In Red California, the anger over the rash of the recall. “The Democratic Party is the New York Yankees”

JANESVILLE, Calif .–

On election day Denise Pickens had a surprising feeling: hope.

Surely, she thought, Governor Gavin Newsom would be removed from his post. Or at least have a good scare.

There was such fervor here in rural Lassen County – where 84% of voters backed the recall, the highest percentage in the state – that it was hard not to believe it could happen.

Then Newsom’s landslide victory landed like a kick to the shin with a steel-toed boot.

“I went to bed really wanting to put a For Sale sign outside my house,” said Pickens, 50, as she sipped chai milk tea outside Artisan Coffee in Janesville, a population of 1,400.

Once again, votes from vast rural Northern California, which overwhelmingly backed the recall, were drowned out by urban liberals, Pickens said.

As for the California GOP, which has had its best shot in more than a decade of state government?

“Ineffective, as usual,” said Pickens, a longtime Republican.

“Part of me is like, you know what, the progressive democratic machine is what it is, and we just aren’t enough,” she said.

Getting the recall on the ballot initially looked like a victory here in Northern California, where the Conservatives have long thought they’d better secede and form their own state called Jefferson.

But there was no symbolic and emotional victory in forcing an election. The result was a punch that displayed, in the harsh, bright lights of an unbalanced dashboard, which firmly controls this state.

“The Democratic Party is the New York Yankees, and the Republican Party in this state is the Minor Leagues,” said Christopher Cole, former Lassen County Republican Party chairman. “You cannot compete.”

The results – with Newsom prevailing from 64% to 36% on Friday – highlight California’s urban-rural divide. Every county in Southern California has rejected the recall, as has the entire coast, except for the tiny county of Del Norte in the northwest corner of the state.

The far north, the heart of red California, strongly supported him. The Central Agricultural Valley – which swung to the left after decades of Republican rule – did so too, but with weaker margins.

The governor does not seem to have any illusions that he is loved in these regions. In his 2019 inaugural address, Newsom pledged to represent all Californians, saying he recognized that “many in our rural communities think Sacramento doesn’t care about them, doesn’t even really see them.”

“Well I see you. I care about you,” he said.

The people here, however, never believed it. A common refrain is that “King Newsom” doesn’t visit unless there’s a wildfire and a photo op.

“We’re only three and a half hours from Sacramento, but we might as well be on the other side of the moon,” said Cole, a 63-year-old videographer who lives in Susanville and voted for MP. ‘State Kevin Kiley. (R-Rocklin) to replace Newsom.

“The people of Lassen County are not fools or cuckoos. They are hard working, warm and patriotic people, but I think there is going to be a smoldering resentment for a long time to come.

Cole called the election a “disaster” by a disorganized state GOP that never lent its support to a particular candidate. He envisions people here breaking away from the state Republican Party and increasingly supporting Jefferson’s secession movement.

Jessica Newton, who owns a dance studio on Main Street in Susanville, said she had mixed feelings about the costly election.

She voted to recall Newsom, believing her unique initial approach to the coronavirus pandemic – with large-scale closures last year – hurt rural areas with fewer cases and more natural social distancing than crowded urban areas. .

But she didn’t pick a candidate to replace Newsom because she wasn’t thrilled with the choices.

“Was it good to show that we were united?” Yes ”, Newton, 36, said of the election. “Is this the best execution of public funding? I do not know.”

In the future, bridging the cultural divide between Red and Blue California will be incredibly difficult, said Kim Nalder, director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State University.

“One of the things that makes it really hard for people to come to terms with defeat is that we live in these ideological bubbles, and, especially in this state, it’s really geographic,” Nalder said.

“If you live in Lassen County or in the foothills of the Sierras, you don’t see a lot of support for Gavin Newsom. You see a lot of Jefferson signs or, again, some Trump signs. It seems almost impossible for people to feel different elsewhere, and on the flip side, the reverse is true in large metropolitan areas.

In Lassen County, a remote outpost bordering the Nevada state border, the small towns that supported the recall are suffering.

Along the 90-minute drive on Hwy 395 from Reno to Susanville, the hills are black, the air is smoky, and signs featuring Smokey Bear warn of a “very high” fire danger. Over 30 homes in the town of Doyle, population approximately 600, burned in the Sugar fire in July. Last month, the Dixie Fire destroyed several homes near Janesville.

Many here blame the Liberals for policies that they say have led to overgrown forests and more destructive wildfires.

In Susanville, where the population has declined dramatically over the past 15 years, residents brace for potential economic devastation after the state’s planned closure of the California Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison that employs more than 1,100 people and trains inmate firefighters.

The city is suing the Newsom administration for shutting down the CCC before older and more rapidly deteriorating prisons. Local officials say they were kept in the dark about how and why the decision was made, which only heightened Newsom’s resentment.

“We really hoped that if the governor was recalled and this decision really came from his office, the new governor would look at the situation and see that it is not the best decision,” said Kerri Cobb, a loan initiator who has been fighting the shutdown.

In an interview with Lumberjacks restaurant, Cobb, 50, said she grew up in a proud wood family in Susanville. His father was a lumberjack; his grandfather, a team leader. Her husband worked at a sawmill, then became a correctional officer at High Desert State Prison, next to the CCC, after all factories began to close.

She said it was as if her beloved hometown was in a long economic decline and the governor and the rest of the state didn’t care.

Sitting next to her, Hunter Anglea, 61, of Janesville, said the result of the recall had heightened her desire to leave California.

“If my house is on fire, now will be the time to go,” said Anglea, who worked at CCC for 25 years before recently retiring as director of the Sierra Conservation Center.

Tensions between rural communities and the Newsom administration over its handling of the pandemic have helped fuel the recall movement here.

Small counties with fewer COVID-19 cases have hesitated at statewide governor’s closures last year, saying they should have more local control, and some have openly defied residence orders at Newsom’s home.

Last month, several counties in northern California with lower vaccination rates had more hospital patients with COVID-19 than at any time during the pandemic. The number of cases has declined in recent days, as it has across the state.

Lassen County Supervisor Jeff Hemphill said the stress of receiving so many frantic calls and emails from people he knew personally who feared losing their business and not being able to pay rent brought him gave ulcers which sent him to hospital for 10 days.

Hemphill, a rancher who lives in the Janesville house his family built in the 1930s, said Northern Californians have been wrongly caricatured as “a bunch of assholes.”

“They say rednecks, they say uneducated,” added his wife, Nancy, a civilian employee of the US Department of Defense. “Jeff and I graduated. I am working on my master. So nothing could be further from the truth.

Hemphill said people here need to move forward after the election disappointment and he hopes Newsom has at least learned a lesson.

“I’m optimistic that he got this revelation, ‘You know what, I work for people. At the end of the day, they are my boss.

“I don’t believe he learned anything,” Nancy said.

Back at Artisan Coffee, Pickens said she too felt the defeat of the recall only reinforced the feeling that people here are seen as “weird cousins ​​here in the middle of nowhere.”

Pickens’ husband is a correctional officer at the CCC, where the state transferred inmates infected with the coronavirus from San Quentin State Prison last summer, which led to a major outbreak in Lassen County. She blames Newsom for the increase in the number of cases here and for all the disruption her teenage son has had to deal with in the face of school closures.

“But I’ve been saying for weeks, if he wins this, we’re screwed.”