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      Rep. Lee Zeldin Confirms Leukemia Diagnosis

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      Mr. Zeldin, a conservative Republican, says the disease is in remission, and that his bid for governor of New York will be unaffected.Representative Lee Zeldin, a staunch conservative from Long Island and the leading Republican candidate in next year’s race for governor in New York, revealed that he was diagnosed with leukemia last year and has been receiving treatment.Mr. Zeldin, 41, told attendees at an Ontario County Republican Party dinner on Friday night that he had been grappling with the diagnosis of early-stage chronic myeloid leukemia since November 2020. He confirmed on Saturday in a text message to The New York Times that he had cancer, and then released a statement.“Over the last nine months, I have achieved complete remission, am expected to live a normal life, and my doctor says I currently have no evidence of this disease in my system,” Mr. Zeldin, one of the most vocal supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, said. “My health is phenomenal, and I continue to operate at 110 percent.”Mr. Zeldin had mentioned his diagnosis partly because the Ontario County party chairwoman, Trisha Turner, had been facing her own health crises. Brian Kolb, a former state assemblyman, said that Mr. Zeldin had brought her roses, and drew a parallel to her struggles and his own. Mr. Kolb, a Republican, recalled Mr. Zeldin saying he had wanted to make sure that he had his illness under control before he began campaigning earlier this year.In the statement, Mr. Zeldin said that he had no side effects from his treatment, and he brushed aside the question of whether the diagnosis would have implications for him as he pursues the governorship, ticking off the places he’s visited around the state.“I have also not missed any Army Reserve duty as a result of this diagnosis,” Mr. Zeldin said. He shared a statement from his hematologist, Dr. Jeffrey Vacirca, saying that Mr. Zeldin now has “no evidence of disease.” Mr. Zeldin announced his candidacy for governor in April, with an eye toward unseating the incumbent at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo, a three-term Democrat who was elected in 2010.“The bottom line is this: To save New York, Andrew Cuomo’s got to go,” Zeldin said when he declared his candidacy.Mr. Cuomo was, at the time, enmeshed in scandal after a string of sexual harassment complaints had emerged against him from former and current employees. By the time a report by the attorney general, Letitia James, was released in August, the number of accusers had grown to 11.Mr. Cuomo denied the bulk of the accusations, even as Ms. James’s report affirmed the complaints. He resigned a week later, and his exit has reshaped the election.Also running for governor as a Republican is Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. The younger Mr. Giuliani worked in the White House while Mr. Trump was there, and he has presented himself as something of an amalgamation of his father and the former president.But Mr. Trump and the former mayor are not particularly popular in the densest downstate regions of New York, a state where Democrats outweigh Republicans in registration.Mr. Zeldin has amassed most of the institutional support among Republicans statewide, and in his statement he described himself as the “presumptive” Republican candidate. In previous election cycles for governor, the establishment’s choice for the Republican nominee has at times been swamped by a grass-roots candidate. Such was the case in 2010, when Carl Paladino, a businessman from Western New York, handily defeated Rick Lazio, the former Long Island congressman, by roughly 2-1 votes in the primary.But both Mr. Zeldin and Mr. Giuliani are running as more state-specific versions of Mr. Trump, making such differentiation in a primary more difficult. More

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      In California, Republicans Struggle to Expand the Recall’s Appeal

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      California has not been as progressive lately as its reputation would suggest. Yet Republicans have had trouble breaking the recall out of the fringe.THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — The small faction of Californians who still call themselves Republicans did something seemingly impossible when they forced Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of America’s largest Democratic state, to face voters in a recall.It was a side of California often overlooked: the conservative minority that for decades has been on the leading edge of the Republican Party’s transformation into a vehicle for the anti-establishment grievance politics that swept former President Donald J. Trump into office in 2016. The California conservative movement led a national campaign against affirmative action in the 1990s, later shaped the anti-immigration views of the Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Stephen K. Bannon, and gave rise to a new generation of media heavyweights such as Breitbart News and Ben Shapiro.But with Mr. Newsom leading the latest polls before the election on Tuesday, some of those same forces have struggled to gain mainstream support for the recall.California Republicans lack a single, unifying leader who has the ability to appeal beyond the hard right. The hollowed-out state party has left them with few avenues for organizing in such a vast place. And they have been unable to convert the populist anger at the governor over his handling of the pandemic into a broad-based backlash from voters who are right, left and somewhere in between. What started as a fringe campaign to flip the highest office in liberal California and upend the national political calculus seemed to be losing steam with Election Day approaching.Mr. Newsom’s allies blasted the state with advertising that linked the recall to a far-right coalition of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine activists and allies of the former president. And mainstream Republican supporters of the recall said the effort had become saddled with too much of the national party’s baggage.