Like politics everywhere these days, there appeared to be little nuance and lots of passion among voters deciding Tuesday whether Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom should be removed from office.
A disgrace! Ridiculous! Democracy run amok! And that’s just what Democrats had to say.
For Republicans? “I’m voting his ass out. Everyone I know wants change,” said Danielle Harmon, of San Jose. “We’re tired of it.”
Voters went to the polls Tuesday — and many more mailed in ballots in recent days and weeks — to determine whether Newsom remains in office for the final year of his first term as governor or whether Republican frontrunner and conservative talk show host Larry Elder or one of the other 45 alternative candidates will replace him.
But fears among the Newsom campaign that the only fired-up faction of the electorate was California’s Republican minority didn’t seem to track with many voters across the Bay Area dropping off ballots. There was also a palpable disdain for California’s recall process, which requires a majority of voters to oust Newsom but allows his potential replacement simply to be the top vote getter.
“This is the hijacking of democracy,” said Kim Bick, an educator starting her day with a workout at the Central YMCA in San Jose. “The recall wasn’t for the public good. It’s opportunistic. We have 46 people, unvetted, just clawing to get power.”
Not only does she want to change the recall system — an opinion shared by two-thirds of Californians, according to a Public Policy Institute of California poll — but she refused, as a matter of principle, to choose any of the alternatives as a back-up in case Newsom loses. “They just want 15 minutes of fame,” she said.
Recent polls have shown Newsom with a widening advantage to defeat the recall, but just a month ago, the race looked like a nail biter. Newsom began campaigning across the state to energize apathetic Democrats who had a hard time believing a governor elected with 62 percent of the vote just three years ago could be thrown out of office by a Republican minority upset with his pandemic policies.
Those efforts appeared to be paying off. In Santa Clara County, the number of ballots cast by mail through Monday — more than 460,000 from 47 percent of registered voters — was comparable to those cast before November’s general election between then-President Trump and Joe Biden, according to elections officials. In Contra Costa County, 51% of the 706,000 ballots sent out to registered voters had already been returned, and by Monday night, 47% of registered voters in Alameda County had returned nearly 450,000 mail in ballots.
Most of those ballots are expected to be from Democrats, especially since some Republican leaders have discouraged mail voting by alleging, without evidence, that it is rife with fraud.
If there was a surge of in-person voting, it wasn’t obvious at a number of Bay Area polling places Tuesday. At 36 polling stations over the weekend in Santa Clara County, just 3,500 people had voted in person through Monday, and the turnout appeared sparse midmorning at the Registrar of Voters main office in San Jose. In Contra Costa County, officials said that although they operated all 153 polling stations, in-person voting was light.
Hugh Bussell, 62, chairmen of the Alameda County Republican Party, sent his ballot in by mail and received confirmation it was counted. It’s time, he said, that Newsom was kicked out of office for political hypocrisy and his “failed leadership” during the pandemic. Newsom let millions in unemployment dollars fall into the hands of Californians who didn’t need the money, he said, and his safety mandates forced some small businesses to close their doors.
“He went with his buddies to the French Laundry” restaurant at the height of the pandemic, Bussell said, and after school closures, “he sent his kids to schools that were open.”
But to 29-year-old William Guerrero, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, the recall felt like the Republicans acting in bad faith.
“If anything, I’m voting against the kinds of Republican strategies we’ve seen,” he said while casting his ballot at Seventh Avenue Missionary Baptist Church in Oakland, “of knowingly misleading the public and lying to them.”
Guerrero believed Newsom’s pandemic shutdowns and mandates were swift and effective in keeping Californians safe. Though Newsom may come across as elitist, he said, “If we are going to talk about elitism in politics, we have to get rid of every politician.”
Kaitlyn Cullins, from San Mateo, said she voted against the recall because she doesn’t want a Republican in office.
“I want someone who’s pro-vaccine, pro-choice and not someone who’s against human rights,” said Cullins, a junior at San Jose State University. “It’s just not intelligent for us to have a new governor.”
Although Democrats in this overwhelmingly blue state may believe “California can’t turn red,” she was doing her part to make sure it doesn’t.
In Concord, Heather Hannon doesn’t consider herself strongly political or a huge advocate for the Democratic party. But she said she felt strongly about voting no on the recall.
“We also just went through a pandemic,” said Hannon, a stay-at-home mother of three teenagers. “I think it’s a little unfair to judge him on his performance during a time when everything was falling apart. The government above him seemed to have a hard time, so I don’t understand why we’d expect him to make every right move.”
