Newsom might be safe in California this year, but a crucial ruling is being wielded as a weapon against Big Labor and its campaign-cash pipeline.
Newsom might be safe in California this year, but a crucial ruling is being wielded as a weapon against Big Labor and its campaign-cash pipeline.
W hen it comes to combating the might (and indeed it is mighty) of the Golden State’s big-spending public-employee unions, Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center (CPC) — the determined David to Big Labor’s Goliath — is ever the realist: “They’re financial juggernauts. We can’t outraise them.”
“But,” he says, offering no hint of defeat, “we can cut their income.”
And that’s just what is happening, here and in other places, as conservatives, far from the radar screen, engage directly with individual union members to apprise them of their Janus rights — especially the right to stop having union dues withdrawn from their pay — that were established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. It’s the mountains of deducted union dues, of course, that year after year clog the Democratic Party’s cash pipeline.
These impressive efforts may prove too nascent to help recall Governor Newsom, the man who has done so much this past year to immiserate Californians, especially the lockdown-crushed small-business owners and infuriated public-school parents.
For the time being, union money remains the straw that stirs California politics, and it is certain to be behind Newsom, possibly of tsunami proportions, when the recall comes to a head later in 2021.
Now that Georgia has two left-wing senators, we know that nothing is a certainty in American politics, including Newsom’s surviving the recall. But for now, things don’t appear Gray Davis–grim for the incumbent. (Davis was recalled in 2003.) Newsom did admit he is unnerved this week, when the formal “Recall Gavin Newsom” effort met its deadline. A week ago, Newsom’s opponents claimed they’d already gathered over 2 million signatures, a half-million more than required to legally trigger the vote. They expect to submit 2.1 million names, many of which have already been tossed into a signature-verification process that is sure to be lengthy. Still, no one expects an upset here, and Newsom has publicly conceded that an election will likely take place.
He has done more than make that admission. In addition to lining up national Dems to come to his aid, he’s unleashed Stop the Republican Recall, which casts Newt Gingrich, Devin Nunes, Mike Huckabee, and others as the bogeymen behind the effort. Attempting to set the narrative, he has added others to his cast of villains, especially QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the Proud Boys.
If the recall is a GOP affair, that’s news to its organizers, who say that over 30 percent of petition signers are registered Democrats or independents.
In his effort to set the storyline nationally, Newsom has sought out such safe media havens as The View to push his conspiracy about conspiracists. But he may be taking some comfort from this-side-of-disastrous data. A new KRON poll (released March 15, of 1,000 registered voters) shows the recall effort has an uphill battle. (The two-step process requires a vote of over 50 percent to oust the incumbent; if attained, this triggers the second vote on a replacement candidate.) Yes, there’s clear wariness with Newsom: Asked about reelecting him in 2022, when his current term naturally expires, only 41.7 percent approved, with 58.3 percent agreeing that it would be “time for someone new.” Despite that, only 38 percent of those surveyed back a recall; 42 percent favor keeping Newsom in office, while 14 percent are undecided (another 6 percent say they will not participate in the vote). Of interest: According to the poll, 12 percent of Democrats back the recall.
Then there are the mixed feelings about the incumbent: Newsom’s favorability, per the poll, stands at a weak 41.8 percent, but that’s still more than his unfavorable rating of 40.3 percent. (Complete polling data and a goodly amount of analysis are found here.) Gray Davis wishes he had those numbers before his 2003 recall. And then there’s this: A majority of Californians (57.4 percent) think the state is “on the right track” (though only 36.1 percent agree it is on the “right path for economic recovery”).
Something might gel in the recall’s favor, but the big money has yet to show up and monopolize the narrative. According to the Associated Press:
It’s likely [Newsom] will soon receive a flood of cash from his familiar Democratic constituency, including powerful public workers’ unions that spent millions of dollars helping get him into office in 2018. The California Democratic Party quickly showed its support with a $250,000 contribution.
When labor money shows up in the Golden State’s major political battles, it’s anything but a pittance. Some examples:
- In the 2012 Proposition 32 effort to ban political contributions from payroll deductions, government unions spent over $43 million, which came to 77 percent of all money spent on the referendum (it lost 57 percent to 43 percent).
- In 2016, the victorious Proposition 55 initiative to tax high-income earners at 13.3 percent was bankrolled by a staggering amount of union cash — some $82 million.
- The 2020 “Split Roll” referendum (an attempt to allow for increased property taxes on industrial and commercial property) lost, narrowly, despite having close to $23 million in union backing.
