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      The California Recall Isn't Just Gavin Newsom Vs. Larry Elder

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      The prospect of Gov. Larry Elder has jolted California’s Democrats out of their apathy. Polling on the recall has swung from a dead heat in early August to an 8.4 margin for Gavin Newsom in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. But I want to make an affirmative argument for continuing the Newsom experiment: Something exciting is taking shape in California. The torrent of policy that Newsom and the Democratic Legislature are passing amounts to nothing less than a Green New Deal for the Golden State.To understand Newsom, both his successes and his failures, you need to see the paradox that defines his career. The knock on him is that he’s all style, no substance — a guy who got where he is by looking like a politician rather than acting like a leader. The truth is just the opposite. Newsom’s style is his problem; his substance is his redemption.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]When Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco, his nickname was “Mayor McHottie,” and he came complete with a tabloid-ready personal life and funding from the unimaginably wealthy Getty family. His worst mistakes as governor — like attending a birthday dinner for a lobbyist friend at the luxe French Laundry, unmasked, during the depths of the pandemic — deepen those suspicions. The “Beauty,” one of his recall opponents, who fancies himself “the Beast,” called him in a $5 million ad blitz.The attacks wound Newsom because what appear to be his strengths are actually his weaknesses. Newsom is handsome in a way that comes off as just a little too coifed, like the actor you’d cast to play a politician in a movie. His personal life and social misjudgments have dogged him for decades. He doesn’t have a knack for memorable sound bites or quick connection. (A sample line from our interview: “It was not without consideration that last year we passed a number of bills to site homeless shelters and supportive housing and Homekey and Roomkey projects with CEQA waivers and as-of-right zoning.”) He’s an eager nerd who presents as a slick jock, and he’s never found a way out of that dissonance.He’s also been governing amid the worst pandemic in modern history. California has outperformed most states in health outcomes and, particularly, in economic outcomes. “We dominate all Western democracies in the last five years in G.D.P.,” Newsom said. “The G.O.P. loves G.D.P.! Twenty-one percent G.D.P. growth in the last five years. Texas was 12 percent. And our taxes are lower for the middle class in California than they are in Texas.” Basically every economic indicator you can look at in California is booming, from household income growth to the $80 billion-plus budget surplus. But it’s still been a grueling 18 months of masks, lockdowns, deaths and discord. There’s been little attention to policymaking in Sacramento.As a result, people don’t realize how much Newsom and the Democratic State Legislature have done. But in the two and a half years since Newsom became governor, they’ve more than doubled the size of California’s earned-income tax credit and Young Child Tax Credit, and added a stimulus just for Californians (though some of the neediest were left out). They expanded paid family leave from six to eight weeks and unpaid leave to 12 weeks. They added 200,000 child care slots and $250 million to retrofit child care centers. They passed legislation giving all public school students two free meals each day, funding summer school and after-school programs for two million children and creating a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds by 2025.Newsom is “three years ahead of Joe Biden in terms of pro-family policy,” Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “Any parents or grandparents who back the recall are voting against their own financial interest, I’d say.”Housing has been harder, in part because you need to do more than just spend money. Ben Metcalf, who led California’s Department of Housing and Community Development for three years under Gov. Jerry Brown and one year under Newsom, recalls that “when Newsom first arrived, I was excited by his vision, but then dismayed by his inability to effectively deliver and get the Legislature to do what he wanted. Brown knew how to wield power. He knew the points of inflection. He had a team of people he could rely on.”You hear unflattering comparisons with Brown often when you ask around about Newsom. Brown was a more disciplined and experienced leader. He chose his priorities carefully, and he did what he promised. The surplus Newsom is spending is a gift bequeathed by Brown, who persuaded California’s voters to sharply raise taxes on the wealthiest residents. But Brown did little to address the state’s housing affordability crisis and neither did the Legislature.Nancy Skinner, a state senator who’s been a leader on housing, told me that “our shortage has been decades in the making.” The mantra, she said, was to just leave it to the cities. “For years, the Legislature just urged city governments to be more responsive. We tried to create some incentives. And only in the last five years did we realize this is a statewide crisis and we can’t just leave it to local governments to get it fixed. It took the Legislature a long time to get to the place of realizing the urging and carrots didn’t do it. We have to do the mandates.”Newsom, to his credit, prioritized housing from the beginning. Early in his term, in 2019, he sued the city of Huntington Beach for allegedly falling short on its housing commitments and threatened to sue dozens more. He made housing the primary focus of his 2020 State of the State speech. But the initial consensus was that he overpromised and underdelivered. There were widespread frustrations that he wasn’t tough enough with the Legislature and his interventions were often ineffective. He remains far behind his goal of building 3.5 million new housing units by 2025.