“The Republicans have struggled, I think, to identify with clarity that Democrats have been in charge out here for 15 years,” said Doug Ose, a Republican and former three-term congressman who recently dropped out of the race to replace Mr. Newsom after having a heart attack. Instead of focusing on questions such as whether Californians were better off today than they were 15 years ago, Republicans, he said, were being drawn into debates over abortion and other national issues.“Quit taking the bait,” Mr. Ose said of the Republican attention to the Texas abortion law. “Nobody in Texas is going to vote in this election. Why are we talking about what’s happening in Texas?”In a state where Democrats have been adding to their share of the electorate in recent years — now accounting for 46 percent of all registered voters, according to the Public Policy Institute of California — the Republican Party has been steadily shedding voters. Republicans are only 24 percent of the electorate, compared with 35 percent in 2003, the last time the state recalled its Democratic governor, Gray Davis.That is a far cry from the California that produced two Republican presidents — Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who was twice elected governor — and that provided a national model for how to run as a celebrity conservative reformer in a deep-blue state: former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.Mr. Schwarzenegger left office in 2011, and the state has not elected a Republican for a statewide seat since then. But if ever there was a time for conservatives to notch a rare, consequential victory in California, this would seem to be it.Residents have been anxious about this latest round of state-mandated, pandemic-related closures, with almost half sharing the mistaken belief that California is in an economic recession, according to one recent study. Jarring reminders of the state’s inability to solve fundamental, perennial problems are everywhere, from the tent cities that lined the Venice boardwalk to wildfires that suffocated Lake Tahoe.And voters have demonstrated an independent streak lately, rejecting progressive initiatives at the ballot box by large margins. Last year, as the state went for President Biden by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, voters defeated a referendum that would have repealed the state’s ban on affirmative action, 57 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, Californians voted in favor of allowing drivers for Uber and other ride-hailing and delivery apps to remain independent contractors, rebuffing a push from labor and progressive groups to classify them as employees who are entitled to wage protections and benefits.In Orange County and other traditionally right-leaning parts of the state, voters who had swung toward the Democratic Party in 2018 swung back in 2020. Four of the 15 seats that Republicans flipped in the House of Representatives in 2020 were in California, including two in Orange County. And despite losing the state, Mr. Trump still received 1.5 million more votes from Californians in 2020 than he did in 2016.“You didn’t see it in the vote for Biden,” said Charles Kessler, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who studies the American right. But the results in California in 2020 overall, Mr. Kessler said, looked like “the beginnings of a kind of revolt against the Hollywood, high-tech San Francisco-led Democratic Party in the state.”Mr. Elder, the recall candidate, comes from the tradition of California conservatives whose appeal is in refusing to appeal to liberals. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe other California — the one of megachurches in the sprawl of the irrigated desert, Trump boat parades and a would-be secessionist enclave near the Oregon border that calls itself the “State of Jefferson” — occasionally finds common cause with moderates and independents to shake up state politics.But Mr. Kessler said that a major difference between today and 2003, when Mr. Schwarzenegger replaced Mr. Davis in the last recall, was that the Republican Party lacked a candidate with crossover appeal. Success, he said, would depend on a candidate “who gives you an alternative to the Democrat without having to embrace another party exactly.”That is not Larry Elder, the Republican front-runner in the recall race.A talk radio host, Mr. Elder comes from the tradition of California conservatives whose appeal was that they refused to appeal to liberals. The list includes Los Angeles-born Andrew Breitbart, the conservative writer and activist who founded Breitbart News, and Mr. Miller, who is the former architect of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and who grew up in Santa Monica listening to Mr. Elder’s show.At times, Elder campaign events have felt not all that different from Trump rallies.At a Labor Day rally in the suburb of Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles outside downtown Los Angeles in Ventura County, Mr. Elder drew boos from the crowd when he mentioned The Los Angeles Times, and laughter when he said he intended to “speak slowly” because CNN was there. He dropped the kind of bombs that made him a national name in conservative talk radio, winning applause from of his mostly white audience.“What they’re afraid of,” Mr. Elder said, referring to his Democratic opponents, “is Larry Elder from the hood who went to a public school will be able to make the case to Black and brown people: ‘You are being betrayed. You are being used. You are being manipulated.’”“Racism has never been less significant in America,” added Mr. Elder, who is Black.Shelley Merrell, who runs a fire safety company in Ventura, nodded along as Mr. Elder called systemic racism “a lie” and rattled off statistics about police officers killing unarmed white people in larger numbers than they did Black people. Ms. Merrell, who is white, said that her support for the recall was rooted in her belief that California had become too inhospitable to businesses.