CALIFORNIA’S RECALL ELECTION WAS A DELUSION OF THE TRUMP PARTY

 

…Governor Newsom (D) easily beat the extreme conservative talk-radio host

 

Just more evidence of Trump’s power over the GOP

 

Tuesday’s recall election in California was only the latest evidence of how dark and delusional is the place to which former president Donald Trump has led his party.

It was the product of the same undemocratic impulses that have sparked the phony “audit" of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona.  Of which, is likely to soon be replicated in other U.S. states.

These are the same phony moves that have stoked the unfounded fears of voter fraud which undermines the confidence in the American electoral system. 

This undermined confidence has given the GOP officials cover in states across the map for passing measures that make it harder for people to vote.

The party seems willing to do whatever it takes to win.  That is with the exception of putting forward a set of palatable ideas that might make more people vote for Republicans.

The California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) did easily beat back the effort to recall him, an exercise that cost the state an estimated ¼ billion U.S. dollars.

It was California’s great reformist governor, Hiram Johnson, that had sold the state on the idea of giving voters a chance to get rid of statewide officials without having to wait for the next, regular election.

What the governor did not anticipate was that the Republican Party of 2021.  A party that would become so unmoored from Johnson’s idealized vision of democracy, that it would use the recall process to try to set the very concept of “popular government” on fire.

“With public servants whose sole thought is the good of the State the prosperity of the State is assured,” Johnson promised, “exaction and extortion from the people will be at an end, in every material aspect advancement will be ours, development and progress will follow as a matter of course, and popular government will be perpetuated.”

But that result was, preordained by arithmetic.  Governor Newsom is a politician who is not particularly likable, and he has committed his share of political blunders.  However, he has committed no malfeasance and leads one of the bluest states in the country.

Republicans have not won statewide office in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 reelection.  Indeed, they have become such a minority in California that they now practically count as a third party. Only 24.1%of registered voters in the state declare themselves to be part of the GOP, which is barely half the number who count themselves as Democrats and roughly the same as the share who register as independents.

Such a radically undemocratic exercise should never have happened in this state.  That the recall effort even made it as far as it did says something about the ridiculously low threshold set under the California system that Johnson had set up.  He apparently never imagining that politics would become the blood-sport that it has become.  All it took to force an election was collecting signatures of 12% of the ballots cast in the previous gubernatorial contest.  That was just under 1.5 million in a state of nearly more than 22 million voters..

Even so, recall elections were something that rarely happened in California in the past.  It has occurred only 11 times against any state officials of all levels since the process was added to the state constitution, and only once before involving a governor.

There is little reason to be hopeful that Republicans will be upset by the walloping they got in the recall election. Their leading candidate to replace Newsom was the conservative talk-radio host, Larry Elder, who ran as a virtual clone of the former President Trump,  Elder followed Trump’s playbook down to his making the same preemptive claims of voter fraud.

In conceding the election, Elder called for his supporters to be “gracious in defeat,” which probably said more about the lopsided margin by which voters opted not to eject Newsom from his office.  Would Elder have been so magnanimous if the recall had been defeated by five or 10 points rather than nearly 30 points?  Absolutely not!

None of this should give Democrats more confidence about their prospects in next year’s midterm elections.  That is where Republicans need to pick up only a small number of seats to regain control of both the House and the Senate.  Off-year elections are historically difficult for the party of a first-term president.  In addition, Republicans hold the upper hand in redistricting, and key contests will be taking place in areas where the partisan divide is less pronounced than it is in the statewide races in a Democratic California.

If anything, the lengths to which Republicans were willing to go in their Golden State suicide mission speak to the reality that there is nothing they will not try if it gives them even a glimmer of a chance to regain power.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like something Donald Trump would believe in?

Copyright G. Ater 2021