“Nobody has been dealt a tougher hand than Gavin Newsom,” Davis, the only California governor ever to be recalled by voters, said in a recent interview with Politico. “Look, I had the energy crisis and a recession. He has a pandemic we haven’t seen for 100 years. He has the fallout from that pandemic, racial injustice, wildfires, and I think I’m leaving something out. But nobody—no living governor—has had to experience as many crises as him.”
And it looks like one more is on the way: Organizers of a push to make Newsom the second California governor to be recalled have already collected somewhere between 450,000 to 1.3 million of the required 1.5 million signatures needed to trigger a special election, which could be held as early as this fall. The recall movement is filled with QAnon conspiracists, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, anti-vaxxers, and other once-fringy MAGA-friendly groups, all itching for the chance to own one last lib as the Trump administration fades into history. But it’s also gaining steam with regular folk, too—like parents who’ve reached their wit’s end with school closures and small-business owners crushed by the lockdowns who’ve been collecting recall signatures at their shops and restaurants and posting homemade political ads for their cause on social media. If their grassroots revolution succeeds—they have until the state-mandated deadline of March 17 to collect the rest of the signatures—we may soon witness the sort of national political spectacle California excels at. The last time the state held a special election, when Davis was ousted in 2003, more than 100 candidates threw their hats into the ring, including former child actor Gary Coleman, commentator Arianna Huffington, porn star Mary Carey, and, oh, yeah, a body-builder-turned-actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It couldn’t be more ironic. Of all the nation’s governors, Newsom should have been the one best-equipped to handle such a tsunami of crises. He’s a big-government proponent from a wealthy indigo-blue state, a technocrat who could bore even Al Gore with his wonky mastery of facts and policy papers. Who better to juggle the bureaucratic and logistical challenges of simultaneous health, economic, and ecological emergencies? Indeed, the pandemic could have been the opportunity of his career: If he’d handled COVID-19 and the other calamities just a bit more adroitly, it could have guaranteed Newsom’s political future and possibly catapulted him to even higher office. Instead, it may prove to be his undoing.
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