The survey comes as 58 county registrars in California now work to see if the Newsom recall has 1.5 million valid voter signatures needed to qualify for a recall election in the fall. While Steyer opposes the recall, saying in a statement that it was “a clear attempt by the GOP to regain control of the state and repress progressive impetus”, he has been relatively quiet on the move. He didn’t tweet about the recall and just once this year mentioned Newsom in a tweet: a topic tied to the governor’s address in the state of the state.
A spokesman for Steyer told a POLITICO reporter that he was looking to speak with him last week that they should be back in “late April”. The secretary of state’s office says the deadline for registrars to validate signatures for the recall is April 29.
Steyer declined to comment. But a source close to him said on Tuesday that he would be “very, very surprised if he were looking at the revocation vote”.
Still, Steyer’s decision to consider himself a possible replacement suggests that he considered the possibility. At the very least, it is one of the few concrete examples of a Democrat assessing the opportunities and scenario of a post-Newsom California. Antonio Villaraigosa, Newsom’s main opponent in 2018, avoided questions about the recall and took no formal steps to test its viability.
The feeling among political strategists and officials across the state is that many Democrats are waiting to see what Newsom’s political pulse will be at the end of the summer, when they will have to decide whether to enter the race.
There is already speculation that there could be hundreds of candidates in the race because the steps to qualify are so low – just $ 4,000 or 7,000 subscriptions in a state with 39 million people. This is the same limit as in 2003, when then-Gov. Gray Davis was called back, and Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged from a field that included a child actor and an adult movie star.
The Newsom team is warning Democrats not to break with the governor, arguing that even having a serious candidate from their party engaged in the election would offer a clear alternative to Newsom and give voters the incentive to vote for the recall.
Sean Clegg, a leading Newsom strategist, issued a public rebuke to Villaraigosa recently, claiming that the former mayor, who was his former boss, would “be ashamed and poison his legacy forever if he ran.” And Clegg dealt another blow to the Democrats by targeting the governor in public. “No free photos on Gavin Newsom,” wrote Clegg on Twitter.
But this aggressive stance is worrying some Democrats.
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Newsom’s political mentor, said Democrats should “do everything they can to prevent a recall from happening.” But if they fail, Brown added, the party must “absolutely” offer voters an alternative to Republicans who will stock up on the recall ballot.
“You cannot risk Democrats losing the government,” Brown said in a recent interview with POLITICO. “You have to literally protect it … and it may be that the Democrats you put in can announce that they are totally opposed to the recall. ”
Steyer has been a prominent presence in major Democratic circles for years, when he took the fortune he earned as a hedge fund manager and began to apply it to progressive causes, especially in the defense of the environment. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect Democrats and, at one point, was hailed as a liberal counterweight to the Koch industrial brothers. In California, he has invested millions in successful electoral initiatives.
Steyer and Newsom, although both from San Francisco, are not particularly close. But as governor, Newsom appointed Steyer to co-chair an economic and business council – a star-studded panel that included personalities from the business world, such as Disney’s Bob Iger and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
For Newsom, the change was seen by some as a clever attempt to keep Steyer and his political ambitions in check. The panel was dissolved and later criticized by business leaders as a toothless effort that produced few, if any, serious policy changes.
This would not be the first time Steyer has considered offering himself as an alternative to a more well-known Democrat in the state. In 2015, a week after now Vice President Kamala Harris launched her campaign for the U.S. Senate, Steyer calmly told potential supporters that he was thinking of entering the race with an unorthodox promise to serve only one term if he couldn’t achieve unspecified goals related to the environment, economy and education in six years.
Two years later, Steyer told close allies that he was seriously considering a campaign against Senator Dianne Feinstein. At the time, he said he did not think the Democrats were aggressively facing Donald Trump. “Have they forgotten their moral duty to not allow America to behave in a way that endangers all the souls on this planet?” he wrote in an email to a friend.
Instead, at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Steyer became one of the most outspoken advocates of impeachment (well before it actually happened). His investments in this campaign helped him build a huge email list of Democratic voters. And although he told a crowd in Des Moines that he was not going to run, he ended up doing just that. Despite the millions of e-mail addresses and huge amounts of personal wealth to spend, your application has not caught on. He turned his attention directly to South Carolina, hoping that the state’s primary constituency would turn to him as an alternative to Senator Bernie Sanders. Instead, they went with Joe Biden.