Elections, California Gubernatorial Recall (2021)

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      Gavin Newsom Survives Recall Election and Will Remain Governor

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      Voters reaffirmed their landslide support of Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2018.Gov. Gavin Newsom defeated opponent Larry Elder in California’s recall vote, affirming the state’s support for its governor.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesGo here for the latest on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s win.SACRAMENTO — A Republican-led bid to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California ended in defeat late Tuesday, as Democrats in the nation’s most populous state closed ranks against a small grass-roots movement that accelerated with the spread of Covid-19.Voters affirmed their support for Mr. Newsom, whose lead grew insurmountable as the count continued in Los Angeles County and other large Democratic strongholds after the polls had closed. Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, led 46 challengers hoping to become the next governor.The vote spoke to the power liberal voters wield in California: No Republican has held statewide office in more than a decade.But it also reflected the state’s recent progress against the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 67,000 lives in California. The state has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates and one of its lowest rates of new virus cases — which the governor tirelessly argued to voters were the results of his vaccine and mask requirements.Although Mr. Newsom’s critics had started the recall because they opposed his stances on the death penalty and immigration, it was the politicization of the pandemic that propelled it onto the ballot as Californians became impatient with shutdowns of businesses and classrooms. In polls, Californians said no issue was more pressing than the virus.“As a health care worker, it was important to me to have a governor who follows science,” said Marc Martino, 26, who was dressed in blue scrubs as he dropped off his ballot in Irvine.The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Newsom, who had won in a 62 percent landslide in 2018, less than an hour after the polls closed on Tuesday. About 66 percent of the eight million ballots counted by 10 p.m. Pacific time said the governor should stay in office.“It appears that we are enjoying an overwhelmingly ‘no’ vote tonight here in the state of California, but ‘no’ is not the only thing that was expressed tonight,” Mr. Newsom told reporters late Tuesday.“We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear of fake fraud and voter suppression. We said yes to women’s fundamental constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body, her fate, her future. We said yes to diversity.”In Orange County, Mr. Elder spoke to a packed ballroom of supporters and conceded the race. “Let’s be gracious in defeat,” he said, adding, “We may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war.”Considered a bellwether for the 2022 midterm elections, the recall outcome came as a relief to Democrats nationally. Though polls showed that the recall was consistently opposed by some 60 percent of Californians, surveys over the summer suggested that likely voters were unenthusiastic about Mr. Newsom. As the election deadline approached, however, his base mobilized.President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota traveled to California to campaign for Mr. Newsom, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former President Barack Obama appeared in his commercials. Some $70 million in contributions to his campaign poured in from Democratic donors, tribal and business groups and organized labor.The governor charged that far-right extremists and supporters of former President Donald J. Trump were attempting a hostile takeover in a state where they could never hope to attain majority support in a regular election. He also contrasted California’s low rates of coronavirus infection with the large numbers of deaths and hospitalizations in Republican-run states like Florida and Texas.A “No Recall” rally in Los Angeles last week.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesElectoral math did the rest: Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in California, and pandemic voting rules encouraged high turnout, allowing ballots to be mailed to each of the state’s 22 million registered, active voters with prepaid postage. More than 40 percent of those Californians voted early.Initiated by a retired Republican sheriff’s sergeant in Northern California, Orrin Heatlie, the recall was one of six conservative-led petitions that began circulating within months of Mr. Newsom’s inauguration.Recall attempts are common in California, where direct democracy has long been part of the political culture. But only one other attempt against a governor has qualified for the ballot — in 2003, when Californians recalled Gov. Gray Davis on the heels of the Sept. 11 attacks, the dot-com bust and rolling electricity blackouts. They elected Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace Mr. Davis as governor, substituting a centrist Republican for a centrist Democrat.Initially, Mr. Heatlie’s petition had difficulty gaining traction. But it gathered steam as the pandemic swept California and Mr. Newsom struggled to contain it. Californians who at first were supportive of the governor’s health orders wearied of shutdowns in businesses and classrooms, and public dissatisfaction boiled over in November when Mr. Newsom was spotted mask-free at the French Laundry, an exclusive wine country restaurant, after urging the public to avoid gatherings.A court order extending the deadline for signature gathering because of pandemic shutdowns allowed recall proponents to capitalize on the outrage and unease.As the outcome in Tuesday’s recall election became apparent, Darry Sragow, a Democratic strategist and publisher of California Target Book, a nonpartisan political almanac, said the governor held off “a Republican mugging” and “could come out of this stronger than ever, depending on his margin.”Recall backers also claimed a measure of victory.