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.”
Polling places remain open until 8 p.m. 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 Tuesday. 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 to simply 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 60 percent of the vote just three years ago in an overwhelmingly Democratic state could be thrown out of office by a Republican minority upset with his pandemic policies that closed businesses and schools and required masks and vaccines to overcome the COVID-19 virus.
Those efforts appeared to be paying off. In Santa Clara County alone, 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. Most of those ballots are expected to be from Democrats, especially since some Republican leaders have alleged, without evidence, that mail-in voting 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. At 36 polling places 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 Oakland, 29-year-old William Guerrero, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, said the recall felt like 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, “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 elite, 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.”
Cullins said she personally supports Newsom and warned against thinking “California can’t turn red.”
“It totally could,” Cullins said. “Here in San Jose, we live in a bubble. But we don’t consider Southern California and middle California. We need to vote because this is a chance for Republicans to get in office. Vote smart, don’t vote for yourself.”
In Concord, Heather Hannon doesn’t consider herself strongly political or a huge advocate for the Democratic party, even though that’s her party affiliation. 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.”
Hannon has a number of friends who, like her, struggled with closed schools because it meant having children at home. Hannon said online learning was especially difficult for two of her children, one of whom is on the autism spectrum.
“We were totally affected by the lockdowns,” Hannon said. “Probably it could have been better, but it also could have been worse. … OK, we voted for him. It’s already been chaotic. It seems like we were going to add to the pot of chaos that we already have.”
