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      Think California’s recall election doesn’t affect you? It really does | The Week in Patriarchy

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      The Week in PatriarchyCaliforniaThink California’s recall election doesn’t affect you? It really does, I’m afraidArwa MahdawiThe election is a depressing reminder that Republicans are incredibly good at finding sneaky ways to get into power and hold on to it Sat 28 Aug 2021 08.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 28 Aug 2021 10.10 EDTWhy everyone should be paying attention to the recall election in CaliforniaThe wine bill alone apparently came to $12,000. Last November, when California was under a partial lockdown, Gavin Newsom was caught breaking his own rules and celebrating a lobbyist friend’s birthday at the French Laundry, an uber-expensive Michelin-starred restaurant. The Democratic governor’s night at the French Laundry didn’t just stain his reputation, it may have ended his political career. Nobody likes a hypocrite and anger over Newsom’s fancy night out helped fuel Republican-led efforts to oust him. A special gubernatorial recall election is currently under way and there’s a very real chance that, in a couple of weeks, Newsom might lose his job to Larry Elder, a rightwing radio host with some terrifying views and a long history of misogynistic comments.California is a deeply blue state where Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one. How on earth is it possible that Newsom, who is still very popular, might get replaced by a Republican? Because of the weird way that California’s gubernatorial recall elections work, basically. Voters are asked two questions. The first is whether they want to recall Newsom or not. If a majority say yes, then he’s out. The candidate that gets the most votes on the replacement ballot is in. It’s a democratic process with the potential for a very undemocratic result.Perhaps you don’t live in California or the United States. Perhaps you think none of this really affects you. It does, I’m afraid. It really does. California is the fifth-largest economy in the world: the person running it matters immensely. While a replacement governor would serve for just over a year (Newsom’s term ends in January 2023), that’s still enough time for someone to do a lot of damage.There’s also a “doomsday scenario” that is weighing at the back of some Democrats’ minds. The Senate is currently split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats; Kamala Harris gets the tie-breaking vote. One of California’s senators is Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who is 88 years old. (The average life expectancy in the US for women, by the way, is 81 years old.) If she needed to step down for health reasons before the end of her term, the governor of California would appoint her replacement. And if a Republican gets appointed then the Senate would be back under GOP control. That’s not inevitable, by the way. If Newsom loses, Feinstein has the opportunity to step aside before the new governor is sworn in – however she has said she has no intention of doing that. Can’t put the greater good ahead of your career, you know! And while the odds of this doomsday scenario happening are slim, recent years should have taught us that we ought to be prepared for anything.I’ve got a feeling that, in the end, Newsom will probably cling on to power. But that’s not really something to celebrate either. This recall election is going to end up costing $276m. That may only be five bottles of wine at the French Laundry for the likes of Newsom; but for normal people, it’s a colossal waste of money that is desperately needed for other things. The election is also a depressing reminder that the Republicans are incredibly good at finding sneaky ways to get into power and hold on to it. The power-grab in California is just a small taste of things to come.A dystopian Texas abortion law takes effect in SeptemberThe law bans abortion at six weeks of pregnancy with no exception for rape or incest. It also allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps a person get an abortion. In theory that means if you drive your friend to an abortion clinic a Conservative Karen could sue you. It’s possible you could even get sued for donating money to Planned Parenthood of Texas. It’s chilling.No one knows how many Indigenous women are murdered each yearThat’s for a number of reasons including the fact that violence against Indigenous women is often underreported and police reports frequently misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic. The lack of data means the magnitude of the problem hasn’t been fully grasped by policymakers, and the issue hasn’t had the funding and attention it deserves. NBC reports on the Indigenous women who are refusing to let their “people die in silence” and demanding a reshape of the criminal justice system.The Afghan girls’ robotics team has a white savior problemAn Oklahoma woman called Allyson Reneau has been very loudly and proudly taking credit for evacuating members of the all-girls robotics team out of Afghanistan. However, a lawyer for the team’s parent organisation says Reneau has overstated her role and is putting the girls and their families at risk. A spokesman for the Qatari foreign ministry, which helped evacuate the robotics team members, accused the US media of making Reneau a “white savior”.Gavin Rossdale, whose ex-wife is the singer Gwen Stefani, has a new girlfriend called Gwen SingerThere are probably only about five people in the world who care about Rossdale’s dating life. However, since I spent my tweens assuming I was going to one day be Mrs Rossdale (I had a shrine to Gavin on my wall), I feel obliged to report this important name news. Clearly I should have changed my name to ArwaGwen to be in with a chance.Black female chefs are challenging the ‘bro culture’ of cooking showsA taste of progress?Is time up for Time’s Up?The chief executive of the sexual harassment victims’ advocacy group Time’s Up has resigned after it was revealed that she advised Andrew Cuomo after he was accused of sexual misconduct.Some female hummingbirds avoid sexual harassment by masquerading as menAbout 20% of female white-necked jacobins have bright feathers, just like their male counterparts. This stops them from getting socially harassed, a new study has found.The week in paw-triarchyI apologize for being a little late to report this monkey business, but it appears that a nine-year-old female called Yakei has become the new leader of a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys at a nature reserve on the island of Kyushu. Her path to power involved beating up her own mother and then having it out with a 31-year-old alpha male called Sanchu. She’s the first female monkey boss in the nature reserve’s 70-year-history. All hail Queen Yakei.Arwa Mahdawi’s new book, Strong Female Lead, is available for pre-order.TopicsCaliforniaThe Week in PatriarchyUS politicsGavin NewsomcommentReuse this content More

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      California Could Throw Away What It’s Won

