Newsom Noise: How OC Kills Recall's Chances

On How 2003's Lynchpin Will Save Newsom

(I like alliterative puns, what can I say, so new recurring title for any and all California recall content.)

How does a Republican win statewide in California?

Well, the answer to that question used to be Orange County, San Diego, and then like Fresno and the rurals and don't get creamed in Los Angeles. That's not the easiest path to walk, but you could pull it off occasionally, and the GOP pulled it off in getting above 50% on the 2003 Recall. 

In 2003, Orange County and San Diego County combined to cast about 17% of the total valid votes cast on the "For/Against Recall'' question, and those votes broke 69.6% For recalling Gray Davis, and that's a large part of how they managed to get 55% of the state to vote For recall. To be more precise, Recall passed by 970k votes, and 720k of that margin came from San Diego and Orange County. Holding the LA County margin to 2% Against - literally 51/49 against - meant that the only place where Against was netting votes was in the Bay, which wasn't enough when LA was split and the non-LA south was so hard in favour of Recall. So, that's the path to victory, right? Uh, not exactly.

…

The actual answer to "how does a Republican win statewide in California" actually is "by being a Democrat," but that's a lame answer so let's have some fun with this. The GOP are recalling Gavin Newsom for… well, reasons. I don't really know what they are, but they're doing it anyways, so, let's see. Can they rely on their old strategy? Nope.

Gavin Newsom got 57% in San Diego County, 50% in Orange County, and 72% in LA County in 2018. He would need to underrun that electoral performance by 20% easily to be at any risk of losing a recall, based on the benchmarks from 2003. Now, yes, Newsom's coalition is different from the 2003 coalitions, sure, but you can't lose statewide in California if Orange County/San Diego, Los Angeles, and the Bay all support you. And they all do still.

A new poll of the state, from PPIC, has For recall down 40/56, a bad place to be starting in a massively Democratic state, but the 1700 person poll also released regional data, which had Newsom winning by 11 in Orange/San Diego, and that's the ballgame right there. It's literally everything, right there, if that's true. Now, it's US polling, US polling is shit, and it could be off by 10%, easily. Call it a tie in the non-LA South, even, and you're still dead in the water if you want to recall Newsom.

How do you recall Newsom if LA opposes recall by 17%, a far cry from the 2% opposition of 2003, and Orange/San Diego oppose it by 11%, a literal 50% swing from the 39.2% margin there last time? Again, even move the poll right by 10%, and your leads from 2003 are now gone, and you can't get enough votes from everywhere else to make it up. You can't, there just aren't enough Fresnos, guys. So, you'd need that non-LA SoCal number to be radically wrong. The problem is, it isn't.

Here's why Newsom is fine, in a nutshell - rich white people who chomped at the bit to get rid of an incompetent idiot who blew a massive budget surplus and oversaw the energy crisis aren't willing to toss Newsom out. These people used to be Republicans, and some of them still might think of themselves that way, but they're not willing to vote for the current incarnation of the GOP anymore. Now, sure, the GOP will put up a competent, moderate face to this effort, I'm sure, but it doesn't matter, because so long as recall cannot get the margins it got in Orange County, it's over.

Think about who lives in OC, and it makes sense. It's very rich, very wealthy people who could afford to live in LA but chose Orange County because they could. It's full of country club conservatives who used to be able to go to charity dinners with the most liberal of Democrats and chat about golf and kids or grandkids and not think about politics, who can't anymore. It's people who are not willing to trade the prospects of some tax relief at the cost of the rights of, bluntly, people like me. It's people who don't flinch when you casually drop your homosexuality to them in conversation for the first time because they're just used to dealing with gay people, and all of that is why they're people who are not going to vote to put a Republican into office.

Yes, yes, the GOP made some small swings in OC - and yes, they won a couple of House seats back - but that was because of low propensity, Trumpian cultural conservatives, both white and non-white, who are very unlikely to bother voting in an off year, off cycle election. The GOP will need to convince country club members that they can be trusted again, and they can't and won't pull it off. Like, sure, maybe they could, but they can't, because Kevin McCarthy is a Congressman up the freeway who is too chickenshit to tell Marjorie Taylor Greene a goddamn thing, or to say anything about Matt Gaetz's general asshatery, let alone the news of his criminal investigation.

The signature accomplishment of the Trump era can be summed up in five words - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. The last of those three claims that homosexuality is merely a "sexual preference", as if my homosexuality is the same as not being a fan of missionary. How in the name of all that is holy is a party whose biggest actual accomplishment in office - by the admission of basically everyone - was to put Obergefell at risk because of a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court going to revive its fortunes with the social liberals of Huntington Beach? Oh, wait, it won't happen, because we just saw Huntington Beach elect a Democrat to the Board of Supervisors or whatever the fuck it's called.

Newsom recall is this theory that's super interesting, kind of, and I get why people enjoy the prospect of a special, additional election to discuss and report on and everything. The problem is, it's not going to be anything. Newsom will win, and win handily, because socially liberal whites who make a lot of money are not going to risk the GOP of 2021 in the way they did for Arnold 18 years ago. There is literally no evidence - not in California, not in Georgia, not in anything we have seen in the US since 2016, not in Canada, not in the UK, not in Australia - for the idea that the GOP will suddenly flip these voters again. It's nowhere, nothing, nada. It's a "Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real," to quote Matthew McConaughey's best scene ever. And that's why, no matter what else, Newsom's safely home and dry.