The Greatest Generation Gave Virginia To The GOP

As Ed Kilgore points out in new voting analysis from last year, Virginia's deep red turn in 2021 wasn't angry suburban moms complaining about COVID precautions at all, but a massive spike in turnout in those 75 and older, the Greatest Generation.

The prevailing conventional wisdom has been that Republican Glenn Youngkin won and Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost because suburban swing voters upset about education and, to a lesser extent, economic issues switched from voting Democrat to Republican between 2020 and 2021. Indeed, a lot of influential focus-group work on the election began with the assumption that these voters made the difference and tried to interpret why they swung rather than how far they swung and how much it mattered. And the more that analysts dwelled on education issues as crucial, the more they agreed that school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic may have damaged Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey (where Democratic governor Phil Murphy had a surprisingly narrow winning margin) even more than Republican attacks on the alleged teaching of “critical race theory” or other culture-war topics related to schools.

Now comes a new study from the data-analysis firm TargetSmart that calls this narrative into question even more than past dissents. As TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier notes, comparing the Virginia results to data on school closures calls into question the idea that the latter affected the former:

Of the top 10 counties in Virginia ranked by days with in-person education during the 2020-2021 school year, 6 of the 10 saw a larger swing towards Republicans than the state average swing of 5.3%, while the remaining 4 counties saw a slightly below average GOP swing. In fact, the biggest swings towards Republicans occurred in southwestern Virginia, where schools were open for in person instruction for most of the year.

Conversely, those counties that conducted virtual learning for most of the 2020-2021 school year saw a smaller shift towards Republicans than the state average — the top 10 counties for days spent in virtual learning in 2020-2021 saw a 3.8% average swing towards Republicans, well below the statewide average of 5.3%.

More generally, TargetSmart took a look at the voter-file information recently made available by Virginia and drew attention to some rather dramatic turnout numbers that seemed to suggest parents of school-age children in the Washington and Richmond suburbs weren’t the keys to this election:

Turnout among voters age 75 or older increased by 59%, relative to 2017 while turnout among voters under age 30 only increased by just 18%. Notably, turnout of all other age groups combined (18-74), which would likely include parents of school-aged children, only increased by 9% compared to 2017.

These are massive changes in the electorate in an election that was far from a blowout: Youngkin won by just 2%.

It’s common for seniors to turn out to vote significantly more than younger cohorts in non-presidential elections. But the figures for Virginia in 2021 were unusually large: 

Voters age 65 and older are an estimated 15.9% of Virginia’s population according to the census, yet accounted for 31.9% of all ballots cast in 2021.

348,314 more seniors (ages 65+) voted in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election than in the 2016 presidential election.

TargetSmart calls it a “silver surge.” Whatever you call it, it seems to suggest that variable turnout patterns rather than swing voting was the biggest deal in Youngkin’s win. It’s also what a December analysis in FiveThirtyEight of precinct-level data showed, indicating that the big net gains by Youngkin were in Democratic- and Republican-base areas, not in highly competitive swing areas. And for that matter, that’s what the much-discounted exit polls suggested, as Ron Brownstein pointed out right after the election:

Compared with the 2017 governor’s race, or the 2020 presidential contest in the state, the electorate Tuesday was older, whiter, less college-educated, and more Republican, the exit polls found. Census figures show that voters of color have increased as a share of the state’s eligible voter population since 2017, but in the exit polls nonwhite voters plummeted from about one-third of the electorate in both 2020 and 2017 to only a little over one-fourth this year. Voters under 30 fell from 20 percent of the vote in 2020 and 14 percent in 2017 to just 10 percent Tuesday. College graduates shrank from nearly three-in-five voters in 2017 to just under half. And although Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 11 percentage points in the 2017 electorate, the exit polls found that GOP voters almost exactly equaled them this year.

None of this is to say that Youngkin’s victory over McAuliffe was some sort of aberration or that it shouldn’t alarm Democrats. But what it takes to boost turnout by Democrats without further boosting turnout by Republicans is not the same as what it takes to persuade a narrowly defined suburban swing vote upset principally about schools. Narratives matter, and Democrats should take care to ensure they aren’t telling themselves the wrong story.

 

The story in Virginia was that angry 75+ seniors turned out in massive numbers.  The GOP turned out the base across the state, while the Democrats did turn out, the GOP turned out much more.

Call it the FOX News effect. Rage gets people to vote on the GOP side. If Dems don't find a way to counter, we're all screwed in November.

Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

Yes, white rural voters in Virginia turned out and voted for Republicans out of white grievance identity politics, and they freely admit doing it and say they will do it again in 2022.

The rural share of the vote in America has been steadily shrinking, but remains sizable enough to be politically potent. National exit polling in 2020 estimated that one in five voters lived in rural or small-town America. The Democratic data firm TargetSmart, which categorized voters based on population density, labeled 30 percent of the electorate as rural.

But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.

A monument to Confederate soldiers stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs, a visual representation of the cultural gap between its residents and the Democratic base. The town is accessible only by a two-lane highway that winds through mountains near the West Virginia border. It’s best known for The Homestead, a luxury resort founded in the late 1800s that has hosted golf tournaments, conferences for the United Nations and presidents, including William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.

White children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters,” Ms. Williams said.

Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump. Of President Biden, he said, “the best thing that can happen is to get him and that woman out of there.”

John Wright, a 68-year-old retiree, said he listened only to pro-Trump programming.

“I don’t care if the media said the moon was full of cheese, and there was an astronaut who brought back some cheese,” Mr. Wright said. “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”

Some of these voters are simply out of reach for Democrats, incompatible with the party’s embrace of Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and #MeToo.

But the politically urgent problem for Democrats is that rural America has moved faster and further from them in the last 20 years than urban America has moved away from Republicans. From 1999 to 2019, cities swung 14 percentage points toward the Democrats, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. At the same time, rural areas shifted by 19 percentage points toward the Republicans. The suburbs remained essentially tied.

Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks for Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said it could be challenging to recruit candidates in deep red small towns — and to lure money into what are most likely losing causes.

“We just have to try and lose by less,” she said. “And ‘investing to lose by less’ is not a fun sell to Democratic donors. But it is what it is.”