“I love my employees, and I just want to give them the best life possible, but it’s getting more and more difficult,” she said as she urged passers-by at the event to take her pro-recall material, including one flier that read, “Don’t Vote By Mail.”The in-your-face, contrarian style of right-wing talk radio hosts who scorn the mainstream media and mock liberals has served Mr. Elder well, helping him build a weekly national audience of 4.5 million listeners. California was the ideal market to build out his brand, as it was for other stars of conservative radio. Rush Limbaugh got his start at KFBK in Sacramento, and Sean Hannity started his career at KCSB in Santa Barbara.But Mr. Elder may find that what works on talk radio is ill-suited to win a statewide election in California.“We cannot simply appeal to ourselves,” said Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego and Republican recall candidate whose centrist campaign was often overshadowed by the far-right rhetoric of Mr. Elder. “We can be a party that wins again in California if we focus on solutions, if we focus on reform and if we’re inclusive. You cannot win office in California until you get Democrats and independents.”Kevin Kiley, a lawmaker in the State Assembly and one of the other more moderate Republican recall candidates, said he would not put a conventional political label of left, right or center on the kind of coalition he hopes to appeal to. Cognizant of what having an “R” after his name on the ballot means to many California voters, he has pitched himself as a bridge candidate.“Part of the unique opportunity with this recall is it is a chance to cross party lines,” Mr. Kiley said. “They’re not signing on for four years. They’re signing on for one year.” (If Mr. Newsom is recalled, the winning candidate to replace him would serve out the remainder of his term through 2022.)At the rally in Thousand Oaks, Mr. Elder seemed to acknowledge that his appeal was limited, and pivoted slightly to a more centrist message. He insisted that he was not merely a “Trump supporter” but a Republican through and through — since he cast his last vote for a Democrat in 1976, for former President Jimmy Carter, a decision he said he had regretted ever since.Mr. Kessler, the professor at Claremont McKenna College, said if there was another Republican renaissance coming to California, he doubted that this was the moment. But he also said he doubted that the current state of one-party control was sustainable. “This is a case where I think from the Republican point of view, things have to get worse in the state before they can get better,” he said. More

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      Covid Isn’t Finished Messing With Politics

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I’m trying to keep an open mind — OK, semi-open — about what to think of Joe Biden’s Covid vaccination mandates. I have no problem with the president requiring federal employees to get the shot. I have no problem with businesses large or small requiring the same. Their houses, their rules.But the civil libertarian in me doesn’t love the idea of this or any president using administrative powers to force vaccines on the people who refuse to get them. Your thoughts?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, if Biden was rounding up the non-vaxxers, having them tied down and inoculated by force — the way many Republicans seem to be drawing the picture — I’d certainly have reservations. But in effect he’s saying that they shouldn’t be allowed in certain places where infection is relatively easy to spread, like workplaces or public buildings.This is a serious, serious health crisis and I don’t think I’d want the president to content himself with giving pep talks.And don’t I remember a previous conversation in which you suggested the non-vaccinated didn’t deserve to be allowed in hospitals if they got sick?Bret: Not exactly, but close. The most elegant policy riposte to the anti-vaxxers — and I mean the willful ones, not the people who simply haven’t had access to the shot or have a compelling medical excuse — is to refuse to allow Medicare or Medicaid to pay their medical bills in the event they become seriously ill. Private health insurers might also follow suit. I accept that people don’t want the government or their employer telling them what to do with their bodies. But these same people shouldn’t expect someone else to bail them out of their terrible health decisions.I have another reservation about what Biden’s doing. Right now, the vast majority of Covid-related hospitalizations are happening among the unvaccinated, which is further proof the shots work. I understand that puts doctors and nurses under a lot of strain, though Covid hospitalizations seem to be declining and the surgeries that are being put off are mainly elective. Otherwise, I don’t see the latest Covid spike as the same kind of issue it was a year or so ago. It’s gone from being a public-health crisis to a nincompoop-health crisis.Gail: Imagining that as a new political slogan …Bret: Is “nincompoop” too strong? How about “total geniuses if they do say so themselves,” instead? Anyway, as anti-vaxxers are mostly putting themselves at serious risk of getting seriously ill, I don’t see the need for a presidential directive, including the renewed mask mandates, which only diminish the incentive to get vaccinated. No doubt I’m missing a few things …Gail: As someone who hates hates hates wearing a mask, I love the idea of getting rid of them. And there are a lot of public places now where I see signs basically saying: If you’re vaccinated, mask wearing is up to you.But in my neighborhood, where most of the people I see on the streets are long since vaccinated, a lot of folks wear masks even when they’re just walking around. It’s more convenient if you’re popping in and out of stores or mass transit, but I like to think they also want to remind the world that we’re still fighting back a pandemic, which is easier if everybody works together.Bret: There are people, particularly the immunocompromised, who have a solid medical or emotional need to take great precautions, including masks, and I totally respect them. The busybodies and virtue-signalers, not