What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

After all that hubbub, it was over relatively quickly: Our colleagues at the ABC News Decision Desk projected that the recall would fail at 11:37 p.m. Eastern, barely half an hour after polls closed. As of this writing, 67 percent of voters voted against the recall, and 33 percent voted for it. That margin will almost certainly narrow as more votes are counted (the numbers we have right now are mostly mail ballots, which lean very Democratic), but it’s still likely that Newsom will survive by a large margin, perhaps even comparable to his 24-point win in 2018.

About a month ago, though, it seemed as if the recall race might prove to be competitive. After all, some polls in July and early August found opposition to the recall only narrowly leading support for it. However, as we got closer to election day, the polls showed the opposition with a sizable lead, and while it remains to be seen just how accurate the polls were, they appear to have been broadly right in the sense that the recall race wasn’t close. And that speaks to some of the fundamental conditions of this election: California is a solidly blue state (Biden won it by 29 points last year), and Newsom’s approval rating hovered just above 50 percent in most polls, despite some criticism of his tenure as governor and anger on the right toward his COVID-19 policies. In other words, after months of signature-gathering and campaigning, all the recall did was prove that California is still a very blue state. By comparison, the 2003 recall succeeded because California wasn’t nearly as blue as it is now (Kerry only won the state by 10 points in 2004) and Davis was terribly unpopular, with an approval rating in the mid-20s.

The second question on the ballot (the replacement question) is now purely academic since Newsom wasn’t recalled, but for those interested, Elder is currently at 43 percent, followed by Paffrath at 11 percent and Faulconer at 10 percent. But those numbers don’t factor in how many people skipped the second question entirely: 48 percent of those who voted on the first question, as of this writing. That reflects a concerted strategy by Newsom to urge Democrats to vote “no” on recall and leave the second question blank, which implicitly made the race a head-to-head matchup between Newsom and Elder. The strategy obviously worked, as Elder made no effort to distance himself from Trump and unpopular conservative COVID-19 policies, and Newsom was able to successfully present himself as a foil to the “Republican recall.”

Thanks for hanging with us, and if this post isn’t enough, feel free to scroll back through the liveblog and relive it in all its chronological glory. Or if that sounds too daunting (who can blame you), here’s a round up of the live blog crew’s headlines:

Meena: California, We’re Unsurprisingly ‘Right Back Where We Started From’

Micah: Democrats Happy With Democrat And Willing To Turn Out To Defend Democrat (And Maybe His Approach To COVID-19 Too)

Nathaniel: Governors Are Now 2-2 In Recall Elections In U.S. History

Ryan: Landslide. Blowout. Historic. Or At Least The Conventional Wisdom That Recall Elections See Low Turnout Might Be Wrong.

Tony: Do We Still Have To Podcast About This?

Jacob: San Francisco Area Man Passes Performance Review

Maya: It’s Nice To Be A Democrat In California

Sarah: What Will Gavin Newsom Run For Next?

Galen: The Boston Mayoral Primary Was The Night’s Most Interesting Contest

Geoffrey: Is That All There Is?

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.

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.

Don’t worry, everyone, I’m hyping your analysis on Twitter:

It can be tricky to guess the final margin because of the difficulty of estimating the margin of the remaining election day and late-arriving mail ballots. But for what it’s worth, betting markets currently suggest that the recall is favored to fail by more than 20 percentage points. In that case, the polling average will have underestimated Newsom by at least a few points. But we’ll have to wait a while until we get the final margin, since late-arriving mail ballots can take weeks to count.

Another question now that the recall is projected to fail: Can we say anything yet about how accurate polls are looking to have been? Or too much of the vote left to count for that?

And so while ABC News and other outlets have projected that the recall vote will fail, one thing to point out is that Question 2 on the ballot — who should replace Newsom — is essentially moot. As such, it will not be projected by the ABC News Decision Desk. That said, it seems as if Elder was leading on that question with more than 40 percent of the vote.

The ABC News Decision Desk is now projecting that the recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom has failed.

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.

Decision Desk HQ has called the race for Newsom:

But ABC News Decision Desk has not yet made a projection.

