[ Governor Gavin Newsom will remain in office, but GOP attempts to
undermine elections aren’t going anywhere. ] [[link removed]]


THE CALIFORNIA RECALL’S WARNING FOR DEMOCRACY  
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Ronald Brownstein
September 15, 2021
The Atlantic
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_ Governor Gavin Newsom will remain in office, but GOP attempts to
undermine elections aren’t going anywhere. _

, The Atlantic

 

Governor Gavin Newsom of California defeated yesterday’s recall
election by a large enough margin to squash earlier Republican threats
to challenge the results no matter the outcome. But the proliferation
of those allegations of voter fraud _before_ the election, including
ungrounded claims from former President Donald Trump that the contest
was “rigged,” points toward an ominous future in which more GOP
candidates challenge the results of any election that they do not win.

Although Trump, Larry Elder
[[link removed]] (the
leading GOP candidate to replace Newsom), and other Republicans had
repeatedly raised unspecified allegations of fraud in recent days,
those same claims were muted after the “no” position on the recall
quickly established a commanding 2-to-1 advantage as the first results
arrived last night. Elder, in his remarks to supporters, did not
repeat any of his fraud claims and used the word _defeat_ to
describe the outcome. California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan
Patterson, in her statement
[[link removed]], said
Newsom had achieved only a “hollow victory”—but by using the
word _victory_, she acknowledged that he had won.

Those concessions, however grudging, marked a sharp turn for
Republicans. Elder previously insisted that he was ready to file
lawsuits against unspecified “shenanigans” and linked from his
campaign homepage to a website [[link removed]] that,
before any ballots were counted, called for a special legislative
session to investigate “the twisted results of this 2021 Recall
Election.” (That language had come down from the StopCAFraud.com
website this morning.)

Even as Democrats celebrated Newsom’s resounding win—which turned
on his support for the kind of aggressive COVID-19 vaccine mandates
that President Joe Biden has now embraced—they saw the preemptive
Republican claims of fraud as a measure of the threats that are
mounting to voter access and election integrity, particularly in
GOP-controlled states.

“Long-term, this is becoming the new GOP party line,” Jena
Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado told me
yesterday. “For races that conservatives are unlikely to win, like
the California recall race, activists, pundits, candidates, and
officials are preempting those losses with the idea that something is
wrong with the election.” The result, Griswold said, “is it sows
doubt in the entire election system to make it easier for extreme
legislators to come in and suppress the vote.”

That message was only underscored because Newsom’s victory came on
the same day that Senate Democrats introduced what might be their last
chance to counter the laws proliferating in Republican-controlled
states making it more difficult to vote and increasing partisan
influence over the counting of ballots. After a Republican filibuster
blocked a version of the bill in June, Senate Democrats renegotiated
it this summer
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to address objections raised by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia
and also to add more provisions to protect the independence of
election administrators.

Given Manchin’s initial objections, voting- and civil-rights
advocates praised the new bill as surprisingly robust, offering
automatic and same-day voter registration and guaranteed early and
mail balloting to voters in every state, as well as provisions to
restrict partisan gerrymanders. “It remains transformational: It
will address the voter-suppression laws being enacted all over the
country in a profound way,” says Fred Wertheimer, a longtime
government-reform lobbyist and the founder of the advocacy group
Democracy 21. Yet although every Senate Democrat is expected to vote
for the bill, it remains doomed in the Senate unless Manchin and
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona drop their opposition to the
procedural reform of exempting voting-rights legislation from another
certain Republican filibuster.

The preemptive charges of fraud in California previewed the partisan
battles ahead over voting rules, but the actual
voting _results_ offered Democrats an encouraging message. Not only
the magnitude, but the manner, of Newsom’s win provided Democrats
potentially important signals for the gubernatorial elections coming
this November in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as the broader slate
of House, Senate, and governor’s races coming in 2022.

Earlier this summer, some polls
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race, and Newsom faced an especially severe version of the problem
that usually afflicts the president’s party in midterm elections:
Voters from the minority party showed much more interest in voting.
But Newsom took command of the race
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stressing his support for mask and vaccine mandates to combat the
Delta coronavirus variant, and linking his Republican rivals not only
to Trump but also to Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and
Greg Abbott of Texas, who have implacably opposed such requirements
and whose states remain hot spots for the virus.

Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, says the governor’s
success at energizing Democrats by leaning into his support for taking
tough steps against COVID-19—and linking his Republican rivals, led
by Elder, to the GOP-controlled states where the virus has
surged—demonstrated an effective formula to counter the usual
midterm turnout drop. “We really did wake up this blue giant, and
that’s what we have to do in 2022,” Clegg told me.

Both exit polls
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the raw election returns captured the success of that strategy. In a
state that leans so heavily Democratic, the recall’s sole chance to
succeed would have been if Democratic voters had slumbered through it.
But the results showed that Newsom was buoyed by robust turnout in big
Democratic strongholds such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, and
surprisingly strong performances in the state’s more competitive
places, including Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Riverside
Counties.

The exit polls conducted by Edison Research
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a consortium of media organizations showed that a clear majority of
voters backed Newsom’s approach to combatting the pandemic. More
than three-fifths of voters said his policies for fighting the virus
were about right or even not strict enough, and he won roughly 85
percent of them. Almost exactly the same share of voters said getting
the vaccine was a public-health responsibility (as opposed to a
personal choice) and Newsom likewise won nearly 85 percent of them.
More than seven in 10 voters backed his mask mandate for public
schools. The recall ran up huge margins among those who said his
policies were too strict and that getting the vaccine was a personal
choice, as well as those who opposed the mask mandate, but in each
case they constituted only about one-third or less of voters (just
one-fourth in the case of masks).

Those results suggest that both in California and nationally,
Republicans who have centered their messaging on defending the
“rights” and “choices” of the unvaccinated are playing to the
short side of public opinion—and potentially alienating many among
the roughly three-fourths of American adults who have gotten the shot.
(A flurry of national polls
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found narrow majorities backing vaccine mandates for large employers,
teachers, and health-care workers, and a bigger majority supporting
mask mandates in schools—both of which almost all Republicans are
opposing.) Although the exit poll did not ask voters about their
vaccination status, two of the best-respected late California polls
each showed Newsom winning about two-thirds of those who have received
the shot (as did Newsom’s internal polling).

If the recall’s near-term impact may be to stiffen the willingness
of Democratic leaders to support tougher steps to combat the virus,
the long-term effect may be to illuminate how deeply Trump’s Big Lie
about election fraud is taking root inside the GOP. The preelection
accusations from Trump and Elder in California came amid continuing
demands from GOP state officials for “audits” of the 2020 results,
a lengthening list of Republican candidates for governor or secretary
of state who have embraced Trump’s discredited claims of fraud, and
efforts by GOP elected officials to downplay the violence of the
January 6 insurrection. “The threat is getting worse; the big lie is
getting bigger,” said Griswold, in an assessment shared by many
nonpartisan students of voting and democracy. Compounding the danger,
she said, is a growing number of physical threats, including death
threats, targeting election officials.

Polls since last November’s election have consistently found
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a big majority of Republican voters accept Trump’s claims of fraud
in 2020 (even though his “evidence” was uniformly rejected by
courts across the country): In a CNN/SRSS national survey released
this week
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about three-fifths of GOP voters agreed that a “big part of being a
Republican” was “believing that Donald Trump won the 2020
election.” In a June Monmouth University national survey
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fully 47 percent of Republicans described the January 6 attack on the
Capitol as a “legitimate protest”—far more than the 33 percent
who labeled it an “insurrection.”

In California, a handful of Republicans warned that preemptive charges
of fraud would be counterproductive, by discouraging GOP voters from
casting a ballot. “Claiming before Election Day the California
recall is rigged is equal to telling Republicans to throw their ballot
away rather than mail it in,” the former state GOP chair Ron Nehring
complained in a tweet
[[link removed]] on
Monday.

Nehring, the spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas during his
2016 presidential bid, is now an adviser to former San Diego Mayor
Kevin Faulconer, one of the Republicans who ran to replace Newsom.
Nehring told me that alleging fraud “without evidence” represented
both “bad policy” and “bad politics” for the Republican Party.

