Elections, California Gubernatorial Recall (2021)

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    What We Learned About California in 2021

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    Here’s what we learned about the Golden State this strange year.A firefighter worked to save a home in Meyers as the Caldor fire raged in August.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesLooking back on this year as we head into the new one, it may feel as if not much changed in California during 2021.A year ago, Californians were hunkering down against surging Covid-19 infections, as they are now. Although vaccines had arrived, distribution was a challenge. Holiday plans had been disrupted.I was even writing this newsletter. (This time, I’m filling in for Soumya, who’s taking a much-deserved break.)But we’ve been making progress. Hospitals are not overwhelmed in Los Angeles, one of the national centers of the pandemic at this time last year. Millions of Californians are vaccinated and have gotten booster shots, providing them with a level of protection against illness and hospitalization that felt unimaginable a year ago. The Rose Parade is back on.And we still managed to deepen our understanding of this vexing, beautiful state. Here are some of the stories that taught my colleagues and me something new — or, at least, made us think — about California:Gov. Gavin Newsom’s sound defeat of the recallGov. Gavin Newsom successfully battled the recall effort against him by framing it as a national political issue.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesIt has long been relatively easy to attempt a recall of the governor of California. But as my colleague Shawn Hubler reported, there are reasons that the only person to have successfully unseated the state’s leader is the singular Arnold Schwarzenegger.Although Californians spent months in a state of limbo — wondering whether we’d be asked to decide whether to oust Newsom from office and if so, when — once the election was on, the governor tried to beat back the campaign against him by leaning into national political divisions. The choice, he said, was effectively between him and former President Donald J. Trump, between science and conspiracy theories. The strategy worked, as voters across the state — including in the political seesaw that is Orange County — rejected the recall.A wave of anti-Asian violenceUnited Peace Collaborative volunteers, in blue, patrolled San Francisco’s Chinatown after attacks aimed at members of the A.A.P.I. community.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesEarly this year, a string of jarring attacks, captured on video, reignited simmering fear and hurt among Asian Americans who have felt like targets for violence and harassment. For many, the anxiety started with the former president’s rhetoric — his insistence on calling the coronavirus “the China virus” or the “Kung Flu” — but in 2021, that anxiety and fear coalesced into outrage.That was before March, when a gunman shot and killed eight people in Georgia, six of whom were women of Asian descent working in spas. Across the country and in California, my colleagues and I reported, Asian Americans were at once devastated and galvanized. Leaders demanded serious action to address anti-Asian discrimination.But as my colleagues Kellen Browning and Brian X. Chen recently wrote, agreeing to fight racism is one thing. Reaching consensus on what that actually entails is quite another.Climate change’s continuing chokeholdIn 2020, while huge swaths of the West burned, many tourists sought refuge at and around Lake Tahoe, the azure gem of the Sierra Nevada. This year, as the Caldor fire burned dangerously close, residents were forced to flee in an exodus that felt symbolic: a cherished sanctuary, suffocating in smoke.This year, in addition to contending with fire and power outages, Californians became acutely aware that the state is running out of water. (My colleague Thomas Fuller wrote about a Mendocino innkeeper pondering the reality of $5 showers.) And scientists say drought is very much in the future, even if it is raining or snowing where you are now. But as I learned when I reported on San Diego’s long, difficult journey to water stability, the situation isn’t hopeless.The enduring changes brought about by the pandemicDiego Ponce selling fruit from his family’s stand at the Clement Street Farmers Market.Clara Mokri for The New York TimesLast year felt like one long string of crises, each one colliding with the one that came before it, like cars piling up on the freeway. (Drive safe this weekend, by the way.) This year, it felt as if there were finally opportunities to take stock of ways the pandemic helped us break free from some of the conventions of life before.In California, as my colleague Conor Dougherty reported, a small pilot program aimed at getting homeless people off the streets, away from Covid-19, and into hotels, also showed a possible path forward for making a dent in the state’s enormous homelessness crisis.As Soumya reported in October, Clement Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District was spared the financial ruin that ravaged other cities in large part because it is relatively self-contained — residents can find most of what they need within a short walk or bike ride. Clement Street’s success, she wrote, shows how neighborhoods of the future can be resilient.Here are a few more uplifting stories that defined this year:Britney Spears pleaded with a Los Angeles judge to end the conservatorship that controlled her life for 13 years. It was an astonishing development and a request the judge granted, finally freeing Spears.A deaf football team took the state by storm.Betty Reid Soskin — the woman synonymous with the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, once described as “sort of like Bette Davis, Angela Davis and Yoda all rolled into one” — turned 100.A 2018 voter-approved California ballot measure, to take effect Jan. 1, 2022, set the nation’s toughest living space standards for breeding pigs.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe rest of the newsNew laws 2022: With bacon leading the roundup, here’s a list of new laws going into effect starting in 2022, The Associated Press reports.5 million cases: California is the first state in the country to record five million coronavirus infections, The A.P. reports.State Medicaid overhaul: The federal government approved California’s overhaul of CalAIM, an insurance program for low-income and disabled residents, The A.P. reports.SOUTHERN CALIFORNIAHoliday Bowl canceled: The 2021 San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl was canceled after U.C.L.A. pulled out hours before kickoff, City News Service reports.CENTRAL CALIFORNIAWildlife corridor: With the acquisition of one final property, a 72,000-acre preserve centered in the Tehachapi Mountains was completed after 13 years, The Bakersfield Californian reports.Farming in a drought: Though California is experiencing the driest decade in history, farmers added a half-­million more acres of permanent crops, Technology Review reports.NORTHERN CALIFORNIADiscord: In 2015, Jason Citron, a computer programmer, turned his video game’s chatting feature into its sole product and named it Discord.Reservoir levels: Though Northern California reservoirs are still at historically low levels, December precipitation gave them a boost, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.Missing skier: Severe snow storms hinder the search for a skier who disappeared Christmas Day in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, NBC reports.Mask mandate: Bay Area Counties are rescinding exemptions that allowed masks to come off in places like gyms, offices, and places of worship, SFist reports.Boosters: San Francisco will require some workers to receive a coronavirus vaccine booster by Feb. 1, The Associated Press reports.Shark attack: A man killed in a Morro Bay shark attack was identified as a Sacramento resident, The Sacramento Bee reports.Andrew Scrivani for The New York TimesWhat we’re eatingVegetarian chili with winter vegetables.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhere we’re travelingToday’s travel tip comes from Lori Cassels, a reader who lives in Alameda. Lori recommends Point Reyes National Seashore:“Kayak on Tomales Bay, and you can even see bioluminescence in the new moon nights. Hike any trail and you will awed by natural beauty at every turn. Eat oysters or drink local wine and drive by Tule elk. And it is only an hour away from where live.”Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.Tell usHow are you marking the start of the 2022? Are you making any New Year’s resolutions?Share with us at CAtoday@nytimes.com.And before you go, some good newsSometimes, two birds in the bush may be better than a bird in the hand.It seems as if that would be the case, anyway, for the avian enthusiasts who recently participated in the Golden Gate Audubon Society’s 122nd annual Christmas bird count.Their mission, The San Francisco Chronicle reports, was to tally every bird within about 177 square miles over the course of a day.That task, birders said, requires a kind of Zen-like patience.“It can be hard. It’s not for everyone,” Terry Horrigan told The Chronicle. “Sometimes, for hours, you’re just looking and looking and looking.”Thanks for reading. We’re off tomorrow and will back in your inbox on Monday. See you in 2022.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Sunscreen letters (3 letters).Soumya Karlamangla, Jonah Candelario and Mariel Wamsley contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      No, California Isn’t Doomed