“We were David against Goliath — we were the Alamo,” said Mike Netter, one of a handful of Tea Party Republican activists whose anger at Mr. Newsom’s opposition to the death penalty, his embrace of undocumented workers and his deep establishment roots helped inspire the attempted ouster.Just gathering the nearly 1.5 million signatures necessary to trigger the special election was “a historic accomplishment,” Mr. Heatlie said.Mike Netter and Orrin Heatlie, proponents of the recall, led a meeting in Folsom in February.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesThe recall campaign, the two men said, had expanded the small cadre that began the effort into a statewide coalition of 400,000 members who are already helping to push ballot proposals to fund school vouchers, forbid vaccine mandates in schools, and abolish public employee unions, which have been a longstanding Democratic force in California.Other Republicans, however, called the recall a grave political miscalculation. About one-quarter of the state’s registered voters are Republicans, and their numbers have been dwindling since the 1990s, a trend that recall proponents believed might be reversed if they could somehow flip the nation’s biggest state.Tuesday’s defeat — in a special election that cost the state an estimated $276 million — instead marked “another nail in the coffin,” said Mike Madrid, a California Republican strategist who has been deeply critical of the party under Mr. Trump, charging in particular that the G.O.P. has driven away Latino voters.Mr. Madrid said the recall signified that, even in California, Mr. Trump’s party had become part of “an increasingly radical, exercised and shrinking Republican base, lashing out in different ways in different parts of the country.” He took note of the voter fraud accusations that some in his party began to make well before the polls closed, echoing Mr. Trump, who claimed without evidence that Democrats had “rigged” the recall election.Despite the yawning gap in support, for example, Mr. Elder demanded this week, before the voting was finished, that a special legislative session be called “to investigate and ameliorate the twisted results.” He said there had been “instances of undocumented ballots” but provided no examples.Some Democratic observers were circumspect, warning that the disruption caused by the recall effort hinted at deeper problems.“This recall was a canary in the coal mine,” said Mr. Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist who cited the state’s income disparities, housing shortages and climate crises. “And until the issues that created it get dealt with, people in power are in trouble. There’s a lot of anger and fear and frustration out there.”Canvassers for an immigrant advocacy group pitched Mr. Newsom to voters in Palmdale in August.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesTuesday’s vote capped a nearly yearlong push by the governor to persuade voters to see beyond that darkness. Since early this year, when it became clear that the recall would have the money and time to qualify for the ballot, Mr. Newsom has campaigned relentlessly.Taking advantage of a huge state surplus — a result of higher-than-expected gains in income and stock prices for affluent Californians — the governor moved aggressively to demonstrate that the state could both protect its economy and curb the virus. In recent months, he has rolled out vaccinations, cleaned up trash in neighborhoods neglected by pandemic-worn Californians, thrown motel rooms open to homeless Californians, announced stimulus checks and rent assistance for poor and middle-class Californians and stood repeatedly in front of a gold lamé curtain to host one of the nation’s largest vaccine lotteries.Past recall efforts informed his political strategy. Unlike Mr. Davis, whose lieutenant governor ran as a Democratic alternative in the 2003 recall, effectively giving partisans permission to oust Mr. Davis, Mr. Newsom and his team quickly cleared the field of potential Democratic alternatives.Like Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin and the only previous governor to prevail in a recall election, Mr. Newsom painted the recall effort in national, partisan terms and rejected a defensive posture. His strategy galvanized major donors and his base.As in 2003, when he ran against a popular progressive for mayor of San Francisco, Mr. Newsom framed the race not as a referendum on him but as a choice between himself and a potentially catastrophic alternative — in this case, Mr. Elder, whose name recognition quickly vaulted him to the top of the list of challengers.Vice President Kamala Harris joined Mr. Newsom at a rally in San Leandro last week.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesNoting that Mr. Elder had built a career bashing liberal causes, the governor painted him as a Trump clone who would foist far-right policies on a state that has been a bastion of liberal thinking.“Vote no and go,” the governor told voters, suggesting that they stick to voting against recalling him and not even dignify the second question on the ballot, which asked who should replace Mr. Newsom if the recall succeeds.Millions of voters chose not to answer the ballot’s second question, with Mr. Elder receiving about 44 percent of the vote from those who did. Kevin Paffrath, a Democrat, and Kevin Faulconer, a Republican and former mayor of San Diego, each had about 10 percent of the vote as of 10 p.m. Pacific time.Republican support and money failed to come anywhere close to matching Mr. Newsom’s large operation and war chest.California has no limits on donations to committees for and against recalls, but the state caps contributions to candidates from individual donors. Mr. Newsom capitalized on the rules, raising more than $50 million just in donations of more than $100,000 to oppose the recall. Mr. Elder raised about $15 million, with even less raised by committees promoting the recall.Many major Republican donors said it seemed futile to try to recall a Democratic governor in such an overwhelmingly liberal state.Thomas Fuller More

