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.