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There’s no need to make the California recall complicated. It’s pretty simple.

Today is election day here in California, where we all get to vote on whether to recall our governor. But why are we doing this? The LA Times dives deep into this baffling question:

When 1.6 million voters signed a petition to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, they signaled their indebtedness not just to century-old political reforms but also to a spirit of restless reinvention that took root 170 years ago.“

Californians,” said historian H.W. Brands with the University of Texas at Austin, “have learned to be impatient with patience. The idea of sticking to an unsatisfactory status quo doesn’t stick.”

....Filter out the static and a bipartisan picture emerges of an electorate struggling to address the most challenging issues California has had to face. Climate change and catastrophic wildfires, a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis, income inequality and racial inequities have reached a point where any proposal that doesn’t lead to a fix is reason to mobilize.

....Former Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez sees a struggle taking place in the conscience of Democrats and Californians who are trying to understand what it means to be “the most multiracial, diverse and forward-looking state.”

For chrissake. I've rarely seen such a stream of pseudo-analytic bafflegab in service of avoiding the simple and obvious answer. Here's the deal: The recall is solely the work of "Stop the Steal" Trumpistas who took advantage of the fact that California requires only 1.5 million signatures to certify a recall. Even in their current moldering condition Republicans still make up about a third of all voters, so all the nutbags needed was signatures from the 20-30% of their compatriots in the nutbag wing of the party. Easy peasy, especially if you're gathering signatures at the same time that Trump and Fox News are firing up the nation about corrupt Democrats trying to take the presidency away from him.

That's it. Forget the crap about Californians being any more impatient or unhappy than anyone else. We aren't. Nutbags got the recall on the ballot, and once that happened Republicans were all perfectly happy to go along with putting one of their own in office. That's it. That's all there is.

Activists gathering recall signatures in Huntington Beach at a rally of "Stop the Steal" nutbags.

38 thoughts on “There’s no need to make the California recall complicated. It’s pretty simple.

  1. golack

    You're right, that's why there is a recall election.
    The bafflegab, and it certainly is that, is hedging--there is a chance Newsom could lose. Of course the real reason for this is simple--a small motivated minority can "beat" a baffled "why is we doing this now?" majority.

  2. NotCynicalEnough

    It's even less complicated than that. The GOP pretty much can't win a regular election because their policies are unpopular in California. They can will a recall election because that only requires a plurality of the vote in a large field in an off year election and most of the cost is born by the state, not the party. I'm only surprised they don't have a recall drive every year.

    1. NotCynicalEnough

      will => win. My fingers no longer seem to accept commands from my brain as well as they used to. And they were never very good at it.

    2. rick_jones

      It's even less complicated than that. The GOP pretty much can't win a regular election because their policies are unpopular in California. They can will a recall election because that only requires a plurality of the vote in a large field in an off year election and most of the cost is born by the state, not the party.

      Yet for that plurality in a large field to be effective, there must first be a majority of the voters willing to toss the current Governor out. So if the GOP's policies are unpopular in California, it would seem to suggest the Governor at the time (ostensibly someone other than a Republican if the GOP is pushing the recall) would have to be more unpopular than the GOP's policies.

      1. golack

        Not necessarily. The Republicans try to turn the recall into "are you happy with how things are going now" not "do you like us better". Fires, covid restrictions, outbreaks among children, loss of extra unemployment payments, etc....and child tax rebates just starting (too late to affect election?), so I could see some people lodging a protest vote against the Governor.

      2. weirdnoise

        Typically, people are significantly more motivated to vote to change the status quo than to vote to have things left alone. So your "majority of the voters" is not a democratically representative test of public sentiment, unlike an actual vote between two or more candidates.

        Leave it to Republicans, who (metaphorically) will sell their first-born for a win, to find the least democratic means to achieve their ends.

  3. azumbrunn

    The real cause of this mess is the exquisitely stupid design of the recall election rules. It makes if perfectly possible to recall a governor with 51% of the vote and have the successor "win" with 25% or less. It was designed by idiots.

    Apart from that: What happens if a governor resigns? Or dies on the job? The lieutenant governor takes over. This is the entire job description of the lieutenant governor. If a recall led to the appointment of the lieutenant governor (as it clearly should) we would have hardly any recalls in California.

    1. bbleh

      In fairness, it was designed at a time when corruption was truly rampant (we think things are corrupt now, but take a look at the 19th century sometime), and a Lt Gov would have been another cog in the same (likely rail-baron-owned) machine.

      It's wildly inappropriate for today, where well-funded special interests and an apathetic voter base combine to produce ludicrous results. But fixing it would require a constitutional amendment IIRC.

  4. KawSunflower

    Reading elsewhere that Elder, if he replaces Newsom, might have an opportunity to install Stephen Miller as Is Senator, makes me hope that (1) Newsom isn't replaced; & (2) that California eliminates the ease with which recall elections can be requested.

