With just over a month to go, the campaign to recall the Government of California, Gavin Newsom, has almost reached the required number of signatures needed to qualify for a nationwide vote.
Remember Gavin 2020 – one of the two committees organizing the effort – says this morning collected more than 1.4 million signatures from the required 1,495,709.
The campaign must collect signatures well above the number to compensate for the signatures that will necessarily be invalid. Their deadline is March 17.
MANAGEMENT: Governor Gavin Newsom addresses a press conference at the launch of a COVID-19 mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
(Los Angeles Times via AP)
Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager and financial director of Rescue California – the other committee organizing the effort – said she was confident they would collect enough signatures in time.
Dunsmore said in an interview with Fox News that Rescue California has collected paid signatories within the past week that have already raised 52,000.
She said: “It is very possible that we can reach 1.5 or 1.6 (million signatures) by this week”, but their ultimate goal is 2 million signatures.
Should organizers collect and ratify enough signatures, the state’s lieutenant general is obliged to choose a date for a special election. Dunsmore has estimated that the date will be somewhere between mid-August and late September.
“Once the election (date) is chosen, the ballot paper will contain two things. One, an inch up or an inch down at the recall, and (two), the replacement,” Dunsmore said, adding: “If 82 “% of the (1.8 million) signatures we submit are valid if we only need 1.8 million signatures. We aim for 2 million. So I think we should have more than enough.”
Dunsmore said the recall campaign in a few weeks’ time had crossed the line of “possibility to probability” and that Newsom’s actions during that time indicated that he was beginning to take the threat more seriously.
“I think for that and even during the French laundry (incident), his staff allegedly sat there and said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he thought, ‘I need to work on it,'” Dunsmore said. . “I think his very obvious standard is to go after political messages rather than plan policies. And that is that he started having problems because it created inconsistent decisions and hypocritical decisions and very transparent bad decisions.”
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Fox News repeatedly tried to reach Newsom’s office for comment through the recall campaign, but received no response.
Not long ago, the idea that liberal favorite Newsom could be ousted by the voters in the strong Democratic state that elected him a landslide two years ago would sound. But the slick politics of the pandemic and a jumble of burdensome vaccine decisions and the reopening of businesses and schools have conspired to make the Democrat look vulnerable in the first term.
Voters in California who avoid the restrictions they have cut off from work, classrooms and friends, coupled with fears of the ongoing threat of the coronavirus, could create a volatile mix at the ballot box. Newsom also undertook a public outing last fall to dine with friends and lobbyists at a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, while advising residents to stay home.
More recently, an ever-increasing fraud scandal at the state unemployment agency has further investigated its leadership during the pandemic.
Democrats are nearly 2-to-1 more than Republicans in California, occupying every office across the state and dominating the legislature and congressional delegation. But some are seeing signs of a shifting tide in the Golden State,
Former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, who formally launched his gubernatorial bid last week to challenge Newsom, argued voters were eager for a change after years of democratic rule. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute in California found that Newsom was losing ground among likely voters with independents, Latinos – even his fellow Democrats.
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There were warning signs in the November election that the state may not be as strictly Democratic as registration numbers suggest: voters rejected the attempt to restore affirmative action, as well as a proposed tax increase on commercial and industrial properties. Republicans also regained four seats from Congress they lost in 2018.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.