O2C's 2021 California Gubernatorial Recall Election Voter Guide

A friend of mine pointed out that voting via strategy should Falcouner be close enough to push out Elder with a few thousand votes might mitigate damage should Newsom get ousted. The guy fucked up out budgets in San Diego but at least he's not Trump scum. Hell do as a placeholder for the next year.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/19/elders-ex-fiancee-said-he-brandished-a-gun-at-her-506286

Last bunch:

Rhonda Furin - Republican. Well produced website. Capitalizes her sentences like a German (maybe even more... do Germans capitalize possessive pronouns too?). Retweets Trump press releases, and election conspiracy theories. Not even going to bother digging into policy. No.

Kevin K. Kaul - NPP - Why a man named so named would use his middle initial in his official run for governor in California is completely unfathomable to me. Given that he's Indian-American, seems unlikely he's a raging white supremacist, so I can only imagine it was an unfortunate choice on the paperwork. Seems to be some sort of business leader? Founded a whole bunch of US Business Forums. Led an Asian trade forum of some kind? San Diego Union Tribune calls him a real estate developer. Website hasn't been updated since 2020. His interview with the SDUT is a mess: "Q: Why should Governor Newsom be recalled? A: He is unpatriotic because he shut down California last year on Independence Day." Climate change denier (says it's a hoax). Wants to close the border and make all illegal immigrants citizens immediately. I'm not convinced there aren't two Kevin K. Kauls, and the SDT is using a photo of the wrong one, the one who endorsed Hillary Clinton, who has a picture with Barack Obama, and hasn't updated his website since last year. No in either case.

Steven Chavez Lodge - Republican - Former gang homicide detective from Orange County. Engaged to one of the Real Housewives of Orange County. Has several accusations of police brutality against him, but all charges were dropped (hmm, maybe not, another source says he beat a jaywalker for "resisting arrest" so severely the jury awarded punitive damages). He had a restraining order against him in 2012. Changed his name to appeal to Latino voters when running for Anaheim city council; is not Latino in the slightest (his middle name was Albert). Can't actually find any policy positions or website except for a 4 minute interview with a San Diego news station, which was pretty uninformative except that he didn't like the small business closures and he thinks of himself as a problem solver. No.

John Cox - Republican - Republican Gubernatorial nominee in 2018. Endorsed by Trump in that election, but tried to hide it. He has upped the crazy a bit with his campaign this time around, notable for bringing a live bear to campaign events and torturing the poor metaphor to death at every opportunity. Probably the closest thing to a policy wonk that the Republicans have. In 2018, I thought he would be better than Newsom, but for the fact that he was pro-life. Now? He compared Florida's COVID policies favorably to California's. And not 2 months ago, or last year. A week ago. He strikes me as less likely to be corrupt than Faulconer, but the dude has lost his marbles. No way.

Leo S. Zacky - Republican - Scion of a has-been chicken production family. Anti-MSM, believes COVID is a conspiracy theory, anti-sex-ed, anti-CRT, warrior against social justice, pro-oil, pro-nuclear, pro-solar. Has secret plans for ending homelessness and stopping wildfires. I need to stop before my eyes roll out of my head. No.

Joe M. Symmon - Republican - Born-again Christian, Kenyan immigrant. Ex-Democrat, thought the party was too hostile towards his faith. Many of his issue positions end with a Bible citation and/or quote. Believes the 2020 election was stolen (or at least that several elements of the conspiracy theories were true). Anti-CRT. Big fan of Ron DeSantis. "Does not support the use of pronouns." Okay I'm done. Hell no.

Sarah Stephens - Republican - Mirror universe Bernie Sanders. Young, female, Republican, but just as prone to yelling about the problems IN ALL CAPS without offering solutions. Has only 2 real policy points: no mandatory vaccinations, allow homeschooled and charter school kids to participate in public school programs. No.

Diego Martinez - Republican - bog-standard modern CA Republican, with a sprinkling of the national party lunacy, mostly showing up in education policy. Maybe a bit dimmer than usual. Doesn't seem to understand that full reservoirs do not counteract drought. So tired of these. No.

David Moore - No Qualified Party Preference - Public school teacher. Trotskyist Marxist (self-described, I swear). Member of the Socialist Equality Party. Wants to overthrow capitalism, come for private property, yadda yadda, basically everything the Republicans warned you about Democrats, he's actually it. I'm on board with his COVID plans - make and follow an international plan for eradication, and lockdowns should be accompanied by worker and business compensation. Other than that, he's a loony lefty. No.

