What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

That’s it for today, readers. But don’t worry, your indefatigable live blog crew will be back at it early tomorrow morning, and we’ll be busy live blogging all day tomorrow. We’ll take a well-earned dinner break around 6 p.m. Eastern, but we’ll be back online after polls close in California (11 p.m. Eastern) and live-blogging until we either know the results of the recall election or when we can expect to know more. Remember, this election is being conducted mostly by mail, so if the result is close, it could be days before we have a final result. As Nathaniel and Geoffrey wrote earlier today, only two-thirds of California’s votes were counted on election night last year, with the rest trickling in over the next several days.

That said, as we’ve talked about on the live blog today, polls suggest that Newsom will not be recalled. On the eve of the election, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of the first question on the recall ballot — whether to remove Newsom from office — shows that 40.8 percent of Californians want to recall him, while 57.5 percent want to keep him in office. (We’ll freeze our polling average at 9 a.m. Eastern tomorrow.)

But, of course, our polling average is not a probabilistic forecast — meaning you shouldn’t think of those polling numbers as a prediction of what will happen; instead, you should think of them as a snapshot of what the polls have said thus far. And remember, even though the polls point in favor of Newsom staying in office, polling errors — even of a magnitude of 16.6 points — aren’t out of the question. A polling error of this magnitude would be rare, but it’s not out of the realm of possibilities.

Off-year elections are always hard to poll, and in this race, the question of who will actually turn out to vote is still open. Californians have, of course, been casting ballots for days with the California firm Political Data, Inc., putting the tally of returned mail ballots as of Monday at 7,799,192 mail ballots with 52 percent cast by registered Democrats, 25 percent cast by registered Republicans and 23 percent cast by unaffiliated voters. But don’t read too much into these numbers — as Nathaniel and Geoffrey pointed out earlier today, there’s no guarantee that registered Democrats are voting against the recall (or registered Republicans for it), and in-person voters will likely be disproportionately Republican. So there could even be a “red mirage” if the final result is close. That said, it doesn’t seem as if Democrats have an enthusiasm problem at this point, meaning turnout could be relatively high for both Republicans and Democrats in this election.

We’ll just have to wait and see what the results say tomorrow. But in the meantime, tune back in tomorrow as we discuss, the final polls heading into tomorrow’s election, the history of the GOP and recall elections in California and why Newsom faces a recall challenge in the first place (It’s not just his handling of COVID-19 that has upset voters).

And as always, thanks for following along — scroll back through to see what we’ve chatted about so far — and if you have any questions, ping us @538politics and I’ll try to get your question answered on the live blog. See you tomorrow!

If you’re feeling a bit lost about how the California recall came about, FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast host Galen Druke and senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich have got you covered. Here, they discuss the events that led to the recall, what the ballot will look like and the chances that Newsom will in fact be replaced.

Efforts to recall Newsom predate the pandemic, but his opponents have latched on to his handling of COVID-19 as a reason to recall him. And although every state government has had to make hard choices on how to handle the pandemic — including dealing with some level of public criticism over their pandemic policy — this is the one where a governor’s office is on the line. So it makes sense to ask: How different is Newsom’s policy, and California’s outcomes, from those of other states?

While California hasn’t been the state with the most stringent COVID-19 protection regulations, it’s definitely in the top 10, according to an analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford in the U.K. That team developed a stringency index, which measures and compares how strict different states have been in setting rules around lockdowns, social restrictions and other containment strategies to combat COVID-19. Basically, it assesses which states have been the most careful.

Measured on a 0-100 scale, the average national stringency index peaked above 70 in April of 2020 and quickly fell after that. Even during the virus’s surge last winter, it barely passed 50. California, however, retained a stringency index score above 60 for nearly all of 2020 and into spring 2021. In other words, it’s very easy for Californians to look around and see neighbors whose lives were less disrupted for shorter periods of time.

The upside for Californians is that the stringency of the state’s COVID-19 rules have led to lower death rates compared to less-stringent states. An analysis by the L.A. Times found that if California had had the same death rate as Florida (ranked 23rd on the Oxford stringency index), another 6,000 Californians would have died. A death rate like Arizona’s (ranked 34th) would have meant another 38,000 dead Californians.

To be sure, California didn’t escape the impacts of COVID-19. In particular, as the L.A. Times analysis pointed out, the state was hit hard by last winter’s surge — something that could, for some Californians, contribute to a sense that the suffering of stringency wasn’t worth it. But recent polls suggest that most people in the state are fine with the trade-off. An Ipsos poll from late August found that 61 percent of registered voters approved of Newsom’s handling of the pandemic.