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      California has been struggling. It has stumbled through the Covid-19 pandemic and recession, afflicted by wildfires, an epidemic of homelessness and stratospheric housing prices. Last year it experienced its first population decline in records going back to 1900. Its latest mess was a costly and unsuccessful campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.The state’s problems are real. Nevertheless, there are positive signs. The first step toward fixing problems is recognizing them, and on that score, Californians have grown increasingly aware of what’s wrong. California is also blessed with abundant resources that enable it to fix problems that would be daunting for less endowed states.Housing is a good example. Prices are crazy: On Sept. 16, the California Association of Realtors announced that the median sale price in the state in August was $827,940, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Only 23 percent of California households could afford to buy a median-priced home in the second quarter, down from one-third a year earlier, the association announced in August.To make ends meet, many Californians scrimp and save and commute long distances from exurbs; others give up and move to cheaper states. Employers struggle to lure out-of-state recruits. Homeowners can swap one high-priced house for another, but renters can’t buy starter homes because they have no housing equity to use for a down payment. And California’s epidemic of homelessness can be traced in part to a lack of affordable housing.The upside is that almost everyone in California understands that building more housing is essential. More homes are being built in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin combined than in the entire state of California, says Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association.One of Newsom’s first acts after surviving the recall attempt was to sign three bills to increase housing supply. Senate Bill No. 8 extends a 2019 law that accelerates approval of housing projects. Senate Bill No. 9 allows homeowners to build up to three additional housing units on their land. And Senate Bill No. 10 allows environmental review to be sped up for multiunit projects near transit hubs or in urban developments. Those are the latest of dozens of housing bills signed by Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown.The California Environmental Quality Act, signed into law in 1970 by Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor, is valuable on the whole but enables people to use environmental pretexts to resist housing developments in their neighborhoods that they could not as easily oppose otherwise. There’s widespread agreement that this needs to change.Progress, though, is halting. The pace of issuance of permits for housing construction in California is slower now than in 1975, according to data compiled by the state’s Department of Finance and the U.S. Census Bureau. Environmentalists fight efforts to circumscribe the environmental quality act, worrying that legitimate environmental concerns about new projects will be neglected. And local elected officials continue to push back against efforts to increase density, which they perceive as reducing the value of existing homes. In Palo Alto, the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard and Tesla, Mayor Tom DuBois expressed opposition to Senate Bill No. 10, writing that “such legislation echoes more of Russia than of California.”Up against such forces, Dunmoyer, the president of the building industry association, told me that he’s impressed by the “courage” shown by Newsom and the California State Legislature in enacting senate bills 8, 9 and 10. But, he added, “This is a marathon, and we’re still in the first quarter of the marathon race.”Other problems in California should be fixable with effort and good will. As I wrote in my Sept. 8 newsletter, the state’s water shortages could be alleviated by diverting a little water from agriculture to other purposes. Farms account for only 0.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product but more than 80 percent of the water used by people (that is, not counting water that stays in streams, deltas and so on).Homelessness is caused partly by a lack of housing, but also by inadequate treatment of people experiencing mental illness and drug addiction. Many conservatives argue that the state has focused too much on low-income housing as the solution to homelessness. “Focus on treatment first rather than housing first,” says Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics at the right-of-center Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. “Otherwise all we’re doing is taking the problem from the street to the hotel room.”Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-of-center California Budget and Policy Center, disagrees with Winegarden, and calls for more spending on Homekey, the state’s program for housing the homeless. Social services should be “wrapped around,” or integrated with, a home, Hoene says. It’s unfortunate, he says, that “people on different sides of strategies pit the potential solutions against each other.”One advantage that California has in dealing with these and other challenges — fixing K-12 education, lowering the tax burden on families and businesses and so on — is that the state’s finances have improved. The state raised taxes and trimmed spending to brace for the Covid-19 recession, but tax revenues came in unexpectedly high because higher-income workers kept working and the financial markets did well, generating taxable capital gains. The $100 billion California Comeback Plan, which Newsom signed in July, is a Christmas tree of Democratic priorities, including stimulus checks for two out of every three Californians, renter assistance, housing for the homeless, tax relief and grants to small businesses, universal pre-K, college savings accounts for low-income students and investments in infrastructure and wildfire resilience.I bounced this optimistic line of thought off Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who is an expert on cities. He was more pessimistic. “The way our economy is structured, there’s an incredible amount of wealth being minted for a small number of people,” he said. “We have the worst overcrowding. The schools are terrible and they’re going to get worse.” He added, “Used to be a young, ambitious person went to California. I don’t think that’s happening anymore.”It’s hard to argue with a veteran observer of California like Kotkin, who began writing about Silicon Valley in 1975. On the other hand, the bearishness can be overdone. Matthew A. Winkler, editor in chief emeritus of Bloomberg News, observed earlier this year that people love to declare California “doomed.” It ain’t.The readers writeHow you describe a bill depends upon what you are talking about. If you are concerned about too much fiscal stimulus, then taking note of the tax increases and spending cuts makes sense. If you are concerned with the size of government, taking note of spending cuts makes sense, but it does not make sense to reduce the size of the bill by the amount of the tax increases. Same way with a Republican tax cut. If they cut taxes by $1.5 trillion and fully offset it with $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, that is a $1.5 trillion tax cut and that is how it should be described. Only offsetting tax increases should be taken into account.Paul PecorinoTuscaloosa, Ala.The writer is a professor of economics at the University of Alabama.Quote of the day“According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” (2004)Have feedback? Send a note to coy-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      How They Failed: California Republicans, Media Critics and Facebook