To answer your question, Micah, Newsom’s campaign definitely emphasized the COVID-19 issue in a lot of their messaging, running ads calling Elder an “anti-vaccine Trump Republican.” I think it’s definitely a strong issue for him when feelings about pandemic policy are sharply polarized by party and Democrats have such a strong edge over Republicans in California. On the other hand, other issues like homelessness and housing affordability may not have such clear partisan battle lines.

Oof, that’s a tough one, Micah. It certainly makes for a pithy slogan for Democrats looking to take on Republicans in 2022 who have either been resistant to enacting policies to help curb the spread of COVID-19 or have flat-out refused to do so, but I worry that’s too neat of a narrative by half. I largely side with what Jacob said. To be sure, COVID-19 played a role in this recall, but I don’t think it’s something we can extract too much from and apply elsewhere.

Micah, I think the more succinct description of the campaign is, ‘I’m a Democrat, you’re a Democrat, let’s get this over with.’ Everything else is secondary to that, which also makes answering the second point tougher. We’ll have a better look at a more competitive state when Virginia holds its gubernatorial contest later this year. But California is its own beast, and I’d be wary of applying much of what we see here to swing states.

I’m curious for people’s takes on this tweet — if “no” wins as it’s looking like will happen:

https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1437979089206456325?s=21

1. Is this an accurate description of how the campaign played out in California?
2. If so, does it apply outside blue states (in swing states, to be exact)?

Related to Nathaniel’s comment, I noticed that in deep blue Los Angeles County, about 1.85 million votes have been cast on the recall question, but only about 850,000 have been cast on the replacement question. That speaks to the pre-election polls that suggested a huge number of Democratic voters planned to not vote for any of the replacement candidates. This was in part because Newsom’s campaign explicitly encouraged voters to do that and also because California Democrats discouraged any notable Democrats from running — so even if a Democrat had wanted to vote for a replacement choice, they would likely be unfamiliar with any candidates on the replacement ballot.

Elder is currently leading the replacement question with 40 percent of the vote. Paffrath is in second place, all the way back at 12 percent, followed by Faulconer, who is doing better than expected at 10 percent. (I wonder if Faulconer, as a more moderate Republican, might be overperforming on mail ballots, too.)

While the organizers of the recall began their work before COVID-19 hit, the pandemic arguably played a big role in why we’re here today. For one thing, California courts extended the signature gathering deadline because organizers argued the pandemic had stifled their efforts. But Newsom’s COVID-19 restrictions and public relations snafus — like attending a posh dinner party unmasked in an enclosed space in violation of state protocols — may have galvanized Republicans and even some Democrats — to support his recall.

Nevertheless, despite some frustration with Newsom’s handling of COVID-19, the preliminary exit polls suggested that only about 3-in-10 California voters felt his pandemic policies were too strict, and Newsom is winning more than 4-in-5 of the roughly 7-in-10 voters who said his policies were about right or not strict enough. Additionally, about 3-in-10 voters named the pandemic as the most important issue (more than any other issue named), and Newsom won 4-in-5 of those voters, too.

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.

Mail ballots in Orange County, one of the main counties we’re watching tonight, are breaking against the recall 58 percent to 42 percent. Good chance it votes against recall even when all the votes are counted, too.

The latest batch of preliminary exit polling says that 55 percent of voters approved of the way Newsom is handling his job, and 42 percent disapprove. That’s a good position to be in when facing a recall that’s in many ways a giant approval poll. But it also underscores just how strong Newsom was heading into the race compared with his less fortunate predecessor, Gray Davis, who was recalled in 2003. Exit polling that year found Davis’s approval rating at an abysmal 26 percent approve/73 percent disapprove. And yet 45 percent of voters still wanted to keep Davis!

So Newsom is starting from a much stronger position and it’s entirely possible some voters who don’t approve of him will still vote No on recall, as they did in 2003.

These preliminary exit polls also indicate there’s a pretty big divide between the inland and coastal vote. Newsom is doing best in the Bay Area and Los Angeles County. The former is essentially his home turf — he came up in San Francisco, serving two terms as mayor — and has consistently voted overwhelmingly for Newsom in his statewide races. But further inland, according to these preliminary results, Californians voted in favor of removal by a 10-point margin.

We have our first county that is voting in favor of recall: conservative Trinity County, where mail ballots have split 54 percent to 46 percent for “yes.” Merced County (52 percent no, 48 percent yes in mail ballots) will likely join it once election day votes are counted.

