With national figures flying in to campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom in the lead up to the recall, it’s raising questions about the impact on the election outcome and how public education, homelessness, wildfires, and other issues that have led to the recall will be addressed.
The more confident Democrats are, the less likely they are to stray from the message discipline of characterizing the recall proponents with a broad brush, Matt Welch, editor at large of Reason and contributing writer to L.A. Times Opinion, told the Northern California Record.
“I think that you could make a purely anti-science case in favor of the recall, which goes something like this, why would you be yellow-taping playgrounds around the state as late as December 2020,” Welch said. “It's completely unscientific – we knew certainly by the summer of 2020 that people weren't catching this outdoors as a matter of course and yet anti-scientifically, we closed stuff down. It was similar to schools; California had some of the most closed systems in the country.”
Those kinds of decisions contributed to voters crossing party lines in support of the recall.
“I think that speaks to not just education policy but all of the lockdown policies,” Welch said.
Questions persist about what could happen to recall law in California whatever the outcome is for the governor.
Welch noted that California’s recall mechanism was passed by former governor Hiram Johnson in the early days of the progressive movement.
“In states that are veering ever closer to being one-party states, many voters are essentially disenfranchised—your preferences are not going to show up very much in governance and politics,” Welch said.
“Generally speaking, it is a great mechanism, particularly in one-party states, where the same party has control of the governorship and the legislature, and right now in America that is becoming a majority of the states.”