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      California Recall Election Results: Live Map

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      If Governor Newsom is recalled, how long will the new governor be in office? The new governor, if one is elected, would take the oath of office as soon as the vote was certified and would assume the position for the remainder of the term, which runs through January 2, 2023. California has a regularly scheduled election for governor next year. More

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      Early Recall Voters Are as Democratic as in 2020. Here’s What it Means for Newsom.

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      Already, more people have returned ballots than cast votes in the last California recall election in 2003. More than nine million votes have already been received in the California recall election, suggesting a relatively high turnout more reminiscent not of a low-wattage special election but of a high-profile midterm.These nine million votes will probably account for most of the ballots cast in the election. They were overwhelmingly cast by mail or through early in-person voting. And they offer an emerging picture of an electorate that is somewhat older, whiter and more highly educated than those who had returned ballots at this time in last November’s presidential election.Overall in the recall, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 25-point margin in ballots recorded so far, 51 to 26 percent, according to figures from Political Data, a California-based data vendor. That Democratic advantage is nearly identical to the 50 percent to 25 percent edge that California Democrats enjoyed among the ballots returned by this point in 2020.Like last November’s election, registered Democrats have been slightly likelier to cast advance ballots than Republicans, likely reflecting the new Democratic enthusiasm for mail voting during the pandemic — or Republican skepticism of mail voting during the Trump era.President Biden went on to win California by 29 percentage points.Despite the similar partisan makeup of the advance vote, the state has received fewer ballots than at this point in the general election, when 13 million ballots had already been returned to election officials.Over all, 16 percent of the returns are from 18- to 34-year-old voters and 18 percent are thought to be Latinos, based on their surnames or neighborhoods. At this point in 2020, 21 percent were ages 18 to 34 and 21 percent were Latinos.Typically, young and Latino voters are likelier to vote closer to the election and will likely represent a larger share of all voters, as they did in 2020.Even so, the recall turnout appears high by nearly any other standard besides the 2020 election. Already, more people have returned ballots than cast votes in the last California recall election in 2003, when the Democratic governor Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. It is also higher than the total turnout in the 2014 midterm election.The relatively high and Democratic turnout so far has further narrowed the already daunting path to recall Mr. Newsom. The possibility that Republicans might benefit from an unusual turnout advantage was thought to be one of the likeliest ways that the recall effort might succeed in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. More

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      What Does the California Recall Mean for the U.S.?

