Perversion of the recall process could bring reform — if California survives it
In 2018, Gavin Newsom defeated John Cox in the California governor’s race with 62% of votes cast, the biggest victory for a non-incumbent governor since 1930, and the first time ever that Democrats had won three consecutive gubernatorial elections. But now, recent polling shows he could become just the second governor to be recalled — and replaced by a Republican getting 20% of the vote or less. And how much damage a Republican governor could do in California and beyond — especially as the COVID-19 Delta variant still rages — is difficult to imagine.
It could turn the state into a Florida-style COVID-19 basket case — where the case rate recently was almost five times California’s. It could wreck havoc with our efforts to fight climate change, tear the state apart with Donald Trump-style executive orders (regardless of their legality) and even tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate — derailing President Joe Biden’s agenda — should Dianne Feinstein die or become incapacitated. It would certainly encourage other ongoing GOP efforts to undermine majority rule — voter suppression laws, partisan gerrymandering, even increased physical violence.
If Newsom does survive, however, there’s invigorated interest — and strong public support — for major reforms to the recall process… and perhaps even the initiative, too.
COVID foolishness
Take COVID-19 first. All top GOP candidates share some degree of COVID-19 denialism: denying the public health consensus that mandated mass vaccination is the key to controlling the pandemic, and that mask mandates are essential in the meantime wherever there’s pandemic spread. They encourage outright hostility to effectively fighting the disease on the false premise that “freedom” means an inalienable right to spread deadly disease, and that public health measures — which save millions of lives annually — are a form of tyranny.
Cox, for example, would like to see California be more like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned local mask mandates and is at war with local health officials and school districts with the highest COVID-19 case rates in the nation. “What we need to do is look at what other states have done. I mean I compare California to Florida,” Cox said Aug. 4 at a recall candidate debate fittingly held at the Nixon Library.
“To make the case that California got it right, you also have to make the case that all 49 other states got it wrong,” said Assemblymember Kevin Kiley, epitomizing the GOP attempt to paint California, rather than Florida, as the disastrous anti-science outlier.
“I do not favor mandates; I favor education,” said former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, attempting to strike a balanced, “reasonable” tone. But it would only be reasonable if the virus weren’t contagious — if a single individual’s decisions not to vaccinate or mask didn’t put everyone else at risk.
“You’re not going to mandate your way out of the coronavirus,” Faulconer added. But that’s exactly what science says will do the trick. In Florida, more than 800 physicians wrote a letter calling on DeSantis to repeal his ban on mask mandates, writing that “Gov. DeSantis’ anti-safety strategy puts people at risk, including children.”
The good news is that none of these four candidates are likely to replace Newsom. None have led in any recent polls. The bad news is who just might: rightwing talkshow host Larry Elder, self-proclaimed “sage of South Central” who’s made a comfortable career out of saying things white conservatives love hearing from a Black man.
Elder’s ideas are profoundly unpopular, particularly in California. He opposes gun safety laws, safe and legal abortion, and the minimum wage — he says it should be “zero dollars.” He could never beat Newsom in a head-to-head two-person race. But the chaos and confusion of a recall election, where he only has to beat other losers, is custom made for his simplistic pitch mobilizing the Trump base.
The dark horse of the recall
Elder routinely claims to possess “common sense,” as a way of dismissing experts and evidence that complicate or contradict his simplistic worldview, and he easily lies about things he’s said and positions he’s held that he finds inconvenient now. “I’ve never said that climate change is a myth,” he said in an Aug. 1 KABC interview, for example. But the Internet’s Wayback Machine shows that from 2007 to 2009 his website featured a page headlined, “Debunking the Gore-Bull Warming Myth.”
On COVID-19, Elder blends in with the rest of the GOP.
“I don’t support mandates for masks. I don’t support mandates for vaccines,” Elder said in that same interview. “If I’m fortunate enough to become governor, I’m going to repeal any mandates that are in place when I become governor,” he added. He didn’t say he’d try to ban local mandates, but with Elder, you can never be sure. He has a Trumpian way of jumping around on issues, while staunchly maintaining his own consistency and “common sense.”
Elder’s not just a soft denialist on COVID-19, however. He’s much the same on climate change as well. “Climate is changing, of course, the climate is always changing,” he said in that same KABC interview — a standard turn of phrase that denialists have been using for decades. But when asked if climate change was responsible for California’s wildfires, he flat-out denied what the science says.
“I’m not sure if it’s because of climate change,” Elder said. “Fires have gotten worse because of the failure of this governor to engage in sensible fire-suppression,” echoing Trump’s attacks from last summer. This ignores vast scientific literature, along with two simple facts: first, that the number of large fires in the Western U.S. had doubled between 1984 and 2015 — three years before Newsom’s election, and second, that most of California’s forests are on federal land.
Elder is similarly hostile to public education. “There are far more bad public school teachers than there are bad cops,” Elder wrote in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests last year. “So when and where can we expect the #DefundPublicEducation rallies?”
This month, the Los Angeles Times reported that in an interview, “Elder implied that he might declare a state of emergency in order to fire ‘bad’ teachers, estimating they make up somewhere between 5% and 7% of the California public school faculty of about 300,000,” a figure that comes out of thin air.
The state of emergency is a new Trumpian twist, but “Californians have faced these claims and threats before,” Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) told Random Lengths News. “Gov. Schwarzenegger threatened the same thing years ago, also with no evidence or basis.” At that time, Lowenthal chaired the Senate Education Committee, and Arnold Schwarzenegger could not produce a single example. “I think it is ridiculous,” Lowenthal said. “Larry Elder would be a threat to many of the foundational protections and policies that have taken decades to put in place in our state.”
