California recall pulls Gavin Newsom left and Larry Elder right. What about the middle?
With a new TV ad featuring liberal darling Bernie Sanders and press conferences highlighting vaccine requirements he’s imposed, Gov. Gavin Newsom is making a play for the left in his fight to hold on to his office.
His leading rival, Larry Elder, is leaning into the conservative credentials he developed as a longtime talk radio host, blasting COVID restrictions and mandated vaccines.
The hyper-partisan dynamic in California’s recall election will be on display this weekend.
Newsom is heading to Los Angeles to campaign with former Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. Elder will rally supporters at a Rocklin church that defied California’s pandemic rules.
As the deadline for California voters to return their recall ballots approaches, Newsom and Elder are focused on firing up their core supporters rather than appealing to voters in the center, a dynamic experts say is motivated by the unusual structure of the recall.
Recall voters face two questions. The first asks if they want to recall Newsom: yes or no. The second asks them to pick from a list of more than 40 candidates to succeed Newsom if enough people vote to throw him out.
If Newsom is recalled, the top vote-getter on the second question becomes governor, meaning someone could be elected with a small share of the vote.
As a Democrat, Newsom needs to turn out as many Democrats as possible to secure a majority of the vote. In a regular election, that might be easy for Newsom in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. Voters registered without party preference make up nearly as much of the electorate at 23% as Republicans do at 24%, while Democrats constitute about 47%.
Yet the unusual timing of the recall in an off year with little lead time for campaigns to mobilize means he needs to work to ensure turnout is high among his supporters.
Newsom is spending the final weeks of the campaign running ads that call his opponents Trump Republicans. He’s railing against the recent law passed in Texas that bans most abortions.
Elder, on the other hand, doesn’t need a majority, just enough votes to outpace his rivals on the second question. With no prominent Democratic politician running to replace Newsom and the state Democratic Party urging its voters to leave that question blank, Elder can afford to play to a more conservative crowd.
He’s spending his final weeks campaigning in red parts of the state, like Fresno, and making time for conservative audiences like Rocklin church he’ll visit this weekend.
Elder and “Newsom are both playing a math game. It’s just different equations. There’s a huge Democratic advantage in registration, so all Newsom needs to do is get them to vote,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist who worked on former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful recall campaign.
As for Elder, “what he’s engaged in is essentially a Republican primary,” Stutzman said.
Gavin Newsom doubles down on Democrats
Newsom’s campaign has pulled out all the stops to frame the election along party lines, painting the recall as a Trumpian effort in California. His campaign has spent more than $16 million — nearly 90% of its total spending — on TV, radio and online ads that repeatedly call the election the “Republican recall” and warn that Elder, a conservative, will become governor if Newsom is removed.
At an event in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Thursday, Newsom was asked what he would tell voters in the middle about what he would do differently in his last year as governor.
Newsom declined to list a single thing. Instead, he defended his record.
“I’m proud of the fact that this state was the first state to do a stay-at-home order,” he said. “I was proud of the fact that the state of California didn’t wait for the CDC or the American Academy of Pediatrics to say we should wear face coverings and masks in our public schools.”
He contrasted that with what Elder would do.
“His top priority, Larry Elder, is to sign an executive order eliminating those protections,” Newsom said. “Consequences could not be more stark, and the choice cannot be more clear.”
Newsom has held campaign events primarily in coastal cities with large Democratic populations, including San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.
The campaign’s phone banking and door knocking efforts are also targeting Democrats. At one virtual phone banking event where Newsom gave a kick-off speech to pump up volunteers last month, callers focused on reaching voters registered with the party, as opposed to no-party-preference voters. A recent canvassing event organized by labor unions in Sacramento directed volunteers to knock on doors of registered Democrats and to skip other houses.
Newsom has been targeting Latino voters with Spanish language ads and endorsements from prominent Latino Democrats, including Sen. Alex Padilla. On Thursday, he also held a virtual event with Padilla and other prominent California Latinos campaigning against the recall. He’s held similar calls with prominent Asian-American and Black Democrats.
Political experts agree driving up turnout among core Democratic voters seems to be Newsom’s easiest path to victory, but some note that the strategy could backfire if he overlooks an opportunity to convince voters who may be harder to turn out.
“It may be a strategic miscalculation not appealing more to moderate Democrats and historically underrepresented groups,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “The Latino population in the state is a huge bloc, and there’s always some additional work that needs to be done to get the Latino vote out.”
Michael Gomez Daly, executive director of Inland Empire United, oversees an effort to convince voters of color to vote against the recall. He said his organization’s conversations with voters demonstrate to him the Newsom campaign is making a mistake framing the race as partisan.
“From what we can tell, Newsom’s campaign is just focusing on party line conversations with party voters. The ads we’ve seen are ‘Stop the Republican Recall,’ which in our opinion is not the right approach,” Gomez Daly said. “We make an effort not to talk about it from that perspective. This isn’t about party politics, it’s about California values.”
Larry Elder courts conservatives
Elder, meanwhile, needs to mobilize his base of conservatives.
He’s focused his messaging around the limited government policies he’d push as governor: undoing COVID restrictions, promoting school choice and cracking down on crime.
In an interview with CalMatters, Elder said he would appoint education officials similar to former President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and judicial appointees in the vein of the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Elder, a radio talk show host who gained a following by promoting his libertarian beliefs, needs to focus on turning out conservatives to win the second question on recall ballots. But that approach also gives “ammo” to Newsom’s campaign against the first question, Romero said.
“Newsom wants to paint this as a Trump supporter-led recall,” Romero said. “If the candidates play to their base… Gavin Newsom can point to that to say, ‘Hey, this is evidence of what I’m saying.’”
Elder is trying to reach some groups that have historically backed Democrats, particularly Asian and Latino voters. He said he thinks his policies on education and crime could particularly benefit their communities.
“I’m appealing to everybody,” he said. “But I do believe that the impact of the poor quality of education disproportionately hurts Black and brown people.”
As Newsom and Elder double down on their bases, other candidates attempting to appeal to more moderate voters in the center haven’t gotten much traction.
Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has positioned himself as a more moderate Republican alternative to Elder, but is trailing his more conservative challenger by double digits in most polls. A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found Elder in first place with 26% and Faulconer in second with just 5%, for example.
Romero said she believes the incentive in the election for candidates to run away from the center will further polarize the state.
“It does incentivize more rhetoric and divisive politics,” she said. “The outcome of this election, and the rhetoric that has fed it, is a potential breeding ground for distrust.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California recall pulls Gavin Newsom left and Larry Elder right. What about the middle?."