Recall Recap: Rush Of Blood To The Head

Newsom Wins Again

(This column is being written while counting continues in California. Best estimates at this point are that Recall will lose by ~20-25% once all votes are in, and that is the underlying assumption I’m going with. If that assumption proves to be incorrect, I will amend.)

How on earth did so many supposedly smart people think the Recall ever had a hope in hell?

Like, I’ve been taking a victory lap and talking some shit on Twitter, but I’ve really only been doing that because I wrote a fucking betting column where you could get Gavin Newsom at 69 cents on PredictIt, and because Nate Silver said Democrats had a 30% chance to lose, and because Harry Enten used the bad Recall polling as evidence the National environment was shifting right, and the thing I’m stuck with is how the fuck did you get caught with this shit?

Yes, I’m aware that I have no leg to stand on, the guy who thought Jaime Harrison was gonna win in South Carolina, but come the fuck on, this is substantially stupider. It’s fucking California, and while that’s generally bad analysis, sometimes it is all you need. It’s California, and California wasn’t going to make Larry Fucking Elder Governor. You didn’t need a more complicated analysis of this, and believing bad polls in the name of unbiased reporting isn’t journalism, but hackery. Oh, and Silver, fuck right the way the fuck off with that Trafalgar A- - you know it’s wrong, you’ve known this whole fucking time, make it right.

There’s actually a lot to talk about here, from the way that Hispanics seem not to have snapped back to Democrats as some delusionally hoped, to the way that educated whites haven’t snapped back to the GOP in that the average member of the commentariat thinks is going to happen, and we’ll get into that in a second, but I’m stuck. I’m stuck, because the clear lesson of 2020 was polarization and partisanship cannot be overcome by even good candidates - I’m thinking of Joe Cunningham losing, Ron Kind getting run close, amongst others - and the response to that was to uncritically believe that California could be close? Are you fucking kidding me?

This result is entirely in line with what you’d expect for an off-cycle, but Vote-By-Mail, election if the political environment is somewhere in the 2018-20 results range - Newsom’s going to win by something close to his 2018 margin, give or take a couple points on either side, and this is perfectly in line with the idea of a 4-8% Democratic environment these days. Democrats picked up that New Hampshire House seat recently, and in Iowa tonight, the GOP held a State House seat in the suburbs that they had won months ago by just under 7% by 3%. These results are all consistent with a political environment where nothing much has really happened, which is also what you’d get if you went back to the New Mexico 1st Special in June. This is also what you’d expect if you looked at what the best pollster to have released a Generic Ballot poll recently said, as last week’s YouGov had a D+5. It’s almost as if all of these things could have been foreseen.

Amongst other things that could be foreseen, if I see anyone shocked that Newsom didn’t get the Hispanic reversion that so many pine for, I’m going to lose what little is left of my mind. He didn’t get Clinton numbers with Hispanics because to do that he would have to win over self-described conservative Hispanics, which wouldn’t happen unless he also lost socially liberal whites in Orange County. You can’t dissociate the Hispanic stuff from the educated white stuff, for one simple reason - they’re two sides of the same coin. Why are Democrats doing better with socially liberal whites with money in Orange County? Because these are people with a deep ease with homosexuality, to pick but one example. I’ve never been there, actually, but I am completely confident I’d be able to freely show the man I love as much soft affection in public without fear as I would be able to if I was straight. Well off white social liberals have not just a theoretical acceptance of homosexuality, amongst other issues, but they are okay with it in a more real sense. The reason Huntington Beach and Southlake and Forsyth are all swinging hugely towards us is because in those places, and with those people, getting dinner with a gay couple isn’t notable, because of its normalcy. There is no need to worry or panic, for people like me, because these people actively want people like me to be able to act exactly as they are able to.

The Hispanics who have swung against us, on the other hand? They’re overwhelmingly self-IDing as conservatives, and we can tell from Pew it’s religious Hispanics who are moving. Hillary won them nationally by 59%, and Biden won them by 16%. Why would we think that religious voters, especially those outside of major metros, would vote for us? Oh, wait, it’s solely because of the colour of their skin, which was a huge error I made in my 2020 coverage, and it remains a huge one. If politics is realigning on the axis of social issues - if social liberal versus cultural conservatism is the dividing line, which it is - then why are we expecting Democrats to do better with culturally conservative voters? Of course the Hispanic slide is here to stay, because it was always going to be impossible to stitch together an ascendent coalition of social liberals in the suburbs and hold onto cultural conservatives. The thing is, if you’re the Democratic Party, you make that trade every single time, because that trade gets you Texas, Georgia, and Arizona, and you aren’t losing California, New York, or Colorado any time soon anyways. All this recall did was confirm the bloody obvious, which makes it so fucking confusing that smart people got fucking duped by this.

I have no idea what the value of this bullshit was, both from the California GOP, and from the people who uncritically accepted the bad polling. Like, I’m genuinely perplexed how so many smart people believed that this could actually succeed. They might as well blame it upon a rush of blood to the head, because that would honestly make more sense than any other fucking answer.