What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

I haven’t seen any precise turnout estimates, Galen, but it looks like the mail-in vote is accounting for approximately 60 percent of the estimated vote in most counties on The New York Times results site. That would mean about 40 percent of the vote was cast in person.

The reason we are still encouraging caution in interpreting the results at this point is because of how they could shift once the day-of in-person vote is tallied. For some context, what percent of the vote do we expect to have been cast in-person?

The preliminary exit polls also say that President Biden has a 56 percent approval rating in California. It definitely helps Newsom that the president (and fellow Democrat) is holding his own in California even as he’s struggling in the polls elsewhere. It’s a sign that the Democratic brand is still strong in the state, and in today’s hyperpartisan world, that matters. In 2003, exit polls said that President George W. Bush, a Republican, had a 51 percent approval rating in California, so voters clearly weren’t too turned off about the prospect of Republican leadership, and that may have made it easier for them to vote to jettison Davis.