What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Something that hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage in national media is the scandal over unemployment benefits in California. When the pandemic hit and millions of Californians found themselves unemployed, scammers saw an opportunity to make money by filing fraudulent claims. Once the state wised up, though, they cracked down so hard that some eligible applicants didn’t receive the benefits they were entitled to. Apart from impacting the lives of thousands of Californians, the episode has been a massive headache for Newsom. The state is still struggling to dig out from at least $11 billion, and potentially as much as $31 billion, in fraudulent claims.

I wonder if Republican advertisers felt that voters had made up their mind about how Newsom handled COVID-19, and if that wasn’t enough to get them riled up and ready to vote for a recall, maybe pointing out some other perceived failings would be.

We actually just published an article over at Inside Elections that speaks to this! According to data from the media analytics firm Kantar, Republican advertising actually avoided messaging on COVID-19 in favor of more traditional lines of attack. For instance, taxes featured in 67 percent of all GOP TV ads, and housing and homelessness featured in just over 50 percent. COVID-19 was mentioned in just 7 percent of GOP ads.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, COVID-19 featured in 60 percent of TV ads, indicating that Democrats now think Newsom is particularly strong on the issue even if he’s had a few missteps.