By dispatching President Joe Biden to campaign against the California recall the day before the election, the White House may hope to do more than drag Gov. Gavin Newsom across the finish line.
“It’s the first big, national-scale contest since the [2020 presidential] election,” said Mike Madrid, a California GOP strategist. “I can’t think of a smarter tactical move at this moment in time than surrounding themselves with a double-digit Democratic victory. It’s capital extremely well spent.”
Biden has backslid in recent polls after a chaotic drawdown from Afghanistan, inflation woes, and a rise in violent crime in major cities across the United States. If Newsom secures a decisive victory as polls suggest he might, Democrats who traipsed westward will reap the benefits, longtime campaign strategists said.
NEWSOM SOUNDS ALARM ON CALIFORNIA RECALL, PULLING WHITE HOUSE INTO THE RACE
“Earlier this summer, it looked like Biden might need to come to Newsom’s rescue. But now Newsom is in a very strong position, and the president looks like he needs a win,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at three California universities and veteran of gubernatorial and presidential campaigns.
On the eve of the recall, Biden stumped for Newsom in Long Beach, California, after visiting Sacramento earlier in the day.
Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris stood before roughly 200 supporters and more than 70 reporters in the East Bay to deliver a made-for-television address that circled the themes Democrats are looking to as the party gears up for next year’s midterm elections.
While watching television news before departing Washington, Harris said she heard Texas Gov. Greg Abbott discussing his state’s new abortion bill.
“That is not who we want in our leaders,” Harris said. “We want in our leaders someone like Gavin Newsom, who always speaks the truth.”
“They wouldn’t be trying to recall him except that they know he is a national leader,” Harris said of the governor, a longtime ally whose anti-recall team is staffed with veterans of her past state and national campaigns. “This is why they are putting so many resources and time into trying to take out Gavin Newsom. It is because of his vision. It is because of the agenda.”
She flew 11 hours for the approximately 11-minute address.
That day, Newsom made a frantic appeal to Democrats, asserting his leading recall opponent, Larry Elder, a conservative, Trump-aligned talk radio host, could replace him “in a matter of weeks.”
“Newsom’s Achilles’ heel has always been apathy,” said Joanna Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, explaining the move to energize Democrats. If voters think he’ll win comfortably, “then he’s no longer our governor,” she said.
Biden’s visit “is all about turning out the base Democrats in this very blue state,” said Matt Rexroad, a political consultant specializing in redistricting and local elections.
Elder’s rise created an opportunity for Newsom to turn the race from a referendum on the governor’s past 18 months in office to a contrast between two possible leaders for deep-blue California: Newsom, the conventional Democrat, versus a Trump-aligned Republican governor.
But this is only one factor, said Joe Rodota, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s policy chief during his run for California governor in 2003 and a veteran of the Reagan White House.
Rodota said Newsom’s approach to the coronavirus shifted significantly from one year ago, when the recall effort first gained steam.
“Last year, [Newsom] was saying health first — there was no higher goal than conquering the virus. He was providing no leadership on opening schools. And he had a disastrous, ineffective economic recovery task force of 107 people that collapsed in November of 2020, with no recommendation,” Rodota said. “Going into this fall, he is a different guy.”
Today, Newsom is “buoyed in part by the state’s surplus, driven by the run-up in tech stocks, he became an advocate for opening schools, and became an advocate for the business community,” Rodota said. And he abandoned his color-coded coronavirus “tiers” denoting different restrictions.
“He became more of a governor, among Democrats, like Jared Polis and Gina Raimondo — governors trying to do three things at once, which is protect the healthcare of their citizens, keep the schools open, and keep as many businesses open as possible,” Rodota said. “Republicans challenging him failed to present an analysis of this moment and how they would do the job differently beyond some symbolic gestures.”
This was more important than Elder’s rise or Biden’s and Harris’s campaign swings, Rodota said.
“By the time of Harris’s visit, something like 1% of the people had yet to make up their mind,” he said, adding the election was settled “many, many weeks ago.”
For Republicans, the writing was on the wall, Madrid said.
“They are seeing the same numbers everyone else is seeing,” he said. “If this were competitive, you would have seen high-profile Republicans showing up. Everybody wants to be associated with a winner.”
A poll published on Friday from the Los Angeles Times and Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley found that most California voters (60.1%) said they opposed removing Newsom from office, while 38.5% favored the recall. Six weeks ago, the same poll returned worrying results for Newsom, with a near-even split between recall voters, with half voting against the recall and 47% voting in favor.
In another win for Newsom, 60% said the governor had not significantly overstepped his authority in responding to the pandemic, compared to 36% who said he had.
Newsom drew charges of hypocrisy last year after he was pictured dining with lobbyists in Napa Valley while the surrounding county was under lockdown orders. The dinner became a rallying cry for Newsom’s critics and the recall election. The most recent poll still shows 56% of voters said Newsom had shown a willingness to defy his own rules.
The survey sampled 9,809 registered California voters between Aug. 30 and Sept. 6.
The coronavirus remains the No. 1 priority for Californians, at nearly double the response rate than the second-highest priority of jobs and the economy, according to an August poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Newsom has leaned into these concerns, touting his vaccine mandate for health and school employees. In a campaign advertisement, the governor portrayed the race as “a matter of life and death.”
Biden has adopted a similar message, announcing new coronavirus vaccine mandates for federal workers and a shot or test protocol for larger private companies.
By wading into California, Democrats are wagering more than political capital.
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In their bid to shore up Newsom’s standing in the race, the governor and his allies have spent heavily, including more than $36 million in August.
After Tuesday night, Democrats will know whether the effort succeeded.
“It’s too late to change anybody’s mind from ‘yes’ to ‘no’ on the recall,” Levinson said. “It’s not too late to get some people who have their ballots sitting on their kitchen counter to mail them in.”
