‘Mad Moms’ could be key in Newsom recall effort
Cynthia Rojas never had much interest in politics. A mother who owns an online business selling hair accessories from her home in West Los Angeles, Rojas chose Democrats when she voted. But she skipped a lot of elections — and she certainly never glanced at a city council agenda or attended school board meetings.
That all changed after her kids’ elementary school closed down last year amid the pandemic.
“I became very engaged because of my children,” Rojas said. “My son was suffering on Zoom school.”
She started watching school board meetings, reading county public health orders and studying the state’s color-coded tiers of
COVID restrictions. After public health authorities said it was safe for children to return to school, Rojas protested with other parents to demand that campuses reopen. And when that didn’t work, she printed out a petition to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“A lot of us were like, ‘Why aren’t the Democratic politicians standing up for us?’ Democrats were always supposed to be for the little guy,” Rojas said.
“It seemed so clear to me that it was to protect the teacher unions, because
they didn’t shut down the private schools.”
Rojas and her husband signed the recall petition. Then she sent copies to several friends who also signed, helping recall proponents gather some of the 1.7 million signatures that triggered California’s historic Sept. 14 election — only the second time in state history that voters will decide whether to oust a governor.
Recall supporters say that women like Rojas — fed up with school closures and job losses caused by the pandemic — played a huge role in getting the signatures necessary to launch their campaign. Their activism may reflect the pandemic’s uneven toll on women, who have been disproportionately burdened by unemployment, increased child care responsibilities and, among parents with kids at home, feelings of anxiety and depression. They were so instrumental in organizing the recall that one strategist came up with a special name for them: “Mad Moms.”
“‘Mad moms’ are what we used to call soccer moms,” said recall campaign manager Anne Dunsmore. “You mess around with their daily life or their quality life or what they’re able to do with their children, and they become very grouchy.”
“Mad moms” may have helped spark the recall, but now, with children back in school and the state’s economy rebounding, their power to influence the outcome of the election is less clear. Polls show that women voters are overwhelmingly on Newsom’s side
— with two-thirds saying they’re against the recall in a Public Policy Institute of California poll released last week. But among parents (both mothers and fathers) who have children at home, only half say they’ll vote no. Likely voters overall oppose removing the governor by a 58% to 39% margin.
Historically, California women largely vote Democratic, and Newsom’s strategy of persuading other prominent Democrats to stay out of the recall race has helped him maintain their support — sometimes more because they fear a Republican alternative than because they’re enthusiastic about Newsom.
Shannon Huffaker, for example, said she
voted against the recall even though she’s unhappy with Newsom. The nurse practitioner from Albany was livid that her children’s school stayed closed as long as it did. Even now that it’s reopened, Huffaker said the new COVID-19 protocols are chaotic and the school isn’t getting enough support from the state.
“I am so frustrated that I would have considered voting yes if I felt there was any viable alternative, a viable Democrat who had a chance of winning,” she said. “I am angry, but I’m not willing to go so far as to hand the election to someone whose views I find abhorrent.”
Female voters helped elect Newsom in 2018, when exit polls showed 64% voted for him, compared with 55% of men. Aware that women are key to his political future, Newsom is spending the closing days of this campaign trying to ensure that women vote in what could be a low-turnout election.
The governor is highlighting support from powerful Democratic women, campaigning with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar over the weekend in
Southern California, and today with the nation’s first female vice president, Kamala Harris, in the Bay Area.
“Governor Newsom understands that California succeeds when we invest in women’s economic futures,” Warren said Saturday to cheers from a friendly audience of Newsom supporters. “He’s worked to close the gender pay gap, to expand paid family leave. Oh yeah, and he believes that basic health care for women includes access to safe, legal abortion.”
She joined Newsom in stoking fears about the rollback of abortion rights by drawing attention to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week not to block a very restrictive Texas law signed by its Republican governor. It’s another way Newsom is contrasting himself with his leading Republican rival, whose retrograde comments on women have handed the governor daily opportunities to pump up his progressive base.
“Women are smarter in politics, smarter in civics, they’re smarter in economics,” Newsom said as he campaigned in Los Angeles over the weekend.