Politically, Nehring said, pinning the defeat on fraud deterred the
party from examining the actual sources of its trouble in California:
the inability to build a broader coalition. Parties can learn from
defeats but “only if you accept the failure,” he said.

Nehring also sees long-term damage to the United States’ standing in
the world when Republicans “echo Kremlin talking points about our
own elections.” Doing so, he said, “opens the door to this moral
equivalency and that’s what they want: to bring America’s stature
in the world down to Russia’s shit level.”

Yet few other notable Republicans in California or elsewhere condemned
the fraud charges from Elder and Trump. The silence echoed the
response from most GOP leaders during Trump’s sustained campaign to
subvert the 2020 election. John Pitney, a political scientist at
Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican National Committee
aide, says the refusal of prominent Republicans to denounce such
groundless accusations encourages more of them from Trump and others.
“It is like the political version of ‘broken windows,’” Pitney
told me, referring to the criminology theory that failing to police
minor crimes encourages more serious violations.

With Republicans failing to produce any tangible evidence of fraud,
any lawsuits from Elder or others always had little chance to succeed,
notes Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School who
specializes in election law.

If Republicans reverse course to legally challenge the results, she
told me, “I think it’s going to be like the postpresidential
election period in the sense that there are lawsuits that are filed,
they are political arguments wrapped up as legal documents, and they
are dismissed up and down, by state court judges and federal court
judges.”

But to many students of small-_d_ democracy, the proliferation of
fraud claims against such an implausible target as the California
recall represent another point on an arc that may be bending toward a
full-scale crisis by 2024. Sarah Walker, the executive director of
Secure Democracy, a nonpartisan group that works with states to
improve election administration, says that if so many Republicans were
willing to claim that Democrats could win only by fraud “in one of
the deepest-blue states in the country,” such allegations may now be
almost inevitable in swing states such as Georgia and Arizona, where
the margins in 2022 and 2024 likely will be much closer.

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan
group that analyzes threats to American elections, sees Trump’s
involvement in the recall, in particular, as another step in a
long-term campaign to increase pressure on Republican election
officials to subvert the next election if necessary.

“We now know that Trump tried to stage a coup and that one of the
tools he used was drumming up spurious claims of fraud to convince
members of his own party to doubt the true results, because he saw
that as a predicate” for pressuring GOP secretaries of state or
state legislatures to “use legal mechanisms to hand him an election
he clearly did not win,” Bassin told me.

To Bassin, Trump’s California claims, like his continuing calls for
other states to emulate the chaotic “audit” of 2020 results
authorized by Arizonan Republicans, show that he is determined to
increase pressure on GOP officials to side with him next time by
convincing more Republican voters that virtually any outcome in which
the GOP loses can’t be trusted. “What I think we are seeing now is
Trump saying, _I can begin working immediately on convincing a much
broader set of the population that these institutions can’t be
trusted, that there is rampant fraud, so I can create a dynamic in
2024 where I can succeed where I failed last time_,” Bassin told me.

All year, civil-rights and election-reform advocates have complained
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both the White House and Senate Democrats have
appeared insufficiently alarmed or engaged
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a procession of red states have imposed new restrictions on voting
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in multiple cases, created mechanisms for Republicans to exert greater
influence over the counting of ballots. (For instance, through the new
Texas law granting greater freedom to partisan “poll watchers,” or
the provision in Georgia’s election bill through which a
GOP-controlled panel has begun the process of potentially taking over
election administration in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.)

The new Senate voting bill introduced yesterday would respond to those
threats more vigorously than many expected when Manchin objected to
the original proposal in June
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experts such as Wertheimer say “there is more work to be done” to
incorporate into the bill greater safeguards against manipulation of
vote counting.)

Yet any and all provisions of the bill will be moot unless Manchin and
Sinema agree to some exemption from the filibuster that will allow it
to pass the Senate. Advocates aren’t pretending they have a clear
understanding of whether either will do so, even as the dodged bullet
in California offers another warning that races closer than this
recall may face escalating threats of election subversion.

_Ronald Brownstein
[[link removed]] is a senior
editor at The Atlantic._

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