Those Democrats who do run in conservative territory often distance themselves from the national party brand. When Monica Tranel, a Democrat, kicked off her bid for Montana’s new congressional seat over the summer, she lamented how few of the people she grew up with still vote Democratic. “They feel like Democrats look down on rural America,” she said in her campaign launch video.

Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia, has watched his party’s vote share in rural areas wither for three decades.

“I don’t know what our message is there,” Mr. Tribbett said. “Which is a problem, because I’m supposed to be creating content for political campaigns.”

 

The good news is that the Biden era is showing quite clearly that Democrats have finally realized that the best they can do in America's rural counties is triage. White voters in rural areas have been inundated with right-wing disinformation for decades, and fixing the problem will also take decades, decades that the country doesn't have judging by the near-coup by Trump in 2020. You can't sell your policies to people who think you are literally trying to round them up in camps to kill them. The time to get serious about fighting right-wing propaganda and disinformation was a quarter-century ago.

That ship has sailed, folks. All we can do now is to try to stop the hemorrhaging.

Fixing bridges and roads and schools and providing good jobs in the cities and suburbs doesn't matter in the quarter of the country's population that is rural. The hard reality is in states with 75% or more white votes, losing white voters by 2 to 1 means there's no way you can win. Some triage is necessary, but the GOP knows that if they can keep the electorate white and win white voters, it doesn't matter what Black folk like me in a red state want. We literally do not matter politically anymore, and they know it.

If Democrats are going to lose these areas by 50 points, the best they can do is try to only lose them by 40 and accept that. They're not going to listen. We're dealing with people lost to the Years of Trump and Rage, parading around their vaccine refusal, ripping people's masks off and spitting in people's faces to try to infect them, screaming bloody murder at restaurant servers and checkout cashiers, disrupting school board and city council meetings, and running over protesters with their vehicles.

 

We still need to provide folks out here with better infrastructure. Better roads, schools, bridges, broadband internet access, water, clean air. They're Americans too and we took a big step towards that over the weekend.

But we have to try to save the rest of us too. There are people who will never vote for the Democratic party, and at this point, it's time to try to turn out the people you have some chance with instead of chasing the zero percent rage junkies. We have to because if we don't, the alternative is near-permanent GOP authoritarian rule.

Democrats needs to continue to make policies to help everyone, but don't expect some of them to vote for you. There's nothing you can do at this point other than turning out people who will listen and to give them a reason to show up.

And those folks don't live in places like Bath County, Virginia.

Finally, the real lesson here is that Trumpism without Trump is now far more dangerous in 2021 than Trumpism with Trump in 2020. Dems need to counter with actions, with turnout, and with going after the right-wing noise machine that made all this possible.

Or it will be too late for us in only a few short years.

Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

The simple reason as to why Democrats lost in Virginia on Tuesday, very nearly lost New Jersey, and almost lost the House and Senate in 2020, is that white non-college women are anti-Trump Republicans, and without Trump on the ballot, they voted for the white supremacy party.

White women voters may have made the difference for Republicans in Virginia’s high-profile gubernatorial race Tuesday, swinging by double digits towards the GOP and giving the party a potentially winning playbook in future elections.

For some Democrats surveying the wreckage from a bad night, the 13 percentage point swing towards the GOP among white women — fueled by a 37 point shift among white women who didn’t go to college — was the number in NBC News exit polls that stood out among a sea of bad ones.

“That white non-college woman is very sobering,” said Scott Kozar, a Democratic consultant who worked on the Virginia lieutenant governor and House of Delegate races.

Democrats had attributed much of their victories in 2018 and 2020 to driving up their margins with women, helping propel the party to control of Congress by tilting key districts away from their previous Republican slant.

But that tide appears to have receded.

The startling shifts enabled Republican Glenn Youngkin to cut into Democrats’ margins in the booming Virginia suburbs and run up the score in conservative rural counties, providing the formula for GOP success in a state that has steadily trended blue since former President Barack Obama snapped a decades-long Republican winning streak in the commonwealth in 2008.

Youngkin made schools and “parents rights” the centerpiece of his campaign. And his party is already picking up the baton, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announcing Wednesday that Republicans plan to introduce a “parents bill of rights” in Congress soon.

“He put together a coalition where he did even better than Trump did with base voters and rural voters, and he improved a lot in the suburbs, where Trump was toxic,” former Virginia Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock, a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, said on MSNBC. “Which is why he closed that gender gap to single digits, instead of Trump’s yawning gender gap.”

 

White voters overwhelmingly want Republicans in charge. Last night proved that. Trump served his purpose even with a Democratic president and Congress, because the best we can do is whatever table scraps President Manchin allows us to have. Republicans have two-thirds of white voters, the courts, the corporations, and the billionaires.

The hard lesson is only overwhelming voter turnout of non-white voters will move the needle, and there's not enough of us to stem the tide of angry white Virginia folk who want us removed from the country, like the Charlottesville and Richmond terrorists.

For a month, FBI agents listened in as two members of a white supremacist group discussed their sinister plans: a plot to use a pro-gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, to engage in mass murder and attacks on critical infrastructure, which they believed would mark the start of a racial civil war.

Patrik Mathews, a former Canadian Army reservist illegally in the U.S., and Brian Lemley, a Maryland resident and self-described white nationalist, fantasized about the brutal murders they'd soon carry out against law enforcement and Black people, all with the goal of bringing about the "Boogaloo," or the collapse of the U.S. government in order to prop up a white ethno-state, according to recordings of the pair's discussions.

"We need to go back to the days of ... decimating Blacks and getting rid of them where they stand," Mathews said in one recording. "If you see a bunch of Blacks sitting on some corner you f***ing shoot them."

"I need to claim my first victim," Lemley said in another recording. "It's just that we can't live with ourselves if we don't get somebody's blood on our hands."
MORE: Inside the neo-Nazi hate group 'The Base,' which is the center of an FBI investigation

The two men were each sentenced in late October to nine years in prison, and ABC News has now obtained newly released audio from the FBI's secret recording of Mathews and Lemley at their Delaware residence in late 2019.

The tapes offer a chilling look into the private plotting of the two members of "The Base," a white supremacist extremist group that the FBI says has, since 2018, recruited members both in the U.S. and abroad through a combination of online chat rooms, private meetings, and military-style training camps. In their plea agreements and at sentencing, Mathews and Lemley both acknowledged their membership in the group.

