Why The California Recall Is Not a Harbinger of What Is to Come on COVID As a Campaign Issue

Some have interpreted Governor Gavin Newsom’s win in the California recall election as a mandate for Democrats to go strong on COVID in their election campaigns. Supporting COVID measures to protect the public is the right stance for any elected official regardless of how the votes may fall, but there […] Read more »

Recall lessons

… Newsom won the governor’s chair with 61.9 percent in 2018. His performance this month was 1.5 points better. In most of the state’s large counties, he was between zero and 2 points stronger in the recall than in his successful 2018 gubernatorial campaign. California congressional Democrats who competed against […] Read more »

Why ‘all eyes’ will be on the Virginia suburbs this fall

Reassured by the results of California’s gubernatorial recall election last week, Democrats now face tougher electoral tests this fall that will measure whether they can defend their most important political advance of the Donald Trump era. Big gains in well-educated inner suburbs ringing the nation’s major cities keyed all the […] Read more »

Voters still don’t like the GOP’s answer to the coronavirus

Republicans have been hoping to turn the political page from the coronavirus pandemic for over a year now. We saw then-President Donald Trump try to do it in the lead-up to the 2020 election. It didn’t work. In the California gubernatorial recall, we saw Republican Larry Elder try and argue […] Read more »

Think all politics are local? The California recall says most politics are now national.

It may be time to revisit the old axiom from Tip O’Neill, the former Democratic House speaker from Massachusetts, who famously said that all politics are local. These days, as the California recall election showed, most politics are national. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) easily avoided being recalled this past week […] Read more »