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      In a special Opinion Audio bonanza, Jane Coaston (The Argument), Ezra Klein (The Ezra Klein Show) and Kara Swisher (Sway) sit down to discuss what went wrong for the G.O.P. in the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “This was where the nationalization of politics really bit back for Republicans,” Jane says. The three hosts then debate whether the media industry’s criticism of itself does any good at all. “The media tweets like nobody’s watching,” Ezra says. Then the hosts turn to The Wall Street Journal’s revelations in “The Facebook Files” and discuss how to hold Facebook accountable. “We’re saying your tools in the hands of malevolent players are super dangerous,” Kara says, “but we have no power over them whatsoever.”And last, Ezra, Jane and Kara offer recommendations to take you deep into history, fantasy and psychotropics.[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Read more about the subjects in this episode:Jane Coaston, Vox: “How California conservatives became the intellectual engine of Trumpism”Ezra Klein: “Gavin Newsom Is Much More Than the Lesser of Two Evils” and “A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture”Kara Swisher: “The Endless Facebook Apology,” “Don’t Get Bezosed,” “The Medium of the Moment” “‘They’re Killing People’? Biden Isn’t Quite Right, but He’s Not Wrong.” and “The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s Naïveté”(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photographs courtesy of The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce, Alison Bruzek and Nayeema Raza. Engineering, music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Kristin Lin. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen and Blakeney Schick. More

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      In Orange County, the Recall’s Defeat Echoes Years of G.O.P. Erosion

