Gavin Newsom is in trouble. Could he take Biden with him?

Ben LaBolt, a former Obama adviser who now lives in San Francisco, said Democrats in California have to do more to confront the real world problems of homelessness, housing, affordability, and safety. Those concerns, he said, transcend party lines, but Democrats in the state are so afraid of crossing left-wing activists and their academic concerns, hashed out on Twitter and other forums online, that they’re losing touch with working and middle class people. “Teachers and firefighters are forced to commute for hours, immigrant communities that moved here for a better life don’t feel safe, the socialists on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors argue about civil liberties for homeless people that are killing themselves with fentanyl in broad daylight, instead of forcing them into treatment and building the buildings that could house them,” he told me. LaBolt predicted that Newsom will win, in part, because Elder is “a Trumpian lunatic.” But he said that after the recall, “Dems would be smart to treat these concerns as serious issues that deserve a results-oriented response.”

What might save the campaign, in the end, is mail-in voting, instituted during the pandemic. Some 22 million registered voters are getting ballots in the mail as you read this. A little more than 10 million of them are Democrats. About five million are Republican, with five million more claiming no party affiliation. That might seem like easy math in favor of Newsom, but his campaign is quite obviously in break-glass mode, worried that enough Democrats might not even pay attention to the ballots in their mailboxes. Newsom’s campaign even called in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to campaign for him down the stretch. In California! “It won’t do shit,” Gonzales sniffed. Maybe, maybe not. But after four years of exhausting Trump panic, a grueling presidential campaign, and almost two years of a pandemic that seems like it’s not going away, Democrats are going to have to find a way to galvanize millions of voters once again—all to save a politician that not many people cared about in the first place.