Newsom and Elder make final appeals to voters in recall elections

Two days before the California recall election closes, Gov. Gavin Newsom and leading Republican candidate Larry Elder spent Sunday making their last ditch effort with Los Angeles voters.

The governor spoke to a few hundred people in Sun Valley – in hopes of building support from the region’s large Latin American population – while Elder held a press conference in Brentwood.

In Sun Valley, dueling crowds passed Newsom as he finished the rally in Chef Robert Catering’s parking lot: “Vote no! they applauded. “If we can!”

“The California dream is still alive and well. But I also want to remind you that the dream is on the ballot, ”Newsom told the crowd. “I know my name is on the ballot, but if they land their hate plane, if they are successful with that reminder, I assure you that our progress on racial justice, social justice, justice economic, environmental justice will be slowed down. ”

Newsom reinforced his campaign message, touting his background as governor and pinning the race as a Republican-led effort that could devastate the state. A group of local, state and federal leaders, including US Senator Alex Padilla, California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks, and Los Angeles City Council Chairman Nury Martinez joined him in urging attendees to vote and have repeatedly called the election a “Republican recall”.

Newsom has targeted Elder, as well as Orrin Heatlie, an organizer of the recall effort. He pointed to Elder’s statement that an argument could be made to owe reparations to descendants of slave owners as well as blacks, and he pointed to Heatlie’s previous comment on Facebook to “chip away all illegal aliens “. Heatlie later called the comment “hyperbole,” not to be taken literally.

“You can’t make that stuff up,” Newsom said on Sunday. “The consequences of this race are deep and pronounced. The xenophobia, the nativism, the hatred, the absolute racism behind it all.

A poll released Friday by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed that 67% of Latino voters reject the recall effort. With 39% of the population, Latinos are the largest ethnic group in California and a crucial part of the electorate.

Sporting a Dodgers mask, Ernesto Pantoja, government affairs specialist for Local 300 of the International Union of Workers of North America, praised the governor for keeping the many workers in the construction industry in the work during the pandemic, enabling them to contribute to the economy of their communities and their families.

Pantoja, 41, said he would vote against the recall because Republicans “are not representative of who we are.”

“They don’t care about me as a Latino, period,” said Pantoja, who is of Mexican descent. “Where do my people come from, what we’ve been through, I don’t want these people to represent me.”

Elder held a Sunday afternoon press conference in Brentwood with feminist, writer and former actress Rose McGowan. In recent days, McGowan had claimed Newsom’s wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom asked him to cooperate with Harvey Weinstein’s attorney at a time when McGowan was considering making allegations of sexual misconduct against the Hollywood mogul. .

McGowan said that in 2017, feminist group UltraViolet contacted her and said Newsom’s wife could help her address some of her concerns about Weinstein.

McGowan, who ultimately accused Weinstein of rape, was considering making the allegation at the time, which was then kept confidential.

Weinstein would later be represented by famous lawyer David Boies and his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner.

McGowan said she had a brief phone call with Siebel Newsom, who she said asked her, “What will it take? What can Boies Schiller do to make you happy?

She said she hadn’t heard from Boies or the company, “so I didn’t say anything and hung up on it.”

McGowan said she believed the call amounted to an attempt by Newsom’s wife, then lieutenant governor, to “crack down” on her and her charges against Weinstein.

The Elder campaign also featured an email Siebel Newsom apparently sent in late 2017 to defend against the idea that it was siding with Weinstein and his lawyer.

In the email, she admits asking McGowan “what if anything Boies could do for her that would help her heal.” She said McGowan rejected the opening. Siebel Newsom insisted in the 2017 email that the idea that she wanted to help Weinstein was “completely absurd,” suggesting that the “unresolved trauma” of some victims had made her a scapegoat.

Siebel Newsom has strongly denied McGowan’s claims.

“What is alleged is a complete fabrication,” a spokesperson for Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “Their limited correspondence has been strictly as sexual assault survivors and as Jennifer’s former ability to lead the Representation Project, an organization that fights the limitation of stereotypes and gender norms.”

Immediately after The New York Times broke the news of the sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein in October 2017, Siebel Newsom wrote a column saying that she believed the accusers and had her own run-in with Weinstein.

“The entire engine of Harvey Weinstein’s business and legal machines appears to have been working overtime to silence decades and dozens of accusations,” Siebel Newsom wrote in HuffPost.

Elder did not say how the charges against Newsom’s wife related to the governor.

Newsom called the allegations “outrageous and false.” He also reiterated a series of positions from his opponent that he said were bad for women.

Elder also touched on other topics at the press conference, including school choice, Barack and Michelle Obama’s alleged lack of support for public education, and what he called the Democrats’ false belief. that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election. He focused much of his anger on the media.

“If anyone said my significant other… called Rose McGowan and said, ‘What can we do to get you out? What can we do to make this happy? ‘ that’s all you’d be talking about by the end of my campaign. It is a double standard to which I have been subjected all my time. And I’m fed up and you should be fed up.

Times editor Laura Newberry contributed to this report.