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      Voters struck down the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, continuing the political seesawing that has defined the former Republican stronghold.LADERA RANCH, Calif. — When Gail Grigaux first moved to Ladera Ranch in Orange County from the East Coast more than 15 years ago, she knew she had arrived in the conservative heart of Southern California.“If I met anybody new, I would assume they were Republican,” said Ms. Grigaux, 53, a teacher’s assistant.It often felt that way, even as recently as last year when supporters of former President Donald J. Trump drove golf carts with Trump flags and sold Trump paraphernalia on street corners of the master-planned suburban community. But the Democratic side has been nearly as visible lately. A Ladera Ranch social justice Facebook group formed.“I got my little Black Lives Matter sign,” Ms. Grigaux said. Ladera Ranch, much like Orange County itself, is changing.In 2018, Democrats flipped four House seats in Orange County, turning the county entirely Democratic for the first time in the modern era. But in 2020, Democrats ceded two of those seats back to the Republicans even as Mr. Trump lost both Orange County and California overall.Now, in 2021, Democrats have swung Orange County back once again, helping Gov. Gavin Newsom stop the Republican attempt to recall him. Fifty-two percent of voters in Orange County, including Ms. Grigaux, opposed the recall, compared to 48 percent in favor, though the results are still not official.The county’s seesawing status has consequences far beyond its 3.2 million residents, as strategists of both parties see it as a bellwether of key suburban and diversifying House districts nationwide in the 2022 midterms.Many of the touchstones of Orange County’s storied conservatism — the birthplace (and resting place) of Richard M. Nixon, the incubator of the right-wing John Birch Society, the political base of Ronald Reagan — are now decades out of date. The county has steadily transformed into one of the nation’s premier electoral battlegrounds, a place where political and demographic cross currents are all colliding.Nestled along the scenic coastline south of Los Angeles, Orange County has seen an influx of Asian and Latino residents and a backlash from some white voters resistant to change. The college-educated and affluent white voters who once were the backbone of Orange County Republicanism have increasingly turned away from the G.O.P. in the Trump era.The old Orange County represented the cutting edge of Republican politics. Now, in many ways, the county represents the new face of America, and its divisions.“Orange County used to be reliably Republican when it was fairly homogeneous,” said Jim Brulte, a former chairman of the California Republican Party who lives in San Juan Capistrano. “We’re not that Orange County and we haven’t been that Orange County for two decades.”Today, more than one in three of the county’s residents are Hispanic and more than one in five are Asian, according to census data. Forty-five percent of residents speak a language other than English at home. In Santa Ana, 96 percent of the 45,000 students in the school district are Latino. Not far away is Little Saigon, home to the densest population of Vietnamese Americans in the nation. The two Republicans who won back House seats in 2020, Michelle Steel and Young Kim, are both Asian American women.“In Orange County, if you run a cookie-cutter campaign, you are going to lose,” Mr. Brulte said.In Mr. Newsom’s resounding statewide recall victory, and his narrower advantage in Orange County, Democrats see something of a road map for the midterms. Mr. Newsom had carried Orange County by a narrow 50.1 percent in 2018, the year that Democrats picked up four House seats. He outpaced that margin in the recall, winning 52 percent. Roughly 90 percent of the vote had been counted as of Friday evening, with an estimated 130,000 ballots still to be tallied.A senior adviser to Mr. Newsom, Sean Clegg, said the campaign’s analysis of the remaining ballots suggested the governor’s lead would swell further in the coming weeks. He offered a theory for the governor’s success. “Orange County is national ground zero for the realignment of college-educated voters away from Trump’s Republican Party,” Mr. Clegg said, adding that vaccines had proved a particularly potent issue.Ladera Ranch in Orange County is wealthier than California as a whole, with a median household income of $161,348.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesFifty miles south of Los Angeles, Ladera Ranch is an unincorporated maze of well-kept townhomes and tract mansions first built in the rolling foothills of southern Orange County about two decades ago. Its population of 26,170 is whiter and richer than California as a whole: The median household income, $161,348, is a little more than double the state median.As in other wealthy bedroom communities stretching between Santa Ana and San Diego, many residents are outspoken conservatives who in recent years became ardent supporters of Mr. Trump. Earlier this year, federal investigators raided the Ladera Ranch homes of two men in connection with the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol.Other Trump voters in Ladera Ranch supported the former president more reluctantly.Andrea Dykstra, 40, a stay-at-home mother who has lived in the community for a decade and who identified as “more a libertarian than anything else,” said Mr. Trump was the best choice of less-than-ideal options.“Things are getting so polarized, it’s almost impossible to find more moderate voices,” she said.Ms. Dykstra was, however, passionate about recalling Mr. Newsom, whom she called corrupt and overreaching in his coronavirus pandemic restrictions.“I felt much more strongly that Newsom as governor has a lot more power over my day-to-day than the president does,” she said.Wendy Mage, 57, remembered that when she first lived in Ladera Ranch more than a decade ago, her neighbors vocally opposed gay marriage during California’s epic battle over Proposition 8, a measure to ban same-sex marriage.She moved away and returned with her husband in June to be closer to her mother. This time, she was pleasantly surprised to see a rainbow flag flying.“Oh,” she recalled thinking. “Ladera’s coming around.”Even the smallest shifts in Orange County are tracked closely in Washington. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he was feeling bullish after studying the recall results in Orange County — not just for particular seats up for grabs in 2022 but because he sees the region as an indicator of what’s to come.“What I think is important about Orange County is that it’s a good approximation for a battleground district,” Mr. Maloney said. “And it’s a good barometer for where things stand.”For now, the recall is clinging to a roughly 9,500-vote lead in the district of Ms. Steel, the Republican whose seat is contained fully in Orange County. In another Orange County congressional seat, held by Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat, the Republican recall effort was trailing by more than 18,000 votes.Ms. Porter downplayed any comparison between Mr. Newsom’s campaign and her own next year. While Mr. Newsom’s anti-recall rhetoric worked statewide, she said, “that is not a strategy that allows you to productively engage Republicans.”In contrast, Ms. Porter said her emphasis on oversight and accountability work has resonated with constituents regardless of party, even as she has carved out a national reputation as an outspoken progressive.Looking ahead to next year, she said it would be tough to guess “how you would best engage across party lines,” without knowing more about the direction of the Republican Party in Orange County and beyond.Voters cast their recall ballots in Anaheim in Orange County, which has steadily transformed into an electoral battleground. Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMr. Trump made his biggest gains in Orange County in 2020 around Little Saigon and in Santa Ana, compared to his 2016 results, making inroads in the Vietnamese American community and among working-class Latinos as he hammered Democrats as socialists.But a preliminary 2021 results map from Vance Ulrich, of the nonpartisan consulting firm Redistricting Partners, shows Mr. Newsom’s anti-recall campaign succeeding in places like Garden Grove, Westminster and Santa Ana, cities where Mr. Trump had improved his performance in 2020. Majority-Vietnamese precincts swung heavily from their support of Mr. Trump in 2020 to opposing the recall, Mr. Ulrich said.At the same time, Irvine, one of the largest cities in the country where Asians are the dominant group, has become more solidly blue territory.Marc Marino, 26, has lived in Irvine for most of his life, moving with his parents, who are of Filipino descent, from Hong Kong when he was small. He said his first introduction to politics was through his family’s church, where he remembered leaders advocating Proposition 8, the measure to ban same-sex marriage.Mr. Marino said he eventually stopped going to church, and now identifies as “more of a Berniecrat.” Many of his friends from home have also parted political ways with their more conservative immigrant parents.“Most of my friends have shifted more left,” he said, “which I didn’t expect.”On Tuesday, he cast a ballot against the recall. As a health care worker, he supported Mr. Newsom’s pandemic response.Focusing on the pandemic, the Newsom campaign relentlessly pounded Larry Elder, the Republican front-runner, as a Trump-style candidate who wouldn’t prioritize containing the virus.The result statewide was that 64 percent of vaccinated independent voters opposed the recall, according to David Binder, Mr. Newsom’s pollster. The small slice of unvaccinated independents went overwhelmingly in favor of the recall.“Vaccinations are the driving issue polarizing our electorate in a way that is stronger than standard demographics,” Mr. Binder said.Neal Kelley, who has served as the Orange County voter registrar for the last 16 years, began his job when Republicans still dominated the county rolls. Now there are roughly 10 percent more registered Democrats than Republicans.Mr. Kelley is already hearing word of national efforts by both parties to boost their voter registration ahead of 2022. For now, Democrats keep pressing their advantage.Between the 2020 election and the recall, Republicans added 654 voters to their party rolls, according to state records.In that same time, the Democrats added 22,564. More