After the two men were arrested in January 2020, just days before the Richmond rally was set to take place, law enforcement found tactical gear, 1,500 rounds of ammunition, and packed cases of food and supplies in their residence.

In the course of their investigation they also found that Lemley and Mathews had both attended military-style training camps with other members of The Base, and had built a functioning assault rifle that they tested out at a gun range in Maryland.

The recordings captured by the FBI included Mathews and Lemley discussing potential acts of terror they could carry out around the Richmond rally that would lead authorities and, eventually, the U.S. government, to capitulate to the chaos and bloodshed taking place.

"You wanna create f***ing some instability while the Virginia situation is happening, make other things happen," Mathews said. "Derail some rail lines ... shut down the highways ... shut down the rest of the roads ... kick off the economic collapse of the U.S. within a week after the [Boogaloo] starts."

"I mean, even if we don't win, I would still be satisfied with a defeat of the system ... and whatever was to come in its place would be preferable than what there is now," Lemley said. "And if it's not us, then you know what, we still did what we had to do."

 

Plenty of your friends, neighbors, co-workers and church congregants think Mathews and Lanley are American heroes. 

They showed up in Virginia to vote this week, too.

The people siding with these assholes are exactly who we're up against. For some of us, it's a matter of survival, and less of "Well I didn't get X from Biden so I'm sitting this one out."

Remember that.

Last Call For The New Mayor In The Queen City

Across the river in Cincy, Aftab Pureval has become the city's first Asian mayor, succeeding John Cranley in a relatively easy win over Republican David Mann.

 

Aftab Pureval is Cincinnati's next mayor, nabbing a whopping 66% of the vote.

He defeated longtime Cincinnati politician David Mann, who conceded the race at 10 p.m.

"We made history in Cincinnati," Pureval said to supporters who gathered to celebrate his win.

He'll be the first Asian-American mayor in the city's history and the only one in the Midwest.

Pureval's mother and brother were with him during his victory speech at Lucius Q in Pendleton.

Pureval told the crowd of their journey "to a place called Ohio" from New Delhi for a better life.

"What on earth were they thinking?" He said to laughter. "They came to this country to provide a better life for their sons. Because of that incredible decision, our family went from being refugees to mayor of Cincinnati."

Mann was gracious, tweeting: "Congratulations to Aftab on his well-deserved victory. I have spoken with him and wish him nothing but the best, and it has been the honor of my lifetime to serve this community as a councilman, mayor, and member of congress throughout my career. Thank you, Cincinnati!"

 

In City Council elections, after an ugly bribery scandal left no fewer than four council members facing criminal charges over bribery and misconduct over the past two years, voters cleaned house and elected 8 Democrats and one Republican, Liz Keating, who squeaked in at 9th place. Only Democrat Greg Landsman remains from 2019.

We'll see what Pureval and the new City Council can do. They have a lot of problems ahead.

Coming Up Short In Virginia

Virginia reverted to form with the party out of power in the White House winning the Governor's Mansion a year later. The only person to beat that curse in the last 40+ years was...Terry McAuliffe in 2009. That didn't happen last night as Slate's Jim Newell explains.

 

Republican Glenn Youngkin, a private equity magnate turned friendly sweater-vest campaign dad, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday, leading by nearly three points when networks called the race. It’s Republicans’ first gubernatorial win in Virginia since 2009. This now makes it 11 out of the last 12 governor’s races in the state that the party not controlling the White House has won. (The lone exception was McAuliffe in 2013, who pulled off a squeaker against ideologue Ken Cuccinelli. So at least he has that.)

While there will be plenty of miscalculations for Democrats to pick over in the coming days and weeks, it’s that last statistic, about the out-party traditionally winning the Virginia gubernatorial race, that provides the architecture of McAuliffe’s loss.

This pattern is not a coincidence. One year after an election, the base voters of the party that just lost a presidential race are going to be pissed off, and wake up each morning dreaming of the next time they can vote against the president’s party. (There’s a critical addendum to this in Virginia’s case, too: Republicans had lost every statewide race for nearly a decade in a state they used to dominate. Each loss irritated them more! They were ready to go this time.) The president’s party’s base, meanwhile, can’t match that level of enthusiasm. The president, about whom everyone was so excited to elect the previous year, takes ownership of national problems and sags, or plummets, from their post-election high. This is also the basic structure of why the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections the following year. (Just wait!)

In this case, Democrats’ problems accumulated over the summer with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan; the Delta variant, which brought a new, post-vaccine wave of the pandemic; and inflation and supply chain kinks that turned voters’ opinions of the economy sharply negative. As I pointed out earlier this week, an NBC News national poll from this weekend showed that only 22 percent of voters felt the country was on the right track, compared to 71 percent who said it was on the wrong track. Joe Biden’s average approval rating is 42 percent. I’m not sure which closely contested election Democrats expect to win when that’s the case.

Terry McAuliffe, a lifelong Democratic operative, is not a generational political talent. But Washington also didn’t give McAuliffe much material to work with. As I write, we are on month… 3… 4… 17?…of congressional Democrats saying they’ll pass a monumental pair of bills any day now. This week? Eh, might have to push it to next week. How does your December look? This meant McAuliffe had little-to-nothing to point toward as examples of what Democrats can get done if you just give them the chance.

So, McAuliffe basically ran on Trump. His opposition to Youngkin largely hinged on tying him to Trump. This will be treated in the punditry as a catastrophic mistake and extrapolated into broader conclusions about the futility of even bothering to mention Trump from now on. But such conclusions would be news to the Youngkin campaign, which worked strenuously, and oftentimes awkwardly, to keep its distance from Trump (who was eager to embrace Youngkin) and to keep General Election Youngkin sequestered from Primary Election Youngkin, when the latter said an awful lot of nice things about Trump and the need to ensure “election integrity.”

 

No state, with the exception of Pennsylvania, is more "We're not with the guy in DC, that asshole" than Virginia when it comes to governors, but it sure didn't help that Democrats still haven't passed the Build Back Better plan or the Senate infrastructure bill after talking about it for over a year, and then winning the White House and both chambers of Congress. 

