Some Democrats touted California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s landslide victory in a recall election Tuesday as a good sign for their chances in the 2022 midterm elections, as some Republicans and strategists downplayed any connection between the results and what might happen in congressional races more than a year away.
Democrats suggested that high turnout Tuesday meant Newsom had hit on a successful formula that could help other candidates overcome the voter apathy that typically disadvantages parties in control of Congress during off-year elections.
Newsom retained his spot convincingly, with initial results showing votes for “no” on Question One — the recall — ahead by around 30 points early Wednesday.
Newsom cast that success as a rejection of the Trumpism embodied by GOP frontrunner Larry Elder, as well as an affirmation of Democrats’ aggressive efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
More than 9 million voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s recall election, surpassing totals for the state’s previous recall election in 2003 and the 2014 midterms.
“We’re pretty excited about California, and it’s not because we thought we were going to lose, it’s because the margin is better than expected and it shows that the Republican message is failing badly in swing districts,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney said during a press call Wednesday.
“You couldn’t have had a better mouthpiece for the Trump brand than Larry Elder in that election, and he got his ass kicked,” Maloney said.
Democratic candidates in some of the state’s most competitive House districts were already adopting those messages.
Caution ahead
But strategists from both sides of the aisle cautioned that the political realities could shift dramatically in the next 14 months and that it would be a mistake to draw too many comparisons between a statewide race and federal elections, where the dynamics are automatically different.
“The recall election won’t have any impact on the midterms and anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about,” said Torunn Sinclair, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for House Republicans.
Democrats are targeting 21 House Republicans in 2022, four of whom represent California districts: David Valadao in the 21st, Mike Garcia in the 25th, Young Kim in the 39th and Michelle Steel in the 48th.
But the competitiveness of those elections will be determined by new congressional maps that are currently being redrawn by the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission.
It could be weeks until population and district-level data from the recall election is released, which will give a clearer picture of how voters responded in the parts of the state that will matter most to the midterms.
“I would be little hesitant to be standing on the rooftop to say, ‘Look at this we beat them in a recall, oh boy!’” Democratic pollster Paul Maslin said in an interview before the results were released.
“But, if in fact it did produce a larger Democratic turnout in California, it does suggest this could be a mechanism of overcoming a grave worry of the midterms, which is turnout,” Maslin said.
Pressing ahead
Maloney said the DCCC would continue to press vulnerable Republicans in California, using votes on the House floor to force them to go on the record on issues he considered to be in play in the recall.
Especially, Maloney said, the debate over abortion rights that intensified this month, with a new GOP-enacted law that essentially halts most abortions in Texas.
“If you’re Young Kim or you’re Michelle Steel out in those California districts, where last night you watched your Republican message go down in flames, you’re now going to get to go on the record and we’re going to know whether you’ll stand with this bounty hunter law in Texas that attacks women or whether you’re going to do the right thing,” he said.
Democrat Harley Rouda, who is attempting to retake the seat he lost to Steel in 2020, was among Democratic House candidates already taking those messages to the campaign trail.
“Californians spoke with a united voice tonight, rejecting Larry Elder and Michelle Steel‘s harmful and extremist agenda,” Rouda said in a statement Tuesday night.
“Despite Elder’s far-right views, including eliminating the minimum wage, eliminating a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions over her own body, claiming women ‘know less than men,’ eliminating the Affordable Care Act, and slashing Social Security and education, Michelle Steel stood by and defended him, calling him a ‘friend’ and a ‘good guy,’” Rouda said.
Steel had been supportive of Elder’s campaign and, with her husband, contributed an essay attesting to their 30-year friendship on his campaign website.
A spokeswoman for Democrat Jay Chen, who is running in the 39th District, pointed to incumbent Young Kim’s recent social media posts calling for voters to reject Newsom as evidence that she is out of step with the district.
“It seems like she’s really trying to align very tightly with the recall movement, which is a little surprising, given that the recall movement could be described as anti-science, anti-women’s rights, anti-vaccine,” Chen campaign manager Lindsay Barnes said.
She added that Chen did not see his fortunes as tied to Newsom’s.
Kim’s campaign did not return a request for comment in advance of the election Tuesday. And Republican strategists were skeptical that attempts to tie GOP candidates to Elder would stick.
“This guilt by association thing? They tried it once before it didn’t work,” said one Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a heavy lift for them.”
Kate Ackley contributed to this story.