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      California's Governor Says Two of His Children Tested Positive for the Coronavirus

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      SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who four days ago beat back a pandemic-fueled attempt to recall him, is “following all Covid protocols” with his family after two of his four children tested positive for the coronavirus.“The governor, the first partner and their two other children have since tested negative,” Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, confirmed late Friday. The children, she said, tested positive on Thursday and have mild symptoms. They are being quarantined.The report came on the heels of Mr. Newsom’s victory over a Republican-led recall attempt that had gained traction as Californians became impatient with health restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. The rate of new Covid-19 cases in California is among the lowest in the nation, and the rate of vaccination is among the highest.The governor’s children, however, are all under 12, the threshold age for inoculation. In a victory speech Tuesday night, the governor mentioned that his oldest daughter was about to turn 12 this weekend.“The Newsoms continue to support masking for unvaccinated individuals indoors to stop the spread and advocate for vaccinations as the most effective way to end this pandemic,” said the governor’s wife, Jennifer Siebel-Newsom.Governor Newsom’s spokeswoman did not specify which of his children had tested positive for the virus. But this is not the first time it has affected his family. In November, three of his children were quarantined after being exposed to a California Highway Patrol officer in the family’s security detail who was infected, and one child was quarantined after a classmate tested positive.This summer, the Newsoms pulled their children out of a summer camp after it was determined that masking requirements were not being strictly followed.The governor has been vaccinated since April, when he received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a news conference. The unvaccinated head of the recall effort, Orrin Heatlie, said this week that he had recovered after being sidelined with Covid-19 during the last weeks of the campaign. More

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      Jeffrey Katzenberg Talks About His Billion-Dollar Flop

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      The public failure of his start-up Quibi hasn’t stopped Jeffrey Katzenberg from doubling down on tech. A Hollywood power broker, he headed up Disney in the 1980s and ’90s and co-founded a rival studio, DreamWorks, before finding a puzzle he could not yet solve: getting people to pay for short-format content. Investors gave him and the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman $1.75 billion to build a video platform, but not enough customers opened up their wallets, at $4.99 a month, and Quibi folded within a year of its launch. Katzenberg says the problems were product-market fit and the Covid pandemic, not competition from TikTok or YouTube.[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, Kara Swisher and Katzenberg delve into Quibi’s demise, the shifting power dynamics in Hollywood and his pivot to Silicon Valley. They also discuss his influence in another sphere: politics. And the former Hollywood executive, who co-chaired a fund-raiser to help fend off California’s recent recall effort, offers some advice to Gov. Gavin Newsom.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photograph by WndrCoThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen and Caitlin O’Keefe and edited by Nayeema Raza; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Liriel Higa. More