The betting concerns are not taking real money yet. Expect them to weigh in when the signatures are certified and the recall vote is a certainty. But they probably won’t trod the Davis 2003 path.
Who knows, though? Newsom has proven adept at being his own worst enemy. Example: his infamous, hypocritical, and rule-breaking French Laundry dinner.
But the long game of California politics, for activists on the right, is not the Newsom recall but figuring how to deal with Big Labor. Janus may be the stone to cast at Goliath’s noggin.
Which brings us back to Will Swaim and the California Policy Center, who accept the obvious: Competing with that mammoth amount of dough in ballot-box battles is unrealistic. But here’s what is quite realistic, assuming organization and those tried-and-true methods of the Fuller Brush Man door-knockers and the Avon Lady bell-ringers: utilizing the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in a determined ground game. This means meeting and contacting and educating, one by lonely one by unaware one, government workers, a not-small number of whom oppose the leftward political activity of their representative unions. Apprise them of their rights, how to exercise them, and how to rescue their dues-dunned earnings (amounting to millions when accumulated, worker by worker) from Big Labor political game-playing.
Dubbed “the biggest court case you probably never heard of,” Janus is named for Mark Janus, the plucky former Illinois state worker who took on his union because he didn’t like how they were using his dues. He sued the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in a case that quickly made its way up through federal courts to the Supreme Court. On a 5–4 vote, the justices overturned decades of labor-loving jurisprudence (formalized in the 1977 Abood ruling, which was tantamount to a cash printing press for the Democrat Party). Justice Alito authored the decision ruling that government-union members had a clear free-speech right to see that their dues were not used to support positions or candidates or campaigns with which they were at odds. Further, the decision held that dues and “agency fees” — the lifeblood of Democratic politics — could be withheld by the union only if a worker gave affirmative consent.
No surprise, Alito’s language is being fought or disregarded by government unions and blue-state attorneys general. In fact, some unions and their statehouse allies anticipated the Janus ruling and established various nefarious practices to complicate its implementation. Which happened, of course, in California: On the very day that Janus was rendered, California’s Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 866, which among its components precludes government employers from educating employees about their new rights. From the law:
This bill would prohibit a public employer from deterring or discouraging applicants to be public employees, as defined, from becoming or remaining members of an employee organization. The bill would prohibit a public employer from deterring or discouraging public employees or applicants to be public employees from authorizing representation by an employee organization or authorizing dues or fee deduction to an employee organization.
All this and more has led the California Policy Center and similar pro-freedom state groups to devise and implement a battle plan — replicated by conservatives in other states — that defends workers’ First Amendment rights and produces a de facto result of drying up the cash sea that Big Government Labor unions took for granted and depended upon.
The results are remarkable. So are the consequences.
When Janus was issued in 2018, California had approximately 1.5 million government-union members. In the intervening three years, largely through efforts of CPC and other groups, the membership number has dropped by 18 percent. That’s roughly 270,000 people. The dollar significance — many fewer dues payments are coming in — amounts to roughly $200 million less annually in Big Labor’s coffers.
CPC’s five-year goal is to see that government-union membership drop by an additional 180,000, which would mean an overall post-Janus cut of 30 percent. In two-year election-cycle terms, this means that government unions could have $720 million less to spend on behalf of left-wing candidates, referenda, and causes.
Swaim (who co-hosts NR’s popular weekly Radio Free California podcast with David Bahnsen) says it is the ground-game efforts — an amalgam of digital engagements, website sessions, phone calls, text messages, and personal meetings — that have achieved this.
CPC ran an interesting A/B test of sorts that ratified the game plan. California’s adjoining Riverside and San Diego Counties each have a comparable number of SEIU members (Service Employees International Union); CPC engaged in what it calls “intense” activity in the latter and saw the SEIU rolls there decline 24 percent post-Janus. It engaged in no activity in Riverside in the same period, and there SEIU numbers enjoyed a modest increase.
When CPC began its efforts in Riverside in 2020 — experiment over — it met with a strong response, and the union opt-out estimate in Riverside may prove to be as high as 40 percent.
By CPC’s calculations, every opt-out means $16,000 less revenue to the union, over a typical 20-year career. Of the union members who’ve already exercised their Janus rights, that means $4.3 billion. And should CPC reach the five-year goal it has set, it would mean $7.2 billion less to be had and spent by Big Labor.
It would mean the piggy bank could be broken. And in some other states (more about that in Part 2 of this look at how Janus has rolled out), that has indeed proven the case.
Gavin Newsom may look back one day and be thankful he wasn’t being recalled in 2025.