An effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom is nearing the number of signatures needed with over a month to go before the deadline.
“It’s highly possible we could get to 1.5 or 1.6 [million signatures] by the end of this week,” said Anne Dunsmore, the campaign manager and finance director of Rescue California, one of the two groups responsible for the recall effort.
The groups have collected 1.4 million of the 1,495,709 required to force a recall election but will likely have to collect more than the minimum as some signatures will be invalidated upon review.
Dunsmore’s group is hoping it can collect 2 million total signatures ahead of the March 17 deadline, something she says she is confident the group can accomplish.
Dunsmore said that Rescue California has begun deploying paid signature gatherers, who alone collected 52,000 signatures last week.
If the organizers collect enough valid signatures before the deadline, California’s lieutenant governor would be forced to select a date for a special election.
“Once that election [date] is selected, the ballot will have two things on it. One, a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the recall, and [two], the replacement,” Dunsmore said. “If 82% of the [1.8 million] signatures that we submit are valid, then we only need 1.8 million signatures. We’re aiming for 2 million. So I think we should have more than enough.”
Dunsmore is signaling optimism, saying that the recall effort has crossed a line from “possibility to probability” while the governor has seemingly not taken the issue seriously.
“I think prior to that, and even during the French Laundry [incident], his staff reportedly was sitting there saying, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he was thinking, ‘I need to worry about it,’” Dunsmore said. “I think his very obvious default is to go to political messaging rather than policy planning. And this is, he started to have problems because it has created inconsistent decisions, and hypocritical decisions, and very transparently poor decisions.”
Newsom has come under increasing fire in recent months over his pandemic response, with restrictions costing people jobs and businesses while the governor was caught violating his own rules while dining at an upscale French restaurant last year.
The governor has also faced a growing fraud scandal related to the state’s unemployment agency, making him vulnerable among voters.
Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California has shown that Newsom is losing ground among voters he would need to survive a recall election, with independents, Latinos, and Democrats expressing less support for the embattled governor.
Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
