There 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.
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