Stolen-election fantasies are likely to demoralize GOP voters, and the party’s embrace of candidates as radical as Newsom’s main challenger just narrows its base.
September 15, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+9
Feeling blue.
Feeling blue. Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has survived the recall effort against him, and while the votes are still being counted, it wasn’t close. Nor is the result much of a surprise. California is about as solidly Democratic as it gets, and there was no particular reason for Democrats to turn against the governor. The fact of the recall was more a function of the state’s terrible Progressive-era laws than it was of discontent with Newsom, and once the campaign started, it wasn’t hard for the governor and his party to overcome any lack of enthusiasm Democratic voters may have felt tpward the incumbent by reminding them how much they dislike former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
I wouldn’t advise using the results to project anything about upcoming off-year elections or about next year’s midterms. Single elections don’t provide reliable information about how voters will behave, and even all the off-year elections put together (and adjusted for the context of where they take place) only have minimal predictive value. Especially when there are direct measures of public opinion such as presidential approval ratings and generic ballot polling.
But while the California recall tells us nothing helpful about voter mood, it does say something small and something large about the Republican Party that may affect upcoming elections.
The minor point is that Republicans are still following their 2020 strategy of giving their own voters a one-two demobilization punch. They’re still demonizing absentee and other mail-in or drop-box voting, thereby discouraging their own voters from using those methods and making it harder for their own supporters to vote. Some of the recent Republican state laws making voting harder are in part simply a convoluted way of making up for the campaign that’s pushed Republican voters away from voting methods they were in the habit of using.
The bigger idea is that Republican claims of election fraud are not only fictional and dangerous for democracy, but also may be sending a message to Republican voters that voting is futile.
My guess is that these dynamics won’t add up to much, but that’s just a guess. It’s possible that they cost Republicans one or both of the U.S. Senate seats they lost in the Georgia special elections back in January, and it’s possible that they contributed to what appears to be a Democratic margin in California that exceeded what polls predicted.
A larger potential problem for Republicans is their choice of candidates. While there was no primary election in the replacement portion of California’s all-comers recall (which turned out to be irrelevant once the recall was defeated), the party quickly settled on the Trumpy talk-show host Larry Elder. Newsom and the Democrats would have run against Trump and the national Republican Party regardless, but having Elder campaigning as both a Trump Republican and an ideological conservative made the sale as easy as possible. Yes, Newsom was likely to win anyway, but if Republicans had pushed former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a far more moderate Republican, they might have done better.
In more Republican and more conservative states, Republicans can nominate more conservative candidates without much risk. But choosing the Trumpiest candidate risks a lot more than ideological disconnects. As was the case in the Tea Party era, Republicans who value radicalism and extremism can wind up choosing candidates who are unqualified, or have significant baggage, or just come off as flaky. And it can’t help that Trump’s endorsement may be important in Republican primaries and his litmus test may wind up being a demand that candidates focus on his fantasies of 2020 election fraud.
Not to mention that hitching the party to a solidly defeated president who left office with a 39% approval rating and seems unlikely to have made up any ground since then is not exactly a strategy most Republican campaign professionals would propose.
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It could be that the weakest Republican candidates will be defeated in primaries, and that midterm elections will, as they usually do, come down to a referendum on the current president. It also is possible that Republicans won’t be harmed from a further danger that didn’t arise in this one-shot recall election — the chance that phony accusations of fraud show up in primary elections, with the losers refusing to concede and taking some of their voters with them.
But there sure does appear to be some possibility of significant unforced error for Republicans in 2022. And 2024.
1. David Hope, Julian Limberg and Nina Weber at the Monkey Cage on public opinion and taxing the rich.
2. Norm Ornstein and Dennis Aftergut on voting rights.
3. Margaret Sullivan on media word choices.
5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien on Trump’s final days in the White House.
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Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net
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Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net
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