Rehashing 2020 Election, Thoughts on Recall
My Anxieties about the Upcoming California Recall Election
The last time I felt this sense of foreboding about an election was in November 2016 following FBI director James Comey’s October Surprise. If you live in California, you likely know that I am referring to the recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom. I am not alone in feeling this anxiety. FiveThirtyEight election forecaster, Nate Silver, has noted that like President Biden’s dip in approval following the Taliban’s chaotic takeover of Afghanistan, the public’s appetite for a recall of Gov. Newsom has shifted. Polls indicate that Newsom’s early advantage has almost entirely evaporated to the point that Californians are almost perfectly split on the question to keep or remove him from office.
TV personality, Chris Hayes, Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, and Sacramento-based writer (also briefly by brother’s writing professor at UC Davis), Sasha Abramsky, have all highlighted the unconstitutional farce of having election procedures in place that allow for a popular governor elected with more than 60% of the vote in 2018 to be replaced by a candidate unlikely to reach even 20%, as FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages currently indicate. For the last week, the Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chermerinsky, has been on a media blitz to bring much-needed national attention to this flagrant breach of constitutionality that would offend fundamental democratic principles. Former Senior advisor to President Obama, now host of the popular podcast network, Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer, noted on his personal substack that a national audience should absolutely care about this story because, if successful, it will embolden a Republican party that has already proven that it values power over democracy, setting a precedent that could spread like wildfire around the country.
There is another danger related to Chermerinsky’s assurances that a successful recall is unconstitutional and would be struck down by the courts. After all, when liberals were overwhelmed last year by the well-funded campaign from the ride-share companies in support of Proposition 22 that voters mostly didn’t realize included a clause that prevented workers from ever drawing up legislation for standard employee protections, it was also struck down. The recent strategic emphasis on the courts as a backstop that prevents bad anti-democratic things from happenings puts democrats in a complacent position that leaves me more than a little uncomfortable. The historian, Samuel Moyn, hits the nail on the head in a piece for Dissent Magazine, warning of the dangers of juristocracy. If the differences between the parties weren’t so great and the stakes weren’t so high, I might be inclined to accept the “backstop” argument without much reflection. But as the state is currently engulfed by flames and the choice is between a democracy that seeks to address the problem, if imperfectly, and a Trumpian theocratic cult that is pathological in its denial, I will always choose democracy without hesitation. Since no bright legal minds can forever insulate us from the paranoid tendency that periodically dominates American politics, there is no alternative to true democracy of the kind John Dewey once called “social action”.
In other words, if Democrats want to avoid a deep reddening of a blue state, they need a ground game. With no serious challengers, a talk radio host, Larry Elder, is decisively in the lead. If Newsom fails to receive more than 50 percent opposition to the recall on the first question of the ballot, Elder will ride his name recognition in California’s conservative movement to rise above the cast of characters running against him, including Newsom’s Republican challenger in the 2018 race, John Cox, former San Diego mayor, Kevin Faulconer, and 29 year-old YouTuber (not a misprint), Kevin Paffrath. Elder’s clear path to the Governor’s Mansion should lead voters who do not have the habit of listening to conservative talk radio to Google what he believes. They will find that on climate change, he is in lockstep with the GOP, a organization that may be the most dangerous in human history. Building on Gov. Brown’s legacy to decarbonize the grid by 2045, Gov. Newsom has charted a different course from the rest of country that has cast the state as a world leader, even at times willing to work directly with other countries to work toward meeting Paris commitments. As he has made abundantly clear, Elder would jeopardize all that, unleashing on California what Trump and Scott Pruitt unleashed on the country.
Voters who have been cooped up in their homes too long and do not yet recognize climate as a bread and butter issue will have no trouble finding other statements to scrutinize. In classic Trumpian fashion, there are almost too many statements to sift through that for any normal politician would all be causes for concern. Organizers of the Stop the Republican Recall campaign would be wise to fixate on Elder’s adversarial view of labor that is so reactionary, believing all minimum wages and labor regulations are infringements of contractual “liberty”, that the practical effect would be to resurrect the 19th century workhouse.
So what can we do to prevent a return to bad ideas that have already been tried in the 19th century guaranteed to be made worse by climate breakdown, which politicians like Trump and Elder sadistically intend to accelerate? I obviously don’t know, so I started with a question geared toward my local community. Where are the voters in Sacramento that typically don’t vote, but tend to vote Democrat when they do? While we won’t be able to solve these problems before the September 14th election date, the answers could be the key to successful organizing in the coming weeks, as well as reveal patterns that I imagine are true for every major California city, not just my native Sacramento.
I was planning on answering this question by dumping a series of maps that I was able to create after I discovered a treasure trove of data from a California redistricting project conducted by UC Berkeley Law. In theory, that data could be used to make the same maps for other cities in the state, but I limited my focus to just Sacramento.
