What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

The early exit polls also indicate that Elder is fairly unpopular among voters, with just 34 percent viewing him favorably and 49 percent viewing him unfavorably. That’s in contrast to the winner of the 2003 recall election, Schwarzenegger, who had a 50 percent – 45 percent favorability rating heading into that election. Two things stand out here, both good for Newsom. First, that 83 percent of voters have an opinion on Elder, who until a few months ago was not well-known outside of conservative circles, suggests that the Newsom team was able to effectively define him negatively. Second, it suggests that Democrats bet right when they declined to put up a replacement candidate.

With an unpopular Elder leading the polls and no big-name Democrat to vote for, Democratic voters really do have a binary choice: Newsom or Elder, and they don’t want Elder. In 2003, voters had Bustamante or they had Schwarzenegger, who didn’t seem so bad, either.

In another positive sign for Newsom — with all the caveats Nathaniel cited about these results possibly changing as we get more results — Democrats currently outnumber Republicans in these preliminary results, by 17 percentage points, 43-to-26 (with the rest being independent voters and others). That gap might narrow as we get more data, but currently that means the electorate looks more like Newsom’s 2018 bid for governor (46-23 percent, Democrat vs. Republican) and less like the 2003 recall (39-38 percent Democrat-Republican).

We just got the first wave of very preliminary exit polls. Remember, there are still four hours of voting left, and exit polls need to be weighted to the final results before they can be truly called authoritative, so these numbers are almost certainly going to change. But there are still some good numbers for Newsom in here: For instance, only three in 10 California voters said his pandemic control measures were too strict, and 69 percent supported the state’s mask mandates for students. That doesn’t sound like an electorate ready to oust their governor over COVID-19.