Kevin Paffrath - Democratic - Real estate investor and broker, YouTuber. Makes most of his money on the latter. Apparently the best-known Democrat in the field. I'd never heard of him. Presents himself as a Democratic alternative to Newsom. Trying to ride Newsom's coattails, almost literally, following him to his rallies and trying to steal press attention. Seems like a bit of a dick as a landlord, but probably less than his opposition is making him out to be. His policies can best be described as Democratic proposals turned up to 11 and then given all-you-can-snort cocaine. Case in point: Wants to build a 14-foot diameter water pipeline from the Mississippi River to CA to end water shortages by doubling the flow to the Colorado River, with branches to Arizona and New Mexico. The kid is ambitious, I'll give him that, but either he's on cocaine, or he's trying to pull the Overton Window WAY far towards big projects. Which, if it's that, I can kind of admire it, since for once it's an Overton Window pull that doesn't demonize the other side. His COVID policies make a lot of sense, and he actually has a grasp on the scale of the housing crisis and lack of wildfire prevention. Wants to tackle climate change with an actual carbon tax. Wants to slash income taxes for everyone making under $250k, and legalize gambling to compensate. I dunno. Pretty sure 95% of his plans are going to run headlong into reality and crumble. But the ones that won't are probably worth doing. So, yeah, I guess? Not better than McGowan, but McGowan's polling between "not in the polls" and 2%, while Paffrath is polling 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. Might just have to vote for him depending on how the polls go.

Armando "Mando" Perez-Serrato - Democratic - Wants to be "the first Conservative Catholic Latino Democratic Governor". No, the "Mando" connection to the Mandalorian is not a coincidental nickname, any more than a candidate going by Jedidiah "Jedi" Smith would be. I don't think I can summarize him better than the SDUT interview, nor do I care to try anymore. No.

Major Singh - No Party Preference - Software Engineer. His entire campaign, as far as I can tell, is the following: "Respect –Respect for everyone[.] Integrity – Work honestly[.] Balance – Balanced decisions[.] Sharing – Share your good fortune". That's it. Nothing else. His Twitter account has 0 tweets, but parts of that are in his bio. Website has basic "how to vote" info, plus that, and a pair of checkboxes "Yes on Recall, Yes for Major Singh". I'm sure he's nice. No.

Finally. Time to cry myself to sleep after spending that much time on these.

So what's the upshot?

Newsom probably deserves to be recalled. On the other hand, California definitely does not deserve what's most likely to happen if he is. So vote No. Newsom: if you're not dominating in the polls by 9/13, resign so we can avoid the chaos that this election is likely to cause. Prove yourself actually a public servant and not a self-absorbed jackass.

As for replacements: harm reduction principles + the game-theoretic results of this variation on our electoral system strongly suggests Faulconer or Paffrath, depending on who's more likely to beat Elder. If Elder's support in the polls collapses, as long as no one else intolerable is winning, or has a shot of winning, I'll vote McGowan.

This has to be a fake name.

Someone on Facebook brought up a point about Faulconer as a harm-reduction alternative: as a Republican, if anything were to happen to Dianne Feinstein, would he replace her with a Republican, flipping the balance of power in the Senate? As the oldest Senator, DiFi is the most likely to die between his getting seated the next general election, with a 10.4% chance according to the Social Security Administration (unadjusted for the fact that she's a Senator who can get the best medical care, so actually probably lower). And she could always resign. Her health, especially mental, is not 100%. So it's worth considering.

But she won't resign. She's far, far too stubborn for that. I give her a 0% chance of resigning. So that only leaves death. Can't control that, but I think the chances are somewhat under 10%.

So would Faulconer appoint a Republican to replace her? I don't think so. He's had his eye on the governorship in 2022 for over a year, and if he did that, he'd be toast. No amount of good he could do for the state in the meantime would override handing the Senate back to the Mitch McConnell for well over 50% of voters. Democratic turnout would be insanely high. By contrast, if he appointed, say, Shirley Weber (current SoS, former Assemblywoman from a district that includes part of San Diego), he'd massively bolster his non-partisan, pragmatic credentials, and with it his chances of getting elected in a solidly Democratic state.

So I think it's still safe to vote for Faulconer if necessary.

Now, once this thing is over and done with, we as need to have a conversation about the recall process in general. I didn't see it in 2003, and frankly it wasn't as big of a problem before 2010, but game theory strongly suggests that between the top-two primary, the low recall petition signature requirement, and the plurality-wins rules of the recall election itself, the incentives are currently aligned for a recall after every gubernatorial election. Which could further decrease gubernatorial general election turnout, further increasing the chances of a recall election in a vicious cycle.

