Takeaways from Gascón recall flop
On Monday, it was announced the second attempt to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón fell short of collecting the number of signatures required to qualify the recall attempt.
That wasn’t a particularly surprising outcome.
Last month, David Leibowitz, a spokesperson for signature-gathering company Let The Voters Decide, sent out an email to the press alerting us L.A. County District Attorney that “the recall has a strong like- George Gascón on June 21. lihood of failing to qualify because it likely will not have submitted more than the required 566,857 valid signatures.”
“How could this have happened? In short, because the campaign was a comedy of errors,” Leibowitz wrote, arguing the recall campaign, among other things, failed to follow sound advice on how to ensure the recall qualifying phase succeeded and that collected signatures were valid.
Fast forward one month and, yeah, it turns out Leibowitz’s email was prescient.
“Based on the examination and verification, which conducted in compliance with the statutory and regulatory requirements of the California Government Code, Elections Code, and Code of Regulations, 520,050 signatures were found to be valid and 195,783 were found to be invalid,” the Los Angeles County Clerk’s office announced.
Gascón’s critics are understandably annoyed. They came close but fell short, and so here we are. Gascón’s opponents dropped the ball. They’ve lost the momentum they had after the successful recall of former Hugo Chavez employee Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. They failed.
“Grateful to move forward from this attempted political power grab,” Gascón tweeted out. “[R]est assured LA County, the work hasn’t stopped.”
Gascón’s line of argument over the last year is that the recall attempts have been nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans for relevance. I can’t say he’s totally wrong about that. In Los Angeles County, Republicans are an even more endangered species than they are in California generally. Gascón is an obvious punching bag for the right in California (and nationally).
However, the fact that over half a million valid signatures were collected to remove him does mean criticisms of him have trickled down to enough of the general public to make it possible for so many people to sign recall petitions.
Accordingly, Gascón over the last year has moderated some of his policies. That’s wise and arguably he shouldn’t have been so gung-ho about pushing his full policy agenda from day one without ensuring public support for what he was actually doing. But he did what he thought was right, overextended himself a bit and got people mad as a result, often justifiably.
Gascón’s ambitious criminal justice reform project was always going to spur some backlash. He’s had a target on his back since he co-authored Proposition 47, the totally reasonable measure, supported at the time by noted left-wingers like Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich, which reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor drug possession and some low-level property crimes. On Prop. 47 and many of his big picture ideas, like his view that the harms of incarceration should be weighed against the anticipated benefits, Gascón has a legitimate point and his point of view has been prevailing in California because of that.
Californians and Angelenos, like all people, don’t like crime, but they’ve also been convinced the criminal justice system has been overly punitive and has needed reform.
That said, Gascón is lucky his opponents aren’t particularly competent. Gascón’s bold policies, backed by honestly mediocre or nonexistent messaging from his office about why his policies are justified, leave him politically vulnerable even if many or most of his policies are indeed defensible.
It’s one thing to throw around slogans and heartfelt rhetoric about the need to reform the criminal justice system. It’s another to actually balance reforming the justice system while also holding criminals accountable and ensuring justice is served. And on that front, Gascón has been losing the messaging battle. With this latest recall flop, however, Gascón should take the time to bolster his public messaging and communicate clearly about why his policies are justified and most importantly, effective — and change course if necessary. If he doesn’t, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he gets booted from office in 2024 by liberal Angelenos who like Gascón’s overall message but can’t stomach his implementation.