What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Back in March, Probolsky Research and the Public Policy Institute of California each polled the California recall. They found ‘No’ ahead by 18 and 16 points, respectively. Since then, a lot of hair has been pulled out of heads and dollars pulled out of wallets ($125.2 million, according to the L.A. Times, two-thirds of it going to anti-recall efforts). But it looks like the final result will fall somewhere pretty close to what those two pollsters saw at the beginning of the year: a comfortable win for Newsom. In an era where partisanship is king, that shouldn’t surprise us.

We already knew that California was a Democratic state. We already knew that Democrats like Newsom and his predecessor Jerry Brown tend to win by comfortable double-digit margins. Tonight’s results were an expensive way of confirming our priors and reminding us not to ignore a state’s fundamentals, even when the national narrative is hungry for competitive races.

There weren’t a ton of surprises at the regional level: Based on the results tallied tonight, coastal Californians — who overwhelmingly support Newsom — came out and broke strongly against the recall. As you move further inland, the preliminary results look less favorable for Newsom. But with less than 20 percent of the state electorate living outside the Bay Area and Southern California, any traction the recall got in the more conservative Central Valley or in the state’s northern reaches would have a limited impact. Still, there are a couple counties I’d be curious to see full results from. In his three statewide races, Newsom has never won Fresno County, but with 59 percent of the estimated vote in, the recall there is failing by 7 percentage points.

As we’re doing our final takeaways from the night: I know we’ve been rightly cautioning people against reading any national political lessons into the California results. But I do wonder whether there’s something in the relatively high turnout — for an off-cycle race. Namely, that Democrats are willing to go to the polls (or the mailbox) to defend masking, vaccines and other measures to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s determinative in a super blue state like California, but if it holds true it could also really matter in more competitive states and districts.