 

Yes, I know the problem is Manchin, Sinema, and the filibuster. Yes, the Democrats are still being jerked around by the pair. Yes, it's hurting the Democrats as a whole, making them look comically ineffective. That wasn't Terry McAuliffe's fault at all.

But he lost because a 75% white electorate voted 60% for the Republican. That's 45% for the Republican before a single non-white vote is counted, and that's a guaranteed Democratic loss scenario.

And in particular, McAuliffe was completely undone by non-college White voters, who made up 36% of the electorate.

And this is with the Biden-passed stimulus and child tax credit putting thousands in the pockets of working-class white parents, and with Northam at the state level legalizing weed, ending the death penalty, and restoring voting rights to 70,000 people.

White voters simply reverted to the Southern state norm, voting overwhelmingly Republican. It wasn't voter suppression in Virginia, Democrats in the state made it easier to vote than in 2020 and expanded early voting. Turnout for an off-year governor's contest was a record. McAuliffe won college-educated white voters by 6. He lost non-college white voters by 52.

The people who showed up were overwhelmingly white, and they voted overwhelmingly for Youngkin.

Dems continue to ignore GOP propaganda at their own peril. Trumpism without Trump wins. If they can't find a solution to at least stay closer than a 50-point loss with non-college white voters, it's going to be ugly from here.

And Biden's popularity in the low 40's isn't helping. At all.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

Last Call For Sour Virginia

No matter what the outcome is in Virginia tonight, Republicans are already screaming about the vote being rigged.

This is how it’s going to be forever: Republicans and conservatives will claim that any election they lose is fraudulent. Donald Trump established this as the playbook for his party-cum-cult. And the full embrace of this authoritarian and dangerous tactic has been evident in the much-watched and tight-as-a-tick governor’s race in Virginia between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Days before the final balloting on November 2, right-wingers and Republicans began hurling the accusation: The Democrats are stealing this election. They had no evidence. They were just beating this tribal drum. But the aim was to create an echo chamber for the delegitimization of the election should McAuliffe, the former governor, prevail.

The strategy is simple: repeat the phony charge over and over to block full public acceptance of an unfavorable result. And this attack has come from multiple directions. Steve Bannon, the once-indicted-and-Trump-pardoned strategist has inserted himself into the race, and appearing on a Virginia-based talk show on October 29 to discuss the election, warned, “They’re Democrats. They’re going to try to steal it. They can’t win elections they don’t steal, right? They understand this. This is what they did in ’20. It’s time now to start calling them out.”

At a Youngkin rally on October 27, country singer John Rich, who was campaigning for the Republican, suggested to the crowd that a Democratic conspiracy involving Stacey Abrams was afoot: “Why the hell is Stacey Abrams in Virginia right now? What is that? What is she doing up here? We know what she’s doing up here. She’s working on it… Do you really think California voted for Gavin Newsom again? I don’t think so. Stacey Abrams was probably out there, too.” Abrams had been campaigning in Virginia for McAuliffe, much as Rich was doing for Youngkin. (Newsom survived the recall election with 61.9 percent of the vote.)

That same day, conservative talk show host John Fredericks huffed, “Everything’s moving in Youngkin’s direction and the Republicans, but a lot of people fear that this is going to get stolen, they’re gonna try and cheat. We’ve got all kinds of irregularities right now going on.” In another show, Fredericks claimed that Democrats were going into nursing homes to “extract votes from people that were incapacitated.” He did not produce any proof of this nefarious plot.

On one recent episode of Fredericks’ show, John Mills, a former cybersecurity official at the Defense Department who now provides commentary to the conspiratorial-minded and pro-Trump Epoch Times, claimed that security is intentionally poorly designed at vote-counting facilities and “people can walk in and out.”

Amanda Chase, a Republican state senator from Virginia who has campaigned with Youngkin, has been a constant champion of the-Democrats-are-cheating disinformation. On her Facebook page, she declared, “I know how their [sic] cheating. We know. Watching closely.” Appearing on Newsmax, she asserted, “I know how Democrats are cheating, and that information has been given to the Youngkin campaign.” She also told this far-right network that an unidentified man had showed her “exactly how they’re stealing elections in Virginia.” She maintained, “They’re moving, in cyberland, they are switching inactive voters to active voters, all in the same week, it’s undetectable. I know what they’re doing…and now the Youngkin campaign has all that information.” When Virginia attorney general Mark Herring, a Democrat, demanded Chase hand over any material she possessed indicating improbities in the election, a Chase spokesperson told Talking Points Memo, “We don’t owe Herring a thing.” Chase also posted on Facebook a debunked charge that voters had been turned away from early voting in Virginia because they had been sent absentee ballots they never requested.

 

My prediction is this: Trump will demand an audit no matter who wins, and if McAuliffe's early voting lead holds out for a win, we'll see actual violence in the state. Virginia should be prepared to deal with both.

So should all of us.

Last Call For Getting It In Gear

As Steve M. notes, Democrats have completely failed to turn things around on the perceptions of the infrastructure bill, of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and of their 2022 chances.

The last two Democratic presidents also found themselves in the weeds in their first two years in office. Both watched their parties suffer bloodbaths in their first midterms. But both presidents won reelection, right? So we're not doomed, are we?

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were immensely talented politicians at the top of their game. They were young, vigorous, and charismatic. They were great speakers.

Joe Biden is ... Joe Biden. He's not vigorous, charismatic, or a great speaker. If he's losing the confidence of Americans, does he have the ability to persuade them that he's a steady hand who can steer the country out of trouble?

And does he understand that he should start trying to do that soon?

This moment is reminding me of the fall of 1988, when Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee, blew a 17-point post-convention lead in the polls under relentless attacks from the GOP. Dukakis lost that race because he didn't punch back and he didn't find a way to change the subject when the GOP attacks dominated the news cycle. Joe Biden doesn't seem to know how to make news in a way that helps him. Vice President Harris doesn't seem to have that skill either, or she's not trying because it's believed that she shouldn't upstage the president, or it's been decided that she should keep a low profile because she's not sufficiently well liked, although maybe she'd be liked if some effort were made to change the way the public sees her. Or maybe everyone in the Democratic Party thinks things are going as well as they possibly could.