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      California’s Housing Crisis Looms Large for Gavin Newsom

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      Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.The median home price in California has eclipsed $800,000. Tenants in the state are among the most cost-burdened in the country. Each night more than 100,000 residents sleep outside or in their cars. A crisis, a disaster, the religion of sorrow, a disgrace — whatever journalists and politicians call it, people across the state, including all the major candidates for governor in the recall vote this week, agree that the situation is untenable.The question is what, if anything, the governor can do about it. It’s something that Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the past three years talking about. And now that he has won a decisive victory in the recall election, which cost close to $300 million and consumed the state’s and governor’s attention for several months, Mr. Newsom is turning his attention back to problems like housing.In many ways the answer there is different from what it was when he took office in 2019.Right now the focus is Senate Bill 9, which would allow duplexes in neighborhoods throughout the state and is one of the hundreds of unsigned bills that piled up on Mr. Newsom’s desk during the recall campaign. But even if Mr. Newsom signs it, which he is widely expected to do in the coming days, his legacy on housing is likely to be less about laws passed on his watch than his administration’s ability to enforce them. That’s because the executive branch has gained much more power over state housing policy than it had even a few years ago, after years of state frustration with how difficult the local governments make it to build housing in California.Mr. Newsom’s administration has come to embrace the role, taking action like suing cities for not building enough to keep up with population growth and creating a team to ensure that cities approve new housing. The moves are part of a nationwide shift in power — away from city councils and toward statehouses — over the $1 trillion annual residential construction market.“It used to be that housing was run by the local planning departments and California governors didn’t really pay attention,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “That has changed.”Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has tried to get through the pandemic emergency by extending the state’s eviction moratorium even as the federal one lapsed, and pouring money from the state’s budget surplus and various coronavirus relief packages into homeless funding and programs like an effort to turn hotels into supportive housing.But California remains one of the most difficult places in America to build housing, causing a supply-and-demand imbalance. It is the leading edge of a nationwide problem that is pricing middle-income families out of ownership and has one in four rental households paying more than half its pretax income on rent.A polling site in El Centro, Calif., on Tuesday, when a statewide vote kept Gov. Gavin Newsom in office.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPlanners, economists and both political parties have long called for states to use their power to ease the housing shortage by breaking local logjams. They point out that suburban governments have little incentive to fix the problem since they are accountable to homeowners who prefer that prices only go up. That conundrum has vexed would-be housing reformers since at least the 1970s, and emerged during California’s recall campaign in the Republican debates, where candidates talked a lot about adding more housing but shied away from discussions of where that housing would go.These often contradictory comments were a perfect encapsulation of Californians’ mood: They are universally unhappy with the state’s cost of living and the tent cities that have appeared along freeways, in parks and on beaches. But homeowners remain fiercely protective of their power to say what gets built near them. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and a Republican candidate in the recall election, all but ran away from his own pro-density policies in California’s second-largest city by saying, “When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that’s wrong.”Mr. Newsom has tried to walk this same line. In 2018, he campaigned on a “Marshall Plan for housing” that had a goal of delivering 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. He came to regret the figure once he was in the governor’s chair, and it became fodder for his leading recall opponent, the talk show host Larry Elder, who seized on it as an example of broken promises. Mr. Elder did not need sophisticated research to find fault with the number: In a state that permits around 100,000 housing units a year, delivering 3.5 million — 35 years of housing at the current pace — is close to a physical impossibility.Mr. Newsom has been mostly quiet about big zoning legislation ever since. He did not take a position on Senate Bill 50, a contentious measure that would have allowed apartment buildings in neighborhoods across the state. And he was largely quiet about Senate Bill 9 as it passed through both houses of the State Legislature and lingered on his desk.Mr. Newsom, at a rally on Monday in Long Beach, Calif., has emphasized enforcement of existing housing laws.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat he has done instead is enforce existing laws more aggressively than his predecessors did. Two weeks after Mr. Newsom assumed office, California’s attorney general sued Huntington Beach for failing to plan for sufficient new housing. Since then, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sent hundreds of letters telling cities to change or simplify their planning codes to comply with state law.The governor’s most recent budget allocated $4.3 million to staff a “housing accountability unit” made up of planners and lawyers who will monitor local governments’ housing decisions and intervene when they’re not following state law.Zoning defines a neighborhood’s physical character and who might be living next door, so it has captured most of the attention in California’s housing debate. But over the past few years, the Legislature quietly passed a slew of smaller measures that when strung together have radically changed the relationship between state and local government. The new rules change how much housing cities have to plan for, make it harder for them to stop developers from building and ultimately deprive them of funding and local control if they drift too far from state mandates.Because they transfer more oversight of housing from localities to Sacramento, the question of how aggressively those laws are enforced has fallen to the executive branch. It’s one thing for the state to pass laws to desegregate neighborhoods, set aside more land for subsidized housing and require cities to permit backyard cottages. If enforcing them isn’t a priority — which has long been the case with housing laws — they are bound to be ignored.In an interview after the recall vote, Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who works on housing policy, rattled off a series of bill numbers and the esoteric text of planning codes to point out dozens of housing regulations that remain mostly unused. Environmental measures that support increasing density to reduce car trips. Various laws allowing backyard units. A way for developers to sue cities that don’t follow their own zoning rules. These are the types of statutes the new housing accountability unit will try to enforce.“I’m never going to say we’re done passing laws and we can’t do more,” Mr. Elliott said. “But what we really need to do if we want to see units spring up is get several dozen people thinking about this and only this, and empower them to reach out to cities.”Will Mr. Newsom ever get anywhere near 3.5 million new units? No. Even if it were politically possible, it would strain lumber and labor supplies.It took California several decades to get into a housing crisis this bad. Lofty rhetoric and promises for millions of units make do for a campaign slogan, but the reality looks more like a process of slowly digging out. More