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrats argued that he was running not on his record or against a particular candidate, but against Trumpism.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Let’s start with the obvious caveat: California is different. That’s true for many, many reasons, but this week all eyes are on its bizarre — some say unconstitutional — recall process, in which a small minority of Californians have forced today’s no-confidence vote on Gov. Gavin Newsom, despite a vast majority’s support for him.The latest polls show that Californians overwhelmingly want him to stay, and are especially wary of his leading opponent, the conservative talk-show host Larry Elder. But this being politics in 2021, let’s also concede that there is always a chance that the polls are disastrously wrong. By tomorrow, could we all be talking about Mr. Elder’s brilliant campaign and bright future?With those two huge caveats in mind, let’s take up the opposite question: What does Mr. Newsom’s likely cruise to victory say about American politics over the coming years?Again, this being 2021, we can’t talk about politics, national or local, without talking about Donald J. Trump and, by extension, Trumpism. The man and the phenomenon (or is it a movement? or an ideology?) played into the race in two ways, both of which we’re going to see repeated in coming races.First, Mr. Newsom and the Democrats seem to have persuasively argued that he was running not on his record or against a particular candidate, but against Trumpism — that the alternative to Mr. Newsom was, as this paper put in a headline, “the abyss.”“We defeated Trump last year, and thank you, but we haven’t defeated Trumpism,” Mr. Newsom has told anyone who would listen.Such scaremongering is a time-honored tactic, but it’s an especially salient and effective one today. Mr. Trump is always in the news, always taking the extreme position, and as long as he lays claim to being the head of the Republican Party, Democrats will try to tie their opponents to him.And it works. Because Trumpism is so vague, opponents can make it anything they want it to be. Incipient fascism? Rampant libertarianism? White supremacy? Check, check and check. It can also mean specific things, like eviscerating climate policy or canceling mask and vaccine mandates. California has a lot of problems, but Californians generally approve of Sacramento’s pro-government, pro-regulatory approach. Rather than be forced to defend their specific policies, the Democrats can simply paint their opponents as Trump manqués bent on destruction.Another caveat: This is California, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by two to one, forcing the Republican Party into a corner, where it has become captive to its base. That means it’s going to behave in ways that the Republican Party of Texas or Florida, for example, might not.“Compare it with, let’s say, the Democratic Party in Mississippi,” said Chris Stirewalt, the former digital politics editor at Fox News. “It’s probably a very weird space.”Will the Democrats’ strategy work in purple states, or even a state like Virginia, where Republicans are more numerous and better organized — and where Terry McAuliffe is already deploying it against his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, in their race for governor?Traditional political analysis would say no. But again, this is 2021. Following their base, many Republicans have largely (but not entirely) abandoned the political middle, where most Americans say they abide. Democrats have spent months painting their opponents as anti-democratic and anti-reality, a message that has played well among independents and moderates, starting with the Senate runoffs in Georgia, and with Mr. Trump ringing in with false claims about election fraud, expertly timed to prove their point.Not every race is going to play out that way. Most Republicans will read the room, so to speak, and adjust their campaigns accordingly. Look at Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego who’s also running to replace Mr. Newsom. Yes, he has the requisite photo of himself standing beside Mr. Trump. But his message has been about pragmatic solutions to state problems, exactly the sort of campaign you’d expect from someone trying to put space between himself and his national party.Then again, Mr. Faulconer is running a distant second behind Mr. Elder and barely registers in the national conversation. One reason is the uniqueness of the race. It’s a battle royal, not a primary; the candidates had little time to prepare; and as a result, name recognition, which Mr. Elder has and Mr. Faulconer doesn’t, is critical.But another is the new dynamics of right-wing politics — and the second way in which the recall illustrates the lasting impact of Mr. Trump and Trumpism.Mr. Newsom has been running with his “me vs. the abyss” strategy since the recall began. But it didn’t stick at first, because the recall was focused on Mr. Newsom and his performance during the pandemic — including an embarrassing maskless dinner at the French Laundry, one of California’s most exclusive restaurants, during the state’s shutdown.“In a vacuum, there was a lot of discontentment with Newsom and ambivalence with him among Democrats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant in California.That started to change once “the abyss” got a name.Mr. Elder isn’t the Trumpiest candidate imaginable, but he’s close. A novice campaigner with a background in conservative talk radio, Mr. Elder has a treasure chest full of embarrassing comments in his past — about women, about Black people — and a penchant for making more of them on the stump.“Larry Elder has been the gift that keeps on giving,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic political consultant in California.Again, Mr. Elder has been effective because this race is so much more about celebrity than policy. But he’s also effective because he, more than anyone else, is attuned to the Trumpist base, and is willing to tack accordingly.After he drew fire from the right for telling the editorial board of The Sacramento Bee that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, he reversed himself. He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the recall race is rife with fraud. He is crushing it among the “guys with an Uncle Sam costume in their closet” demographic, but not much else.Arguably, Mr. Elder isn’t a serious politician; he’s running not to win, but to raise his media profile. But that very fact says something about today’s Republican Party. Many of its highest-profile figures blur the line between politician and celebrity, and act accordingly, even if their success as the latter undermines what we expect out of the former. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn — and, yes, Larry Elder — are only nominally politicians. In substance, they’re entertainers.True, they’re entertainers who say scary things about guns, political violence, the pandemic and anyone to their political left. And true, some of them do win elections, usually in deep-red districts. And true, many people in the Republican Party are much smarter, or at least more thoughtful about elected office, than they are.Still, Mr. Elder and Co. highlight a lasting, possibly permanent dynamic on the right: the rejection of politics as anything other than smash-mouth spectacle, in which the most outrageous and insincere figures draw the biggest crowds — and force their colleagues to play constant defense against their own party.That’s not an insurmountable challenge. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seems, at least for now, to have figured out a way past it. But many won’t — and many Republicans won’t even try. Remember when the party could dismiss as side shows the occasional extremist figures like Todd Akin, who made comments about “legitimate rape,” and Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell? In 2021, that’s become much, much harder to do.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      As California Votes, It Rethinks Its Tradition of Direct Democracy