I don't believed we're doomed -- but we're doomed if Democrats keep doing what they're doing while expecting change to just happen. Democrats need to fight back. They need to fight as hard to win news cycles as Republicans do -- no, harder, because the right-wing media will always amplify Republican propaganda, and the mainstream media prefers right-wing messaging whenever Democrats are actually trying to govern. Democrats have to understand that they're in a more difficult struggle than they were during the Trump years, because the press likes Democrats when they're out of power and Republicans have clearly failed, but the press despises Democrats when they're in power. That sucks, but it's reality, and Democrats need to start acting as if they recognize reality.

 

Both Clinton and Obama learned to play the game, but only after both suffered catastrophic midterm losses (and Obama suffered them twice, with 2014 being the lowest turnout in my lifetime.)

Both the Virginia race and the vote on Biden's Build Back Better plan happen on Tuesday.

We need to pull off both.

Sour Virginia, Con't

Considering how badly state polling did in 2020 in underestimating statewide races in general, I have a very bad feeling about Tuesday's gubernatorial race in Virginia.

Virginia’s race for governor is a toss-up as Tuesday’s election draws near, with 49 percent of likely voters favoring Democrat Terry McAuliffe and 48 percent favoring Republican Glenn Youngkin, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

The result is little changed from last month, when a Post-Schar School poll measured the race at 50 percent McAuliffe-47 percent Youngkin — although the Democrat’s six percentage-point edge among all registered voters in September has narrowed to three points in the new poll, at 47 percent for McAuliffe to 44 percent for Youngkin.

Youngkin is fueled by an 18-point advantage among independent likely voters, up from an eight-point advantage last month — a significant swing in a group that could determine the election’s outcome. While Virginia does not register voters by party, 33 percent of voters in the poll identified themselves as independents. That compares with 34 percent who said they consider themselves Democrats and 27 percent who said they are Republicans.

The Post-Schar School poll, which was conducted Oct. 20-26, finds a larger share of voters saying education is the top issue in their vote compared with the September poll, with fewer citing the coronavirus as the biggest factor in their decision. The survey interviewed 918 likely voters reached by professional interviewers on cellphones and landlines, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Third-party candidate Princess Blanding accounts for 1 percent support among likely voters, which in a tight race could make a difference. Blanding, who is campaigning on racial justice as a member of the newly formed Liberation Party, is most likely to draw votes from McAuliffe.

The election also features contests for lieutenant governor and attorney general, as well as all 100 seats in the House of Delegates. Democrats are defending a 55-45 advantage in the House, with Republicans targeting several suburban swing districts — and a few close rural races — that could tip the balance of power.

Early voting ends Saturday, with polls open Tuesday from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m.

 

If Youngkin is able to mobilize enough cultists on Tuesday, he wins. The polls in general have seen a major shift in his favor in the last two weeks.  Five Thirty Eight has the race tied thanks to a FOX News poll that has Youngkin up by a whopping eight points.

 

 

The problem is the race will be close enough for Youngkin to scream ELECTION FRAUD11!!1 should McAuliffe's early voting lead stand up,  and Trump and the rest of the GOP cultists will pile on. The potential for Tuesday's results to be a powerkeg in search of a spark is ruinously high. We've already seen deadly political violence in Virginia four years ago, hell the trial of Trump's "very fine people" in Charlottesville is going on as we speak.

 

I just have a tremendously bad feeling about next week.

Last Call For Sour Virginia

The Virginia gubernatorial race is effectively tied and has been for two months now according to Five Thirty Eight's averages. Former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe's lead has gone from six points to two since August and in October alone Republican Glenn "I'm Not Trump, But..." Youngkin has been within three points for the whole month.

Steve M. sheds some light on what the heck is going on over there, and the answer is that the news on the Right is vastly different from that on the Left and the Left remains unaware, thus unable to fight back in Virginia.

 

We all know that right-wingers often won't acknowledge the same basic set of facts as the rest of us. But the right doesn't just look at major news stories and disagree on the facts -- it also has a separate set of top stories that are unknown to the rest of us but are, to the right, harbingers of the end of civilization as we know it. Right now, several such stories are arousing anger on the right. They are:

•  Reports that a teenager sexually assaulted two students in separate schools in Loudoun County, Virginia. As the right tells it, in the first of these assaults, the assailant was a"skirt-wearing male student" who described himself as "genderfluid" and who committed the assault in a girls' bathroom, just as the county was considering a rule allowing students to use the bathroom of their choice.
• Claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci personally approved extremely cruel scientific and scientifically unnecessary experiments on beagles.
• Allegations that the crowd at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally occupied the Capitol because they were goaded to do so by a provocateur who's being protected by the FBI.

Right-wingers think the existence of a provocateur on January 6 exonerates all the arrested participants (even though the participants were adults with free will who, if the story is accurate, were encouraged but not forced to become a rioting mob). They think the experiments partly funded by money from the National Institutes of Health are among the many signs of Dr. Fauci's limitless depravity (even though when Snopes looked into an earlier version of the story in August, it could find no evidence that Fauci had any personal involvement in the approval of the experiments, and even though it could find no evidence of animal cruelty.) They think the Loudoun school bathroom policy is linked to the assault even though it's unclear whether the assailant was actually a "skirt-wearing male student." (No one claims the assailant was dressed in a "genderfluid" was for the second incident, which took place despite the fact that the alleged assailant was wearing an ankle monitor.)

These are huge stories on the right. If right-wing voters turn out in big numbers for Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor's race or donate large amounts of money to Trumpist, Fauci-averse candidates, these stories are among the reasons why. And yet if you get your news from the mainstream media, you probably aren't aware of them at all -- which means that virtually all the available information on the stories is slanted or distorted in a way that favors the right.

