Posted on 09/17/2021 4:08:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
The nation's largest state has just voted in an election triggered by one of the nation's weirdest recall processes, and the results have come out just about where they've been before.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was elected governor in 2018 by 62% to 38%, a result that was, unsurprisingly in an era of straight-ticket voting and strong partisan allegiance, almost identical to President Joe Biden's 64% to 34% margin over Donald Trump in 2020.
As of this writing -- and it has taken California weeks to fully count its votes in recent general elections -- incomplete returns show 64% of Californians voting against recalling Newsom and only 36% for removing him from office.
That result makes the second question on the ballot about who should replace the governor irrelevant. But it did enable Democrats to spend enormous sums linking Larry Elder, the conservative radio talk host who led in polls on the replacement question, as a clone of Trump.
Some liberals even attacked Elder, who is Black, as a "white supremacist." It's interesting who plays the race card these days.
Newsom's success is good news for Democrats. Polls over the summer showed as many as 47% of voters supporting the recall. When voters focused on facts on the ground such as the growing homeless encampments and the rapidly rising numbers of homicides and carjackings, they found reason to repudiate the liberal policies that Newsom has pursued or supported.
Newsom's maskless appearance at the expensive ($350 a plate) French Laundry restaurant, celebrating the birthday of a Democratic lobbyist, was an unforced error, perhaps characteristic of a politician whose core constituency has been San Francisco billionaires.
But an avalanche of TV ads targeting Trump got voters thinking in partisan terms, with the results as noted. Go over the county maps of the 2018, 2020 and 2021 contests and see how the results are the same within a couple of points just about everywhere.
The exit polls, however, suggest some shifts among demographic groups. The recall was opposed by 81% of Black voters, who are only 6% of California's population, but by significantly fewer Asians (62%) and Latinos (58%).
These latter "people of color" groups were less supportive of Newsom than white college graduates (68%). This reflects the increasing dominance in the Democratic Party of white college graduates and the fact that on issues, they are often the party's leftmost group.
White voters without college degrees, or those left behind after hundreds of thousands others have left California's high housing and energy costs behind, were the one ethnically defined group that favored the recall by 57% to 43%.
These results mirror the recent national Quinnipiac poll that shows approval of Biden nationally at 42%. Approval is 69% among Black people and 56% among white college graduates, but only 38% among Hispanics and 28% among white people who didn't attend college.
That polarization seems to be increasing. MSNBS's Steve Kornacki compared the 2018 and 2021 Newsom exit poll numbers and found that his support has risen 9 points among white college graduates but has declined by 12 points among noncollege white voters and 6 points among Hispanics. That looks much like the changes nationally between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
California, which seemed a harbinger of the political future from the 1950s through the 1980s, is clearly not anymore. It was the second best state, after Hawaii, for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the fifth best, after Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland and Hawaii, for Biden in 2020.
Nor does California seem to be the demographic wave of the future. Forty years ago, I was writing about the dynamic economic growth on both sides of the Pacific Rim, in California and Japan. In the 1990s and 2000s, I substituted China for Japan and saluted California's booming high tech and China's double-digit economic growth.
Now the flowers on both sides of the Pacific Rim seem to be wilting. Thanks to its recently repealed one-child policy, China's workforce is now shrinking, while California's poverty rate of 15% is the highest in the nation when cost of living is taken into account. Illegal immigrants, who headed mostly to California 20 years ago, are mostly heading to Texas now.
After two decades of domestic population outflow, the 2020 census showed California gaining population at less than the national rate since 2010, and in the reapportionment following the census, it lost a congressional seat, and hence an electoral vote, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.
Newsom's victory shows that California voters want more of the same. As H.L. Mencken put it, they "deserve to get it good and hard."
Every state, and it is as true today as it was in the 19th Century.
This silly notion presupposes that every voter sat down and carefully thought through the choice and said, “Give me tyranny - I love it!”
This silly notion blames the victims for only voting once and NOT being on any California State give-away program.
38% of Californians are victimized by Democrat/communists every day.
Those who voted NO on the recall?
They will be bent over and used like puling receptacles
fdor the Leftist Amrican Marxist Totalitarians.They will get it good and hard.And I will laugh all the way to when they apply to the UN for aid , just like Venezuela.
Those who voted Yes to the recall...Sell out and move to either Texas or Florida.You will be glad you did.There is no fixing “Stoopid.”
Let them rot
IMO, the 38% of Californians who are GOP should pack up and leave. Let the remaing 62% wallow in their own feces.
The wife and I moved out in July, back to Michigan. I was there since 1985.
Tragic what the Rats did to my home state.
How come the winning Rat, i.e. Newsome or the Cadaver in the whitehouse “wins” elections with NO SUPPORT other than media/other rats. The conservative can generally draw big crowds.
I call B.S. that people “voted” for this garbage.
Elections are not fair nor free.
They are fully bought and cheated by the DemonRat party.
And if you believe elections are legit, wow, just wow...
God bless!!
The first order of business after his reelection was to sign a bill eliminating single family zoning in the state. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
If this result means more mentally-deranged White college grads move to Cali and out of FL, TX, AZ, PA etc it will be a GODSEND. We won’t even need the Big One to drop the Left Coast into the sea.
Although the results are ridiculously identical, I question if it was the anti-Trump paranoia and mental illness this time around. I think it was the Covidian paranoia. Either way, we have to accept this 60% or more of the population aren’t people we still want to share a country with.
That is big in leftist cities. Seattle just did this too. Next governor nephew will ban new natural gas hookups in new construction. That’s another commie move popular with the little tyrants.
CA voters deserve to live in a burning outhouse full of illegals.
Opps...they already do.
I said the same thing to my wife yesterday, a Kalifornia native from Bakersfield who weeps for her former state. The only problem, we live on the Pacific beach in Washington State in a small conservative county. When it slides, let it slide in around us, Washington State would be much better if only the Pugetopolis area disappeared.
You’re on fire, I couldn’t agree more with both your posts.
Wrong. So very wrong. I lived in California for 40 years, more than half my life. I know without a shadow of a doubt that California voters have chosen the path the state is on.
Its universities have been leaders in communist thought and propaganda since at least the early 1960's.Their entertainment industry, banking and business elite have been manipulating California politics to their advantage for decades, always moving further and further left.
Their middle class has comfortably gone with the flow for decades, all the while ignoring the squeeze put on them from top and bottom.
The lower classes love being on the dole. They vote Dem for the goodies the Dems promise.
And the libertines of all classes want the freedom to do whatever perversions they want, whenever they want, without legal and moral consequences.
This toxic stew has been metastasizing across all the other states really bit by bit since the 1920s, interrupted only by the Depression and WWII, but taking off again with a vengeance post war. People vote for who and what they think will benefit them which, for far too many people means the ability to have a libertine lifestyle.
California, the “Thank You, Newsom, May I Have Another?” state.
Seattle did this? Must have missed that one. Wow.
It’s incredible that people accept this kind of misgovernance.
Crime control, forest fire prevention and functioning schools mean nothing to them. It’s no big deal to literally walk over drug addicts dying in the street. Power brownouts and blackouts are an acceptable part of life.
What else are these partisan freaks willing to accept as normal?
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