The effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, explained

A protester holds a placard that says “Dictator Newsom Is the Least Essential Thing In California #RecallNewsom” during a demonstration in Sacramento, in May 2020. | Jeff Gritchen/Getty Images

Covid-19 made governors popular, until it didn’t. Now, California’s Newsom may lose his seat.

One and a half million. Or, to be more exact, 1,495,709. That’s how many signatures are needed to force California Gov. Gavin Newsom into a recall election.

Thanks to the state’s affinity for direct democracy, a judge’s order extending the deadline to collect signatures, and Newsom’s now infamous decision to attend a $350-a-person, unmasked, indoor dinner party — all of which catalyzed simmering resentments governors around the country are facing over Covid-19 restrictions — Newsom, a Democrat, just might have to face one.

It’s going to come down to the wire. Last week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) injected $250,000 into the final stretch. One of the two committees working to recall Newsom says they have already collected over 1.6 million signatures — but since not every single signature will be valid, they are racing to collect at least 1.8 million, if not 2 million, signatures before the March 17 deadline.

On Friday, the California Secretary of State’s office released the current total signatures received as of February 5. Of the nearly 800,000 signatures they’ve counted so far, 668,202 are valid. (The recall committees have submitted over 1 million, but some of the signatures are still being counted). At this point, organizers are averaging a roughly 84 percent validity rate. If that rate holds as the state continues counting, the organizers will only need to collect another 200,000 signatures on top of what they say they already have.

If the recall effort gets the necessary signatures, that doesn’t mean Newsom necessarily loses his job, it just puts the question to the voters in an election that will happen likely near the end of the year.

Ballotpedia

The ballot to recall former California Gov. Gray Davis.

The ballot will ask two questions: If voters want to recall the governor, and who should replace him in the event that the majority votes to recall. Hundreds of people could decide to run, as California has no candidate cap during recalls, and the winning candidate only needs a plurality to claim victory.

The last time a California governor was successfully recalled was in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to snatch a win from then-Gov. Gray Davis and over 100 other candidates.

“It’s an expensive, distracting pain-in-the-ass for Californians if it happens,” Dan Newman, a spokesperson for Newsom, told Vox. “In the Davis recall we had 135 candidates and it was a total circus. Some people think we could have 10 times as many candidates this time around.”

FiveThirtyEight’s analysis indicates that for now, “Newsom seems well positioned to survive” a potential recall election, as California’s electorate has become a lot more Democratic since 2003 when Davis lost his seat.

In 2000, 53 percent of the state voted for Al Gore and in 2004, 54 percent voted for John Kerry — but Hillary Clinton tied up the state with 61 percent of the vote in 2016, and Joe Biden won 63 percent last November.

Additionally, Davis’s approval rating was in the low 20s and, importantly, his disapproval rating was in the high 60s, whereas recent polls have Newsom’s favorability rating between 46 and 52 percent. The chart below from the news outlet Cal Matters compares two polls that show a recent dip in Newsom’s support, however.

Recall organizers argue that it’s more important to note that Newsom’s favorables have been trending down, which they view as an indication that he has further to fall. And Newsom is facing the challenges of vaccine distribution, a worsening homelessness crisis, and getting kids back into school as quickly as possible, so they say there’s ample opportunity for his support to drop.

“If [Newsom] wants to project out that he’s not in a vulnerable position and pooh pooh the fact that he is in trouble and that he has upset his constituents, I’m okay with that. That’s tone deaf. There’s plenty of evidence that he is in trouble,” Anne Dunsmore, co-chair of Rescue California, one of the committees working to recall Newsom, told Vox.

The French Laundry affair, direct democracy, and a stroke of legal luck

So, if Newsom is still reasonably popular, why is he teetering on the edge of facing a recall election?

There are some structural reasons: Only 19 states allow citizens to recall their public officials. In California, the only requirement is that 12 percent of the total number of voters in the previous election sign on to the effort, and that those signatures are from voters in at least five counties. And recall efforts are incredibly common in the state — every single governor since Reagan has had recalls filed against them, and this is the sixth effort Newsom himself has faced.

Jeff Gritchen/Getty Images

Hair dresser Nikki Johnson dons a “Recall Newsom”mask and “Make Hairstylists Essential again” hat as she protests coronavirus salon closures by Gov. Gavin Newsom in Costa Mesa in August 2020.

California has a strong culture of direct democracy — citizens are used to voting on dozens of ballot measures which allow them to legislate by popular will, and are the only electorate since 1921 to have ever recalled their state’s chief executive. Born out of the post-Gilded Age progressive movement, “direct democracy, for better or for worse, has become California’s most distinctive and emblematic political institution. Initiative, referendum, and recall elections were added to the state constitution in 1911,” writes San José State University historian Glen Gendzel.

