What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Galen, I’m not sure that the 2018 margin is a particularly good baseline, but it may be the best we’ve got. Because the recall is a two-part question, not a traditional Democrat vs. Republican contest, it’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison, leaving aside questions about an off-year, September election that was only scheduled a few months ago.

That said, if you’re looking for a baseline performance, it’s better to go off of the 2018 race than a national contest like the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, and, well, Senate races in California have been all-Democratic affairs since 2012. Inside Elections has our own state-by-state benchmark, the Baseline metric, which takes into account partisan results from all statewide elections over the last several cycles. For California, the Baseline for a Democrat is 60.4 percent, and for a Republican it’s 39.2 percent, which is right about where Newsom was in 2018. But again, comparing a yes-or-no recall to a partisan race is always going to be tenuous.

I don’t know, Nathaniel. As we’ve written previously, this was a hard race to poll, with it being held at an irregular time and the fact that a lot of votes have been cast by mail. It wouldn’t be that unusual for the polls to be off by at least a few points from what our final polling average said. Newsom certainly would want a healthy single-digit margin (think +8 points), but I think even that could be a strong performance for him when this is all said and done.

With poll closing time now having come and gone, ABC News is reporting a few more nuggets out of the preliminary exit polls. Newsom is 55-43 approve-disapprove among recall voters. Elder meanwhile is 34-50 favorable-unfavorable.