Reasons to be cheerful — and fearful — about the California recall result
Gov. Gavin Newsom began the strange campaign that just ended fulminating about a “Republican recall” and Trumpist extremism. That was well before it was clear that the election would oblige his hope that he could somehow continue to run against the former president who had long served as his easy foil. By the time it was all over, however, the opposition had lived down to the governor’s wishful campaigning.
To listen to Larry Elder’s rambling election night speech was to be unwillingly transported to a time not as long ago as it seems, when Newsom could charm much of the state just by reminding us that he was not, thank goodness, Donald Trump.
The underside of the governor’s resulting victory is that it enables the Democratic establishment’s everlasting mediocrity. Whatever Newsom said in the aftermath about voters’ appreciation for his intermittently science-based approach to the pandemic — which is, to be fair, infinitely more science-based than the epidemiological denialism of his opponents — the governor ran less on his record than on the implausibility of his opposition. And he got away with it.
Five years ago, I moved back to my native California from the East Coast just before millions of its voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton — though, thanks to an ancient, misbegotten compromise known as the Electoral College, to no practical effect. California’s recall provision is not half as antiquated and questionable as that other constitutional relic, but it’s antiquated and questionable enough. And a complacent Democratic supermajority bears much of the blame for allowing it to continue to fester in all its unreconstructed, century-old glory.
This is a fraught time to be any kind of American, let alone a Californian headed to the state’s capital to cover its frustrating politics in the week of one of its most baroque expressions. But I’ll take it over 2016.
Elder’s concession was a reminder of that heyday of the Trump rally, taking the form of a stand-up comedy act without any punchlines. It was similarly unburdened by reality or relevance, including the proximate fact that he had just suffered what by any measure was a humiliating rejection by the electorate.
Based on the share of ballots cast against recalling him, Newsom is improbably outperforming his 2018 cakewalk over John Cox. And while Elder dominated Cox and the rest of the moribund field of replacement candidates, his showing was in turn dwarfed by the number of voters who didn’t bother to waste any ink on the second part of the ballot. At the very dawn of his political career, Elder thereby achieved the rare and dubious distinction of losing in a landslide to “none of the above.”
Yet he had irrationally risen from right-wing radio to the top of the crowded field of replacement candidates, a few of whom had at least put a modicum of thought into the effort. He thereby completed the campaign’s devolution into a West Coast rewrite of 2016, the election the country appears cursed to continuously relitigate as if it weren’t bad enough the first time around. An experienced, establishment Democratic politician, one who like Clinton had spent much of a career striving to please too many and succeeding in pleasing few, once again faced the void of nonsense and Know-Nothingism that has all but completely replaced the Republican Party.
The recall did briefly make our dreary political present cheery in one respect: by reaching the only reasonable result. Undeterred by preemptive claims of voter fraud and undaunted by the bizarre format of the recall, voters turned out in relative droves to give it the resounding rejection it deserved. California didn’t have to settle for the likes of Clinton’s empty popular victory or even Joe Biden’s clear but electorally close win.
Unlike Trump in 2016 or even 2020, the recall failed so dramatically as to dissuade the cynics from crying conspiracy and contesting their loss by any means. Thanks to Elder and an electorate that was wiser to the ruse, 2021 delivered the sort of repudiation of Trumpism that its critics previously yearned for in vain.
Perhaps Newsom will take Tuesday’s backward mandate as a signal to tackle the state’s challenges — housing chief among them and intertwined with most of them — with all the vigor and consistency he has so far lacked. But he might just as well see the result as ratifying a government that’s just OK because the only alternative so clearly isn’t.