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      Any proposed changes to a century-old recall law are likely to be met with stiff opposition from Republicans, who see it as one of the last avenues of influence in a Democratic-led state.SACRAMENTO — As Californians went to the polls on Tuesday to determine whether Gov. Gavin Newsom would be removed from office, the recall election had already spawned another campaign: to recall the recall.In a state famous for its acts of direct democracy, whether banning affirmative action or legalizing cannabis, detractors of this year’s special election say the recall process is democracy gone off the rails, a distraction from crises that require the government’s attention, and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.California’s forests are on fire, with wildfire smoke sending thousands of residents fleeing. Towns are running out of water from severe drought. And some rural hospitals are packed with coronavirus patients.Many voters who went to the polls on Tuesday said the election was an unwelcome distraction that preoccupied Mr. Newsom and, some critics said, might have prevented him from taking on tough decisions.“This recall is so dumb,” said Frankie Santos, a 43-year-old artist who voted in Hollywood on Tuesday. “It’s so not a good use of resources.” She said that if she could have scrawled “absolutely no” to recalling Mr. Newsom without invalidating her ballot, she would have.Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the State Assembly, and other legislative leaders have already said discussions were underway to place a constitutional amendment regarding recalls before voters in 2022.Voters waited to enter a polling site at a library in Huntington Beach.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesAn election worker collected mail-in ballots at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena.Ryan Young for The New York Times“This is a system that was put in place 100 years ago,” said Mr. Rendon, referring to the current recall rules. “We’ll be asking if this is what’s best for the state.”The election, which is costing the state $276 million to administer, has at times had a circus atmosphere to it, not least when one of the 46 candidates on the ballot brought a large bear to a campaign rally.No one in the state’s Democratic leadership is suggesting the elimination of recalls, which are baked into the State Constitution. But many are vowing to make it more difficult for them to qualify for the ballot, or to change the rules on how a successor is chosen.Currently, opponents of a governor — or any other elected official in California — can trigger a recall election by submitting signatures equal to 12 percent of the turnout in the most recent election for that office.In a sharp piece of political irony, it will take a referendum to decide whether to change this particular referendum.Democrats will be working over howls of opposition from Republicans, who see the recall process as one of the few resorts left to them in a state where Democrats control every statewide office and have supermajorities in the Legislature.“The last thing we need is legal changes that make it even harder for Californians to access their government,” said Kevin Kiley, a Republican assemblyman who ran in the recall election.Mr. Kiley said Democrats had already tried to delegitimize the process by calling it a democratic coup.“If they are trying to make it harder or impossible to hold your public officials accountable, that is absolutely something that I would oppose,” Mr. Kiley said.Critics of the recall process say it is fundamentally antidemocratic. With a simple majority, voters could recall Mr. Newsom, who was well ahead in the polls in the final days of campaigning. But his replacement would be chosen by plurality.Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked members of the IBEW Local 6 union for their support in San Francisco.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesLarry Elder, the leading Republican candidate, in Whittier last week.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesPolling showed that the front-runner to replace Mr. Newsom, the conservative talk show host Larry Elder, had nowhere near a majority of support, and many Democrats left that section of the ballot blank.Among Newsom supporters, there were strong feelings about the recall.Jose Orbeta, an employee of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, was blunt in describing the recall election as he voted on Tuesday.