    1. dmsilev

      Newsom., or Elder if God forbid that happens, has about a year or so left in the term. So, if Feinstein has to leave office in the next year, yes in principle Elder would appoint a replacement to serve out her term, and yes I could easily imagine him trying to nominate Miller. However, I'd imagine that the legislature would very quickly pass (and with a veto-proof majority) a bill requiring that Senate replacements be of the same party as the departing Senator to forestall exactly that scenario; several states already have such laws, though I don't think California is one of them.

      1. NotCynicalEnough

        It's possible to find Democrats that are largely indistinguishable from Republicans, for example, the "leading" Democrat that is on the recall ballot, Kevin Paffrath. I think the "real" solution is to require a much larger stake to get on the ballot as well as a significant number of signatures. That would at least weed out the clowns like Paffrath.

  5. skeptonomist

    Kevin is right about the matter being simple, but no, it did not take Trumpistas to initiate the recall petition, just ordinary Republican politicians and activists. Kevin seems to have forgotten about the 2003 recall, when there was dissatisfaction with Governor Davis because the blackouts caused by deregulation and Enron. This time there has been some dissatisfaction about Newsom's handling of the pandemic, but Republicans don't really need any real reason to try for a recall. The determination to do this kind of thing originated long before Trump. Republicans were perfectly happy to install Bush in 2000 by non-democratic means.

  6. jte21

    The recall mechanism, somewhat like impeachment, was originally passed to remove a pol whose corruption and self-dealing were so egregious that was a danger to democracy and the welfare of the state. Newsom's recall, as Kevin points out, was engineered by a minority of nutjob voters with the help of a bunch of out-of-state, Trump-allied strategists and fundraisers. Yes, the whole French Laundry imbroglio was an outrage and Newsom was rightly tarred and feathered for it in the media, but if you think that one act was so completely disqualifying, you're welcome to punish him by voting against him in the next election. You'd think people would have learned from the last time we recalled a perfectly competent Democratic governor over a bunch of made-up bullshit and replaced him with a Republican who drove the state into the ground so badly we had to re-elect Jerry Brown twice to unfuck it.

  7. Spadesofgrey

    Lol, state recall's are unconstitutional anyways. I would destroy California on the way out, destroying its ability to finance debt, leading to a debt liquidation nationally, destroying the US economy. It's why whining about Trump globalism is a waste of time. The debt ponzi has gone too far. The economy can't grow like in the 20th century. All that is left is supply lines and reality. It's why conservatism should give it up. The death of property and their markets is next. But they are so decadent, their denial of the reality will be what destroys them.

  8. Jimmy7

    Get rid of paid signature gatherers. Stop letting rich people and corporations fund recalls and propositions designed to hoodwink the electorate.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Unfortunately, the courts have ruled you cannot ban paid signature gatherers. Something about money being another form of speech, at least for the rich. Voter initiatives and recalls used to work reasonably well in CA, OR & WA when they depended on volunteer signature gathers, now they are just another way for monied interests to cause problems.

  9. ucgoldenbears

    Don't forget that a judge extended the time to gather signatures. This recall was even easier to verify than the standard.

  10. iamr4man

    The recall process in California was broken by the Republicans and like everything else they break it needs to be fixed by Democrats. Democrats in California were stupid in that they did not fix the recall process the last time. If they don’t fix it this time we will face an endless cycle of recalls. I for one will sign a petition to recall Elder if he becomes governor on day one.

  11. Jasper_in_Boston

    States are supposedly the laboratories of democracy, right? I'd love to see some state adopt a parliamentary system. The constitution requires a "republican" form of government, but many republics (Germany, Finland, Ireland) etc utilize the parliamentary model. Anyway, if a governor (or premier) were really doing an egregiously bad job, his or party could simply swap in a new person. So much saner and easier.

    (I think Newsom's been fine, for what it's worth.).

  12. ProgressOne

    Very Trumpesque for our Trumpesque times. Every rule is to be hijacked to promote Trumpism.

    You wonder when the Trumpists will figure out a way to finally punch through the layers of institutional checks we have in our democracy. Replacing voting officials in states with Trumpists is one of the scarier things. Relentlessly declaring all institutions corrupt is prepping the Trump base for whatever comes. This makes anything and everything seem justified.

  13. Loxley

    '....Filter out the static and a bipartisan picture emerges of an electorate struggling to address the most challenging issues California has had to face. Climate change and catastrophic wildfires, a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis, income inequality and racial inequities have reached a point where any proposal that doesn’t lead to a fix is reason to mobilize.'

    LOL. As thought a modern Republican governor could- or would even want to- address ANY OF THEM. Only an idiot would trust a Republican to govern, especially in times of crisis. But then, what else is the GOP base made up of, these days....

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