine requirements for health care workers, state employees and school staff, a position that several of his competitors have echoed.
“The governor is looking for a campaign issue, so he rolls out these mandates that don’t exist in any other state, and then less than a week later, he’s up running ads,” Assembly Member Kevin Kiley of Rocklin (Placer County) said at a debate last month. “Once again, he’s playing politics with COVID and he’s playing politics with the
vaccine.”
Conservative voters in Oakdale, a small Stanislaus County city that bills itself as the “Cowboy Capital of the World” because of its long history of rodeo champions, were similarly fed up with the recent orders around masks and vaccines.
But talk to them about why they want Newsom out, and the first answers are usually about the state not sufficiently prioritizing vegetation management to prevent wildfires, widespread homelessness or how revenue from the gas tax is being used. It can take a while to get to the complaints about overly restrictive lockdowns or Newsom’s hypocritical behavior during the pandemic.
“At some point, Americans have to decide for themselves they have to take the risk,” Cherie Charmbury, 37, a stay-athome mom who leans libertarian, said as she waited with a group of friends to enter a fundraiser luncheon for the Cowboy Museum at the local community center.
The few Republican voters who pointed to the pandemic response as their top issue also expressed doubts about the seriousness of the coronavirus itself.
Jeff Otto, 50, an engineer from Modesto who was picking up lunch in Oakdale, said the pandemic was a fraud that had destroyed businesses and families. He was furious that Newsom had deferred to the “Fauci flip-flop” — a reference to changing public health guidelines from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“The governor is the last line of defense against the federal government for we the citizens, and he has given away all of our rights,” Otto said outside his idling car, the air conditioning already blasting for his waiting passengers. “I’m looking for a candidate who is going to stand up for our individual freedoms, for our constitutional rights.”
Newsom still has a careful line to walk on restrictions, after more than of year of whipsawing lockdowns and reopenings has left voters, even in his Democratic base, fatigued at the prospect of another retreat in the face of the delta variant.
Though she is vaccinated, Liz Mendez, 37, an insurance agent from Modesto, said she does not support forcing people to get the shot if they don’t want to. But she’s OK with policies giving people an option to show either proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test to access certain businesses, venues or events, because then they still have a choice.
A Democrat, Mendez planned to vote against the recall because Newsom “was taking charge and he was doing it in our best interest” during the pandemic, she said as she left Modesto’s Vintage Faire Mall with a bag from Sephora. “It made me feel safer, because although we should all be concerned, not everyone did take it seriously.
Another shopper, Carla Rodriguez, 25, said she had not been vaccinated yet because she wanted to wait a year to see how things went first. Now officials at Sacramento City College, where she is studying to be a dental assistant, have given her until October to get vaccinated if she wants to return for the fall semester. Though she’s dragging her feet, she said she ultimately expected to get the shot because she has only one year left in her studies.
Rodriguez understands the threat of the coronavirus — her entire family was infected in December, she said, and she was shopping with a mask on because she wanted to protect her parents — but the mandates don’t quite sit right with her. A political independent, she said she was leaning toward the recall because she was not satisfied with Newsom’s pandemic response and was looking for a change.
“It’s starting to be forceful,” she said. “It should be a person’s choice at the end of the day.”