Blowout in California

Asking the obvious questions:

In the end, it wasn’t even remotely close. California voters rejected a GOP-led recall of Governor Gavin Newsom by a landslide margin of 64-36 — a 28-point shellacking.

Yes, this is what we should have expected from such a heavily Democratic state, but it might have been (much) closer if the vote had been a straight up-or-down referendum on Newsom himself. Instead, it became a referendum on “the abyss.”

The abyss, of course, was Trumpism.

...The California fiasco will probably not be enough to prompt the sort of introspection that Republicans so desperately need. But as 2024 looms, it provides one more reason for Republicans to ask themselves: Do they really want to do this again?

...As Clay Risen noted yesterday “Newsom and the Democrats seem to have persuasively argued that he was running not on his record or against a particular candidate, but against Trumpism. . . .”

“In a vacuum, there was a lot of discontentment with Newsom and ambivalence with him among Democrats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant in California.

That started to change once “the abyss” got a name.

The election also represented the ascendancy (and vulnerability) of the entertainment wing of the GOP. As Risen noted:

Mr. Elder isn’t a serious politician; he’s running not to win, but to raise his media profile. But that very fact says something about today’s Republican Party. Many of its highest-profile figures blur the line between politician and celebrity, and act accordingly, even if their success as the latter undermines what we expect out of the former. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn — and, yes, Larry Elder — are only nominally politicians. In substance, they’re entertainers.

They also put Donald Trump on the ballot. As Perry Bacon Jr. notes this morning: “The rise of [Larry] Elder, whom Democrats cast as a California Donald Trump, was ‘perfect,’ [Newsom senior adviser Addisu] Demissie said. ‘Couldn’t have been better. He made no effort to appeal to anyone outside of his base.’”

“Newsom’s victory,” writes Bacon, “suggests that running as the anti-Trumpism party still has real political value, even with Trump no longer in the White House.”

BONUS: The California results were a repudiation of anti-mask, anti-vax politics — a clear sign that Republican opposition to precautions against the pandemic is a colossal miscalculation. As the AP notes this morning: “The Republicans running to replace Newsom opposed mask and vaccine mandates, and the California governor was happy to highlight that. Newsom aired an ad calling the recall ‘a matter of life and death’ and accusing the top Republican candidate, talk radio host Larry Elder, of ‘peddling deadly conspiracy theories.’”