so much.Gail: On another presidential matter, I noticed your last column was somewhat, um … negative on the Biden presidency. You really think it’s been that bad?Bret: In hindsight, the headline, “Another Failed Presidency at Hand,” probably took the argument a step farther than the column itself. It’s too early to say that the Biden presidency has failed. But people who wish the president success — and that includes me — need to grasp the extent to which he’s in deep political trouble. It isn’t just the Afghan debacle, or worrisome inflation, or his predictions about the end of the pandemic when the virus had other ideas. I think he has misread his political mandate, which was to be a moderate, unifying leader in the mold of George Bush Sr., not a transformational one in the mold of Lyndon Johnson. And he’s trying to do this on the strength of Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote in the Senate. I think it’s a recipe for more social division and political failure.Gail: As reviews go, that’s certainly a downer.Bret: None of this is to commend the not-so-loyal opposition party. But they’re the ones who stand to gain most from a weak Biden presidency.Gail: Looking at it from my end, we have a president who’s got to make the country feel it’s not trapped in an unhealthy, unhappy, overall-depressed state forever. I’m buying into big change, which requires more than a gentle hand at the wheel. But back to your Biden critique. You said you voted for him last time but now he has revealed himself to be “headstrong,” “shaky” and “inept.” What if Donald Trump runs against him?Bret: One of the reasons I’m so dismayed by Biden’s performance is that it’s going to tempt Trump to run again. In which case, I’ll vote for whoever is most likely to beat Trump. Hell, I’d probably even vote for Bernie. I’d rather have a president who’s a danger to the economy and national security than one who’s a danger to democracy and national sanity.Gail: I do like imagining you walking around town with a Bernie button.Bret: Let’s not take this too far! Hopefully it will work out differently. Bill Clinton managed to straighten out his presidency after a terrible start that included the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia and the failure of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. But that means tacking back toward the center. If I were Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, I’d be quietly pushing Nancy Pelosi to pass a “clean” $1 trillion infrastructure bill that gives the president the big bipartisan win that he really needs now.Gail: And has all the stuff that you like.Bret: As for his $3.5 trillion social-spending behemoth, he might consider breaking up the bill into separate items of legislation to bring the headline price tag down. If this stuff is as popular as progressives claim, they should be able to score some legislative victories piece by piece.Gail: Sounds reasonable outside the reality of our modern-day Congress, in which the idea of passing more than one bill on anything seems way, way more difficult than firing a shuttle into space.Bret: In the meantime, we’ve got a recall election coming up in California, for which polling shows Governor Newsom will likely survive. I’m not Newsom’s biggest fan, but the whole idea of recall elections seems … unsound.Gail: Yeah, California makes it relatively easy to gather enough signatures for a recall vote, and this is a good example of why that’s bad. Newsom has been one of the strongest governors when it comes to pandemic-fighting, and while that’s great, the restrictions have been around for so long it’s left a lot of people feeling really cranky.Bret: I’m making my quizzical face. Go on.Gail: Then we had one of the worst political errors in recent American political history, when Newsom snuck off to a very fancy restaurant for a maskless birthday dinner for a lobbyist pal. Who wouldn’t have muttered “this guy has to go”?Bret: It was also emblematic of out-of-touch California elites who live on a totally different planet from the one in which there’s a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, an affordability crisis, an addiction crisis, a pension crisis, a schooling crisis, a power-outage crisis, a wildfires crisis, a water-shortage crisis and maybe even another Kardashian crisis — all in a state that’s under almost complete Democratic Party control.Gail: But now recall reality is creeping in. People are looking at the conservative Republican who’d probably wind up as Newsom’s successor and realizing there are way worse things than a tone-deaf politician.Bret: California could really benefit from breaking up the Democrats’ electoral monopoly. Too bad the state Republican Party did itself so much damage with its terrible anti-immigration stance in the 1990s.Gail: Having two consistently competitive parties is good — when a party has hope of winning an election, it’s less likely to snap up a crazy person or a ridiculous person as a candidate. Which I’m afraid does get us over to Newson’s potential Republican successor, Larry Elder. Speaking of Republicans, anybody coming up now who’s winning your heart?Bret: Liz Cheney: gutsy and principled. Adam Kinzinger: ditto. Ben Sasse: decent and smart. Larry Hogan: ditto. John McCain: historic, heroic, humane — but tragically deceased. Basically, all the folks whose chances of surviving in the current G.O.P. are about as great as a small herd of gazelles in a crocodile-infested river.Gail: You’ve picked five Republicans, none of them stars on the rise and one long since passed away. Trump still has a grip on the heart of the party. Which is why I haven’t given up hope that we’ll lasso you back into voting Democratic in 2024.But way, way more topics for discussion before that. Have a good week, Bret, and let’s make a date to discuss the results of the California recall next time. If Newsom wins, we’re all going to be watching avidly to see where he holds his victory party.Bret: He should try holding it at an actual laundromat this time, not the French Laundry.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What If Gavin Newsom Resigned Before the Recall Election?

