Voters will be asked two questions: would Mr. Newsom is revoked, and if the revocation passes, who should complete his remaining year as governor?
For now, fellow Democrats have the ranks around Mr. Newsom closed and flanked him at his appearance and waved his handling of the pandemic with great praise. The Biden government also assisted the governor with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. emphasize this month that President Biden “clearly opposes every attempt” to recall the governor.
The governor himself avoided the “R” word. “I am focused on the vaccine issue,” he recently told reporters who asked about the recall effort. Mr. However, Newsom’s team noted that recall efforts are not uncommon in California: in the past 61 years, there have been requests to remove every official from office.
Only one recall succeeded – in 2003, when fears following the 9/11 disappearance due to energy deregulation helped Republicans persuade voters to fire Gray Davis and hire Arnold Schwarzenegger, who then became his own flash of attempts at recall.
Dan Newman, a political adviser to Mr. Newsom, pointed out that 135 candidates qualified for the vote after the 2003 petition, including Arianna Huffington, former child star Gary Coleman and Mary Carey, then an actress in pornographic films. “Some people estimate that we could have ten times as many candidates as in 2003,” he said, noting that such a special election would cost about $ 100 million.
Already three Republicans – Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego; conservative activist Mike Cernovich; and John Cox, who in 2018 against Mr. Newsom lost – announced plans to challenge the governor, and Richard Grenell, who was former President Donald J. Trump’s acting intelligence chief, would not rule it out in a recent appearance on Newsmax.
But the recall effort also expanded into a broad, dual inconvenience, as the virus claimed about 50,000 lives in the state. Through the pandemic, Californians saw their governor, not only as the happy son of their state at the forefront, as he was when he was elected, but also as a pale-faced, all-too-human man trying to stay calm on a living current.