“I said the 3.5 million houses was a stretch goal,” he protested to me. “I said in trying to achieve it, we’d find what we were capable of!”To be fair, Newsom couldn’t have predicted that the pandemic, which descended on California just weeks after his big housing speech, was coming. Still, in February, I was furious watching California’s political class, including Newsom, fail and fail again to pass major housing legislation. But when the facts change, so must your mind. The Legislature just passed, and Newsom will sign, a series of housing bills that achieve something I never expected to see in California: the end of single-family zoning. S.B.9 allows homeowners to divide their properties into two lots and to build two homes on each of those lots. It won’t solve the housing crisis, but it’s a start.Newsom and other Democrats are also finally appreciating the depth of the anger even liberals feel about homelessness. “People can’t take the tents and open-air drug use,” Newsom said to me. “They can’t. Nor can I. They want the streets cleaned up. They want more housing. They don’t care about task forces or bills. I think that sense of urgency coming out of Covid sharpens our edges. The five- to 10-year plans, no one is interested in that anymore. What’s the five- to 10-month plan?”In Newsom’s case, it’s using the state’s budget surpluses to drive a $12 billion investment over two years in permanent residences and mental health care for the homeless. How well it works remains to be seen, but no other state is investing in housing at anything like this scale or speed.What’s most encouraging to me is a broader change you can sense in the politics of this issue. At every level of power in California, the state’s political actors have realized they need to find ways to build. Inaction is no longer a viable option. Even the politicians who oppose development have to pretend to favor it. There’s no illusion that the tent cities can continue, nor that they can be cleared without offering housing to their residents. Politics isn’t just about policy. It’s also about will, coalitions and a sense of consequences. That’s what feels different in California right now. And Newsom deserves some credit for that.“The reason we began suing cities was to provide air cover,” Newsom told me. “I can’t tell you how many mayors privately thanked me even as they publicly criticized me for those lawsuits. We’re trying to drive a different expectation: We will cover you. You want to scapegoat someone, scapegoat the state. We haven’t had that policy in the past. Localism has been determinative. And that’s part of what’s changing.”This is why I disagree with those, like the economist Tyler Cowen, who argue that a Republican victory in the recall would be a healthy wake-up call for California Democrats, with little downside because Elder would be checked by the Legislature. The political system has already woken up. But the politics of housing are miserable, and there’s much more yet to do. To wreck the governing coalition that is finally making progress would be madness.“If Gavin were recalled, that’d be disastrous for housing policy in this state,” Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, told me. “The Legislature, I believe, could override Larry Elder’s vetoes on key bills. But all of these hard-fought housing bills that we are not passing with a supermajority cannot survive an Elder veto. All that would die.”“I also think that if the recall succeeds, in part due to housing, the overall situation in Sacramento would just be chaotic,” Hanlon added later. “It’ll be a lost year as Democrats and the Legislature work to retake the governor’s office in 2022.”Metcalf, the former head of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has moved from dismayed to impressed by Newsom’s record on housing. “We’re beginning to see Newsom find the levers to pull,” he said. “We’re seeing him figure out how to get the Legislature to do what he wants. We’re just getting there with Newsom, which would make it very painful to lose him now.”Every California politician brags that if California were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. On climate, though, that’s a point of leverage, a way California can try to use its economic might to push the world to decarbonize faster. “There is no peer on California’s climate leadership,” Newsom told me. “We move markets. We move policy globally, not just nationally.”The first part of Newsom’s climate agenda is a series of executive orders setting aggressive decarbonization targets and standards. They include orders mandating that all new passenger cars sold in the state are zero-emission vehicles by 2035, a pledge to conserve 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, and directives to the California Air Resources Board to map out a pathway to carbon neutrality by 2035 and an end to oil extraction by 2045.California has, in the past, used access to its markets to transform the products that are sold globally — our tight fuel economy standards became the de facto national standard, and our subsidies for electric vehicles laid a foundation for that market to boom. Newsom wants to do that again, but for far more than just cars.I am, to be honest, skeptical of far-reaching targets and ever more aggressive decarbonization goals. It’s always easier to promise sweeping change in the future. But you can’t build a different future without planning for it now. What matters is whether these orders really do shape public and private decisions in California over the next decade. If Newsom or a like-minded successor remains governor, they have force. But they are instantly vulnerable if he loses office to Elder or anyone else.The second part of Newsom’s climate agenda is, well, money. The California Comeback Plan that Newsom signed this year put nearly $8 billion toward electric vehicles and climate resilience. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who tracks state climate policies, said that “spending in the billions on climate is basically unheard of at the state level. No other state is doing anything remotely close to this scale.”I could keep going, and Newsom certainly did. He’s got a whole health care agenda meant to integrate physical and mental care called CalAIM that he gets extremely animated talking about (“If you could see me, I’m smiling, I’m so excited by this!”). He also has a plan to let the state bargain for prescription drugs on behalf of not just its public insurance programs but also any private insurers that want to join. He’s trying to convert the Valley State Prison into a rehabilitation center modeled on the Norwegian prisons that progressives admire. He’d love to tell you about his immigration ideas.It’s really a blizzard of plans. Newsom sees what he’s doing as “raising the bar of expectations.” He told me a quote, often attributed to Michelangelo, that he repeats to his staff: “The biggest risk is not that we aim too high and miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it.” He admitted they roll their eyes at this. But it is, for him, a strategy. “We’ve stretched the mind and I don’t think it goes back to its original form.”Perhaps. I’ve spoken to Newsom allies who worry that he’s attempting too much and that it could end with him achieving too little. Every one of these ideas will face serious implementation challenges. Transitional kindergarten, for instance, will require the state to produce 12,000 credentialed pre-K teachers and 20,000 more teacher’s aides in the next four years, according to Fuller. It’s going to require a decade of patient political work on housing to reverse California’s affordability crisis. Newsom’s health care agenda alone would preoccupy a traditional term, but his administration hasn’t done much to communicate its vision. When I asked a leading doctor at the University of California at San Francisco about it, he had no idea what it was.So there are challenges still to come — many of them. But I’d like to see Newsom and the Democratic Legislature get the chance to face them. If they succeed, they will make California the progressive beacon it’s long claimed to be.Additional reporting by Roge Karma.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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      in US Politics

      Newsom has a huge cash advantage in California’s recall vote. It may mean nothing

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      CaliforniaNewsom has a huge cash advantage in California’s recall vote. It may mean nothing The governor’s rivals have only a fraction of his funds, but an unorthodox voting process throws the usual rules out the windowAndrew Gumbel in Los AngelesTue 31 Aug 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 31 Aug 2021 08.50 EDTIf war chests won elections, Gavin Newsom would have nothing to fear from the effort to recall him as governor of California.As the campaign moves into its final frenzied phase ahead of 14 September, the official voting day, Newsom and his supporters have outraised the entire panoply of his would-be replacements by a wildly lopsided margin.Last week, Newsom’s fundraising haul surpassed the $58m he raised in 2018, when he first ran for governor and won, and that total is on track to hit $70m or more before all is said and done. The pro-recall effort, by contrast, has raised only about $8m, and only three of the 46 candidates to replace Newsom have raised seven figures on their own account.Larry Elder, the Trump acolyte and firebrand conservative talkshow host, has established himself as the frontrunning challenger with a haul of about $6m, and the only Republican to eclipse that total, the businessman and perennial candidate John Cox, is largely writing checks to himself.Newsom’s huge fundraising advantage guarantees absolutely nothing, however, because the unorthodox, rarely tested rules of the recall don’t allow the incumbent to face off directly with his opponents. Rather, the ballot is split into two parts: the first asking voters whether Newsom deserves to stay in office, and the second asking who should replace him if he doesn’t.Apathetic voters could hand California recall to Republicans: ‘Folks seem unaware’Read moreWhile money can be very useful to an incumbent in a normal election to create a clear contrast with a challenger whose policy positions may be unpalatable to a majority of voters, that’s not the situation Newsom faces, because he is excluded from the second question on the ballot. Polls indicate that he may win two or three times as many votes as Elder, but that won’t help him if he doesn’t reach 50% on the first, yes-or-no recall question.And it’s far from clear that he can buy his way out of that problem – even in a state that last year voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a 30-point margin.