Total recall (Part III)

A volunteer for Gavin Newsom's "Stop the Republican Recall of Governor Newsom" campaign texted me yesterday. They said the recall attempt is being led by a collection of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers and hardcore Trump supporters who want us to do less to fight COVID. Now matching the tone of those petitioning for the recall election, the California Governor has ramped up his campaign strategy since I last wrote about the issue weeks ago here. Now the recall is not only a partisan effort, but its led by radicals.

In my last post, I discussed a theory from an L.A. Times article that the recall campaign was rural, conservative Northern California's response to the Governor's prolonged and disproportionate lockdown of the region. Another post discussed this article and the author's firsthand experience in Colusa County. We both  noted that the article cited various sources suggesting the recall campaign was more of a mixed bag. My post ended by questioning how the Secretary of State reports the signatures and whether we could see where the petitioners are from. I wanted to know if the backlash was truly regional. 

Since my last post, the Secretary of State filed a new status report showing the most recent tally of signatures from each county (the next and final tally will be reported on April 19, 2021). As of March 11, 2021, Los Angeles County has the highest number of signatures at 181,846. That figure is not surprising purely considering LA county's massive population. Indeed, the only counties providing six-digit numbers are in Southern California: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego. 

However, the picture of the recall in California looks different when you see the number of signatures per thousand residents in each county. As shown in this Redding Record Searchlight article, the map of support for the recall practically flips from Southern to Northern California. The report confirms that the highest per capita clusters of signatures came from rural communities. The Record Searchlight article notes:

At the top of the list supporting the recall are six counties accounting for at least three times the number of valid signatures expected compared to their populations. Between them, those counties — Placer, Tuolumne, Siskiyou, Sierra, Calaveras and Amador — delivered 58,329 valid signatures.

That county breakdown supports the theory that the recall campaign is coming from rural Northern and Eastern California along the Nevada border.

Just as the recall effort enters the final stretch, the state's COVID numbers are drastically improving. Today, Governor Newsom tweeted that California has administered more than twenty million vaccinations and the lowest positivity rate in the country. At this pace, the Governor announced his plan to fully reopen by June 15.

Winning on the ballot was an uphill battle for Newsom's opponents before there was a plan to reopen. If the state reopens on June 15, the arguments for recalling the Governor might fade with the memory of the pandemic. Northern California's fight not to be forgotten in this recall election will probably have to remind some of their petitioners to show up for the ballot, too.