California recall fueled by a dinner, a ruling on same day
Photos of the maskless dinner showed the Democratic governor going against what he had been urging for months to combat the coronavirus: don’t gather in groups, keep your distance, wear a mask. That it was happening at the French Laundry — where the cheapest meal is
By March, organizers had more than the 1.5 million signatures they needed to force a vote on whether to remove the first-term Democratic governor in the nation's biggest blue state.
“We had a perfect storm with the judge's ruling, with the French Laundry incident, with the greater environment of COVID and the economic disaster," said
Voters will have the final say next Tuesday. A majority of voters would need to mark “yes" to oust Newsom more than a year before his term ends.
If they do, they would chose from a list of 46 replacement candidates — many of them unknown, but others with some recognition, including conservative talk show host
Because so many people are running, the winner would likely become the next governor of the nation's most populous state with 25% or less of the votes. That's a far cry from the landslide that swept Newsom into office in 2018.
In
A loss for Newsom, 53, would be a shocking twist in his relatively charmed political career and would almost certainly install a Republican governor in the nation’s chief laboratory for progressive policies. A slight majority approve of his job handling, according to a recent poll from the
The results will be picked apart for clues on how voters are feeling heading into the 2022 midterm elections, when control of
“The outcome of this election is going to be fuel for 2022, period," Romero said.
Amateur political organizer
By the time he began collecting signatures, the coronavirus dominated.
Newsom was the first governor to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, and when he dined at the French Laundry eight months later, the state had gone through whipsaw reopenings and closings that left small-business owners, parents of schoolchildren and others overwhelmed and confused.
News of the
The next day, a Los Angeles TV station obtained cellphone photos calling into question that the dinner was outdoors. The photos showed the table set back in a space with three walls and one side open with a sliding glass door. Newsom and the other guests were sitting close together and not wearing masks.
“The French Laundry was an incredible boost to the effort," Dunsmore said.
The recall campaign similarly tagged Newsom as elitist when his children returned to class in person at a private school while most public school students were stuck with virtual learning.
“They realized that they had bottled up this intense anger among the Trump base, and the trick is they only needed a fraction of the Trump base to get this thing qualified" for the ballot, Smith said.
Neither explanation would have mattered had recall organizers not won four more months to pitch voters. A judge granted the extra time because the coronavirus stalled traditional in-person signature gathering outside stores or at farmers markets.
Newsom's team never appealed the judge's decision, a move widely seen as a tactical mistake. Then-Secretary of State
The judge sided with recall organizers in a tentative ruling, and neither side showed up to argue it in court on
The two main recall committees raised roughly
Newsom launched his “Stop the Republican Recall" campaign in March, weeks before the signature gathering ended, painting the effort as one driven by Trump-supporting extremists. He's made the state's response to the pandemic and the economic fallout a central theme of his campaign.
The highly contagious delta variant blunted his early message of
Elder is the target of much of
It's part of a calculation by Newsom's team to turn the recall from a referendum on the governor and his actions into a choice between Democratic and Republican values.
“If you sit around and let it become a referendum on the person in office, it doesn't matter how good or how positive they are, you're always at a disadvantage because you're playing defense," Smith said. “We need to be in a place, very simply, where we're playing offense."
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