A long time ago ago, in the early years of the last Democratic president's time in office, there were voices in the mainstream media arguing that the MSM should pay more attention to what the right-wing press was talking about. Many people on the left were repulsed by that idea, saying that the mainstream press shouldn't make bad-faith right-leaning media voices their "assignment editors." Some of that criticism makes sense -- the mainstream press shouldn't cover stories from the right-wing fever swamp the way the right-wing media covers them -- but it's still good for the mainstream media to be an honest counterbalance on stories that are being successfully turned into propaganda reaching a large portion of the country. If right-wing media sources identify someone they believe was a January 6 provocateur working with the FBI to sabotage the MAGA movement and that's not the case, wouldn't it be best if the mainstream media acknowledged the story's existence and debunked the right's reporting? If right-wingers and animal lovers think Anthony Fauci is sadistically okaying cruel treatment of animals and he isn't, wouldn't it be beneficial for that to be disproved? 

The problem is, every time the news tries it, it only further "proves" that the disinformation is correct and hardens the position of the right. Tens of millions of people refusing vaccinations alone are proof of the flaws with that theory.

But yes, these are the stories getting massive play in Virginia right now, along with the usual election period "Caravan of illegals!" story.

The entire right-wing noise machine has been improved and perfected over the last 25 years. The actual news can't compete anymore, and Virginia being even moderately close is the result.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The more you realize that the GOP is the party of white supremacy, and that everyone still involved with supporting the party is a white supremacist, full stop, the more the actions of the GOP make sense. And as much as candidates like Glenn Youngkin in Virginia try to convince voters that he's not in the party of white supremacists, the actual, avowed white supremacists keep showing up at his campaign events to support him.

A routine campaign stop for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin turned chaotic on Saturday night after the candidate's team was forced to boot a local Republican leader and apparent white nationalist from the event, causing a scene that a spokesperson called "antithetical" to the Republican hopeful's message.

The incident happened just before Youngkin was slated to give a stump speech to a crowd of "Latinos for Youngkin" at a local restaurant, when campaign officials approached a man, named Fredy Burgos, who was wearing both a red pro-Trump hat emblazoned with "Build the Wall" and a pin promoting white nationalist and Unite the Right rally attendee Nicholas Fuentes.

Burgos is a longtime far-right activist and former local Republican party official who made waves during the Trump years with a series of bombastic statements that earned him plenty of enemies in local conservative circles. The Washington Post, reporting on a 2018 drive to oust him from his post on the Fairfax County Republican Party committee, wrote that he was a "verbal bomb-thrower whose attacks against Muslims, immigrants and others have turned off moderates."

He even appeared alongside several of Fuentes' white nationalist followers — known online as Groypers — at a Loudoun County School Board meeting recently, which has become a local flashpoint in the nationwide right-wing campaign to ban anti-racist lessons in public schools.

As Saturday's Youngkin event was getting underway, Burgos, who sported a thick mustache and vintage suit vest for the occasion, made a short-lived walk around the inside of the venue, only to be forced out after Salon inquired about his pin and associations.

Notably, Burgos said he only became a Youngkin supporter recently, after Virginia state Senator-turned-"toxic [Youngkin] surrogate" Amanda Chase lost her bid to Youngkin. Prior to the loss, she had taken to calling herself "Trump in heels."

Despite Burgos being booted from the event Saturday, he told Salon he remains a steadfast supporter of the candidate and that he hopes to appear at future rallies.

"I'm a supporter of the ticket," Burgos told Salon after being removed from the "Latinos for Youngkin" event. "They are concerned about the [Build the Wall] hat. I think that they have a problem thinking that other people may have a problem with the hat."

 

Burgos will be back at Youngkin's rallies, because Youngkin needs the votes of Burgos and other Virginia white supremacists. You'd better 100% believe that if Youngkin wins, he'll be implementing the GOP agenda against women, Black folk, LGBTQ+, Latino, and reality.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

I know that like in California's recall election where the Democratic governor was "doomed", it seems to me that Terry McAuliffe is suffering from the same level of "doom" in next month's gubernatorial race, likely because Virginia Republicans keep "helping" Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin like this.

 

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) encouraged a group of students to go against their school’s policy and not wear masks.

“If nobody in Rappahannock complies [with the mask mandate], they can’t stop everyone,” Good said to a government class of 20 students Thursday, Rappahannock News reported. “If I was ya'll, I’d say none of ya'll wear a mask. What are they gonna do? They’re still going to have school.”

The state of Virginia mandates that every school must require masks regardless of students' vaccination status. The meeting between the class and Good had to take place outside because Good refused to wear a mask in the school.

Along with discouraging masks, Good claimed that masks are ineffective and that coronavirus vaccines are more dangerous for teenagers than the virus itself.

The Food and Drug Administration has deemed the vaccine safe for those above the age of 12.

“Being able to expose students to different world views is important on both sides,” Rappahannock County High School Principal Carlos Seward, who was at the event, said, according to the local outlet. “We don’t endorse one way or the other.”

Other topics discussed were Good’s anti-abortion stance, his thoughts about colleges being taken over by “the left,” his anti-critical race theory position and his support for video cameras in classrooms.

Superintendent Shannon Grimsley told the local outlet she believes the students will not listen to Good’s remarks regarding violating the face mask policy.

“Our students and families are very smart, competent individuals who have seen in real time the impact of increasing chances of being quarantined or causing others to be quarantined, as well as the potential of losing privileges, such as the ability to host events and fun activities should numbers increase too much,” she said.

However, the school previously had trouble with compliance and said events would get canceled if coronavirus cases didn’t go down. There are currently 54 students and staff in quarantine.

 

The conventional wisdom bleats are all about how "concerned, angry parents" are going to tip the election -- and the country in 2022 -- to the Republicans. Several dozen students in quarantine, but an elected official is telling kids don't wear masks when there's a potentially lethal disease going around.

That seems like the party that cares about kids, right? 

 

Parents should totally vote for them.

Last Call For Gavin Versus The Big Lie

California Republicans, and national Republicans including The Former Guy™, are already claiming Gavin Newsom's recall victory tomorrow can only be the product of massive voter fraud, and are vowing not to accept the results, or to concede the race.

The results of the California recall election won’t be known until Tuesday night. But some Republicans are already predicting victory for the Democrat, Gov. Gavin Newsom, for a reason that should sound familiar.

Voter fraud.

Soon after the recall race was announced in early July, the embers of 2020 election denialism ignited into new false claims on right-wing news sites and social media channels. This vote, too, would supposedly be “stolen,” with malfeasance ranging from deceptively designed ballots to nefariousness by corrupt postal workers.