“There are a number of forces driving this election and they are only partly controllable by having a lot of money,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist who runs the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “What Newsom’s faced with is 100% a mobilization election, not a persuasion election … And campaign strategists are still learning how to mobilize voters.”Money can, of course, buy television ads and fund get-out-the-vote operations. But the challenge for Newsom in an election that does not follow the usual calendar, and has not yet fired up registered Democrats the way it has fired up anti-Newsom Republicans, is to persuade low-propensity voters to send in the absentee ballots sitting on their kitchen tables. And that, Sonenshein said, was a much trickier proposition – “more of an art than a science”.California has a long track record of humiliating candidates who thought they could win office through sheer force of financial muscle. But the recall is also an outlier by US political standards, a constitutionally questionable process designed more than a century ago that doesn’t follow the usual patterns – concerning money or anything else.That, in turn, has raised two interesting questions. One, if money is only so useful to the anti-recall forces, how come people are showering Newsom with so much of it? And, two, if the recall is giving the Republicans their best – perhaps their only – shot at high office in a bluer-than-blue state, how come their donors are largely staying away?Think California’s recall election doesn’t affect you? It really does | The Week in PatriarchyRead moreOn the Democratic side, campaign experts say, special interest groups are writing checks to Newsom largely because the recall provides them with a unique opportunity to do so and because they see only advantages in giving to a Democratic party that controls a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature and, one way or another, is likely to win the next regularly scheduled gubernatorial election in November 2022. While individual contributions in an election are capped at $32,500 per candidate, contributions to a pro- or anti-recall campaign have no legal limits.“Even if Newsom loses,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican political consultant who teaches political communications at Berkeley and the University of Southern California, “California donor interests won’t have to risk harming their relationships in Sacramento in any significant way … Even if Newsom isn’t in a position to show his gratitude, in about a year the next Democratic governor will be.”Among the biggest donors to the anti-recall effort are Reed Hastings, the Netflix chief executive, who supported one of Newsom’s primary challengers in 2018; the prison guards’ union, which does not give to Democrats exclusively but won a pay raise earlier this year that Newsom championed against the advice of his budget analyst; and the teachers’ union, whose previous support for Newsom became a political liability during the worst of the Covid-19 lockdowns because schools remained shut under union pressure.On the Republican side, the lack of funding enthusiasm reflects a broader change in the party since the only previous gubernatorial recall in California, in 2003. Back then, the GOP threw its weight wholeheartedly behind the campaign to kick out the then governor, Gray Davis, and replace him with its superstar alternative, Arnold Schwarzenegger.This time, by contrast, the party played no role in gathering signatures for a recall petition, which was spearheaded by a retired sheriff’s sergeant from the Central Valley who has frequently expressed frustration with the state Republican party’s leadership. The party has also stayed largely out of the race itself, offering less than $200,000 to the recall campaign – a stark contrast to the more than $2m that the California Democratic party has kicked in for Newsom.“The California Republican party isn’t spending a lot of money on this race because they don’t have a lot of money,” said Schnur.The party is demoralized all around, since it has won no statewide office in California since Schwarzenegger and is increasingly eclipsed by its own grassroots, who have acted with increasing autonomy – some might say defiance – in the age of Trump. They, not the party, have fueled Elder’s rise over the previous frontrunner, the more moderate former mayor of San Diego, Kevin Faulconer, and over Cox, Newsom’s challenger in 2018 who lost then by more than 20 percentage points.Money has not been the determining factor in any of these developments. Indeed, according to Schnur, California’s most reliable Republican donors are already looking forward to next year and a handful of competitive congressional races in California that could help swing control of the US House of Representatives back to the GOP. “It’s only recently that Newsom’s chances became an open question,” Schnur said, “and these donors generally like to be in early rather than late.”If the recall is challenging received wisdom in both parties about how to finance and run an election campaign – albeit for diametrically opposed reasons – that’s partly because there is no reliable playbook to ride what is proving to be a pretty untamable horse. “You’re talking about what in European terms would be a snap election,” Sonenshein said. “And we don’t have snap elections … It’s still better to have more money. But everyone assumes your likelihood of winning is dependent on how much money you have, and I’m not sure that’s true.”TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      How Did Deep Blue California Get Played by Recall-Happy Republicans?