The simplest fix would be to remove recalls altogether. I don't think that's the right call. The recall process creates accountability where there otherwise isn't any, beyond overt criminality. And as we've seen, legislatures controlled by the same party as an executive are unlikely to remove the executive, even with overt criminality. But eg failure to enforce laws isn't impeachable, nor is hypocrisy, even at the expense of public health. No, the recall itself should stay.

2nd simplest would be to eliminate the 2nd question on the recall. Governor gets recalled, Lt. Governor takes over. Lt. Governor gets recalled, Governor appoints a replacement or the Senate selects one. Both get recalled... well, that gets trickier. I don't know that we want to model it after the federal government's succession rules, but there' probably a way to do it right enough to keep grumbling to a minimum, at least until another pathological case is discovered.

3rd simplest would be to require a 50% vote threshold on the 2nd question in order to assume office. With filing fees so low and no primary, the simplest way to do this would be to implement IRV, score/range, or STAR voting for recall elections. Another approach might be to require 50% in a plurality winner or approval voting election, and if no one gets that, then give the office to the Lt. Governor. I'm pretty sure the latter option has the same issues as the previous paragraph. Still, I'm in favor of pretty much anything over plurality winner elections generally, so literally anything is an improvement here.

Anyone else have options I haven't considered?

Guess we know who Paladin will vote for then

Thought of another option to break the current recall incentives: change the primary system to approval voting: no candidate can be on the general election ballot without at least 12% approval of registered voters, not actual voters, and any that meet the bar are in the general. Or use STV, with the quota set to 12%+1 of registered voters, so that no single candidate's supporters can trigger a recall because their guy didn't make it out of the primaries. Ideally either one would be paired with the aforementioned voting systems for the general election. I'm partial to score and approval voting for single-winner offices, but if it takes using IRV for consistency in the optics (IRV is the single-winner case of STV), so be it. This is not as helpful as the other options presented, but would still make the current situation a bit less pathological. Also this could (and maybe should) be done without regard for the recall, so that's nice.

If I was living in the state I would vote no on any recall just on general principle. If you hate the guy in office, vote him out at the end of his term. Removal from office should be for criminal conduct, not philosophical differences.

The lawsuit has been tossed. Didn't even make it to mid-election, just ruled as straight up not a violation of one-person-one-vote. Not surprised.

What is surprising is that McGowan is now 3rd in the latest poll and rising quickly (or maybe not; not sure a change from "no one including you in polls" counts as a rise), which gives me some hope I'll be able to vote for her in a couple weeks. 1 point behind Paffrath, but far behind Elder.

https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...der-debate-radio-california-republican-510563

Elder's sell out is particularly disgusting but its different only by degree from the sell out by white talk hosts who are doing the same thing.

Selling out seems too good of a term. Look, I have a deep disrespect for a lot of white people. I think a lot of them are low intellect goons who are closer to an ape than human. I am pretty sure these "sell outs" actually think black people are worse than whites and they probably somehow disassociate themselves with black people somehow. They are just pretending they don't believe what they say to get in good with the person they are talking to because that is the grift.

Look, I have very little respect for a trumpista, but yes I would string them along that way. It keeps them saying stupid shit for longer. Go ask OF and dayton. They are black people profitinbg off of their racism against black people. Selling out is going against your morals and ethics for money. These guys are not going against their morals and ethics. In their minds they do not see themselves as the black people they are racist against.

Elder's also suggested that any reparations for slavery should go to the descendants of the slave owners, because they had their legal property taken away...

Fuck him and fuck that.

The South got beaten. We didn't pay reparations to any other losing side in a war.

About that...

Another way to put it: the slaveholders stole enslaved people's labor by force. When we catch a criminal who's been robbing people's houses, we don't pay them restitution to make up for the fact that they can't rob houses anymore.

538's numbers are showing up much better for Newsome.

As the right galvanizes around Elder, most Californians are waking up and saying OH HELL NO.

The Dems also learned from their previous mistakes, and didn't endorse any other candidate 'just in case.' The format of the recall effort makes that suicide.

As of today Newsome is at +15%.

Let's hope people are motivated to vote.

Update: after looking into the polls’ methodologies, I am seriously annoyed at the pollsters this time around. I think SurveyUSA is singlehandedly responsible for creating the narrative that Newsom was in jeopardy, based on how they worded their likely voter qualification question up through the middle of August, and especially in the Aug 2-4 poll. Normally the question would be “how likely are you to vote in the election for {office}?” In this case they asked “how likely are you to vote in the election to recall Governor Gavin Newsom?”. The obvious ambiguity creates a huge bias towards Yes on Q1 voters being counted as "likely" while No voters are less likely to be counted.