“Waste of time,” he said. “It’s a power grab by the G.O.P.”Mr. Newsom had done a “decent job” leading California through the pandemic, he said.Recalls in California date back more than a century, to a suite of reforms passed from 1910 to 1913 under Gov. Hiram Johnson, a Republican and progressive crusader. They were the capstone of a yearslong effort to curb the political power of the Southern Pacific railroad, which all but owned the state’s government and economy, controlling politicians, judges and regulators.Mr. Johnson’s reforms broke the hold, overhauling the state’s election system and, through a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1911, instituting the system of referendums, ballot initiatives and the recall. Kevin Starr, a California historian who died in 2017, called this “the very re-creation of the political and social order of California.”It is often pointed out that Mr. Johnson’s reforms — tools that were explicitly created to curb the influence of big business on California’s politics — have now become a major corporate weapon. This is particularly true of initiatives, which can be put on the ballot with a few million dollars’ worth of clipboard-holding workers gathering signatures from registered voters.One recent example was Proposition 22, a $200 million initiative by the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees.“That is the bigger problem here,” said Jim Newton, a historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written biographies of the governors Earl Warren and Jerry Brown.“It’s not whether Gavin Newsom gets 51 percent or we have Gov. Larry Elder. That’s important, but the general premise that the initiative, referendum and recall are intended to curb the influence of powerful special interests has been tipped entirely on its head and it has now become the tool of special interests.”Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert and the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that the state’s recall process is unconstitutional because the two-step nature of the process — with voters deciding whether to recall the sitting governor and then, separately, choosing a replacement — makes it possible for a new governor to take office with less popular support than the old one.If 49 percent of voters supported Mr. Newsom, 25 percent supported Mr. Elder, and fewer than that supported any other candidate, Mr. Elder would become governor with about half as many votes as Mr. Newsom. In that scenario, the vote of one Elder supporter would effectively have twice as much power as the vote of a Newsom supporter, said Professor Chemerinsky — and that would violate the “one person, one vote” principle affirmed in two Supreme Court decisions in 1964, Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders.Californians were not forced to confront that problem in the 2003 recall, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gov. Gray Davis, because Mr. Schwarzenegger received more votes on the second question than Mr. Davis did on the first.Voters cast their ballots at Redwood Playhouse in Garberville.Alexandra Hootnick for The New York TimesLeaving a voting site at Jesse Owens Park in Los Angeles on Monday.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMr. Davis, the first California governor to lose a recall election, said in an interview that the ability to recall officials was part of California’s “unique direct democracy approach to voting,” but that he supported changes to the specifics of the process.“For 110 years, anyone running for governor knew there was a possibility of being subject to a recall,” he said. “It comes with the territory — and life isn’t always fair.”But he argued that the threshold for getting a recall on the ballot — signatures from 12 percent of the voters in the previous election for governor — was insufficient in an era that allows interest groups to gain supporters with the click of a button on Facebook.“We should go from a 12 percent to a 25 percent threshold,” Mr. Davis said, and ask voters only one question: “Who should serve out the balance of the governor’s term?”State Senator Josh Newman, who experienced the state’s recall rules firsthand when he was recalled in 2018 and replaced by a candidate who received fewer votes than him in the recall election, said he planned to propose a constitutional amendment early next year that would remove the replacement race on the ballot. Voters would decide whether a governor should be recalled, and if so, the lieutenant governor would automatically take the job. Mr. Newman ran against his replacement and won back his seat in 2020.Yet amid the plans and proposals to tweak the recall rules, there were voters who wanted them to stay just as they are.Jim Mastrosimone, a voter in Irvine, groused that the list of replacement candidates was too long after casting his vote for Mr. Elder.But ultimately, Mr. Mastrosimone said, he is happy Californians have recall elections.“It gives the power to the little guy,” he said.Thomas Fuller More

