2.1 million sign petitions for Newsom recall
SACRAMENTO — Critics of Gov. Gavin Newsom seeking to remove him from office turned in the last of more than 2.1 million signatures Wednesday, ending a ninemonth petition drive that likely will force a recall election later this year.
Organizers said they had gathered 2,117,730 signatures by the end of the day, giving them a healthy cushion to meet the qualification threshold of nearly 1.5 million valid signatures from registered voters.
Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager for Res
cue California, one of the groups collecting signatures, said they were feeling more confident than ever about ousting Newsom as he has embarked on a crusade to downplay the recall’s legitimacy. Dunsmore said Newsom’s approach has been condescending and that it would only further turn voters against him.
“It reminded people that he’s out of touch with the core problems that started this in the first place,” she said. “COVID spotlighted his weaknesses as a leader.”
Californians likely won’t know for several months if and when they will have an opportunity to decide the governor’s fate. County election officials have until the end of April to complete their count of valid signatures. Even if recall proponents have submitted enough, there is an extended period for people to withdraw their support and state officials to assess the cost of the election. A vote would probably not happen until November or December.
But even the governor expects the recall to qualify. He launched an aggressive defense this week with a national media blitz decrying the recall as a power grab by rightwing extremists, conspiracy theorists and supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“We’re going to fight it,” Newsom said Tuesday during a visit to a school in Alameda.
“Sure, it’s about a governor. But it’s also about you. It’s about our values. It’s about what we hold dear.”
Newsom has tried to turn the recall back around on its organizers, making it a referendum on them and Trump, who received just 34% of the presidential vote in California in November.
In Alameda, Newsom said the recall was not really about his response to the coronavirus pandemic but instead anger over “the browning of California.” He pointed to a Facebook post last year by Orrin Heatlie, the retired Yolo County sheriff ’s sergeant who initiated the recall drive, that suggested undocumented immigrants should be microchipped. The governor also highlighted the antivaccine views, belief in the QAnon conspiracy and donations to Trump by some recall leaders.
“I’m fighting for the values of this state, and there’s a lot at stake. Because in these elections, who knows what could happen?” Newsom said. “Just learn about who these folks are. It’s just anathema to who we are as Californians.”
Recall backers accuse Newsom of insulting people who signed their petitions, including what they say are hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independents frustrated with his stringent lockdown measures and faltering response to the pandemic.
After a slow start in which the effort appeared doomed to fail like several previous attempts since Newsom took office in 2019, a judge in November granted organizers four more months to collect signatures. The ruling coincided with an explosion of public frustration over the governor’s attendance at a birthday dinner for his political adviser at the French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley.
But Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University Sacramento, said portraying the recall as an outside attack on California rather than engaging in any substantive discussion of his record was one of the best moves Newsom could make at this point. She said the infusion of prorecall cash from national donors, including the Republican Party, made it easy for him to draw the connections.
“One of the things he’s done since he became governor is to position himself as the antiTrump,” Nalder said. “So this just continues that narrative, and narratives are more persuasive if we already have some investment in them.”
While Democrats have rallied around Newsom — holding a series of news conferences against the recall over the past week — Republican candidates are jumping into the race, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and John Cox, a real estate investor and tax attorney who lost to Newsom by 24 points in the 2018 governor’s election.
On Tuesday, Doug Ose, a Sacramentoarea business owner and former member of Congress, said he would also challenge Newsom, either in a recall election or in his reelection bid next year. He said his campaign would focus on reopening classrooms for inperson instruction, giving students the choice of enrolling outside of their neighborhood schools and addressing homelessness through drug and mental health courts.
“I’ve lived here all my life. The reason I’m running is I’ve never seen it so screwed up,” Ose said. “It’s just disgraceful and I’ve had enough.”
Ose explored a run for governor in 2018, but dropped out after concluding that Republican donors were uninterested in seriously challenging Newsom. He said the pandemic and the recall had changed that, giving the GOP a real shot to take back the California governorship for the first time in more than a decade.
“We know the record of failure that Gavin Newsom offers us,” Ose said.