As a wave of recent polling indicated that Mr. Newsom was likely to brush off his Republican challengers, the baseless allegations accelerated. Larry Elder, a leading Republican candidate, said he was “concerned” about election fraud. The Fox News commentators Tomi Lahren and Tucker Carlson suggested that wrongdoing was the only way Mr. Newsom could win. And former President Donald J. Trump predicted that it would be “a rigged election.”

This swift embrace of false allegations of cheating in the California recall reflects a growing instinct on the right to argue that any lost election, or any ongoing race that might result in defeat, must be marred by fraud. The relentless falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election have only fueled such fears.

“I very honestly believe there were irregularities and fraudulent activity,” Elena Johnson, 65, a teacher in Los Angeles County who was in the crowd at a rally for Mr. Elder last week in Ventura County, said of the presidential contest last year. “It was stolen.”

Because of her concerns about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Ms. Johnson said, she would be casting her ballot in person on Tuesday instead of by mail. She said she was supporting the Republican because she thought California, her adopted home after immigrating from the Philippines 40 years ago, was on the brink. “California is where I came, and California is where I want to stay,” she said.

Since the start of the recall, allegations of election fraud have been simmering on social media in California, with daily mentions in the low thousands, according to a review by Zignal Labs, a media tracking agency.

But singular claims or conspiracy theories, such as a selectively edited video purporting to show that people with a post office “master key” could steal ballots, have quickly ricocheted around the broader conservative ecosystem. The post office video surpassed one million views, amplified by high-profile Trump allies and members of the conservative news media.

Nationally, Republican candidates who deny the outcomes of their elections remain outliers. Hundreds of G.O.P. candidates up and down the ballot in 2020 accepted their defeats. But at the same time, many of them joined Mr. Trump in the assault on the presidential race’s outcome, and in other recent election cycles, candidates, their allies and the conservative news media have increasingly expressed doubts about the validity of the electoral process.

And while false claims of wrongdoing have long emerged in the days and weeks after elections, Republicans’ quick turn in advance of the California recall — a race that was always going to be a long shot for them in a deep-blue state — signals the growing normalization of crying fraud.

“This is baked into the playbook now,” said Michael Latner, an associate professor of political science at California Polytechnic Institute. As soon as the recall was official, he added, “you already started to see stories and individuals on social media claiming that, you know, they received five ballots or their uncle received five ballots.”

 

This is the GOP now. Every win is honest, every loss is a rigged election, even in a ridiculously blue state like California. The whole point of this is to justify the next round of violence. It worked on January 6th. It will work in other instances of political terrorism.

And why shouldn't Republicans claim voter fraud every single time? We refuse to give them a downside to doing so. There is no downside to claiming fraud for every single Republican loss, especially in states run by the GOP. And eventually in those states, elections where Democrats win are simply going to be overturned by Republicans in charge of states and elections.

I expect that in 2022, and I expect a lot of it, including entire state electoral slates, to simply be given to the Republican running in 2024.  You will see states throw out Democratic wins and replace them with Republicans, full stop.

That's where this is going, folks.

Last Call For I Recall Gavin, Con't

With only weeks to go to California's recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the polls remain distressingly tight.

 

Earlier this month, results from a SurveyUSA poll showed that 51% of likely voters in California’s upcoming recall election would vote to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom from office. It was the first poll to show a majority favoring his removal and led to a dramatic shift in polling averages.

Before these results, polling averages calculated by the politics and data website FiveThirtyEight showed a seven-point margin favoring keeping Newsom in office. But with SurveyUSA’s data, the margin narrowed to less than one point. As of Aug. 17, the latest date for which FiveThirtyEight has data, the margin inched up to 1.2 points, with 48.8% for keeping Newsom in office and 47.6% for removing him.


FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages are perhaps the most sophisticated data-based method of assessing the state of the recall race. The numbers come from a statistical model that aggregates individual poll results into two averages — one for keeping Newsom in office and another for removing him. The website has been producing these averages since mid-July but incorporates polls that go as far back as January.

FiveThirtyEight also tracks averages for whom Californians would choose as a replacement if Newsom is recalled. In their latest numbers, Larry Elder leads with an average of 19%, followed by Kevin Paffrath at 9% and John Cox at 6%. The other 43 candidates on the ballot have averages below 5%.

 

In other words, there's a 50/50 shot that odious grifter Larry Elder ends up governor.

Nobody in California seems to think that there's much alacrity needed, either.

It's a disaster in the making.

 

Last Call For I Recall Gavin, Con't

Californians overwhelmingly support vaccine mandates in the latest CBS News poll, and there's every reason to believe that Gov. Gavin Newsom will soon make them a reality. The question is whether or not Newsom's recall vote next month will send the Golden State back to GOP control.

As Californians express widespread concern about the Delta variant, they overwhelmingly say the state's recent rise in cases was preventable, had more people gotten vaccinated and taken more precautions.

California's vaccinated voice a lot of judgment toward the unvaccinated: "They're putting people like me at risk" is a top way the fully vaccinated pick to describe those who won't get the shot, with many others outright "upset or angry" with those unwilling to get it. From a policy standpoint, there's strong support for vaccine mandates, too.

Meanwhile, as the effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom heads into its final month, Newsom faces what looks like a turnout challenge: while voters would marginally prefer to keep him in office at the moment, it looks like that will heavily depend on whether Democrats in his party get more motivated about it.

When California's vaccinated describe people unwilling to get the vaccine, another phrase they select is that "they're being misled by false information," in addition to the emotional response of being upset. Far fewer of the fully vaccinated say they respect the decision of those who won't.

Behind some of those sentiments, we also see that while unvaccinated Californians tend to describe the decision to get the shot as a "personal health choice," the vaccinated are more likely to call it both a personal choice and public health responsibility.

Californians' list of what may have prevented rising cases is dominated by more vaccinations and taking masking precautions, while far fewer point to other measures like more travel and border restrictions. Nor do they cast any blame on scientists and medical professionals for the recent rise in infections. (Though on this, we do see more partisan differences: Republicans are notable for singling out limiting of border crossings as one top way to have prevented it, more so than more vaccinations or policy measures.)