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      What is a Recall and How Does it Work?

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      Besides this effort to recall Gov. Newsom, only one other attempted recall of a California governor, Gray Davis, has ever reached an election. And California is the only place where a recall of a governor has made the ballot twice. So how does the process work?A recall petition must be signed by enough registered voters to equal 12 percent of the turnout in the last election for governor. The organizers do not need to give a reason for the recall, but they often do. The petition must include at least 1 percent of the last vote for the office in at least five counties. Proponents have 160 days to gather their signatures.The signatures must then be examined and verified by the California secretary of state. If the petitions meet the threshold — 1,495,709 valid signatures in this case — voters who signed have 30 business days to change their minds. More

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      Larry Elder Has Put Issues of Race at Recall Election Campaign

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      LOS ANGELES — Campaigning together on Monday, President Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated California, the country’s most diverse state, as a potent example of multiracial democracy in action.On the other side of the aisle, issues of race and diversity are similarly at the core of the message being put before voters by Larry Elder, the Republican radio host who is the leading contender to replace Mr. Newsom.His message is that the United States long ago vanquished racism.Mr. Elder’s choice of a campaign stop on Monday in Monterey Park, a city in eastern Los Angeles County that is predominantly Asian American and has a sizable Latino population, seemed intended to celebrate diversity. But Mr. Elder, who is Black, also used the visit to argue that systemic racism, which he has called a “lie,” does not exist in America anymore.“No matter what language we speak, what color we share, even what political stripe we brag about,” Betty Chu, the former mayor of Monterey Park, told Mr. Elder’s supporters, “If it’s an ‘R,’ a ‘D,’ or ‘decline to state,’ the city long stood for anti-hate and bringing people together.”Ms. Chu said that Mr. Elder’s success as a columnist and radio host, and the fact that he attended public schools and rose to prominence from South Central Los Angeles, were proof “that skin color doesn’t hold you back.”For many of Mr. Elder’s supporters, especially conservative white voters who say they are tired of hearing about systemic racism after last year’s social unrest following the murder of George Floyd, that message is resonant.Stacy Hallum, 47, a supporter of Mr. Elder’s who attended his rally on Monday, said she loved the diversity of where she lives, but said that “just because we’re white, we matter too.”She continued: “I’m so tired of the racism thing. We’re done with racism. I’m not privileged, let me tell you.”Mr. Elder has often sought to seize on issues of race, describing his policies as ones that will benefit people of color.On the issue of private versus public education, he has attacked Democrats like Mr. Newsom for sending their children to private school while opposing charter schools and other forms of private or semiprivate education. Mr. Elder said such moves leave public schools to fail their Black and brown students.“So what they’re afraid of is Larry Elder, from the hood, who attended a public school, is going to break that stranglehold Democrats have over Black and brown parents, specifically over the issue of school choice,” he said at the rally on Monday. More