With just over a month to go, the campaign to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom has nearly reached the required number of signatures to qualify for a statewide vote.
As of Sunday, Recall Gavin 2020 – one of the two committees that organize the effort – says that the petitioners have collected more than 1.4 million signatures of the 1,495,709 required.
The campaign will need to collect signatures well above the number to compensate for signatures that will inevitably be invalidated. The deadline is March 17th.
ARCHIVE: Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a news conference held at the launch of a mass vaccination site COVID-19 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
(Los Angeles Times via AP)
Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager and finance director for Rescue California – the other committee that organizes the effort – said she is confident that they will gather enough signatures in time.
In an interview with Fox News, Dunsmore said Rescue California last week deployed paid subscription collectors that have already collected 52,000.
She said “it is highly possible that we can reach 1.5 or 1.6 (million subscriptions) by the end of this week”, but her ultimate goal is 2 million subscriptions.
If organizers collect and validate enough signatures, the state’s lieutenant governor would be required to select a date for a special election. Dunsmore estimated that the date will be somewhere between mid-August and late September.
“Once the election (date) is selected, the ballot will have two things about it. One, a thumbs up or thumbs down in the recall, and (two), the replacement,” said Dunsmore, adding: “If 82% of the (1.8 million) subscriptions we send are valid, but we only need 1.8 million subscriptions. Our goal is 2 million. So I think we should have more than enough. ”
Dunsmore said the recall campaign crossed the line from “possibility to probability” in a few weeks and that Newsom’s actions during that time suggest that he is starting to take the threat more seriously.
“I think before that and even during the French Laundry (incident), his team was supposedly sitting there saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’, and he was thinking, ‘I need to work on it,'” said Dunsmore. “I think his obvious pattern is to go for the political message instead of the policy planning. And this started to get in trouble because it created inconsistent and hypocritical decisions, and very transparently bad decisions.”
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Fox News made several attempts during the recall campaign to contact Governor Newsom’s office for comment, but received no response.
Not long ago, the notion that Newsom’s favorite liberal could be ousted by voters in the heavily democratic state that elected him in a landslide two years ago would have seemed like a scam. But the pandemic’s slippery politics and a tangle of confused decisions about vaccines and the reopening of businesses and schools conspired to make the first-term Democrat look vulnerable.
California voters, tired of the restrictions that deprived them of jobs, classrooms and friends, combined with the anxiety of the continuing threat of the coronavirus, can create a volatile mix at the polls. Newsom also resisted a public beating by dining out with friends and lobbyists at a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay area last fall, while telling residents to stay home.
More recently, a growing fraud scandal at the state unemployment agency has taken its lead during the pandemic under even closer scrutiny.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in California by almost 2 to 1, occupy all state offices and dominate the legislature and the congressional delegation. But some see signs of a turn in the tide at Golden State,
Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who formally launched his candidacy for governor last week to challenge Newsom, argued that voters are looking forward to a change after years of Democratic rule. Recent research by the Public Policy Institute of California found that among likely voters, Newsom is losing ground with independents, Latinos – even his fellow Democrats.
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There were warning signs in the November election that the state may not be as rigidly democratic as registration numbers suggest: voters rejected an attempt to reinstate affirmative action, as well as a proposed tax hike on commercial and industrial properties. Republicans also recovered four seats in Congress that they lost in 2018.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.