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The attempt to sack Gov. Gavin Newsom appears doomed to defeat based on the vote tally released Tuesday night in California’s historic recall election.
With some 8.6 million ballots counted – out of 22.3 million ballots mailed to registered voters – the no is ahead of the yes by 65.4% to 34.6%, according to California Secretary of State.
That was enough for most of the major news outlets, including AP, CNN and NBC, to declare that the recall had failed and Newsom had survived.
But there are probably a lot more votes to be counted. Here’s why: The votes reported so far are just the ballots cast before Tuesday, from voters who mailed them in, left them in campaign drop boxes, or voted early in person. After 8 p.m., election officials will begin counting the ballots that were cast on Tuesday. And stamped ballots by Tuesday will be counted as long as they arrive in the week.
Republicans are expected to represent a larger share of those who vote at polling stations on Tuesday, so the results may shift to the yes side as those ballots are counted.
In Contra Costa County, the discrepancies stood at 73.13% for the no and 26.87% for the yes to the recall question, in unofficial results at the end of election night. With an unknown number of local ballots still to be processed, turnout on Tuesday represented 49.38% of registered voters.
The no camp also performed very well in Alameda County, according to early returns on election night, with 83.13% voting No and 16.87% voting Yes on the recall issue. That turnout has so far represented 36.17% of registered voters in the county, with an unknown number of ballots remaining to be counted.
Statewide, among candidates seeking to replace Newsom, if a majority of voters choose to recall him, the GOP talk radio host Larry Elder led the pack with 45.2% of the vote. Democrat Kevin Paffrath was far second at 10.3%, while former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican, was in third place at 9.1%.
Elder has indicated that he will likely run for governor next year if he doesn’t win this time around.
“I have now become a political force here in California in general and within the Republican Party in particular, and I will not be leaving the scene,” he said Tuesday in an interview with the Fresno KMJ radio show. Now.
But even before election day, Elder began to question the validity of the results. He said he thinks there maybe “shenanigans” and that he is prepared to sue for irregularities. For days, a “Stop CA Fraud” website linked to its campaign site called for an investigation into the “twisted results” of the recall elections “leading Gov. Gavin Newsom to be reinstated as governor; These words have been deleted in the past 24 hours.
Newsom’s strategy to combat recall was based on lessons learned from the only other governor recalls in modern American history: the 2003 ouster of Democratic Governor of California Gray Davis and the failed governor’s recall attempt. Republican of Wisconsin Scott Walker in 2012. (Governor of North Dakota has been recalled a century ago, well before the modern era of political communication.)
Davis’ recall lesson: Prevent any prominent Democrat from running as a replacement and focus on telling Democrats to just vote ‘no’. In 2003, Democrat Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor, ran with the slogan “No to recall, yes to Bustamante”.
Newsom’s campaign said this gave some Democrats the belief that they could recall Davis and still have a Democratic governor.
“We weren’t going to make the same mistake,” Newsom quarterback Ace Smith said.
The Walker’s lesson pushing back a recall: Play offensive and set your opponent. Walker was successful in part because he was able to portray the recall as an attack on the unions and paint them as the villain.
The Newsom team used the same strategy, but with the opposite policy. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans twice, they have portrayed Republicans as the bogeyman and have repeatedly tried to tie the recall to former President Donald Trump, who is deeply unpopular in California. And when Elder became the frontrunner, Newsom focused on his conservative positions on race, immigration, women’s rights and dealing with the pandemic.
“Politics should always be a choice,” Smith said. “The choice in this case is not whether your governor is perfect or not, the choice is whether your governor would do a much better job than the other person who would be governor.”
Newsom also benefited from a huge fundraising benefit – raising five times more money than his opponents combined. And he got the help of organized labor. Unions contributed millions of dollars to his campaign and also mounted a huge push to knock on doors, make phone calls and send texts urging voters to say “no” to the recall.
“It was really about contact and face-to-face communication,” said Steve Smith, spokesperson for the California Labor Federation. “This is what we knew it would take, given the research we did in the early summer where we saw a tremendous amount of apathy and poor information. The TV commercials alone were wrong. not solve this problem. “
Newsom also bet his strict approach to the pandemic – as the country’s first governor to demand vaccines for healthcare workers and state employees – would pay off in a state where two thirds of residents are vaccinated. He contrasted his approach with his GOP opponents, who said they would repeal the mandates for masks and vaccines.
Tuesday’s election exit polls reveal that the The pandemic is the main problem on the minds of California voters, and that more than 6 in 10 people say that getting vaccinated is more a public health responsibility than a personal choice.
Editor’s Note: DanvilleSanRamon.com Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Walsh contributed to the local results of this story.
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