What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

In the end, perhaps the biggest reason why Newsom won is that voters generally think he’s doing a good job as governor. Per the exit polls, Newsom’s job approval rating is at about 55 percent, with 43 percent disapproving. This is important because according to the exit polls, 97 percent of voters who approve of Newsom voted “No” on the recall.

That’s a big difference compared to the 2003 recall election, where exit polls estimated Davis’s approval rating at just 26 percent, with 73 percent disapproving. The effort to recall him from office prevailed by double digits.

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.