California Recall: No Time
Is Gavin Newsom In Trouble?
I've never been a fan of Gavin Newsom's.
That's not to say that I don't like the guy - I don't care enough either way. He seems like a classic California politician - arrogant as well, ambitious to the max, and not particularly interested in governing or particularly good at it. It's a weird thing, but Newsom just always bores me. It's a weird person who can both simultaneously be so calculated as to have been planning his Presidential ambitions for the better part of two decades while also being careless enough to get dinner at the French Laundry maskless in a pandemic, but it's a weird person I've met too many times in my real life to find interesting. He just exists. And now, he's supposedly in trouble in a recall election.
Emerson today released a poll showing him at 42/38 to survive the recall bid, but also only 42/58 on a "Reelect Newsom/Time For Someone Else" question, and so people are panicking/celebrating as their partisanship dictates. My original version of this column was going to be a demolition of the poll, of Emerson, of basically the entire notion of this being competitive. And then I realized that 6 months ago, I'd have bought this, at least about a red state Governor. And that's why this won't be quite so rude.
What was the major failure of basically everyone in a public facing sense in 2020? It was overreliance on polls and misidentifying the political environment, and everyone - and I do mean everyone - had a bad cycle. Even Crystal Ball and Dave Wasserman, who got every state but North Carolina right, had bad nights, because their down ballot predictions were absolutely nightmarish (as, obviously, were mine, up and down the ballot). The story of 2020 was in many ways a story of retrenchment - instead of a snapback, everything dug in more. The number of swing states is shrinking, the number of states with split tickets is falling every cycle, and it's a mess, if you're trying to get a red state Democrat or a blue state Republican up. The number of House members from oppositely Presidential districts is at an all time low as well, with the number sub 20 this year. Partisanship is king, and attempts to overcomplicate that narrative end in ignominious defeat.
The lesson of 2020 is that polls are shit, but it's also that baseline partisanship is much more important than anyone thinks. This is a problem for anyone with fanciful notions of blue South Carolina, as I stupidly thought was possible for months, but it is equally stupid to think that red California is possible. For all the same people who come at me when I say anything off-conventional wisdom about my 2020 failures, there isn't any of that same reticence to talk about flipping Virginia or maybe even California. The hypocrisy isn't lost on me, but it goes over the heads of so many of those who discuss politics.
In many ways, the 2020 election wasn't that hard to understand. 2018 was a D+7 election, adjusted for the large amounts of non-contested GOP seats. 2016 was a D+2, and 2020 was a D+4.5. None of this is a story of a radical shift amongst broad beliefs, just amongst who showed up. Whites without a degree made up 44% of the electorate in 2016, 40% in 2018, and 43% in 2020, and that - coupled with swing to Democrats with educated white social liberals - is why 2020 was better than 2016, but worse than 2018.
We all want complicated answers, because complicated answers allow for more interesting discussions. "Could Newsom lose?" is a lot more interesting a discussion than "does he avoid recall by 15% or 25%?" so narratives go to what is interesting. You'll see data points that say it could be interesting, as we saw in Kansas and Kentucky and Montana and South Carolina in 2020. All of it, alas, was a lie. And if this recall was being held in a red state, the same people now saying it is interesting and worth watching would be laughing at the very notion of its competitiveness. And they'd be right.
Newsom will win again because he's a California Democrat. This isn't hard, everyone, and this message - partisanship above all - is the argument we would all be hearing if this was Alaska or Mississippi, states much less partisanly red than California is blue. Don't make this harder than it needs to be, and give this effort the interest it deserves - that is, no time at all.