Is California a ‘coming attraction?’
WASHINGTON—In the end, Tuesday’s recall election in California was an absolute rout.
As of Wednesday afternoon — and with 70 per cent of the ballots counted — Gov. Gavin Newsom won the right to remain in office with the support of 64 per cent of voters.
While the exact result won’t be known for a while, it wasn’t close. Newsom not only won huge, but exit polls suggest he took a majority in every demographic, ethnic and gender subcategory. Roughly 45 per cent of voters didn’t even bother to fill in the name of a replacement candidate in the second half of the ballot.
(On that now-irrelevant result, as predicted, Trump-supporting talk radio host Larry Elder led the pack of wannabes while winding up supported by only a quarter of votes counted as of Wednesday morning. More than 5.8 million had voted to keep Newsom in office, while fewer than 2.4 million had voted to replace him with Elder.)
The takes are coming in hot on what this means for the country at large. California, after all, is “America’s America” as James Fallows puts it, a distorted and liberal microcosm of the country to be sure, but a very large one that often does lead the way in U.S. political trends.
Here’s the lesson I see: The loud and active coalition of ignorance, malice and obstruction that drives the Republican party in the U.S. — a related crew can be witnessed in Canada, throwing stones and blocking access to hospitals — can and does effectively hijack political debate for months on end. But it is ballot box poison.
U.S. President Joe Biden seems to know this. He defeated much the same coalition in November. He’s taking the fight to them right now. But we’ll come back to that.
In California, the Republican perpetual campaign machine managed to take advantage of the state’s gadfly-friendly recall law to force a referendum on Newsom’s leadership by getting 12 per cent of the last electorate to sign a petition forcing the vote.
By most accounts, the Republicans accomplished that by tapping into the dissatisfaction among many signatories with Newsom’s COVID-19 restrictions, and his hypocrisy in attending a party at an elite restaurant in violation of his own health guidelines.
Then, virtually all of the replacement options — Elder most prominent among them — campaigned against the mask and vaccination mandates and COVID-19 business restrictions that Newsom has either imposed or supports.
But here’s the thing: while the Delta variant has made COVID-19 a crisis again in the U.S., killing more than 1,000 people every day, California is faring relatively well compared to places where people who agree with Elder are in power. While permissive Florida is suffering 1.52 deaths per 100,000 residents each day, and Texas is at 0.97 deaths per 100,000, California’s COVID-19 daily death rate is 0.28 per 100,000.
Newsom made his response to the pandemic the cornerstone of his own campaign. The Republicans wanted to fight him on COVID-19 and he was happy to mount his defence on that battleground.
It appears to have been a winning strategy. In CNN’s exit poll, voters named coronavirus the top issue driving their decisions. Some 63 per cent said getting vaccinated was a “public health responsibility” rather than a “personal choice, ” and thought that Newsom’s COVID-19 policies were either about right or not strict enough.
Newsom led off his victory speech saying the “no” vote on the recall vindicated his COVID-19 policies: “We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic.”
And while he trumpeted his victory as a triumph over the Trump-flavoured brand of Republican politics more generally, he also offered a warning: “We may have defeated Trump, but Trumpism is not dead in this country.” That’s a view shared by many who saw Elder’s pre-emptive cries of electoral fraud, opposition to abortion, and support of and from the former president as fuelling turnout for Newsom in a state where no Republican has won statewide office in more than a decade.
But nowhere was the vulnerability of Republicans more obvious than on COVID-19 policy — an issue their base wants front and centre, but one that’s a stone-cold loser among the general public.
That fight is happening federally too, following much the same script. When Biden announced a mandate for large companies to require COVID-19 vaccinations or weekly testing of their employees last week, the angry response from Republican politicians was loud and immediate.
The governor of Mississippi called Biden a “tyrant,” the governor of Texas said it was a “power grab,” the governor of South Carolina said he’d fight it to the “gates of hell.” They were catering to the loud people who bring violence to school board meetings and threaten hospital staff.
But you know who supports Biden’s mandate? An overwhelming majority of the American people. An Ipsos poll for Axios conducted over the weekend showed 60 per cent of Americans, including 62 per cent of independents, support Biden’s new mandate. A Morning Consult Poll for Politico conducted at the same time found roughly the same result.
For Biden, it’s a win-win policy: moving closer to the public health target of greater COVID-19 protection through vaccinations, while also bringing a political fight against the antivaccination crowd to the centre ring.
The anti-vaccine crowd certainly succeed in taking up a lot of space in the political debate; that the California recall election was held at all on Tuesday showed that again. But the fights they’re picking aren’t ones they can win. The recall results showed that just as vividly.
Newsom calls California “America’s coming attraction” — the predictor of the nation’s political future. If that’s so, Biden and his party can hardly wait to see the rest of the movie.
The coalition of ignorance, malice and obstruction that drives the Republican party effectively hijacks political debate for months on end