Newsom on recall: It’s me or Trumpism
SACRAMENTO — As the campaign to oust him heads into its final weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is hammering home the choice he has presented to voters since the start of the recall — Donald Trump or him.
“We defeated Trump last year, and thank you, but we haven’t defeated Trumpism,” Newsom has repeated for the past two weeks in a blitz of campaign stops and Zoom calls. From vaccine resistance to climate denial, he says, everything that terrified California liberals about the past president is on the ballot. And far more than his own personal future hangs in the balance: “This is a matter of life and death.”
His opponents dispute that. Newsom, they say, is the problem, and the recall never would have come to an election had a critical mass of the state not resented his pandemic restrictions on businesses and classrooms, even as his own finances were secure and his own children got in-person instruction. Trump, they note, is not a candidate. “Newsom is scaremongering,” David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist supporting the recall, tweeted recently.
Only three governors have faced recall votes in the United States before Newsom, and he — and the Democratic establishment — are going all out in presenting the effort as a radical power grab, with some partisans even comparing it at one point to the violent Jan. 6 attempt to block President Joe Biden’s election.
By invoking Trump as his opponent of choice, Newsom is reprising a message he has used in the past to blunt criticism effectively, while also testing a strategy likely to be echoed by Democrats seeking to mobilize voters in midterm races across the country next year.
In effect, the leader Californians elected in a 2018 landslide is running less on the Democratic policies of a Democratic incumbent than on an urgent if familiar call to action against an existential threat to blue state values.
Polls suggest Newsom is making his case and has pulled ahead of his opponents — an abrupt focusing of Democratic minds after likely voters indicated this summer that the race might be tightening. A survey released Sept. 1 by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 39 percent of likely voters, mostly Republican, support the recall, while 58 percent plan to vote no.
His edge among female voters has been especially strong, buttressed by campaign appearances in recent days by Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Biden will campaign with him Monday, and former President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders appear in his campaign ads.
He has amassed some $70 million in anti-recall contributions. That’s less than the hundreds of millions of dollars unleashed last year, for instance, in a fight over an initiative involving labor protections for gig workers, but still far more than the money amassed by the other 46 challengers on the ballot. And his team has mobilized a massive get-out-the-vote effort with tens of thousands of volunteers texting tens of millions of voters and canvassing for him in seven languages.
Newsom also has had progress against COVID-19 to tout, with new cases plateauing across the state as 80 percent of eligible Californians report having gotten at least one vaccine dose. In contrast, Orrin Heatlie, a retired Republican sheriff’s sergeant from rural Northern California and the recall’s lead proponent, has not been able to campaign lately for the initiative he started. In a text message interview, Heatlie said he was sick at home with COVID-19.
The landscape has bolstered Newsom’s claim that his removal would undermine the will of a majority of Californians, and reminded voters that the recall was a long shot until the pandemic. Initially supportive of Newsom’s health orders, Californians wearied of his complicated directives. Dissatisfaction boiled over in November, when Newsom was spotted mask-free at an exclusive wine-country restaurant after urging the public to avoid gathering. A court order extending the deadline for signature gathering because of pandemic shutdowns allowed recall proponents to capitalize on the unease.