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      If you live in California and haven’t yet voted or made plans to vote on the proposed recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, please wake up. This is a situation in which apathy could have awesome consequences: California, which isn’t as liberal a state as you may imagine but is nonetheless considerably more liberal than the nation as a whole, may be about to absent-mindedly acquire a Trumpist governor who could never win a normal election.This would happen at a moment when control of statehouses is especially crucial because it shapes the response to the coronavirus. MAGA governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida aren’t just refusing to impose mask or vaccination requirements themselves; they’re trying to prevent others from taking precautions by issuing executive orders and backing legislation banning the imposition of such requirements by local governments and even private businesses. And that’s the kind of governor California will probably find itself with if the recall succeeds.How is something like this even possible? Because the recall process is crazy. Voters answer two questions: Should Newsom be recalled? And who should replace him? If a majority vote “yes” on recall, whoever is chosen by the largest number of people on the second question becomes governor, even if that person receives far fewer than the number of votes to keep Newsom in office.And the most likely outcome if Newsom is ousted is that Larry Elder, a right-wing talk-radio host who is vehemently opposed to mask and vaccine mandates, will end up in the governor’s office despite receiving only a small fraction of the total vote.What would make this outcome especially galling is that California is in many ways — with the glaring exception of housing, which I’ll get to — a progressive success story.The Golden State took a sharp left turn in 2010, with the election of Jerry Brown as governor. Two years later, Democrats gained a supermajority in the Legislature, giving them the power to enact many progressive priorities. California soon raised taxes on the rich, increased social spending and increased its minimum wage. It also enthusiastically implemented the Affordable Care Act.Conservatives predicted disaster, with some saying that the state was committing economic “suicide.” And California gets a lot of negative coverage in the business press, where one constantly finds assertions that business is moving en masse out of the state to lower-tax, less-regulated states, like Texas.The data, however, say otherwise. Given all the trash-talking of California and trumpeting of Texas’ prospects one reads, it’s a bit startling to look at trends in real G.D.P. and employment between 2010 and the eve of the pandemic and discover that California and Texas had essentially the same growth rates. It’s also startling, given all the talk about people fleeing high taxes, to learn that highly educated, high-income workers — who do indeed pay higher taxes in California than in most other parts of the U.S. — were continuing to migrate into the state.California’s experience, in other words, gives the lie to conservative claims that taxing the rich and spending more on social programs destroys prosperity. And the state didn’t just achieve rapid economic growth; its effective implementation of Obamacare helped it reduce the number of its residents without health insurance much more rapidly than the rest of the country.OK, there are some important shadows on this picture. Even as affluent workers continued to move to California, lower-income workers — who actually pay lower taxes in California than they do in Texas — were moving out. This was surely in large part because of the high price of housing, which has become a huge problem.Despite overall economic success, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate (when you measure it properly), largely because of high housing costs: The median apartment in San Francisco rents for more than twice as much as an apartment in any Texas city. California also has a lot of homelessness, for the same reason.What’s behind California’s housing nightmare? Runaway NIMBYism, which has blocked new housing construction. California’s economic performance matched that of Texas in the 2010s, but it issued far fewer building permits despite having a larger population. California gained three million jobs between 2010 and 2019 but added fewer than 700,000 housing units.NIMBYism, however, happens to be one of the few major issues that cut right across party lines. Conservatives are as likely as liberals to oppose housing construction; some progressives — among them Governor Newsom — are strong advocates of housing expansion. So California’s big policy failure shouldn’t be an issue in this recall election. What’s on the line are its policy successes.If Californians choose to turn their backs on these successes, well, that’s their right. The danger now is that the state won’t choose — that it will stumble into MAGAland via a bizarre recall process and lack of attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden to Campaign for Gov. Newsom Before California Recall Election

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      Some political activists had wondered whether the turmoil in Afghanistan would cause President Biden to back out of a planned trip to help Mr. Newsom retain his job.LOS ANGELES — Although he is mired in a political crisis about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden still plans to campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is facing a recall election in California, Mr. Biden’s press secretary said on Wednesday.The president had previously indicated he would try to help Mr. Newsom retain his job. But some political activists had wondered whether Mr. Biden would back out of the trip because of the turmoil in Afghanistan.Jen Psaki, the press secretary, said Mr. Biden still planned to go to California. “I don’t have a date for you at this point in time,” she said, “but that is still certainly his plan.”Mr. Newsom, the Democratic governor of the nation’s most populous state, is fending off an effort to remove him from office that began as a long shot initiated by Republicans dissatisfied with his policies on immigration and the death penalty. But as the coronavirus pandemic wore on and frustration built over prolonged restrictions, the recall gathered steam and, thanks in part to an extended deadline, enough signatures to trigger an election.Now Mr. Newsom and his allies are working to get the attention of the state’s enormous Democratic base, hoping to counteract enthusiasm for his ouster among Republicans.All of the state’s some 22 million registered voters were set to receive ballots by mail. On those ballots, they will be asked whether they think Mr. Newsom should be recalled, and if so by whom. The leading candidate to replace Mr. Newsom is Larry Elder, a conservative radio host from Los Angeles who some Democrats have described as an agent of a far-right power grab.Mr. Biden has already voiced support for Mr. Newsom. The president said on Twitter that the governor was “leading California through unprecedented crises — he’s a key partner in fighting the pandemic and helping build our economy back better.”Vice President Kamala Harris is set to return to the Bay Area this week to stump for the governor of her home state. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the prominent progressive from Massachusetts, has for weeks appeared in television ads warning that “Trump Republicans” are “coming to grab power in California.” More

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      What to Know About California’s Recall Election

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      What to Know About California’s Recall ElectionShawn Hubler �� Reporting from SacramentoMarcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressIf he fails, California’s next governor will be the top vote-getter among 46 challengers on the ballot, even if only a small plurality votes for the winner. Right now, the frontrunner is Larry Elder, a Trump-Republican talk radio host, with about 20 percent support. More