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      Newsom Beat the Recall, Now Comes the Hard Part: Governing California

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing multiple crises. Ninety percent of California is in extreme drought. The median home price has eclipsed $800,000. Some 100,000 people are sleeping outside or in their cars.SACRAMENTO — For nearly a year — while a pandemic raged, while wildfires roared, while smoke smothered the once-pristine blue skies over Lake Tahoe — Gov. Gavin Newsom has had to simultaneously govern the nation’s most populous state and beat back an attempted recall.On Wednesday, he emerged victorious — but still had multiple crises to confront. Ninety percent of the state was in extreme drought. The median home price had eclipsed $800,000. Some 100,000 people were sleeping outside or in their cars nightly. And more than 6 million public school children were struggling to make up the learning they had missed because of the coronavirus pandemic.Hundreds of bills on his desk waited to be signed, including one to allow duplexes in single-family neighborhoods across California and another enshrining the vote-by-mail rules that helped keep him in office.The election’s resounding rejection of the long-shot, Republican-led attempt to oust Mr. Newsom appeared not only to strengthen him for re-election next year, but also to bestow a mandate. As the vote count continued on Wednesday, the recall was being rejected by roughly 2-1. The margin echoes the state’s Democrat-Republican split and the scale of Mr. Newsom’s 2018 election, which was a landslide.Voters cast their ballots at Salazar Park in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesBut what the governor can do with that mandate is unclear. The recall campaign was long and divisive, political experts say, and the state’s problems increasingly resist simple solutions. Many more straightforward challenges were met last year with a massive state surplus and a flood of pandemic aid from the Biden administration.Now — although Mr. Newsom has the advantage of a unified base, a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature and the state’s attention — what remains are issues that require far more than money.“These are problems that take time,” said Jerry Brown, who governed the state for two eight-year stints in the 1970s and again from 2010 to 2018. “Reducing carbon emissions. Reversing the gross inequalities. Being able to keep the crime rate down. Dealing with so many people who have so little that their lives and families are disintegrating.”The recall, Mr. Brown said, was “sound and fury signifying very little” — an “expensive blip” that in a couple of weeks “will be not much more than a footnote.” But, he said, “it’s down now to the bread and butter issues. And they’re the same old issues that have been around for a long time in modern California.”Mr. Newsom offered few details during his campaign on how he would tackle these challenges, in part because of the tenor of the recall. The Republican candidates seeking to replace him framed the campaign as a referendum on him, from his handling of homelessness to the rise of urban crime rates and his decision to party at a luxe wine country restaurant after he had asked Californians to stay home during the pandemic. Larry Elder, who lost a bid to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, thanks supporters who attended his election night party in Costa Mesa after polls closed Tuesday night.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesBut except for his coronavirus policies, which have been pointed to as a potential national model, the governor largely avoided making his agenda part of the recall discussion. Aiming to animate the state’s Democratic base in an off-year special election, he portrayed the recall as a battle to rescue the nation’s biggest blue state from hard right extremists, and as part of a larger, national war on the divisiveness of former President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans who admire him.Outside a victory party afterward, he acknowledged the challenges that await him, but resisted much elaboration.“Let the dust settle,” he said.At least part of the calculus will include next year’s regularly scheduled gubernatorial election. Although the governor is unlikely to face much meaningful opposition, 2022 is a regular election year — a time when controversial legislation tends to be set aside.“It will be interesting to see what he wants to focus on,” said Toni Atkins, the president pro tempore of the California Senate, noting that much of the Legislature also will be campaigning. The dominance of Democrats in the State Senate and Assembly masks an often unwieldy range of views — Bay Area progressives, Central Valley moderates, coastal environmentalists, jobs-first pragmatists.Voting at Central Baptist Church in El Centro. Californians rejected the recall by about 2-1 as of Wednesday morning.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesThe challenge was apparent even within the county-by-county recall tallies, with huge majorities for the governor in Democratic strongholds such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area, thinner margins in San Diego and Orange County and much of the far rural north voting to replace him.Legislation of remarkable sweep quietly passed this year, even as the recall consumed the public’s attention, Ms. Atkins said: preschool for all of the state’s 4-year-olds, stimulus checks for low- and middle-income people, health insurance for undocumented immigrants 50 and older.But climate bills stalled, casualties in many cases of the split between parts of the state that prioritize jobs and parts that prioritize action on climate change.She predicted the governor would resume work on priorities he had held from the start of his administration, including affordable housing and early childhood education. But, she added, his victory has whetted legislative ambitions, too.The fifth-largest economy in the world and home to some 40 million people, California is known both for its bounty and for its epic flaws. It leads the nation in billionaires; when housing is factored in, it also has America’s highest poverty level.Its coastline is renowned, but towering wildfires, burning over as much as a million acres, have become a terrifying annual occurrence. A mega-drought has sent the price of agricultural water soaring and tens of thousands of farms are on reduced water rations.One hurdle in carrying out ambitious policy objectives, experts said, was a political lesson that emerged from the recall: Polarization pays. Governor Gavin Newsom delivers remarks on the state’s wildfires in Sacramento on Monday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPartisan rhetoric mobilized voters on both sides, handing Mr. Newsom his win and raising the profile of an otherwise withering Republican Party. Any group that, in the past, might have been daunted by the challenge of launching a statewide recall learned that even a lost cause can disrupt an opponent for months, Mark Baldassare, president of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, said.But that isn’t necessarily conducive to governance, he added.“This recall election has just really stirred the pot,” said Mr. Baldassare. “Will people find common ground? It’s going to be hard.”Fernando Guerra, a professor and the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said the governor has every tool at his disposal to take bold action if he wants to — a supportive White House, a legislative supermajority, a state surplus and billions of federal dollars in pandemic aid. Leveraging those advantages could leave a legacy to rival the state’s most iconic governors, he said, including Jerry Brown and his father, who governed in the 1960s, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.“California will be positioned to have the most extraordinary two or three years of government and state-led innovation since the Pat Brown era — or California could be mired in political paralysis and doomed to incremental decline. And it will all depend on Gavin Newsom,” he said.“If crises are opportunities, then this is the greatest opportunity any sitting governor in America will ever have.”Thomas Fuller contributed reporting from Sacramento. More

