What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

California’s electorate leans heavily Democratic. But one reason it’s still possible for Newsom to lose is that not all Californians will vote in this recall election. It’s a political cliche but usually true (and absolutely true in this case): The result will likely come down to turnout — who’s motivated to vote.

Earlier this year, the GOP looked like it decidedly had the motivation edge. But recently, overall engagement in the recall — and Democratic enthusiasm in particular — has increased. That’s a big reason Newsom’s prospects look brighter than they did in August,

• Two PPIC surveys from the spring showed only about 20 percent of California voters were following recall news “very closely”;
• A Berkeley/IGS poll from July showed that nearly 90 percent of Republicans were highly interested in the recall election, compared to only 58 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of voters with no party preference;
• The latest PPIC poll showed a change who held in the enthusiasm edge, with 75 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Republicans saying the recall election results were “very important” to them;
• The same poll showed 81 percent of likely voters following the race at least “fairly closely,” compared to only 62 percent in the May poll;
• That poll also showed 47 percent of likely voters reported they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in this election, compared to 30 percent who said they were less enthusiastic.

So what once seemed likely to be a very-very-low-turnout election now looks a bit livelier. Of course, it’s still an off-year election,meaning that it’s not being held in the same year as races for the U.S. Senate and House and/or presidency. Studies have shown that timing matters in state and local races, too. In Los Angeles, for example, voter turnout increased around twofold in city council and school board elections last year after voters overwhelmingly chose to change those elections to even years. But so far, voters are turning out in this odd-year race at a high rate relative to past special elections.

All that being said, a lack of participation in local elections is not specific to California: It’s part of a broader trend of an increasingly nationalized media and less attention on local news. (More Californians have digital subscriptions to The New York Times than the San Francisco Chronicle or the Los Angeles Times.) It’s no wonder that Newsom’s anti-recall strategy has involved nationalizing the race in an effort to energize his liberal base.

So we’ll be keeping a close eye on how many people vote (in addition to how they vote, of course).

As a refresher, there are two questions on the ballot in this election. The first is a yes-or-no question: “Shall Gavin Newsom be recalled (removed) from the office of Governor?” The second asks voters to pick one candidate to succeed Newsom if he is recalled. Voters can vote on the second question even if they vote “no” on the first one. And if the first question fails, the second question simply will not count.

This two-part recall system, though, is controversial. Since there is no runoff on the second question, it’s possible that a new governor can be elected with fewer votes than the incumbent governor. (Say Newsom is removed with 55 percent of voters in favor of recall and 45 percent against, and Elder is elected his replacement with 25 percent of the vote. In that scenario, 45 percent of Californians wanted Newsom to be governor and only 25 percent wanted Elder.)

It doesn’t have to work this way, though. In five states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota and Wisconsin), the target of the recall can run in a normal head-to-head election against any candidates who file to oppose her. Seven other states (Georgia, Louisiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey and Rhode Island) ask voters only the yes-or-no recall question, then hold a special election on a later date to fill the vacancy if the recall is successful. And five other states (Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Washington) ask only the yes-or-no recall question, then appoint a successor if the recall succeeds.

For more on just how odd California’s recall process is, check out this piece by my colleagues Maya and Jasmine.

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.