What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Considering this election is unlikely to be another 12.1-million vote affair, I don’t see Newsom replicating his 2018 margin. I imagine Democrats would be happy with a margin in the mid-teens. But if Republicans can use this election to sniff out Newsom’s weaknesses — say, waning support for the governor in the Central Valley or perhaps turning out persuadable voters in Orange County or other once-Republican strongholds — well, that could be a win.

Yeah, as Ryan said, shouldn’t we be grading Newsom on more of a curve given that this is an oddly timed, oddly formatted election? Lower turnout and so forth. I guess Nathaniel’s 15 points is pretty generous curve.

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.