The attempt to throw Gov. Gavin Newsom out of office failed by a wide margin, according to vote counts released Tuesday night in California’s historic recall election.
With some 9.1 million ballots counted — out of 22.3 million ballots mailed to registered voters — the No vote is ahead of the Yes vote 63.9% to 36.1%, according to the California Secretary of State.
Newsom pulled to such a big early lead that the Associated Press, CNN, NBC and other networks declared within an hour of the polls closing Tuesday night that the recall had failed and Newsom had survived.
“We are enjoying an overwhelming ‘no’ vote tonight here in the state of California,” Newsom said in a brief appearance in the courtyard of the state Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento on Election Night. “But ‘no’ was not the only thing that was expressed tonight. I want to focus on what we said ‘yes’ to as a state. We said ‘yes’ to science, ‘yes’ to vaccines, we said ‘yes’ to ending this pandemic.”
“We said yes to diversity, we said yes to inclusion, we said yes to pluralism. We said yes to all those things that we hold dear as Californians, and I would argue, as Americans,” the governor added.
But there are likely many more votes to count. Here’s why: The votes reported so far are only those ballots cast before Tuesday, from voters who sent them in by mail, left them in election drop boxes or voted early in person. After 8 p.m., election officials will begin counting ballots that were cast Tuesday. And ballots postmarked by Tuesday will be counted as long as they arrive within a week.
The No side performed very well in Alameda County, according to early returns as of Wednesday morning, with 82.54% voting No and 17.46% voting Yes on the recall question. That turnout so far represented 36.20% of registered county voters, with an unknown number of ballots still left to count.
In Contra Costa County, the splits stood at 73.13% for No and 26.87% for Yes on the recall question, in unofficial results at the end of Election Night. With an unknown number of local ballots left to process, turnout as of Tuesday represented 49.38% of registered voters.
Among the candidates seeking to replace Newsom, GOP talk radio host Larry Elder was leading the pack with 47% of the vote. Democrat Kevin Paffrath was a distant second at 10%, and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican, was in third place at not quite 9%.
Of ballots tabulated so far statewide, 44.7% of voters left the replacement candidate question blank.
In his Election Night speech, Faulconer told supporters that while he initially set out to campaign for 2022, it turned into a recall campaign. He said he’d take time to figure out “the best steps here in the coming weeks to continue to be a fighter, to continue to serve our great state.”
Elder indicated that he will likely run for governor next year if he does not win this time.
“We may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war,” he told supporters on Election Night.
But even before Election Day, Elder began casting doubt on the validity of the results. He said he thought there may be “shenanigans” and that he’s prepared to file lawsuits over irregularities.
Nonetheless, Elder conceded Tuesday night and urged supporters to be “gracious in defeat.”
Newsom’s strategy to fight the recall relied on taking lessons from the only other gubernatorial recalls in modern American history: the 2003 ouster of California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and the failed attempt to recall Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. (The governor of North Dakota was recalled a century ago, long before the modern era of political communication.)
The lesson from the Davis recall: Box out any prominent Democrats from running as a replacement and focus on telling Democrats to just vote “no.” In 2003, Democrat Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor, ran with the slogan “No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante.”
Newsom’s campaign said that gave some Democrats the belief that they could recall Davis and still have a Democratic governor.
The governor benefited too from an enormous fundraising advantage, raising five times as much money as his opponents combined.
Newsom also bet that his strict approach to the pandemic — as the first governor in the nation to require vaccines for health care workers and state employees — would pay off in a state where two-thirds of residents are vaccinated. He contrasted his approach with his GOP opponents, who said they would repeal mandates for masks and vaccines.
Exit polling from Tuesday’s election reveals that the pandemic is the main issue on California voters’ minds, and that more than 6 in 10 say getting vaccinated is more of a public health responsibility than it is a personal choice.
Editor’s note: Weekly editor Jeremy Walsh contributed local results to this story.
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