One column shows the difference between the Dems & GOP

From the Washington Post.

“The Trailer: Democrats are feeling better about California's recall. Republicans are feeling cheated.”

By David Weigel
Reporter
Yesterday at 6:04 p.m. EDT

LOS ANGELES — California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) came here on Labor Day to talk about Larry Elder. Local elected officials and Black organizers crowded around a microphone, denouncing the Sept. 14 recall election as a coup attempt to install a right-wing radio host in the governor's office. A Black Lives Matter founder called Elder the “face of white supremacy.” Newsom warned about the ongoing threat of “Trumpism.”

When a Democrat in the crowd asked him for specifics — what, exactly, would Black Californians lose if Newsom lost? — the governor talked for five full minutes.  Me: When was the last time have you heard a Republican answer this type of question without resorting to misinformation, lies, or yapping what the other side is doing?

“It's something no state's ever done, $2 billion child savings accounts for every kindergartner,” Newsom said. “We actually put $5 billion in the budget for after school and summer school for how to reimagine a school year. We got that done this year,”

Newsom kept going, slamming an open palm on his lectern, pointing to the Democratic legislators in the room. “Three billion dollars for community schools [and] mental health for our kids. Adolescent mental health, zero to 25, universal screenings, universal service. A $4.8 billion investment, unprecedented in California history.”

At weekend campaign stops, Newsom and his Republican rivals described radically different Californias — a state where ambitious spending can solve every post-pandemic crisis, or a state on the verge of collapse. Democrats pulled on masks and showed their vaccination cards to hear how Newsom would prevent California from becoming what he called one of “those damn red states.” Republicans gathered in or near businesses that suffered during last year's pandemic orders, with no masks required — and near one Elder rally, a booth where people could buy “CDC mask exemption” cards for $10. Democrats believed polls that showed support for the recall slipping. Republicans did not.

“The recall movement is not only the greatest citizens movement in California's history, it's also the most diverse,” said state Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, an early backer of the recall, as he talked with a dozen voters at Hollywood store that resisted state and county coronavirus mandates. “Gavin Newsom has this way of being very polarizing. He tries to make everything partisan.”

The recall ballot contains two questions — whether to remove Newsom, and which alternative should become governor if he's gone. When they gathered signatures to force the election, pro-recall groups emphasized that they were not partisan, and that they had no alternative candidate in mind. Elder, who hosted shows for Salem Radio Network and the Epoch Times before the recall began, jumped into the race eight weeks ago, grabbed a significant polling lead on the second ballot question and became the focus of Newsom's negative ads.

“I don’t know if he has any appeal whatsoever to any Democrat, and that’s concerning to me,” Randy Economy, a former spokesman for Recall Gavin, said of Elder. “But at this point in the game, he’s the guy.” Orrin Heatlie, another Recall Gavin founder, told Politico this week that Elder's campaign had been “counterproductive.”

Democrats have seen populist uprisings before — the 1978 passage of the anti-tax Proposition 13, the 1994 landslide for cutting off benefits for undocumented immigrants, the 2003 recall that served as a model for this race. They had also just won an election where there was far more visible support for the Republican nominee — from painted barns to flag-flying Trump boat flotillas — than for the Democrat who got more votes. Democrats see the recall banners this time, too.
“Not voting is saying that all those folks who do vote yes, the people who are fine when Larry Elder says he’ll cut abortion funding and that climate change is a crock, can speak for you,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told Democrats at a Saturday morning rally for Newsom in Culver City.

With 6 million ballots already cast, Democrats believe that polarization in the electorate is leaving them with a larger share of it. But Republican voters took a different lesson from 2020, with many believing that the race was stolen from Trump. In interviews over the weekend, supporters of the recall spoke of the friends and neighbors who wanted Newsom gone, and their disbelief at polling that shows just 43 percent of voters inclined to remove him.

“After 2018, it clicked in my brain that they've been cheating us here in California for years,” said Leah Kabaker, 62, who supported the recall. In that race, Newsom had won the endorsement of most elected Democrats and labor unions, and easily dispatched former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in an all-party primary. “Newsom is a White elitist from San Francisco. Villaraigosa was the mayor of Los Angeles. Now, I didn't like him. But in a state that's 40 percent Hispanic, you're telling me that Villaraigosa got buried by Gavin Newsom?” Me: And here you have it.  If the election doesn’t go the way the Republicans think it should then there must be fraud involved.   

Newsom is in a weaker position than in 2018, when anti-Trump sentiment in California led the party to a midterm landslide. An early-summer flurry of spending, including $354 million in stimulus checks that began arriving as the ballots went out, did not move sentiments on the recall. The first anti-recall message, “California is roaring back,” did not survive the arrival of the delta variant. His closing argument, that Elder would undo vaccine mandates, has been more effective.

Asked on Saturday why his paid advertising was so negative, with none of the ambitious agenda he described in campaign speeches, Newsom said that it worked.

“It's a recall,” Newsom explained, adding that the selling of his new spending plans would come later. “That's the reelect.”

Republican voters have tuned Newsom out, and to some extent, so have Republican candidates. At a Monday rally in Thousand Oaks, in one of the parking lots of the city's major mall, Elder spent more time disputing media coverage of his campaign than he did responding to Newsom.

Over 30 minutes, Elder repeatedly said he would speak slowly, so as not to be misinterpreted by CNN. He didn't get into the specifics of Newsom's housing plans but said that he had spoken to former HUD secretary Ben Carson and would adopt a shelved Trump-era plan to relocate the homeless to “large areas where we could build low-cost housing.” He spoke more generally, noting that it had been decades since a governor's veto was successfully overridden, and there was plenty he could mobilize voters against if he vetoed it.  Me: Apparently they are ignoring the NIMBY crowd in those large areas.

“The lawmakers' phones start ringing and the constituents say: ‘Are you guys smoking crack?’” Elder joked. “So, we have more power than I thought. There's also the power to declare a statewide emergency. I have a line-item veto. I'll be appointing members of these very powerful commissions. I'll be bringing back sanity to Sacramento.”

No single popular issue has emerged for Republicans the way that property taxes did in 1978, or a hated tax on car registration did in 2003. One reason is that conservatives simply can't choose among the many reasons they want Newsom gone. Over the last week, Elder held events focused on school choice, on forest fires, on the effect the 2020 pandemic lockdowns had on businesses and on violent criminals released after changes in imprisonment policy. On housing, the campaigns talk past each other, and sometimes past themselves. Shortly before Elder promised to build more affordable housing, actor Scott Baio told the crowd that the threat of new multifamily units was an issue conservatives could talk back about to their Democratic friends.

“Ask them, are you okay with multifamily low-income housing in your area, in the suburbs next to your house?” Baio said. “Because that's what Gavin Newsom is going to do right after he shuts us down again.”Me: So if these folks are poor does that automatically make them bad neighbors?  That they wouldn’t keep their area neat & tidy?

Several voters in the crowd shared part of that worry, suggesting that Newsom was shoveling out resources now to act with impunity after the recall. (He will face voters again in a June 2022 primary.) It was harder, they said, to imagine that a majority of Californians were telling pollsters the truth. Me: Regardless of the reason Newsom put in place all these programs, they actually help a large % of citizens of this state.  While the only thing a Republican would do is offer a tax cut that pretty much benefits the rich and then lie that it would benefit all taxpayers in the state.

“You can see all the people out here who are going to vote for Larry,” said Becky Olsen, leaving the Thousand Oaks rally on Monday. “I think people don't want to say how they're voting. They're afraid to say it, maybe.”