I’ve been in the habit of making a post prior to each election with my takes, so I’ll continue it this year.
I’m hopeful that someday, I can make a post about an election without talking about tactical voting, without needing to worry about how our travesty of an electoral system works. Someday, I hope to be able to pick who to vote for without resorting to arguments about how the other side is incomprehensibly bad.
This year is not that year.
There’s just one thing on the ballot — whether to recall Newsom. And, of course, the electoral system is pathetic. There’s a single question up-front about whether to recall Newsom, yes or no. Then, there’s a second question about who to replace him with — a list that includes 46 people. If a majority of people vote yes on the recall, then whoever wins the most votes out of those 46 people becomes Governor.
Yes, this means that if Newsom gets 49% of the vote, and 46 competitors each evenly split the vote, getting 2–3% each, Newsom loses and we would have a new Governor who won with 3% of the vote or so.
This has led to a campaign filled with nonsense. The Republican party has declined to endorse any candidates — because they believe that the best chance to recall Newsom is if people are voting for a generic “somebody else” without thinking too hard about who they’re actually replacing Newsom with. Because the Republican party in CA exists to “own the libs” and not to actually try to govern, and recalling Newsom would certainly “own the libs”.
The Democratic party has also declined to endorse any recall candidates besides Newsom — because any Democratic candidate on the ballot would increase the number of people voting Yes to recall Newsom, thus, paradoxically, decreasing the chances of a democratic governor.
So, the only reasonable vote is to VOTE NO on the recall. And show up and vote — this is going to be a low-turnout election, where your vote counts even more than usual, and it’s going to be close.
I have three justifications for this vote. In order from simplest to most complicated:
First is the procedural one. A first-past-the-post election with 46 candidates is an incredibly terrible system for picking anything. We’re going to get some absolutely random candidate winning, and there’s really no telling who it’s going to be. It’s absolute nonsense.
Second, is the straightforward one — on the key issues of these last few years, Newsom’s done a good job. CA’s doing better than the US overall on vaccination rates, overall COVID cases and deaths; and despite COVID, we still had a budget surplus. There’s been a CA-specific stimulus and eviction moratorium, there’s the CA-wide free school lunches, and a variety of good housing bills. I think California still has plenty of problems, but Newsom’s governorship is not one of them.
And third, of course, is because the replacements for Newsom would be incredibly terrible. It’s hard to even judge who top candidates would be, because there’s so many, but it seems, according to a recent poll, that the current leading candidate is Larry Elder, a conservative talk show host who has never held any government office, claims to have voted straight republican in every election since 1976, and spread anti-vaccine claims on his show. The top-polling self-identified Democrat in the race, is a Youtuber/Landlord/Influencer named Kevin Paffrath. The websites of every single candidate that I’ve looked at have no indication that the candidates have any idea of how CA government works or what the challenges over the next year are going to be.
There’s no good choice for a replacement on the ballot. I’m going to wait until I get a ballot, look at the polls, and, after voting NO on the recall, put as replacement whoever is the top-polling self-identified democrat, since that way maximizes the likelihood that we don’t get an anti-vaccination governor in the middle of a pandemic.
