Newsom’s longshot option to stop recall
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom is shifting into campaign mode to save his job, but it will be months before voters find out if and when they will have an opportunity to weigh in on a potential recall — the result of changes adopted several years ago by California Democrats trying to protect one of their own.
That law created one lastditch opportunity to prevent a recall from making it onto the ballot. Even if organizers exceed the required number of signatures when they file their petitions this week, Newsom will have six weeks in which he could try to convince enough signers to change their minds and push the petition below the qualification threshold.
The governor instead appears to be going on offense, breaking months of near silence on Monday to denounce the recall as a power grab by “Trump loyalists and far rightwing Republicans.” Given the massive scale of the recall drive and the limited tools available
for Newsom to reach the voters who signed the petition, a signaturewithdrawal strategy would be a long shot to stop an election unless the margin is extremely close.
“For a statewide election, it’s a needle in a haystack,” said state Sen. Josh Newman, a Fullerton Democrat who tried it in his district in 2017, was recalled anyway, then won back his old seat last year. “It’s unviable. It’s too expensive.”
Newsom recall proponents said last week they had collected more than 2 million signatures. If they submit all of those to county election offices by Wednesday’s deadline, and their current verification rate of nearly 84% holds, they could have about 1.7 million valid signatures — 200,000 more than they need to qualify.
A representative for Newsom declined to discuss the governor’s plans. But after all but ignoring the recall drive, Newsom launched a campaign Monday to defend himself in a likely election, with a fundraising appeal to supporters and national endorsements including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The California Democratic Party also put $250,000 cash and a $100,000 inkind contribution into a committee backing Newsom, which released an ad tying the recall to extremists and supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“They’ve moved on to fighting” rather than trying to keep the recall off the ballot, said Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager for Rescue California, one of the groups collecting signatures to oust Newsom.
Because the names of people who sign recall petitions are not public, finding those who might be willing to rescind their signatures is a difficult prospect. Dunsmore said it would be a “massive waste of resources” by proNewsom forces and called the recall election a “fait accompli.”
But that election, if it happens, won’t come for a while.
Once the recall campaign turns in its petitions, county election officials have until April 29 to count how many registered voters signed and report their numbers to the secretary of state’s office.
The state then has 10 days to tally the counties’ results. If the recall campaign has qualified, it starts the signaturewithdrawal period, in which voters get 30 business days to let their local election officials know they’d like to remove their names from the petition. Voters are offered the chance regardless of whether the Newsom campaign tries to persuade them to do so.
Then counties have 10 more business days to report the number of rescinded signatures back to the secretary of state. Assuming the recall is still eligible, the state Department of Finance gets 30 business days to estimate how much the election will cost, and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee has another 30 days to review the estimate.
Only then is the recall certified, at which point Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis must call an election within 60 to 80 days. That timeline could push a vote all the way to November or December.
The extended period to withdraw signatures and review the cost of the election was among the changes in a 2017 law intended to buy Newman, the state senator, more time to fight his recall. It pushed the vote until the following year, when it was consolidated with a regular primary that legislators hoped would have better Democratic turnout.
Newman had narrowly won election to a traditionally Republican seat in 2016, giving Democrats an unexpected twothirds majority in the Senate. After he voted to pass a gas tax increase the following year, local Republicans launched a drive to remove him from office.
The campaign to recall him was closely linked with an unsuccessful effort to repeal the gas tax increase, which Newman said was confusing for people who signed the petition and made it worth it for him to try to convince them to withdraw their support. Finding them, however, was an expensive struggle.
Newman said his campaign spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending canvassers to the homes of voters who fit a profile they assumed the recall campaign was targeting. They ultimately submitted more than 2,000 signaturewithdrawal requests, not enough to prevent the election from taking place.
“It’s an extremely diluted prospect, because you’ve got to ask everybody, ‘Hey, did you sign a petition?’ ” Newman said. “The incentives don’t align.”
After having won back his seat in November, Newman is carrying a bill that would give the target of a recall the right to see who signed the petition against them for the purposes of communicating with voters. If it passes, the measure would not take effect until next year and would have no effect on Newsom’s recall race.
Newman said it’s only fair that the target of recall have an opportunity to “face their accuser” and make an appeal. Yet even if the process to withdraw signatures becomes more efficient, there’s still the challenging political optics of appearing to undermine the will of the public.
“It’s an existential problem for an elected official. What would you do, within reason, to stop from being kicked out of office?” Newman said. “You wind up looking defensive, but there’s sort of no choice.”