Additionally, though I touched on it earlier, I didn't quite realize to what extent Paffrath's popularity among Democrats' is just an artifact of polls that included half a dozen Republicans + Paffrath. Of course the Democrats polled are going to go with the only presented Democratic option. Unfortunately, most of the polls that do not include all 46 candidates, still only included a few options from each party. McGowan's popularity, such as it is, may be a similar artifact. Of the polls that did ask about all 46 candidates, some (SurveyUSA, YouGov, UC Berkeley) appeared to have not randomized the list of candidates, using the list from the Secretary of State's certification list, which groups candidates by party and then orders them alphabetically.

And it turns out that "no one" was actually selected by a lot of people, and FiveThirtyEight didn't publish that. So I'm annoyed, and I have far less information about how the polls are actually shaping up than I thought I did. The only two conclusions I feel confident in are that Larry Elder is actually winning on Q2 (but possibly by less than we think), and that the Democratic Party has succeeded in throwing the choice of next governor to the Republicans if the recall succeeds. Whether this will translate to enough No votes to prevent the recall I'm not sure, but I think it somewhat more likely than I did before. That said, the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans is very real, so we'll have to wait and see.

While I appreciate more now the fact that the Democrats appear to have succeeded on the coordination problem (some polls have Q2 "leave it blank/no one" has high as 45%) I worry that this is an undemocratic move that undermines faith in voting -- "just give up your choice and we'll win" -- (and provides the opportunity for Republicans to push the same lies as after the 2020 election; I think that's already covered in this thread), and so I'm still voting for a candidate. I just have much less certainty about who I should do so for than I expected to. I'm going to wait until Monday for another poll, scrutinize it carefully, and vote for Faulconer, Paffrath, or McGowan, whoever has the best chance of winning. If there isn't one, I think I'm just going to vote for McGowan.

If you find a halfway reliable poll, tag me in the post too. I'm doing the same thing. I don't vote Republican bit if Falcouner is in the 2nd place spot and close enough to topple Elder, I'll give it to him. COVID is making me a one issue voter for the foreseeable future.

I'm also extremely irritated by the misinformation campaign surrounding this Q2. More than one blue check Twitter account has been telling people to note no and keep Q2 blank and that's being spread by progressive organizations saying the same thing on their official websites. An Elder win won't turn 95 percent of our system into Texas, but it certainly will have the effect of impacting COVID procedures in the near future. I work for a big company who are already worried about the impact of state benefits for sick going away if he wins. It feels like a lotta big orgs want to gamble with lives for their own political power...which I expect from the GQP but the so-called leftists ought to know better.

It's not just Twitter. This is straight up the official position of the CA Democratic Party, and they've got the national party behind it (see the Elizabeth Warren ads). The whole point is to scare low-enthusiasm voters into voting, and voting No, by convincing them that a Yes vote, or no vote at all, is a vote for Elder, making sure there's no way that any halfway-acceptable candidate has a chance. The talking point is that "we don't want to confuse voters by saying 'No on Recall, Yes on _____'", but it's actually not confusing to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What it actually does is give false hope to low-enthusiasm voters that there's a chance that a Democrat would replace Newsom, leaving their apathy stronger than their fear. Game-theoretically, they're not wrong to do it if they can pull it off (and it seems they have), but I resent the hell out of it, and I refuse to give up my own power that way. I suppose I could tell everyone I'm leaving the question blank, and then actually casting a vote for my preferred candidate, but that, too, seems antidemocratic, very dishonest, and seems like it would erode trust in our democratic institutions, which is the very last thing that needs doing.

I heard an interview with Gray Davis on Bloomberg Radio a few days ago. I was rather impressed that he was pretty much of the mindset that "them's the rules, if you don't like it, don't play." Of course, the fact that a moderate republican (back when there was such a thing) didn't have much better luck might have had something to do with it. If somebody had come in, won acclaim for "straightening out Davis's mess" and maybe used it as a springboard to the White House (not possible in Ahnuld's case) maybe there would have been a touch of bitterness.

Well, that's because the "Amend for Ahnuld" campaign failed.

Update: the polling quality has not improved. So vote depending on if you think the poll respondents saying they won't vote on Q2 are being honest about that (whomever you want if yes, but it won't make a difference), and whether or not they consider any Democratic candidate in the meager field a viable governor (Paffrath (as the Schelling point) if yes, Faulconer if no). /cc @Shirogayne

Yes, I tossed Parffath's name on there since he appears to be the leading Dem. Here's hoping the No vote goes through.

Dear California:

Please stop trying to be more fucked up than Floriduh. It is not cool, and no one likes what you are doing.

Ya know, I was a senior in HS during the last recall. Remembered a girl in my band class found out she was pregnant the week of that election. Now THAT kid is a senior this year.

Really makes you think.