Elder and the politics of white grievance
But neither COVID-19 nor climate change nor education is the reason Elder is leading the GOP pack. As Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, explained in mid-July, it’s because of his denial of systemic racism.
“He says Black people are ‘more racist’ than whites,” Guerroro wrote, adding:
White grievance politics were once the purview of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, as when David Duke claimed “the white man” was the real “second class citizen in America today.” Now, thanks in no small part to Elder and his proteges, the delusion of rampant reverse racism is mainstream in Republican politics and Fox News.
Not only did Elder mentor Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration policies, he also mentored Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow — both while they were still high-school students. “He invited Miller on as a guest ‘almost whenever he wanted,’ amounting to dozens of times,” Guerrero wrote. Marlow reached out to Elder as a result of hearing Miller, and became an intern — the stepping stone that led him to Breitbart.
Elder remained engaged with Miller long after that, Guerrero noted:
While Miller worked for the Trump campaign, Elder told him to make sure that Trump claimed illegal immigration harmed “unskilled, inner city mostly Black and brown workers.” He told him to read up on Hillary Clinton’s “treatment of her husband’s accusers” months before Trump held a news conference featuring Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers to distract from Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” scandal.
In short, Elder is the perfect embodiment of the Trumpist forces behind the recall. Recall proponents are in denial about that as well. They even filed a lawsuit trying to strike Newsom’s characterization of the recall from the voter guide, specifically language calling it “an attempt by national Republicans and Trump supporters to force an election and grab power in California.” But Sacramento Superior Court Judge Laurie Earl rejected the lawsuit. “The Court finds there is nothing false or misleading about describing the recall effort’s leaders as Trump supporters,” Earl wrote.
It’s not just the leaders, either. “They submitted a little over 2.1 million signatures. According to their own numbers, 64% of those signatories are Republicans, and only 9% are Democrats.” Democratic consultant Garry South told Random Lengths. “Is that the bipartisan revolt?” The imbalance is even more striking given that California Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 2 to 1: 46.5% vs. 24.1%.
For perspective, “We didn’t have any recalls of governors that qualified for the ballot in the 92 years between the recall provision being installed in the constitution in 1911 and Gray Davis’s recall 2003,” South noted. ”Ninety-two years went by without a recall, and two of the last [three] Democratic governors have been subject to recalls. And there’s only been four gubernatorial recalls in the history of the entire United States of America!” he said. “There’s something amiss here…. You have to have some mechanism that assures that this is not just simply being used as a plaything by the minority party.”
Recall reform
South is far from alone in seeing something amiss. There’s strong support for the recall process itself, but also for significant improvements, according to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. “Californians support the idea of setting the bar higher for how a recall qualifies,” PPIC President Mark Baldassari told Random Lengths News, with majority support for two proposals in particular. First, the “idea that we increase the number of signatures that need to be gathered,” (25% vs. the current 12%), and second, “They think that somebody should be recalled when based on something illegal or unethical,” as is the case in most other states. A third idea with majority support was holding a runoff election between the top two replacement candidates if no candidate receives an initial majority.
But there are other ideas worth considering as well, and in a blog post about the poll Baldassari suggested that, “creating a bipartisan commission that offers policy recommendations for California voters to consider on the November 2022 statewide ballot would be a worthwhile endeavor.”
South has a suggestion that takes dead aim at the hijacking he highlighted.
“You put a distributive partisan requirement into the signatures,” he said. Require that a decent percentage of signatures — say 20 or 25% — come from the same party as the officeholder being recalled. There’s already a requirement for geographic diversity. “You can’t go into one big county like LA County and collect all the signatures there,” he noted. “The petition must include signatures from each of at least five counties in the state equal in number to 1% of the last vote for that office.”
But there are even easier fixes that don’t require changing California’s constitution through the initiative process, they can be done through changes in state law. State Senator Josh Newman has two bills to do just that. He’s unique in California history. He lost a recall election in 2018, replaced by a candidate who got almost 16,000 fewer votes than him, whom he then defeated in the next regular election in 2020.
The first bill, Senate Bill 660, would do away with paying signature gatherers on a per-signature basis — a reform that Oregon and several other states have already adopted. With per signature payment, “People doing this work are fully incentivized to find the path of least resistance to get the most maximum number of signatures as quickly as possible,” Newman told Random Lengths.
“That really struck me as sort of a perversion of the original intent.” With the recall or the initiative, “You want to do these things in the spirit of their original intent and if it’s really just about money, it tends not to work that way,” he said.
The bill has already passed the Senate and is headed for a vote in the Assembly in the next two weeks. He believes it’s likely to be signed — though the recall results might complicate things.
His second bill, SB 663, has been delayed and turned into a two-year bill. “This bill will have no bearing on the current recall of the governor but that got lost in the noise very quickly,” Newman said. It would provide the recall target with an opportunity to contact recall signers and ensure they actually supported the petition they’d signed.
“The basic principle to me was in the American system of justice is really about having the opportunity to face your accusers,” Newman explained. “And you think about a recall as kind of an indictment by ballot, it seemed reasonable to me that part of the recall should be the ability to make that case to the people signing it, ‘I’m not deserving of what is really the ultimate punishment electorally.”’
The recall process isn’t the only thing that’s broken. The initiative was implemented to be a check against special interest power — specifically the Southern Pacific Railroad. But it’s long since become exactly the opposite. South puts it well: “These ballot measure campaigns have become a roller derby for special interests.”
Fixing the initiative process requires more care. But if we’re going to think about fixing the recall — as a majority of Californians think we should — it would make sense to reform the initiative process at the same time. These were major innovations 100 years ago. It only makes sense to take stock, see what’s worked and what hasn’t, and refine the process for the next 100 years. If we can survive the current recall, there could be no better time to act.
