What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Good morning! Your live blog crew will be back in earnest at 10 a.m. Eastern, but in the meantime, here’s an important storyline from the recall election that bubbled up last night.

Building off of the ongoing, baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans — including Trump — have been predicting voter fraud in the recall race. And while they’ve mostly made these claims based on either a feeling, or using spurious “evidence,” like the fact that a man was found with ballots in his car (without mentioning that the man also had piles of other mail, as well as stolen credit cards and drivers’ licenses … which points to general identity theft more than it does an election fraud scheme), GOP gubernatorial candidate Elder has upped the ante, explicitly claiming fraud in an election that hasn’t yet taken place, as NBC News first reported Monday.

On Monday, Elder had a section on his website that links out to stopcafraud.com (and as of publication, both the website and the link are still live), where a number of claims are made about fraud having occurred in the election that has yet to take place, including that “statistical analyses used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) have detected fraud in California resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor.” The website states it is funded through a committee paid for by Elder’s campaign.

These kinds of theatrics aren’t new for Elder. Throughout the campaign, he has hinted at potential fraud and urged voters to visit the “stop fraud” section of his website. But this has truly escalated the claims from predictions to preemptive declarations of actual fraud. Remember, this is all impossible since the election hasn’t yet happened — there are no results to analyze, so there can be no analysis revealing fraud.

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.