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      Kathy Schwartz, a retired health care analyst living in Los Angeles, had been following the news about the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom with increasing concern.Ms. Schwartz, 65, initially believed that the recall was a waste of time and money. But she got frightened late last month as Larry Elder, the conservative radio host, vaulted into the top spot to replace the governor, propelled by promises to immediately remove all pandemic health mandates.Then a question occurred to her: Why couldn’t Mr. Newsom resign and allow Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a fellow Democrat, to take over, rendering the recall moot?“Larry Elder is scary, the guy with the bear and the guy in San Diego are scary,” she said, referring to the Republican candidates John Cox and Kevin Faulconer. “So I wondered, ‘Why don’t you just resign to be safe?’”Ms. Schwartz, who recently emailed The New York Times her query, unwittingly stumbled across a kind of thought experiment that has been percolating on social media, and among some Democrats who fear even a brief period of Republican rule in the nation’s most populous state. Earlier in the year, Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, floated the idea to Politico as what the publication called a kind of “nuclear option.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Newsom declined to comment on whether he would step down, and Ms. Kounalakis said she was not considering the possibility.“That is a highly unlikely scenario, so right now my main focus is on keeping Gavin Newsom in office, where he has been doing so much good for Californians,” she said.There has been some ambiguity about what would happen if for Ms. Kounalakis were forced to take over in the next couple of days.The California Secretary of State’s office, which runs elections, said in a statement that “we can’t at this point confirm that it would render the recall moot,” adding that “it would require more extensive research in the matter.”The relevant section of the state’s elections code says, “If a vacancy occurs in an office after a recall petition is filed against the vacating officer, the recall election shall nevertheless proceed.”But just because state law requires the recall election to go forward would not necessarily mean its results matter, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in constitutional law.In the scenario where the governor resigns just ahead of a recall election, “there’s no one to recall,” he said. In his reading, it would take another recall petition to trigger another recall election targeting the lieutenant governor once she took over.Mr. Chemerinsky said there was even less indication in the State Constitution that the recall election’s results would hold if Mr. Newsom was no longer governor.One thing Mr. Chemerinsky is certain about, though, is that if Mr. Newsom were to be replaced by Ms. Kounalakis in the coming days, there would be a lot of litigation.“It would be a mess,” he said.Ms. Schwartz said she did not take any chances, quickly mailing in her ballot with a “no” vote on the first question, about whether the governor should be removed. On the second question — who should replace Mr. Newsom if he is recalled? — she selected Angelyne, the pink-Corvette-driving Hollywood enigma.If Mr. Elder wins, she said, she and her husband might move abroad. More

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      How Seriously Broken Is California’s Recall Election?

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      California’s process for recalling its governor is so broken, some Democratic strategists are encouraging a vote for a Republican former San Diego mayor because “he’s not insane.” Millions of mail-in ballots were already cast before the state even released a list of qualified write-in candidates to potentially replace the sitting governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, leaving voters to choose from a list of 46 mostly gadflies and wannabes.Voters are asked to answer two questions: First, do they want to recall Mr. Newsom, and second, if he is recalled, whom do they want to replace him? The governor can be recalled through a simple majority vote. His replacement needs only a plurality, no matter how small. This means that Mr. Newsom could win the support of 49 percent of voters and still be recalled. A candidate vying to replace him could be elected with half of that support, or even less.Election rules don’t allow for Mr. Newsom’s name to appear on the ballot, as is the case in a number of other states with recall rules, or for him to serve if he wins as a write-in candidate. That structure may amount to unconstitutional disenfranchisement. Another wrinkle: In order for votes for write-in candidates to count, the person written in must have filed paperwork to qualify. The list of qualified write-in candidates wasn’t made public until last Friday, less than two weeks before polls close on Sept. 14 — but weeks after mail-in ballots were sent out.Scrapping the century-old recall system altogether would deny California voters an important check on their top elected official. Whatever the result of the Newsom recall effort, however, the process is well past due for an overhaul.For starters, California’s recalls can happen in off-years, which makes them ripe for manipulation by the minority party. There have been at least 179 recall attempts in California since the measure was adopted by voters in 1911, and every governor since 1960 has faced at least one.The timing also means a far smaller electorate ends up determining who is the state’s leader. Special elections will always draw fewer voters, but for something as consequential as the governorship of the country’s most populous state, every effort should be made to increase turnout, including potentially requiring them to be held during regularly scheduled votes. Voters in off-cycle elections generally skew older, whiter and more conservative, a recent study led by the University of California, San Diego, found. In other words, not very representative of California’s population.Early polling suggested that as few as one-third of the state’s 22.3 million registered voters may participate this time — and they are facing a dizzying array of choices for Mr. Newsom’s potential successor. The slate is a ragtag bunch including the former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, YouTube star Kevin Paffrath and mononymous billboard personality Angelyne. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor, is among the few with any prior political experience.The leading candidate is the Republican talk-radio host Larry Elder, whose conservative policy positions — including his opposition to mask mandates, abortion rights and a minimum wage, as well as his troubling views on women’s rights and climate change — aren’t in line with any statewide election result in California for decades.Yet polls show he is the top candidate with the support of just 20 percent of likely voters. In California’s recall scheme, he could assume the governor’s office with well under two million votes, compared with the 7.7 million votes Mr. Newsom won in the regular 2018 election.