So, given all that, vaccine mandates find wide support across California. A large majority support allowing employers to mandate vaccines for employees. And it's not all that partisan: four in 10 Republicans are OK with this idea, too. There is strong support for making vaccines mandatory for health care workers, and a lot of support for letting businesses that draw crowds also mandate that their customers be vaccinated. Moreover, many people would be more willing to use or visit such a business.

 

 

Indeed, we're looking at nearly two-thirds support for vaccine mandates in California. This should be a winner for Newsom in his recall vote, for the people of California to vote NO on recall.

All the GOP candidates have said they will remove all mask ordinances and mandates if they are elected.

Your choice, folks. Make the clearly correct one.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Former Guy™ has been making plenty of GOP primary endorsements, demanding that people kiss his cheeto-stained rings in the hope of winning House and Senate seats. Only one problem: Trump is lazy and doesn't care as long as his pick is deferential enough, and sometimes Trump's word is not law to GOP primary voters.

 

Donald Trump's advisers are angry at David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, for persuading the former president to endorse a losing candidate in the special election for Texas' 6th District.

Why it matters: Susan Wright's defeat Tuesday in a Republican runoff with Navy veteran Jake Ellzey dealt a blow to Trump's aura of invincibility as a Republican kingmaker. It's critical to his 2022 midterm endorsements and continued hold on the GOP. Trump advisers and allies have been ambivalent about the Club's advice and thought he should stay out of this Republican-on-Republican contest. They take the long view and are protective of his successful record — so far — in GOP primary endorsements.

McIntosh did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Axios.

Trump himself disputed the result had dented his power. In a phone call with Axios on Wednesday, the former president conceded McIntosh had pushed him to support Wright but blamed Democrats — not the Club for Growth — for Ellzey's victory. He also said he actually "won" because Wright had bested Ellzey in the initial primary and the runoff came down to two Republicans he liked.

"I think this is the only race we've lost together," Trump said of McIntosh and the Club for Growth, before catching himself mid-sentence on the word "lost."
 

"This is the only race we've ... this is not a loss, again, I don't want to claim it is a loss, this was a win. …The big thing is, we had two very good people running that were both Republicans. That was the win."
 

Trump is notorious for shifting or refusing to accept blame for any failure, whether as a businessman or a politician.
 

The Club for Growth spent more than $1 million on the run-off, making it easily the top outside spender.

Behind the scenes: In private conversations with Trump, McIntosh pushed the former president hard to throw his weight behind Wright. She's the widow of Rep. Ron Wright (R-Texas), whose death from COVID-19 vacated the seat. In these conversations with Trump, McIntosh painted Ellzey as non-conservative and anti-Trump, according to sources familiar with their conversations. 

McIntosh appealed to Trump's vendetta-streak by telling him that the Never-Trumper Bill Kristol had previously donated money to Ellzey (it was a paltry $250 in 2018).McIntosh also mentioned to Trump that Ellzey didn't want to join the Freedom Caucus — a group of ultra-conservative House Republicans who are fervently pro-Trump.

Between the lines: The Wright campaign and the Club for Growth also cited internal polling to reassure Team Trump of Wright's strength. The polling proved to be way off.

 

I don't feel bad, this was a disaster from the start for Trump, and he walked right into it. Remember, we wouldn't even be having this election if Ron Wright hadn't been a complete dumbass and gotten COVID from refusing to wear a mask.

 

It killed him.

 

Even Republicans don't think the person who married someone that stupid deserves his seat.

Recalling Gavin, Con't

The latest LA Times/UC Berkeley poll shows California Gov. Gavin Newsom is in real trouble of being recalled by voters in September as delta variant COVID, local mask ordinances, and parents just thrilled to go through another round of school lockdowns this fall all threaten to put a Republican in charge of the state again.

 

Californians who say they expect to vote in the September recall election are almost evenly divided over whether to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom from office, evidence of how pivotal voter turnout will be in deciding the governor’s political fate, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

The findings dispel the notion that California’s solid Democratic voter majority will provide an impenetrable shield for Newsom, and reveal a vulnerability created by a recall effort that has energized Republicans and been met with indifference by many Democrats and independent voters.

The poll found that 47% of likely California voters supported recalling the Democratic governor, compared with 50% who opposed removing Newsom from office — a difference just shy of the survey’s margin of error.

Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, who last week won a court battle to appear on the Sept. 14 recall ballot, leads in the race to replace Newsom among the dozens of candidates in the running, while support for reality television star Caitlyn Jenner remains low, the survey found. Forty percent of likely voters remain undecided on a replacement candidate, providing ample opportunity for other gubernatorial hopefuls to rise in the ranks before the Sept. 14 special election.

Even though Democratic voters far outnumber Republicans in California, the GOP’s enthusiasm over the recall promises to inflate the potency of the anti-Newsom vote in September, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll. Nearly 90% of Republicans expressed a high level of interest in the recall election while just 58% of Democrats and 53% of independent voters were as interested, the poll found.

“Democrats, at least in the middle of July, almost unanimously believed that Newsom will defeat the recall. I think that may be contributing to some complacency among those voters. Republicans, on the other hand, are confident that they can turn out the governor,” DiCamillo said. “I think the Newsom campaign really has to light a fire among the Democrats and say, ‘Look, the outcome is in jeopardy unless you get out there and vote.’”

Though Republicans account for only about a quarter of all registered voters in California, the poll found that they account for 33% of those most likely to cast ballots in the recall election. Democrats make up 46% of the state’s 22 million voters and “no party preference” voters 24%, but their share of the likely recall voters drops to 42% and 18% respectively, DiCamillo said.

“Gavin Newsom is in serious trouble at this time because his base of voters is not motivated to come out and support him,” said Dave Gilliard, one of the political strategists leading the effort to oust Newsom.

Gilliard said Newsom doesn’t have much time to correct that, or voter discontent over the homeless crisis and crime in California, since elections officials will begin mailing ballots to all registered voters starting Aug. 16.

 

Hey California, you'd better start giving a damn, or your next governor is going to be a right-wing minstrel asshole who will end the state's affirmative action, climate change, health care, and social services programs by decree. If you think Newsom's making you miserable now, wait until Larry Elder gets done with the place and turns California into Alabama...with Alabama's GDP.