What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

While it may not be totally clear if running on COVID-19 policy is an advantage for Democrats outside of a heavily blue state like California, I think that’s certainly the lesson that many people will take away from this race. Newsom’s campaign leaned into the issue aggressively and closed strong, so Democrats may feel confident about taking the fight to Republicans on this issue.

Newsom is certainly the headline name tonight, but California has two other recalls happening at the local level today. One is for Jill Ravitch, the district attorney in Wine Country’s Sonoma County. With around 125,000 ballots tallied out of 143,000 ballots cast, the “keep” vote is ahead by about 60 percentage points. Two city councilmembers in Vernon, a tiny city in L.A. County, are also facing recalls. After the first canvass, the councilmembers have 53 and 54 votes, respectively, in support of keeping them and 13 and 15 votes against (like I said — tiny city). Even so, this isn’t Vernon’s first or only recall election: In June, it ousted two other members of the council in the first recall in city history.

With 58 percent of the estimated vote reporting statewide, the recall is currently failing 67 percent to 33 percent. Some (mostly red) counties have yet to report any votes, and of course the election day vote will skew more conservative, but that is a big, big deficit for recall supporters to overcome.