“The system as it’s designed allows a minority faction that really has no hope of winning statewide election to get a recall on the ballot,” said Chris Elmendorf, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, who studies elections.Some Californians point to the last recall election, in 2003, as evidence that the system works. That year, voters booted Gray Davis, a Democrat, and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. While Mr. Schwarzenegger fell short of winning an outright majority, at least more people voted for him than voted to keep Mr. Davis.But is that good enough? There are numerous ways that California should reform its recall system.First, it ought to shift the burden of winning majority support from the incumbent — who was, after all, duly elected by the voters — and put it on the recall effort. There is a reason that impeaching and removing the president requires not only a majority vote in the House but also a supermajority in the Senate. In a democracy, the results of a regularly scheduled election should not be overturned before the next election except in the most extraordinary circumstances.Other states with recall provisions, like Minnesota and Washington, require an act of malfeasance or a conviction for a serious crime for the recall to proceed. Mr. Newsom’s maskless dinner at a high-end restaurant to celebrate a lobbyist’s birthday, which buttressed the recall effort, was certainly hypocritical and tone-deaf, but it shouldn’t alone be grounds for early eviction from office.Another needed reform is to make it harder to get a recall on the ballot in the first place. Among the 18 other states with voter recall measures, none have a lower threshold than California’s. It takes signatures equal to just 12 percent of the total votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election to initiate a recall in California. In many other states, the threshold is 25 percent. In Kansas, the bar is 40 percent. In 2020 alone, at least 14 governors nationwide faced recall efforts, but only California’s attempt proceeded to a ballot, according to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform and the author of a recent book on recall elections. That’s due in part to those other states’ higher thresholds. California already has a more stringent 20 percent standard for recalls of state lawmakers and judges. That would make sense for governors as well.Finally, California’s system discourages the sitting governor’s party from backing a replacement candidate for fear of bolstering the recall effort. That’s why Mr. Newsom asked voters to vote “no” on the recall and leave the second question blank. Doing so makes it even more likely that a candidate from the opposing party will win.Another fix would be to hold the vote on the recall itself on a different day than the vote on a successor, as several other states do. That would give replacement candidates time to put together a campaign on the issues, rather than just on the recall itself.Alternatively, lawmakers should consider requiring a recalled governor’s seat to be turned over to the democratically elected lieutenant governor, who would otherwise assume the post if the governor died, resigned or was impeached.Properly conducted, recalls can serve an important function in representative democracies, a salve for buyer’s remorse in extreme circumstances. But it should be in the state’s interest to have the broadest and most diverse electorate possible. That’s not now the case in California, where many people aren’t even aware the recall election is happening, even though ballots were sent to all registered voters in the state.A system that allows a legitimately elected governor to be replaced with a fringe candidate winning only a small fraction of the vote is in desperate need of reform. California voters should vote no on the recall question, and the Legislature should, at last, begin the work of revising the state’s recall elections.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Want to Know Who Might Run for Governor? Check the N.Y. State Fair.

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      Amid cows and crowds, the State Fair became a destination for potential challengers to Gov. Kathy Hochul, including Letitia James, the state attorney general.As Gov. Kathy Hochul sampled a sandwich at the New York State Fair on Sunday, touring the Syracuse-area spectacle like other governors before her, she overtly embraced her role as the state’s new leader — and implicitly set down a marker for 2022, when she intends to seek election to a full term as governor.Two days later, the New York City public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, was in town, observing the cows and swinging by a butterfly garden. On Wednesday, it was Attorney General Letitia James’s turn.Ms. James greeted attendees, admired a butter sculpture and, like Mr. Williams, stoked fresh speculation about future political ambitions — and whether those ambitions included a run for governor.All three New York Democratic officials have visited the fair before. But the pilgrimages this week — not unlike a presidential hopeful’s early visits to Iowa — took on fresh resonance, offering a very public reminder of a nascent political contest that has been brewing behind the scenes.After more than a decade of governors’ races that were dominated and defined by the now-disgraced former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s political class is quietly beginning to plan for a different — and possibly, fiercely contested — primary campaign next year.While Ms. Hochul, New York’s first female governor, has been in office for just over a week, the primary machinery is already whirring to life, with hiring, polling and political gamesmanship picking up speed. One poll had extensive questions about Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has not ruled out running for governor.The most concrete activity among Democrats surrounds Ms. Hochul. She has already brought on strategists with national and New York experience; Tucker Green, a major Democratic fund-raiser, has also recently joined her campaign team as Ms. Hochul works to cement fund-raising strength, often an advantage for a sitting governor. The governor is making other decisions about her campaign infrastructure and will have more personnel announcements after Labor Day, an adviser to Ms. Hochul said.Many New York Democrats expect Ms. Hochul to be a powerful contender, boosted by the advantages of incumbency, the statewide network she has already assembled and an outpouring of good will for a new governor who has moved urgently to restore some of the norms and relationships that crumbled under the previous chief executive.But the field will also be shaped by Ms. Hochul’s track record as she navigates a series of staggering challenges facing the state.