Based on what I’m seeing, the San Diego County mail ballot results being reported now are a very solid sign for Newsom. He’s winning them by 21 points compared to about a 2-point benchmark I had for him based on the pro-Democratic skew of mail votes, as well as presidential partisan leans by county.

Micah, I think it’s likely you will see the results start out more Democratic and then trend more Republican. However, I’m not sure if there’ll be a notable shift back toward Democrats in the coming days as the final ballots are counted. That happened in 2018, but it didn’t really happen in 2020.

So Geoff, in terms of how different types of votes are counted, we’re expecting blue —> red shift —> blue shift?

Early on, the vote results will generally be those from mail-in ballots that were received and counted before election day. According to Political Data, Inc., which tracks the ballot returns, about 8.7 million ballots had been returned up through yesterday, and another million or so have been added today. But remember that as long as a ballot was mailed by Election Day, it can be accepted up through a week from now, Sept. 21, so some mail votes will be counted later on. After the initial wave of mail ballot results, the next set of results later on tonight will be mostly in-person votes.

As for how many in-person votes we can expect, that’s hard to say exactly. A Suffolk University poll recently found that about 16 percent of likely voters planned to vote on election day, so whatever the final tally of total recall votes is, perhaps around one-fifth, give or take, might be cast in-person. What we do know is that those election day votes are likely to more GOP-leaning, as the Suffolk survey found that about 42 percent of those planning to vote today were Republicans, while 24 percent were Democrats (the rest were independents).

We have the first results! The recall is currently failing 61 percent to 39 percent in San Diego County, which is slightly more conservative than the state as a whole. Remember, though, that the first votes reported are likely to skew Democratic because they are mostly mail-in ballots.

I would say that it might make sense to be generous because of the odd question format, but not because of the timing. Special elections are always weirdly timed but in aggregate can still give us a sense of the overall climate.

Considering this election is unlikely to be another 12.1-million vote affair, I don’t see Newsom replicating his 2018 margin. I imagine Democrats would be happy with a margin in the mid-teens. But if Republicans can use this election to sniff out Newsom’s weaknesses — say, waning support for the governor in the Central Valley or perhaps turning out persuadable voters in Orange County or other once-Republican strongholds — well, that could be a win.

Yeah, as Ryan said, shouldn’t we be grading Newsom on more of a curve given that this is an oddly timed, oddly formatted election? Lower turnout and so forth. I guess Nathaniel’s 15 points is pretty generous curve.

Galen, I’m not sure that the 2018 margin is a particularly good baseline, but it may be the best we’ve got. Because the recall is a two-part question, not a traditional Democrat vs. Republican contest, it’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison, leaving aside questions about an off-year, September election that was only scheduled a few months ago.

That said, if you’re looking for a baseline performance, it’s better to go off of the 2018 race than a national contest like the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, and, well, Senate races in California have been all-Democratic affairs since 2012. Inside Elections has our own state-by-state benchmark, the Baseline metric, which takes into account partisan results from all statewide elections over the last several cycles. For California, the Baseline for a Democrat is 60.4 percent, and for a Republican it’s 39.2 percent, which is right about where Newsom was in 2018. But again, comparing a yes-or-no recall to a partisan race is always going to be tenuous.

I don’t know, Nathaniel. As we’ve written previously, this was a hard race to poll, with it being held at an irregular time and the fact that a lot of votes have been cast by mail. It wouldn’t be that unusual for the polls to be off by at least a few points from what our final polling average said. Newsom certainly would want a healthy single-digit margin (think +8 points), but I think even that could be a strong performance for him when this is all said and done.

With poll closing time now having come and gone, ABC News is reporting a few more nuggets out of the preliminary exit polls. Newsom is 55-43 approve-disapprove among recall voters. Elder meanwhile is 34-50 favorable-unfavorable.

One reason it’s challenging to assess this race is that it’s not a standard matchup between a Democrat and a Republican: The ballot question frames the election as a referendum on Newsom. This YouGov poll, for example, showed that Newsom would win by larger margins if he had head-to-head matchups against each of his Republican opponents.

Yeah, Galen, I think that’s a pretty good baseline. You could also use California’s FiveThirtyEight partisan lean, which is D+25. I’d say a weak performance for Newsom would be anything less than a 15-point win.