Even though it is not related to the question I pose at the end of the last section, I wanted to start with the striking result at the top of the ticket. That map, indicating Biden vote shares by election precinct, demonstrates that population density is something close to an Iron Law in American politics, as Will Wilkinson argued in a paper titled The Density Divide. The mechanism is possibly due to what economists know as Tiebout sorting, or people being able to choose the places they want to live. Tiebout models have a few assumptions, which were once all barriers that have been greatly reduced in the 21st century (and perhaps even more very recently as a result of COVID-19 related WFH). Principally, people are perfectly mobile, they have complete information, and there are no commuting costs. So, in the past, people were stuck because they did not know that other places or opportunities existed that were more aligned with their preferences or if they did discover them, they could not make moves that were considered too costly. I suspect there are also deeper factors at play. The historically inclined might interpret every election since 2000 as a contest between liberal cosmopolitan sea power, which tends to support the Democratic Party, and reactionary insular land power, which tends to support the Republican Party. Perhaps the intense political rivalries we observe today are not that different from the Athens-Sparta rivalry Thucydides once observed.
Some of you may not quite know your way around Sacramento county map boundaries, so here is the same map overlayed with major designations and streets. Download it to zoom in as much as you desire (possibly to find your home, if extra curious).
The big item propositions on the ballot in 2020 also reveal some very interesting patterns on the state of politics in the city. One of the reason Proposition 16, allowing affirmative action to return, failed is that the buffer observed in the Presidential maps between strong Democratic urban areas and the tossup suburban areas disappeared. Arden-Arcade and Carmichael are not distinct from Citrus Heights and Fair Oaks, all were against the measure.
As noted earlier, Proposition 22, classifying gig workers as contractors for the benefit of ride-share companies, failed even more spectacularly, suggesting that either California is not quite the liberal stalwart it is made out to be or money really does pay. The recurring pattern of liberal urban areas holds with a majority of voters in the city center still opposing the measure, but significantly atrophied to the point that enclaves of opposition did not extend very far.
Proposition 15, the failed corporate tax measure that would tax based off of assessed property values excluding agricultural land, is perhaps most compelling evidence that many areas that went for Biden should not be confused for hotbeds of progressivism when their check books are on the table. Almost all the affluent areas along Arden-Arcade were substantially against the proposition, and even a slight majority in the very urban Fabulous Forties neighborhood of East Sacramento.
While interesting, the presidential election and ballot initiative results are matters of the past, even as the political logic of density, money in politics, and California’s symbolic progressives remain as relevant as ever. The matter for the immediate future before the recall deadline is to identify where people don’t vote. To those familiar with the diverse north-south axis and predominantly white east-west axis, the data mostly speaks for itself.
There are two striking clusters of low-voter turnout concentrated on the north-south axis separated on each side by the city center. To the south of the city center lies the South Sacramento- Florin cluster and to the north lies the Del Paso Heights cluster which extends out to North Highlands and the western edge of Arden-Arcade around Howe Ave. Sadly, the outlying observation with only about one-third of registered voters sending in a ballot is exactly what anyone familiar with Sacramento would expect, the area around Richards Blvd., where a significant number of residents are not merely poor but homeless. On the other end of the spectrum, the high voter turnout areas are also exactly as you would expect according to theories of social capital, wealth, and political participation, the affluent areas hugging the American River leading up to Folsom.
The racial disparities are too stark to not spend a moment to further demonstrate. The Cooper Center at the University of Virginia has an excellent racial dot map of the entire United States, where each person is represented by a colored dot that indicates their ethnicity. Soon, the map will go dormant in lieu of funding that allows researchers to update the map with 2020 Census data. I overlayed their map with my voter turnout data to demonstrate just how much the clusters of low voter turnout align with racial diversity/segregation.
The low vote clusters have a tendency to vote Democratic when they do vote, which may explain the folk theory of Democratic politics as centered on boosting turnout. Consistent with more sophisticated political science research, the reality is more ambiguous with no discernible partisan edge as it relates to turnout. Notably, there are some low-turnout precincts, mainly further from the city center in North Highlands and Citrus Heights, which are both poor and Republican. Still, of the 13 precincts, I identified in the neighborhoods I’m familiar with on the east-west axis of the city, almost all are strong Democratic opportunities, if not guarantees. In particular, California Democrats ought to watch out for a redux of Miami and Texas during last year’s national election, where a crucial part of the Hispanic base strangely left the party en masse, both turned off by the Brahmin Left’s priorities and manipulated by the Right’s dark projection of non-existent radicalism (i.e. “Cuban socialism”). There are already some signs that this demographic realignment may be making its way to California as a majority of Hispanics support the recall of Gov. Newsom. Public attitudes are always difficult to read, but the survey indicates that the increasing salience of crime is likely a leading indicator behind the shift. Homelessness and affordable housing are appropriately the most salient in voter’s minds as they are the state’s most conspicuous policy failures.
Remember to get registered before Monday, August 30, if you are not already! All Vote Centers will be open on Election Day Tuesday, September 14, 2021 from 7 A.M- 8 P.M. All mail-in ballots must be post-marked by Election Day. Happy Voting!