Newsom sees early payoff in outreach work
After facing criticism from some Democrats for spending too much money on TV ads and not enough time on face-to-face campaigning, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s anti-recall campaign has kicked into high gear with what officials boast is the largest organizing outreach in the state’s history. And it’s producing dividends, although it’s still very early in the race.
Newsom operatives say that the early field work they quietly began in March to reach out to their base voters is resulting in ballots being returned at a faster pace than in the bitterly contested 2020 presidential election — and that Democrats are returning more of them — a lot more.
Of the more than nearly 1.1 million mail-in ballots that have been returned, 56% have been re
turned by Democrats, according to Political Data, a California firm that provides voter information to campaigns and pollsters in both parties. The firm found that 22% of the ballots have been returned by Republicans. The company compiles public information on the ballot returns, noting the party, ethnic, age and geographic breakdown as the ballots are received by election departments.
That kind of lead — roughly 400,000 votes — is significant in a race that is expected to be highly partisan. Major caveat: It is still way early. Those votes represent only 5% of the 22 million ballots that have been mailed to every California voter. And they record only the number of ballots, not the actual votes.
“If we expect Republican (ballots) to come in a big rush at the end, I think the Democrats need more than a big cushion,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data. “Right now they have a 400,000 (ballot) cushion, which is pretty good. I don’t think anyone should get complacent yet.”
Newsom’s lead strategist, Juan Rodriguez, was cautiously optimistic.
“When you are in an off-year (election) and you’re already ahead of the pace of what turnout was in the same interval in a presidential election, that tells you that people are beginning to get plugged in,” Rodriguez said. “It’s really early, but I think it just goes to show you that this program is working and people are becoming increasingly aware.”
Critics say this kind of early start was needed after polls earlier this summer showed Republicans were twice as enthusiastic about voting to recall Newsom than Democrats were to keep him. The fear among Newsom’s supporters was that if Democrats didn’t vote in the Sept. 14 election, the GOP would be able to recall the governor
and replace him with one of their own. That would be a seismic shock to a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.
Polls show the race is in a virtual tie on whether to remove the governor, even though the anti-recall forces have raised $57 million compared with the $22 million gathered by those supporting the recall.
One of the Democrats who was concerned about the direction of the Newsom campaign is Pablo Rodriguez, executive director of Communities for a New California Education Fund, which performs in-person outreach to voters year-round on a variety of issues in the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys.
Rodriguez was among the Democrats who told The Chronicle this month that the Newsom campaign was spending too much money on TV ads and not enough on inperson canvassing, which is the most effective kind of voter outreach.
But he is pleased by the marked increase in proNewsom canvassers that his organization has noticed since ballots started landing in voters’ mailboxes last week.
“Kudos to the really robust campaign that they are running now,” Rodriguez said. But he cautioned: “There are still a lot of working class, undecided voters of color in the Central Valley. They need to continue to reach out to them.”
On Tuesday, the 1.4
million-member liberal activist group Courage California released a survey that found that 30% of voters under 30 didn’t know if they were going to vote in the recall. If young voters were to cast ballots, 43% said they would vote no on the recall, 26% would support it and 32% didn’t know, according to the poll of 2,343 registered voters between 18 and 29, with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
The Newsom campaign said it is spending “eight figures” on connecting to Black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. It has sent 24 million text messages, in both English and Spanish, to its target audience of the state’s 10 million Democratic voters.
In what Juan Rodriguez, Newsom’s strategist, said is a new twist for a statewide campaign, the anti-recall forces are partnering with more than 60 community organizations to get out the Democratic vote. The theory is that local groups are in closer touch with voters in their communities because they engage them on a variety of issues year-round. Voters are more likely to be open to a pro-Newsom message when it comes from a trusted member of their community than from a faraway political campaign — that’s the case in most elections.
Those connections allow the campaign to “really have real conversations with people about how important this is,” said Lindsay Hopkins,
Newsom’s field director and longtime deputy political director of the Service Employees International Union, one of the state’s most powerful and Democrat-friendly labor organizations. “And it is going very well.”
One of the behind-thescenes weapons of Newsom’s field strategy: Part of the voter outreach operation is being run by the same firm that powered Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to victory over Joe Biden in the 2020 California primary.
Democrats of all stripes lauded the Sanders campaign for its ability to reach voters and smalldollar donors online. Newsom campaign operatives are pleased that a similar scenario is unfolding now, as they have almostas many smalldollar donors and are reaching as many voters through text messages as the Sanders campaign did at this point in the 2020 primary.
Despite these positive signs, Newsom’s team is not feeling complacent. They all remember 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign had all sorts of organizational and monetary advantages over Donald Trump’s operation, but lost.
“Remember the feelings, feel the feelings and use the feelings to go vote no” on the recall, Newsom campaign spokesman Nathan Click urged Democratic voters. “Don’t forget those feelings.”