So, California governors are much more at the whim of their electorate than other governors. Anger with Covid-19 orders fueled many of the recall efforts against governors in 2020: Republican Govs. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, Doug Ducey of Arizona, and Brad Little of Idaho, and Democratic Govs. Jared Polis of Colorado, John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Kate Brown of Oregon, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin all have faced recall efforts.

But none have yet come as close as California’s to forcing them into another election. In fact, none of these states have ever successfully recalled a governor; only California and North Dakota carry that distinction.

But even so, Newsom might have been fine — were it not for the pandemic. The recall petition Newsom is facing now was actually filed on February 21, 2020, weeks before a state of emergency was declared in response to Covid-19. As a result, the petition itself doesn’t even mention the crisis. Instead, it cites some traditional grievances like high taxation and the state’s homelessness crisis as well as many traditionally Republican complaints like accusing the governor of imposing a “sanctuary state status,” failing to “enforce immigration laws,” and overruling “the will of the people regarding the death penalty,” among others.

Without Covid-19, however, the petition would likely be languishing in obscurity. In November, nine months after its supporters had begun gathering signatures, the Sacramento County Superior Court issued a final judgment extending the deadline to collect signatures. The Court writes that in light of the various stay-at-home orders, it had become “extremely difficult for petitioners to engage in signature-gathering activities for their proposed initiative.”

On November 17, recall organizers told the Daily Caller that they had only collected 749,196 signatures, which even with a 100 percent validity rate wouldn’t have come close to succeeding.

But Newsom can’t put all the blame on Covid-19 — on November 6, while a stay-at-home order that limited outdoor gatherings to three different households was in effect, he attended a birthday party at French Laundry, unmasked, along with people from several households. While the governor’s team initially claimed that the dinner at the three-Michelin-star restaurant was outdoors, on November 18, Fox 11 obtained photos of the governor indoors with several other guests, none of whom appeared to be masked.

EXCLUSIVE: We've obtained photos of Governor Gavin Newsom at the Napa dinner party he's in hot water over. The photos call into question just how outdoors the dinner was. A witness who took photos tells us his group was so loud, the sliding doors had to be closed. 10pm on @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/gtOVEwa864

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) November 18, 2020

Newsom’s hypocrisy and decision to dine at a $350-per-person establishment while so many of the state’s residents suffered from the economic downturn and residents were being warned against holiday gatherings with family was a mobilizing moment for the recall effort.

Even Newsom’s spokesperson acknowledged it was a good organizing tool due to the attention it received — even as he deflected blame onto the country’s partisanship. “More than 6 million people in California voted for Trump, so there’s no shortage of people willing to sign something saying get rid of every Democrat if you give them enough time,” Newman told Vox.

That dinner may end up costing the governor more than a few hundred dollars.

Who’s behind the recall effort?

Unsurprisingly, all public evidence indicates that the organized effort is Republican-dominated: Most of the major donors are Republicans, all of the notable endorsers are Republican, and a few of the grievances in the petition itself are issues usually cited by the right — hostility toward immigration and favoring the death penalty, in particular.

Significant endorsements of the effort have come almost exclusively from Republicans — Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the House, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Newsom’s 2018 opponent, John Cox, have all lent their voices in favor of recalling Newsom. There are no comparable Democratic endorsements.

The quarter-million from the RNC isn’t the only big money. According to CalMatters, several GOP donors have given hundreds of thousands to the effort. However, the largest single donation thus far has come from John Kruger, an “Orange County entrepreneur... [who] has donated to both GOP and Democratic candidates.” Kruger gave $500,000 to the effort.

The LA Times reported last month that a few far-right extremists were involved in some of the efforts to collect signatures. Organizers deny they are systematically courting these extremists or that they make up a large faction within the supporters of the movement.

“This is not a right-wing extremist movement. This is a movement of the people of California,” Mike Netter, founding member of one of the committees to recall Newsom, told Vox.

But even if the organized effort is Republican-dominated, that doesn’t mean that Democratic and non-affiliated voters aren’t growing disillusioned with the governor. In a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released February 2, Newsom’s approval rating was underwater among registered voters, with 46 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving of the job he was doing.

Only 31 percent of Californians agreed that Newsom was doing “an excellent or good job in handling the pandemic overall,” down from 49 percent last September. However, 49 percent of voters felt it would be bad for the state to hold a special election recalling the governor.

Everyone agrees that if the recall election happens, a lot is riding on Newsom’s ability to oversee a competent vaccine distribution program and ensure that kids can get back to school and the economy rebounds quickly. But first, organizers need at least several hundred thousand more valid signatures.