San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Petitions to recall Newsom illustrate split state
SACRAMENTO — No place in California has generated more fervent support for ousting Gov. Gavin Newsom than Calaveras County in the Sierra foothills.
More than 1 in every 10 residents signed petitions to put a recall election on the ballot, the highest per capita rate of any of California’s 58 counties, a Chronicle analysis shows. Calaveras was the starkest example of a statewide pattern — the way the recall election is all but sure to have qualified because of outsize enthusiasm from rural voters, driven by resentment of Democratic governance and especially of Newsom’s coronavirus pandemic policies. Doug Rockey, owner of Spur R Guns, a gun shop in Copperopolis, started collecting recall signatures from his customers last summer. He said residents of the county despise the governor and the liberal politics of California’s big cities.
“Personally, I think he’s a dictator,” Rockey said. “We don’t want to be part of San Francisco anymore.”
San Franciscans couldn’t feel more differently when it comes to the recall. If it had
been up to them and voters in most of California’s other urban areas, it’s likely Newsom wouldn’t have been on the ballot until the 2022 governor’s election.
Newsom’s hometown provided the lowest number of signatures per capita for the recall effort, The Chronicle found. Fewer than 1 in 100 residents of the city signed the petition, according to the secretary of state’s most recent count.
Similar trends can be seen throughout California. Counties outside the state’s largest metro areas — the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego — are home to about 21% of the population. But those rural areas accounted for nearly a third of the more than 1.8 million signatures that recall organizers had submitted as of March 11.
Put simply, people who live in counties that touch the Pacific Ocean were far less likely, on the whole, to sign recall petitions than residents of inland counties.
Political observers say that discrepancy reflects longstanding divisions in California politics. Most counties with higher rates of recall signatures were won by Donald Trump in last year’s election, even as the former president lost the state overall by nearly 2 to 1. Calaveras County hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 — San Francisco hasn’t backed a Republican one since 1956.
That could foreshadow the problem recall organizers face in challenging Newsom in a state where the most populous areas are overwhelmingly Democratic.
“The pivot to the next stage requires a different level of calculus for Republicans to be successful,” said David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University.
The Chronicle analysis is based on recall signatures turned in as of March 11. Recall organizers say they submitted more than 2.1 million signatures through the March 17 deadline, but the state will not report the final countylevel numbers until late April.
Backers need about 1.5 million valid signatures from registered voters to qualify the recall for the ballot. The Chronicle’s analysis includes all signatures because counties have not finished verifying them. So far, more than 81% of the recall signatures tabulated have been found to be valid, giving organizers a safe cushion.
The preliminary countylevel data shows support for the recall was strongest in the Sierra foothills and the northeast corner of the state, areas that have been solidly red for decades.
In Calaveras County, a county of about 46,000 residents, at least 6,049 people signed recall petitions. That’s more than 13% of the population. Neighboring counties had similar rates.
Rockey, the gun store proprietor, was one of about a dozen business owners in the county who collected signatures. He said many who signed were frustrated by California’s strict gun laws and restrictions Newsom imposed on businesses during the pandemic.
“They want to be able to live their life comfortably,” he said. “We have some of the strictest laws in the United States.”
Frustration in the region speaks to a more fervent brand of protest politics emerging in longtime Republican pockets of the state, where people feel alienated but are unable to sway the outcome of statewide races, McCuan said.
“As you move further east, those are Trumplike counties or recallcentric counties,” he said. Such areas consist of “a lot of farms, a lot of trucks and a lot of guns.”
Outside of the Sierra foothills, the recall collected high rates of signatures in the southern and northern ends of the Central Valley. Support was more lukewarm in the midCentral Valley, where many Bay Area expatriates have moved.
Dan Newman, a consultant for Newsom’s campaign to oppose the recall, said the
geographic split shows the effort is driven by Republicans. He said the map closely mirrors Newsom’s 2018 run for governor, when he defeated Republican John Cox by a wide margin.
“It shows they’re on the same path that John Cox and Donald Trump were on in California elections, with about a third of the electorate supporting them,” Newman said.
Mike Netter, one of the recall’s chief organizers, said the effort has strong support in many urban areas, but it’s simply more difficult to collect signatures in a city like Los Angeles. He said rural counties often have a handful of central gathering places that are easier to target.
“The fascinating part is the number of signatures collected in the really big counties, where it’s frankly hard to do anything,” Netter said. “The reality is, if it had just started and grown out of Northern California, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
He said the recall campaign expects the number of signatures collected in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area to increase in the final count. Netter said voters on the coast tended to be slower to warm to the recall movement.
Residents of Los Angeles County accounted for 281,775 signatures as of the most recent reporting deadline, less than 3% of the population. The 8,220 signatures from San Francisco represent less than 1% of the population.
The recall appears to have made more inroads in some Bay Area counties. Solano County, which is traditionally a lighter shade of blue, had the highest signature rate per capita locally — its 18,062 signatures represent about 4% of the population. Sonoma County was second with 18,634 signatures, almost 4% of the population.
And the urbanversusrural pattern has clear exceptions, The Chronicle analysis shows. Orange County, a traditionally Republican bastion that has turned purple in recent elections, accounted for more than 240,000 signatures, about 8% of its population.
Orange County has been the source of much of the recall’s fundraising and consulting muscle, boosted by wealthy conservative groups like the Lincoln Club of Orange County, which was at the center of the 2003 recall campaign that ousted Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
Seth Morrison, executive director of the Lincoln Club, said many voters in the county were aggravated by what they see as arbitrary pandemic restrictions.
“There was a time when they were wanting to arrest people for sitting on the beach,” he said. “That’s kind of fresh in people’s minds out here.”
Ventura County, another purple outpost in Southern California, also produced a large number of recall signatures. Newsom’s weakness in such counties could be a sign of vulnerability among moderate Democrats and centrist independents.
Melissa Michelson, a political scientist at Menlo College, said that while the overall numbers reflect the state’s redblue county schism, she was struck by the raw number of signatures collected even in blue counties.
She said organizers could not have gathered so many signatures without a number of Democrats and independents souring on Newsom.
“You have to be really disappointed to sign a recall,” Michelson said. “It’s clearly folks from all over the state, from all over the political party spectrum, who are signing these petitions. And that should be very troubling to the governor.”