Newsom back to business as recall process takes fire
The day after: Governor feels more urgency to push his agenda
SACRAMENTO — Critics of Gov. Gavin Newsom spent more than a year trying to recall him. Between administrative expenses for the state and campaign expenditures by the candidates, the cost of the election totaled around $400 million.
And in the end, none of it may amount to much of anything.
Newsom’s landslide victory on Tuesday night — with a margin that could ultimately be in line with the 2018 governor’s race — means he is unlikely to face significant political fallout from the effort to remove him from office. For California’s Democratic leaders, it largely appears to be a signal to get back to business as usual.
“We don’t need a new mandate. We have the mandate. He has a mandate,” state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, said following a campaign rally for Newsom in Oakland on Saturday, as public polls already
showed the governor headed for a massive win. “We just want to keep building on what we’ve been doing.”
The governor, who has resisted reflecting publicly on lessons from one of the greatest threats his career ever faced, struck a more modest tone Wednesday during a visit to a school in Oakland. Newsom said he did not feel vindicated by the election results, but rather enlivened and energized to serve people who are counting on effective government to keep them safe and healthy.
He was not, however, a man who appeared to emerge from the experience transformed by the dissatisfaction with his leadership that fueled the recall effort. Newsom sounded ready, if anything, to double down on his current approach.
“It sharpens your focus about time,” he said. “Things that you may have looked at on the rise and said, over the next two, three years, we want to get this done, you start looking at very differently and saying, well, what’s possible in the next two to three months?”
There are nevertheless a few warning signs for Newsom as he looks ahead to the last year of his first term.
While Democratic voters rallied around the governor during the final weeks of the campaign, largely because of his pandemic response, polling during the summer hinted at low enthusiasm in his base. He has also consistently received poor marks in public polls for his handling of some other key issues, like homelessness.
And a poll released last week found that a majority of voters view Newsom as someone who believes he is above his own rules — a lasting consequence of pandemic-era scandals like his attendance at a November birthday dinner for his political adviser at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, in violation of the state’s social distancing guidelines at the time.
Recall backers have tried to spin the outcome as a moral victory, one that damaged Newsom’s viability as a candidate in the long run and forced him to pay attention to the complaints of a significant minority of the state.
“This recall was a legitimization of the fact that he’s not fit for office,” said Anne Hyde Dunsmore, campaign manager for Rescue California, one of the groups behind the effort. “He’s no longer the party’s golden boy.”
That remains to be seen. With the next gubernatorial election just 14 months away, his re-election campaign will begin almost immediately, putting Newsom’s agenda under the microscope once again.
“People are still hurting” as California continues to climb out of the pandemic, said Democratic political consultant Robin Swanson. “The governor definitely has unfinished business and hopefully he can spend the next year doing that.”
Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who served as communications director for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Newsom should put his head down and focus on showing people some improvement on the issues where he received the most criticism during the campaign, such as homelessness, crime and housing prices.
Though some of those problems long predate Newsom, the frustration that many Californians feel about the direction of the state inevitably reflects back on him because he is the person in charge, Stutzman said. If voter ambivalence carries into next year, it could make Newsom a weak top of the ticket to drive Democratic turnout in an election where scores of congressional and legislative races are on the line.
“That’s the vulnerability that he presents,” Stutzman said. “He’d be well served to be humble.”
Newsom and his allies have been anything but humble as they repeatedly pointed to the budget that the state adopted this summer as evidence that California is on the right track. A record surplus allowed the governor to pursue new multibillion-dollar programs, including converting hotels and motels into homeless housing and expanding health care access to undocumented immigrants age 50 and older, and to send stimulus checks to a majority of California households.
Pressure to build on that progressive vision of governance will likely only grow after Tuesday’s results. Several organizations that opposed the recall put out statements immediately after Newsom won calling for him to go further in his commitments to environmental protections and racial equity.
But the governor seems content for now to continue working on plans that were already in place, allowing the groundwork he has laid to come to fruition.
As the campaign drew to a close, legislative leaders also suggested nothing would shift about their relationship with the governor or their agenda next year — which will likely prioritize pandemic response, homelessness, affordable housing and wildfire management — even if Newsom defeated the recall in a blowout.
“We’re going to move full steam ahead either way,” Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, said last week following the end of the legislative session, which left hundreds of bills on the governor’s desk to sign.
In fact, the lasting consequence of the Newsom recall may be that it becomes harder for a sequel in the future.
Assembly Member Marc Berman, a Democrat from Palo Alto who chairs the Assembly elections committee, said he has heard a lot of interest from both colleagues and constituents about changing the recall rules in California, including regular emails to his office “complaining that the process is insane.”
Some ideas have already been floated, including raising the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot, holding a runoff between the top two replacement candidates or having the lieutenant governor take over if a governor is recalled. A recent poll found that a majority of voters support many of those ideas, though Californians would overwhelmingly like to maintain some sort of recall process.
Berman said he doesn’t favor any particular change yet, but he wants to evaluate them this fall and review what other states with recall processes do, so that legislators can unify behind a proposal next year that they could potentially place on the November 2022 ballot.
“Let’s make this process more democratic,” he said. “How did we end up with a system where somebody who receives 15% of the vote could be governor of California? That just cuts every democratic value that we have.”