A number of indicators suggest that Newsom is likelier than not to keep his job tonight, but what kind of margin would be a good performance for Republicans or Democrats? Should we use Newsom’s previous 20-plus point margin in 2018 as a baseline?

The polls have just closed in California. While we’re waiting for more detailed analysis of the results, one thing we can say based off of preliminary exit polls is that “No” is leading in the first question of the recall, according to the ABC News Decision Desk. To be clear, though, there is not yet enough information to project whether Newsom has been recalled.

Before we move on to the main event, let’s check in on some of the other elections happening tonight that we talked about on the politics podcast earlier this week.

In the race for Cleveland mayor, it looks like progressive nonprofit executive Justin Bibb (26 percent) and City Council President Kevin Kelley (20 percent) will advance to the November general election. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is currently in third place with 17 percent, just conceded the race.

In the race for Boston mayor, few votes have been officially reported, but crowd-sourced results from Jessy Han put City Councilor Michelle Wu at 32 percent, City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George at 30 percent, City Councilor Andrea Campbell at 19 percent and acting Mayor Kim Janey at 15 percent. If those results hold, it would set up a clear ideological contrast in the general election between the progressive Wu and the moderate Essaibi George.

Amid the discussion here and elsewhere about whether it’s too easy to recall — or, at least, try to recall — a governor in California, some intriguing comments from Democratic Rep. Karen Bass of California over on ABC News Live tonight. She took note of the dozens of recalls going on at every level of government in California and said there needs to be a serious effort to “see who’s behind it all.”

More of what she said: “This could be a strategy to essentially grind government to a halt, to paralyze government. And so I think that that’s what we have to take a look at. I know that I’m very interested in analyzing who started all these recalls, who’s funding them, because you can’t just recall someone without financial backing, significant financial backing.”

We (myself, perhaps, included) have sometimes covered this recall a bit like the French Laundry photo made things automatically happen. But, of course, the recall drive began long before that picture went viral, and that photo only mattered because serious political infrastructure was already in place to take advantage of that moment.

To Nathaniel’s earlier point, the preliminary exit polls suggest that Californians — specifically those who took the trouble to vote in the recall — feel pretty good about where the state is in terms of the pandemic, and don’t want to backslide. More than two-thirds of recall voters feel like the state’s coronavirus situation is getting better or staying the same. And in addition to the 69 percent support for the school mask mandate, 63 percent say they see getting vaccinated as more of a public-health responsibility than a personal choice.

Also of note: COVID-19 ranks as the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds — ahead of homelessness, wildfires, crime and the economy.

We’ll be back right before 11 p.m. Eastern/8 p.m. Pacific when the polls close. But in the meantime, we got a great question from Danny Adams on YouTube, who wondered why California has recall elections at all. Here, FiveThirtyEight copy editor Maya Sweedler and politics podcast host Galen Druke discuss how recall elections got passed into law in the state, and whether than law can be changed:

The early exit polls also indicate that Elder is fairly unpopular among voters, with just 34 percent viewing him favorably and 49 percent viewing him unfavorably. That’s in contrast to the winner of the 2003 recall election, Schwarzenegger, who had a 50 percent – 45 percent favorability rating heading into that election. Two things stand out here, both good for Newsom. First, that 83 percent of voters have an opinion on Elder, who until a few months ago was not well-known outside of conservative circles, suggests that the Newsom team was able to effectively define him negatively. Second, it suggests that Democrats bet right when they declined to put up a replacement candidate.

With an unpopular Elder leading the polls and no big-name Democrat to vote for, Democratic voters really do have a binary choice: Newsom or Elder, and they don’t want Elder. In 2003, voters had Bustamante or they had Schwarzenegger, who didn’t seem so bad, either.

In another positive sign for Newsom — with all the caveats Nathaniel cited about these results possibly changing as we get more results — Democrats currently outnumber Republicans in these preliminary results, by 17 percentage points, 43-to-26 (with the rest being independent voters and others). That gap might narrow as we get more data, but currently that means the electorate looks more like Newsom’s 2018 bid for governor (46-23 percent, Democrat vs. Republican) and less like the 2003 recall (39-38 percent Democrat-Republican).