“We don’t know who is going to be in it,” said Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, a New York Democrat. “Who is going to be in it will be defined by Kathy Hochul’s leadership.”On Wednesday, Ms. Hochul announced that Kathryn Garcia — a former mayoral candidate who had been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor herself — had been appointed director of state operations.Perhaps the biggest uncertainty in the race is whether Ms. James will run. Some of her advisers, including some at the Hamilton Campaign Network, which was heavily involved in Ms. James’s previous runs, are beginning to have conversations about who could join a potential James bid for governor, according to people familiar with the discussions — part of an effort among Ms. James’s allies to keep her options open.“We do not comment about our clients,” the company said in a statement.“Tish would be an excellent governor,” said John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union, who lauded her “courageousness” in spearheading the investigation that led to Mr. Cuomo’s resignation. “She has a demonstrated record of steadfast support for working people.”A critical report by Letitia James, the state attorney general, led to the resignation of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last month.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesPeople who have spoken with Ms. James in recent weeks have not gotten the impression that she has made a decision, but one of those people said Ms. James indicated she would like to make a call sometime this fall, ahead of the Democratic State Convention slated for early next year. Others have the broad sense that she would be inclined to see how Ms. Hochul’s early months as governor proceed.Asked about those discussions, a representative for Ms. James said that the attorney general is “fully focused on her work protecting and defending the rights of New Yorkers and plans to continue taking on the big fights that matter.”There has been a flurry of activity in other potential candidates’ camps, too.Recently, Anna Greenberg, Mayor de Blasio’s longtime pollster, conducted a survey testing the mayor’s appeal outside of New York City and the potency of particular messages about him.One Westchester resident, who took notes as he was polled on Tuesday, said that questions tested the appeal of several potential candidates for governor, including Ms. Hochul, Mr. Williams, Ms. James and Mr. de Blasio.Then, several specific messages about Mr. de Blasio — questions that were not raised about the other potential candidates — were tested.Among other things, the questioner discussed Mr. de Blasio’s record of battling Mr. Cuomo over his response to the pandemic, his efforts to provide legal services to New Yorkers facing evictions and his work on police reform and universal prekindergarten. Then the pollster asked if those facts made the respondent more or less inclined to support him.A spokesman for Mr. de Blasio declined to comment.On Long Island, Steven Bellone, the Suffolk County executive, has hired J.J. Balaban and Brandon L. Davis, veteran Democratic political strategists and ad makers, and brought on the national firm GPS Impact as he contemplates a run for governor.Representative Thomas Suozzi, a Long Island Democrat, is also thought to be seriously considering a run. But he intends to assess how Ms. Hochul performs and wants to accomplish his goals in negotiations in Congress over the federal deduction for state and local taxes, according to one Long Island Democrat with knowledge of Mr. Suozzi’s intentions, granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.In recent weeks, Mr. Williams has said publicly that he is exploring a bid for governor, and privately he has told at least one person that he has already decided to run — withholding his plans because he does not want to announce it so close to Ms. Hochul’s swearing-in.In a brief interview, Mr. Williams said he thinks it is important to give the sitting governor time “to get her bearings,” and for the state to “take a moment to recognize the historic nature of the first woman governor.”“There’s definitely time to have those conversations in the near future,” Mr. Williams said. “And I have said I am considering, but it is important that we allow that time period before we dive deep into those questions.”Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, is exploring a run for governor.Chery Dieu-Nalio for The New York TimesJay S. Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, suggested that there could be risks for candidates announcing any intentions so soon after Ms. Hochul assumed the governorship.“Right now it would be premature and probably unseemly,” he said. “You have to have a reason, and I think that means you have to give the current governor a little bit of time. Then you can distinguish yourself from her, if you choose to run.” More

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      in Elections

      It’s Election Season in Germany. No Charisma, Please!

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      The race to replace Chancellor Angela Merkel after 16 years in office is the tightest in years. But the two leading candidates are anything but exciting, and that’s how Germans like it.BERLIN — The most popular politician who would like to be chancellor isn’t on the ballot. The leading candidate is so boring people compare him to a machine. Instead of “Yes, We Can!” voters are being fired up with promises of “Stability.”Germany is having its most important election in a generation but you would never know it. The newspaper Die Welt recently asked in a headline: “Is this the most boring election ever?”Yes and no.The campaign to replace Chancellor Angela Merkel after 16 years of her dominating German and European politics is the tightest in Germany since 2005, and it just got tighter. The Social Democrats, written off as recently as a month ago, have overtaken Ms. Merkel’s conservatives for the first time in years.But the campaign has also revealed a charisma vacuum that is at once typical of postwar German politics and exceptional for just how bland Ms. Merkel’s two most likely successors are. No party is polling more than 25 percent, and for much of the race the candidate the public has preferred was none of the above.Whoever wins, however, will have the job of shepherding the continent’s largest economy, making that person one of Europe’s most important leaders, which has left some observers wondering if the charisma deficit will extend to a leadership deficit as well.While the election outcome may be exciting, the two leading candidates are anything but.A campaign billboard in Berlin featuring Mr. Scholz — sometimes known as the “Scholz-o-mat.”John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLess than a month before the vote, the field is being led by two male suit-wearing career politicians — one balding, one bespectacled, both over 60 — who represent the parties that have governed the country jointly for the better part of two decades.There is Armin Laschet, the governor of the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, who is running for Ms. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats. And then there is Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat who is Ms. Merkel’s finance minister and vice chancellor.The candidate of change, Annalena Baerbock, the 40-year-old co-leader of the Greens, has a bold reform agenda and plenty of verve — and has been lagging in the polls after a brief surge in the polls before the summer.It’s a nail-biter, German-style: Who can most effectively channel stability and continuity? Or put another way: Who can channel Ms. Merkel?For now it seems to be Mr. Scholz — a man Germans have long known as the “Scholz-o-mat” or the “Scholz machine” — a technocrat and veteran politician who can seem almost robotically on message. Where others have slipped up in the campaign, he has avoided mistakes, mostly by saying very little.“Most citizens know who I am,” was Mr. Scholz’s pitch to his party before being anointed chancellor candidate, conspicuously echoing Ms. Merkel’s iconic 2013 line to voters: “You know me.”More recently one of his campaign ads showed his reassuring smile with a caption using the female form of the word chancellor, telling voters that he has what it takes to lead the country even though he is a man. “Angela the second,” was the title of a Scholz profile in the magazine Der Spiegel this week.Mr. Scholz has tried so hard to perfect the art of embodying the chancellor’s aura of stability and calm that he has even been photographed holding his hands before him in the chancellor’s signature diamond shape — making what is known as the Merkel rhombus.Mr. Scholz at a campaign rally last week in Berlin. Opponents say he’s trying to sound like Chancellor Merkel.Florian Gaertner/Photothek, via Getty Images“Scholz is trying to be Merkel’s clone all the way down to the rhombus,” said John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany who has been living in Berlin on and off since the 1960s. “The guy everyone likes best is the most boring guy in the election — maybe in the country. He makes watching water boil seem exciting.”But Germans, political observers point out, love boring.“There are few countries where such a premium is put on being dull,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at the University of Oxford who has written about the country.It’s not that Germans are resistant to charisma. When Barack Obama was running for president and delivered a rousing speech at the victory column in Berlin in 2008, 100,000 Germans cheered him on.But they don’t want it in their own politicians. That’s because the last time Germany had a rousing leader it didn’t end well, noted Jan Böhmermann, a popular TV-host and comedian.The haunting memory of Hitler’s Nazi party winning office in free elections has shaped Germany’s postwar democracy in various ways, Mr. Böhmermann said, “and one of them is that charisma is banned from politics.”Andrea Römmele, dean of the Berlin-based Hertie School, put it this way: “A Trump character could never become chancellor here.”Paradoxically, that’s at least in part thanks to an electoral system bequeathed to Germany by America and its Allies after World War II. Unlike in the American presidential system, German voters don’t get to elect their chancellor directly. They vote for parties; the parties’ share of the vote determines their share of the seats in Parliament; and then Parliament elects the chancellor.And because it just about always takes more than one party to form a government — and this time probably three — you can’t be too rude about the people you might rely on to be your coalition partners.“Your rival today might be your finance minister tomorrow,” Ms. Römmele said.Mr. Laschet, center, campaigning door to door last week in Berlin. He has promised to “secure stability.”Michael Kappeler/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesAs for the chancellor candidates, they are not chosen in primaries but by party officials who tend to pick people like themselves: career politicians who have given years of service to the party machine.Being good on television and connecting with voters doesn’t cut it, said Jürgen Falter, an electoral expert at the University of Mainz. “It’s a strict oligarchic system,” he said. “If we had primaries, Markus Söder would have been the candidate.”Mr. Söder, Bavaria’s ambitious governor, has heaps of beer-tent charisma and is the most popular politician in the country after Ms. Merkel herself. He was eager to run for chancellor, but the conservatives picked Mr. Laschet, a longstanding Merkel ally, not least, Ms. Römmele said, because at the time he looked most like “the continuity candidate.”But Mr. Scholz has beaten him at his game. During a televised debate between the chancellor candidates last Sunday, an exasperated Mr. Laschet accused Mr. Scholz of trying to “sound like Ms. Merkel.”“I find I sound like Olaf Scholz,” Mr. Scholz replied deadpan.“These days you’re doing the rhombus,” Mr. Laschet hit back — before himself invoking the chancellor in his closing statement.“Stability and reliability in difficult times,” he said. “That’s what marked us from Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel. The team C.D.U. wants to secure stability.”Recent polls give Mr. Scholz’ Social Democrats the edge with between 23 and 25 percent, followed by 20 to 22 percent for Mr. Laschet’s Christian Democrats, or C.D.U., and around 17 percent for the Greens.From second left: Mr. Laschet, Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party, and Mr. Scholz during a televised debate on Sunday.Pool photo by Michael KappelerTo his fans, Mr. Scholz is a voice of calm and confidence, a pragmatist from Germany’s taciturn north who represents the elusive silent majority. “Liberal, but not stupid,” is how he once described himself.But critics note that while crises have come crashing down on the election campaign — epic floods, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the pandemic — a sense of urgency is missing from the campaigns of the two leading candidates.Much like Mr. Laschet, Mr. Scholz talks about tackling climate change but above all promises stable pensions, safe jobs, a balanced budget and not getting out of coal too soon.“The big story is that we have a world in crisis and there isn’t any sense of real crisis in Germany,” said Mr. Garton Ash of Oxford University.A bold vision for change has never been a vote winner in Germany. Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar chancellor, won an absolute majority for the Christian Democrats by promising “No Experiments.” Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, once famously said, “If you have visions you should go to the doctor.”As for Ms. Merkel, she has come to embody Germany’s distinctive political tradition of change through consensus perhaps more than any of her predecessors by co-governing with her traditional opponents for three out of her four terms.Mr. Böhmermann, the comedian, calls this a “democratic state of emergency” for Germany. “You could say we were well-managed over the last 16 years — or you could say we were anesthetized for 16 years.”“We need vision,” he lamented. “No one dares to articulate a clear political vision, especially the main candidates.”Chancellor Merkel last week at the Parliament in Berlin.Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockChristopher F. Schuetze More