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      Democrats Continue to Struggle With Men of Color

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      The big headline is that the California recall failed. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom gets to keep his job. He handily fought off the Republican challenge.But there is a worrisome detail in the data, one that keeps showing up, one that Democrats would do well to deal with: Black and Latino men are not hewing as close to the party line as Black and Latina women.There are, of course, issues with exit polls, and results often change as more votes are counted. But that said, the California exit polls do seem to reflect what polls have shown for some time now.In CNN’s exit poll, nearly half of the Hispanic men surveyed and nearly a quarter of the Black men voted to support the recall. The largest difference between men and women of any racial group was between Black men and Black women.Even if these numbers are later adjusted, the warning must still be registered.For many of these men, saying Republicans are racist or attract racists or abide racists isn’t enough.For one thing, never underestimate the communion among men, regardless of race. Men have privileges in society, and some are drawn to policies that elevate their privileges.For instance, many Black and Hispanic men oppose abortion.Some men liked the bravado of Donald Trump and chafed at the rise of the #MeToo movement. Some simply see trans women as men in dresses and want to carry guns wherever they want.The question for Democrats is how do they lure some of these men back without catering to the patriarchy. From a position of principle, the party can’t really appeal to them; it must seek to change them.Add to the patriarchal issues a sense of disillusionment with the Democratic Party and its inability to make meaningful changes on the issues that many of these men care most about, such as criminal justice reform and workplace competition. Democrats often resort to emotional appeals in election season, telling minorities that they must vote for liberal candidates as a defense, to prevent the worst. But many of these men believe that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.The idea of always playing defense and never offense is, well, offensive.Instead, Democrats have to craft a message of empowerment and change. They have to say to these men that they don’t have to operate from a position of weakness and pleading, holding back the forces that would otherwise overwhelm them.To be honest, a robust, offensive messaging campaign would resonate with all people who tend to vote Democratic — men and women.The truth is that in a two-party system, voters have only two choices, so protest votes are self-defeating, as is sitting out elections or supporting the opposition to scare your favored side into better behavior.In a two-party system, if you don’t want the Trump Republicans to win, you must vote Democratic. You are trapped in that way, and no one likes the feeling of being trapped.But “trapped” is not an inspiring campaign message, particularly to people who spent a lifetime feeling trapped and have tired of it, as these men have.Yelling at them isn’t going to work, neither is shaming them or thinking that you are “educating” them.My fear is that these men will continue to drift away from the Democratic Party, not because the Republican Party is the most welcoming of spaces, but because Democrats cannot or will not do more to appeal to Black and Latino men.To my mind, the Democratic Party must do a few things:Admit that it makes many promises to Black people in election seasons that it not only doesn’t accomplish, but sometimes doesn’t even take up.Acknowledge that many of these men feel that the system itself has failed them, that the status quo has failed them.Give the plight of Black and brown men the same prominence that both parties have given the plight of working-class white men.Black and brown men need to feel that they are being seen as more than victims of a predatory justice system or part of the so-called immigrant crisis. They need to be rendered in full and seen as whole.When they are not, it leaves an opening for Republicans to exploit, and conservatives have done a clever job of doing just that in recent elections.If you are like me, you are thinking: These men should know better. They are voting in ways that invite injury or not voting at all. They shouldn’t be coddled. The world is sick of coddling selfish men.But we, too, are stuck in this two-party system, and as such, we must do whatever it takes to prevent calamity and eek out progress.In that world, when men of color vote against the interests of people of color and out of the male ego, we must gingerly talk them down rather than aggressively chant them down.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More