REDDING, California — At Patrick Jones’s gun shop in Redding, customers are greeted with an invitation to sign the recall petition on Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Blank forms sit atop an already overflowing stack of signatures, all of which indicate pledged support to recall the governor.
“He wasn’t highly supported here in the north,” Jones told the Washington Examiner. “We didn’t like him when he served as mayor in San Francisco, and we certainly don’t like him today. His ideas do not align with our ideas. Unfortunately, the laws that are passed in Sacramento, they affect us. That’s why there’s a strong desire here to change this governor.”
Jones is far from alone in his thinking in California‘s Northstate, which encompasses most of the state north of Sacramento. Much of the region is rural, sparsely populated, and home to conservatives who feel at peace away from the blue, urban bastions of the rest of the state.
Many residents have generational ties leading back to the Dust Bowl when Oklahomans fled to California for economic opportunity, and there’s an independent cowboy spirit in many inspired by the Old West.
Darin Beaver of Redding said independence is something that’s valued up north, and many people are skeptical of government overreach, which has been tested to some by the coronavirus pandemic.
“In Northern California, it’s more right-wing,” Beaver said. “For me personally, I have freedom unless I infringe on your freedom, so it doesn’t bother me. A lot of people say they don’t (take COVID-19 precautions) because it’s the government trying to control them, but there have to be some safeguards.”
Beaver said the perception of Newsom within the community is generally “bad,” citing that there’s an occasional “F— Newsom” truck that makes its way downtown.
Shasta County, which houses Redding, is just on the cusp of achieving its needed recall signatures to submit to the state, but several other northern counties have already exceeded their numbers.
Louise Gilatto, the petition coordinator for northern Siskiyou County, said her county secured their numbers by last September.
Gilatto, a retired nurse, said that she disagrees with Newsom’s handling of the pandemic, though she says as a whole, she differs from him politically.
“I totally disagree with everything he’s doing,” Gilatto said. “He tells the citizens to do one thing, and then, he does another.”
The current effort against Newsom is the sixth attempt to hold a statewide recall election against the Democrat, but in recent months, it has reached peak support, especially after the governor was caught dining with a lobbyist and several others at an upscale restaurant last year despite his own rules that prohibited similar gatherings of the sort.
As of this week, more than 1.4 million signatures have been collected across California in support of a recall election on Newsom. Organizers are working to secure 1.8 million signatures by mid-March.
The state must still verify the signatures, but so far, out of the roughly 485,000 that have been checked, more than 410,000 are valid.
Randy Economy, a spokesman for Recall Gavin 2020, said he expects the efforts to exceed the needed signatures by the deadline of March 17, and enthusiasm for the movement is largely due to residents’ frustrations with state lockdowns.
“If you lived in California for the last 11 months, you have watched Gavin Newsom appear on your television for two or three hours a day, every single day,” Economy said. “He has no clue what he’s doing, and yet, all he wants to do is make sure he is the one and only authority to get people out of this pandemic, and he’s failed. He’s failed miserably.”
Newsom’s political stardom dims amid pandemic
Though Newsom, 53, has only been governor for two years, he’s long been viewed as a rising star within the Democratic Party.
As the young mayor of San Francisco in the early 2000s, Newsom became nationally recognized for issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite state and federal laws barring gay marriage at the time.
Since then, he’s been a liberal firebrand, rising from his leadership in local government to the state’s lieutenant governor, and taking over the governorship from Jerry Brown, after a record-breaking margin in the 2018 gubernatorial race against GOP businessman John Cox. Since taking over the state’s highest office, his name has also been floated as having White House potential down the road.
But recent polls show Newsom’s crown might be starting to slip. Though the governor still holds more than a 50% approval rating, compared to 43% disapproval, the ratings have fallen drastically since last year, when Newsom had a 57% approval rating in October, and more than 63% in May, according to a January survey from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Dennis Zeimet of Shasta County said he believes the lockdown orders implemented by Newsom are unconstitutional.
“The guy’s out of control,” Zeimet said. “He’s a tyrant. He thinks he’s king, not governor. He’s not the king. It’s ‘we the people.’ He works for us. He’s supposed to work for we the people, and he’s not.”
Newsom’s lockdowns are among the strictest in the country, with his administration greenlighting business closures on and off for the last year, depending on the severity of COVID-19’s spread in the state. Until two weeks ago, the state forced regional lockdown orders that shuttered restaurants and businesses for two months in an effort to curtail intensive care unit capacities at hospitals.
California has had more than 3.4 million COVID-19 cases and more than 45,000 deaths.
Last week, the Supreme Court responded to lawsuits brought by California churches that ruled the state can’t completely ban indoor church services, though it upheld Newsom’s restrictions on singing and chanting indoors.
Richard Crumb of Redding, who is a retired physician’s assistant, signed the recall petition, in part because he felt Newsom’s restrictions, particularly on churches, violated his right to worship.
Crumb is a practicing Catholic, and he has continued to attend his church throughout the pandemic despite state orders that long prohibited in-person worship.
“I’ll tell you right now, Newsom’s gone as far as I’m concerned,” Crumb, a Vietnam veteran, said. “He needs to be gone because he thinks he’s a God. I didn’t go to war and fight for this country to lose it. You cannot wipe away these constitutional United States that gives me the freedom of religion.”
The French Laundry debacle was an incident that especially bothered Redding resident Adam, who declined to give his last name. Adam said he had family members who took out second mortgages to keep their businesses afloat amid state lockdowns, so it bothers him that those imposing the rules aren’t following their own guidelines. That was enough to have him sign the recall.
“He’s really screwed up all of this,” Adam said. “Really more than anything, it’s just the flaunting. Good for ye, not for me. You can’t go make a living, but I’m going to go party it up with lobbyists, so that in my book … bottom feeders, actually, rank higher than that.”
Newsom faces growing pool of challengers, but some say California can’t be saved
Pressure on Newsom has already prompted a number of potential challengers he could face in the 2021 gubernatorial race, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Pasadena Republican Major Williams, and Cox, who is seeking a rematch.
But some in Northern California say it’s too late to save the state.
Jones said in the past 20 years, half of his customer base has fled California for other states. The idea is one he considers on a daily basis too, adding that he will probably be among the last generation to take over his family’s gun store.
“We wonder how many more years we’ll be able to stay here in California,” Jones said. “The laws are incredibly onerous and getting worse by the day. There’s so many other states where you have much more freedom and you’re less taxed.”
Bill Derbonne, who works in local law enforcement in Cottonwood, is planning to head out to somewhere like Texas once he is able to retire. Derbonne said the decision to leave is easy, but he fears that Californians in exile are only going to eventually take their ideas to other states.
“The problem is the same people who are destroying their own cities, they’re moving too because they want to escape it,” Derbonne said, adding that in some “real American” states, he’d be embarrassed to have a California license plate.
Derbonne, who also supports the recall against Newsom, said the chance to replace the governor would put some pressure on politicians to tread more carefully.
“If we hold people accountable in our government, then what happens is it puts them on notice, and I think each time they’re going to be a little more leery of doing shady stuff or overstepping on their bounds,” Derbonne said.
Jones said though he would love to see a conservative governor for his state, he knows that the likelihood is low, and even if Newsom is replaced by someone with a similar political philosophy, a successful recall could still send a message to Sacramento.
“It’s worth it just to prove the point, and it does finish him off politically because he obviously has higher, political aspirations,” Jones said. “We may get a governor who might be more moderate. Obviously, this is a liberal state, so we’re going to get a liberal governor, but if we could get a less liberal governor, that would be a little bit better. We’ll take our chances.”
