Beware the stolen-election narrative.
Beware the stolen-election narrative.
T here will be much punditry in the next few days seeking to explain the California recall results. Gavin Newsom himself has already claimed the results vindicate his “science-based” response to the pandemic. Leftist commentators have claimed that national star power such as Elizabeth Warren and President Joe Biden helped reverse the momentum. Of course, a fringe element is surely going to go down the voter-fraud path. But there is a cleaner explanation available for those who want to learn a vital lesson from this experience: The stolen-election narrative about 2020 is a toxic narrative for the future of the Republican Party.
More specific to this recall election, I actually do believe it was in the realm of possibility that Newsom would be recalled. Despite an unfathomable two-to-one registration advantage that Democrats enjoy in the state, and a ten-to-one spending advantage Team Newsom had in this race (odds that generally do mean these things are over and done from the launch), one thing could have recalled Gavin Newsom: A race entirely about Gavin Newsom. In fact, as long as the race was about his failed response to the pandemic, his relationship to the teachers’ unions that doomed California students the last 18 months, his rank hypocrisy in following his own pandemic overreach, and his court-rebuked atrocities in how he treated churches during the pandemic, this recall had a prayer. All of that changed in the last few weeks. That is to say, all of it changed when the lead opponent became Larry Elder.
And I actually believe the Larry Elder of 90 percent of his last 30 years in public life could potentially have won, too. Elder’s multi-decade message of repudiating victimhood, of an opportunity society, of school choice, of a more aspirational mindset for minorities is not a politically toxic one, no matter what CNN or the LA Times may say. But the second Larry Elder entered the race, the race became about Larry Elder — not Gavin Newsom — and that was the one political occurrence the pro-recall side could not afford to see. This recall effort had to be about Gavin Newsom, and a high-profile opponent forced the attention to the opponent and off of Newsom. This was an unforced error by the right that was exacerbated by national conservative media.
But beyond serving as an unhelpful diversion away from focus on Newsom, the Larry Elder candidacy also introduced something that was never, ever going to appeal to the vast majority of independents and moderates who would be needed to boot a sitting Democrat governor — the stolen-election narrative.
My comments here, at least for these purposes, have nothing to do with the merits or lack thereof of that belief. It is simply a political comment that strikes me as indisputable — the independents and moderates were, at least according to polling one month ago, willing to go along with the removal of Governor Newsom (largely because they believed the plain-to-see facts that he had been a tyrannical, ineffective disaster throughout COVID); yet once the election was linked to President Trump, to allegations of a stolen 2020 conspiracy, and to the idea that even this recall election was already fixed, it was a bridge way, way too far.
Perhaps you think the 2020 election was stolen. I don’t, but that is not the point here. What is the point is that the narrative of the recall became a brand consideration — did independents and moderates want to be branded as election-fraud conspiracists? Larry Elder had every chance to rebuff this narrative, and actually, to never let the narrative take hold to begin with. What he did, instead, was create the narrative! He jumped in with both feet and asked for the Trump/MAGA/voter-fraud brand in a state that Trump lost by 29 percent.
Dare I point out the obvious — that of the small minority of folks in California who voted for Trump in 2020, somewhere around 100 percent of them were pro-recall and pro-Elder. For the many millions who did not vote for Trump but were sympathetic to the recall, there could not have been a message less effective for earning and retaining their vote than the “stop the steal” story.
This is going to stay around Republicans’ necks as long as they let it. Not just in an “against all odds” case such as recalling a Democrat governor in a deep-blue state, but anywhere independents and moderates are needed to win an election — the backward-looking focus on the unprovable claims of a 2020 stolen election are toxic, self-defeating, and counter-productive. It is a fatal focus. A forward-looking focus on defeating cancel culture, pandemic irrationality and tyranny, and woke corporatism is the winning formula for the party and the cause.
Those who care about the latter will reject the former. Or they will continue to lose.