Since jumping into the race to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom just a month ago, Southern California radio legend Larry Elder has transformed the race, becoming the odds-on favorite to replace the Democratic governor in the bluest state in the union. Outside of Elder’s own local celebrity, the polls have narrowed, in large part, because the race has focused squarely on Newsom.
Yet, somehow, former “Stop The Steal” conspiracy theorist Jenna Ellis would rather have Elder lose this election by turning it into a referendum on Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss.
Ellis, a self-described “constitutional law professor” who has, in fact, never taught at a law school, lambasted the Emmy-winning Elder as “clearly poorly advised” for confirming that President Joe Biden did indeed legitimately beaten Trump “fairly and squarely” in last year’s election.
“There are a dozen different ways he could have answered this without intentionally disaffecting voters concerned about election integrity,” Ellis continued after her claim that Elder acknowledging basic reality could cost him “a lot of votes in California.”
In just one month, Elder has managed to lap establishment favorite candidate Kevin Faulconer, the popular former Republican mayor of San Diego, and Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympian with near-universal name recognition. He is capitalizing on the delta variant reversing Newsom’s narrative of pandemic progress and artfully galvanizing the state’s ardent Republicans as well as disaffected moderates.
Elder, a Los Angeles native who has spent the entirety of the 21st century dominating Southern California television and radio as the region’s preeminent conservative political commentator, needs no advice from any carpetbagging critic, much less one whose political successes include helping Trump become the first president in history to be impeached twice, losing both Republican Senate seats in Georgia, thus losing control of the entire Senate to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Before using Ellis’s own failed foray into politics as a lesson, let’s just look at California, where this election is being held. Trump earned barely over one-third of the state’s votes in 2016, worse than most of his Republican predecessors. Even without the stain of Trump on the ballot, Republicans haven’t won a presidential election in California since 1988, and the last Republican to win a statewide office was Steve Poizner, elected as California insurance commissioner in 2006. Before that, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in 2003 won — you guessed it! — a gubernatorial recall election against a useless Democrat who oversaw a statewide electricity crisis. Gray Davis at least deserved credit for looking and acting a little less like an entitled creep than Newsom does these days.
In the best of times for the party, the GOP does not win elections in California. The Newsom recall is a once-in-a-generation chance for governor two inches to the right of Harris to occupy Sacramento and rein in the existential excesses threatening what was once a bastion of the American dream. And astonishingly, this time, it’s not a RINO who is on the cusp of doing it. It’s a tried and true conservative with the legal acumen (in a prior life, Elder was a practicing attorney) and political chops to make the most of what, even if won, would be a truncated term. It would be political suicide for Elder to throw the whole thing away with five weeks to go by turning it into a campaign to flatter Trump and his lackeys.
Further, the Georgia Senate disaster only enhances the lunacy of Ellis’s “advice.” Trump spent two months claiming the election was rigged, and as a result, his voters refused to turn up — a perfectly logical decision based on the delusional premise that the Castros or Dominion or the “Kraken” was just going to steal the Senate anyway. The campaign to make it all about Trump allowed Democrats to put a guy accused of running over his wife with a car into the Senate.
Why would Elder replicate the Georgia Senate playbook, especially when the referendum (and Elder) are winning in the polls precisely because Republican enthusiasm is handily besting Democratic turnout at the moment? The answer is that he won’t, because, unlike Ellis, Elder has had and will continue to have an actual A-list career in politics regardless of the referendum’s outcome.
Quibble all you want with the Democrats’ obsessive Russia hoax, or with all the ways news and social media collusion sowed the very “disinformation” they purported to loathe. But at this point, denying the reality of the 2020 election isn’t just a fact-free delusion. It’s also political suicide, especially when California Republicans’ future hangs in the balance.