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      The subject line of a recent fund-raising email from Gavin Newsom, the politically embattled governor of California, reads like the wheedling apologia of a busted boyfriend: “Can I please have a chance to explain?”What Mr. Newsom wants to explain is why he desperately needs donations to fight the “partisan, Republican-led recall” in which he is currently embroiled — and that polling suggests he could very well lose.California has way more registered Democrats than Republicans, and the latter are indeed driving this recall effort. But Republicans are all revved up about the fight, making the to-recall-or-not-to-recall split among likely voters uncomfortably close. Depending on who bothers to participate in the Sept. 14 election, Mr. Newsom could soon find himself out of a job. If that happens, his likely successor looks to be a right-wing, outrage-peddling misogynistic radio host who opposes abortion rights, mask mandates and any type of minimum wage.So much for America’s political dynamics getting less weird after Donald Trump.How did Mr. Newsom, the Democratic governor of deep-blue California, find himself in this pickle? Like any leader, he has had his share of stumbles. He has also been hammered by forces largely beyond his control — a deadly pandemic, raging wildfires, economic turmoil and an energized, MAGA-fied Republican Party seeking payback for Mr. Trump’s electoral thumping last year, to name just a few.All elected officials, of course, must contend with unhappy constituents and partisan passions. But California leaders face an additional challenge: an out-of-touch recall system adopted more than a century ago that invites frequent, even frivolous, attempts to oust officials for any perceived offense. Every California governor since 1960 has endured at least one recall attempt. In his first term, Mr. Newsom has faced five. The only Republican to capture the state’s governorship in the past two decades was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won as part of the 2003 recall of the Democrat Gray Davis.Why fret now about a process that has been around so long and, while promiscuously used, rarely succeeds? For starters, it is undemocratic — some say even unconstitutional. It is also ripe for abuse by a Republican Party that has grown increasingly anti-majoritarian and antidemocratic. Nationwide, the G.O.P. has basically given up trying to build winning electoral majorities and instead focused on tilting the playing field in its favor. Refusing to consider a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee? Check. Trying to meddle with the census? Check. Passing restrictive voting laws? Check. Trying to overturn a free and fair presidential election? Check. And so on. There is no reason for California to allow its flawed recall system to facilitate this ignoble mission.No question, Mr. Newsom has made mistakes — most memorably, last year’s French Laundry fiasco. It would have been bad enough for him to be caught gallivanting at a posh restaurant during a lethal, economically crushing pandemic. But to get spotted doing so without a mask, even as he was lecturing others to mask up and stay home? Pure idiocy. Small wonder that his rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me display turbocharged a previously plodding recall effort originally organized by conservatives miffed about his handling of issues like immigration.Hypocritical, entitled cluelessness notwithstanding, Mr. Newsom, like many governors, is an obvious focus for all the rage and frustration percolating as the pandemic drags on. This might not be quite so problematic if everything else in the state were hunky-dory. But it’s wildfire season again, meaning that even areas not threatened with flaming destruction are plagued by smoke-clogged air and creepy-colored skies. Then there are the crises of homelessness and a rise in homicides. It’s enough to make anyone crabby. And crabby voters, even many Democrats, might not feel moved to head to the polls or even mail in their ballots to save him.Mr. Newsom’s conservative critics, by contrast, are highly motivated to kick him to the curb. Aware of this enthusiasm gap, the governor has been begging Democrats to “wake up” and see this race as a referendum not on his leadership so much as on Trumpism. As Mr. Newsom frames it, his ouster would be a blow to the national Democratic Party and the entire cause of liberal democracy.Whatever the governor’s fate, his battle has spotlighted the peculiarities in a recall system that many feel is overdue for reform. For starters, the state has an unusually low signature hurdle for recall petitions: enough registered voters to equal 12 percent of the turnout in the previous election for governor — in this case, close to 1.5 million. Most recall states have higher thresholds: 15, 25, 30, even 40 percent. As The Los Angeles Times noted in a recent pro-reform editorial, 12 percent “might have been a high bar in 1911, when the population was scattered across the 770-mile length of the state, but is it too low in 2021, when petitions for ballot measures are gathered en masse by paid staff in parking lots?”The voting process itself is also troubling. The question of whether to recall an incumbent and the question of who should replace him or her appear on the same ballot. The incumbent must clear 50 percent to remain in office. Failing that, whichever replacement candidate pulls the most votes wins, no matter how tiny the plurality. For this recall, there will be 46 aspiring replacements on the ballot. If Mr. Newsom pulls, say, 49.5 percent of the vote, then whichever challenger does slightly better than the rest will become the leader of the most populous state in the nation and the fifth-largest economy in the world.“In other California elections,” The Los Angeles Times pointed out, “a candidate cannot win without the support of a majority of voters. If a candidate doesn’t win outright, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff.” This helps protect the system from manipulation by daffy or dangerous fringe groups and candidates with narrow but intense appeal. Why should recalls be any different?Many California voters seem to agree. While the vast majority of likely voters support having a recall process (86 percent), two-thirds believe it should be reformed, according to a July survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. Among the more popular potential changes are raising the signature requirement to 25 percent (55 percent support), requiring a runoff if no replacement candidate receives a majority (68 percent) and establishing standards that limit the reasons for which an incumbent may be recalled to illegal or unethical behavior (60 percent).These are hardly the only issues to consider, prompting some political observers to call for the creation of a bipartisan commission to explore possible reforms.Mr. Newsom is correct that this fight is about more than his political future. It should also serve as a wake-up call for Californians to improve an outdated system that is undemocratic and that gives too much sway to the swampy fringes of America’s political ecosystem.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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      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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      in Elections

      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