How Gavin Newsom Landed in a California Jam

SACRAMENTO — For all the controversies and Covid-19 crises that now have Gov. Gavin Newsom of California facing a historic recall election, it was a pair of prosaic events on Nov. 6 — a court hearing and a dinner — that led to the current political instability that will grip the state for months to come.

That Friday morning, a Sacramento Superior Court judge gave a small cadre of conservative Republicans four additional months to gather signatures for a petition to recall Mr. Newsom. The state felt the governor had such a compelling case that its lawyers did not even show up for oral arguments against the recall proponents, who said Mr. Newsom’s pandemic restrictions had “severely inhibited” their ability to collect the nearly 1.5 million signatures required.

Then, that night, Mr. Newsom and his wife celebrated the birthday of Jason Kinney, a Sacramento lobbyist and longtime friend and adviser. The governor had recently urged residents to stay home amid fears of a holiday-season virus outbreak — but there he was in Napa Valley, schmoozing maskless at the French Laundry restaurant. Photographs of him mingling set off a fury up and down the state.

Within a month, a recall effort that had only managed to acquire roughly 4 percent of the necessary signatures was suddenly soaring, as major Republican donors sent money and the petition gained nearly 500,000 signatures.

With Monday’s announcement that the recall has officially qualified for the ballot, California finds itself plunged into a political reversal-of-fortune scenario: A fading Republican Party that has not won a statewide election in 15 years is mounting a real challenge to a high-profile Democratic leader, in only the second recall election of a California governor in more than 80 years of attempts.

The recall effort has revealed that even a one-party stronghold like California can be rocked by the nation’s political polarization, as health emergencies and lockdown policies disrupt and divide a jittery public. It has also brought into relief the conservative vein that threads through the state, from the rural Far North, through the Sierra foothills, down the Central Valley and into the tile-roof-and-cinder-block tracts of the struggling Southern California exurbs.

“The whole social reality is disturbing to a lot of people,” said Jerry Brown, the former four-term governor of California, who said the recall effort also reflected anger at political leaders across the country. “The destruction of so many businesses — there’s an acceleration of instability and therefore in the confidence that millions of people have in their future. That’s then a breeding ground for hostilities. That certainly makes scapegoats very attractive.”

The political targeting of Mr. Newsom comes as public schools have yet to fully reopen, leaving many children at home and many parents aggravated. Public school enrollment has dropped by more than 160,000 students, while the state has lost roughly 1.5 million jobs and unemployment remains at 8.3 percent, one of the highest rates in the country.

“There’s a lot of frustration and rising anger on a variety of issues — jobs are leaving, homelessness is rising, so many parents across the state are furious,” said Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego and a Republican candidate for governor, who has made the slow reopening of public schools a central theme of his case against Mr. Newsom. “I strongly believe that voters are looking for someone with common sense.”

As a political force, Mr. Newsom has always been more inevitable than loved, a rich San Franciscan who has steadily climbed from political office to office and enjoyed long ties to Mr. Brown and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one in California, and Mr. Newsom easily won the open governor’s seat in 2018.

Democrats still have a narrow window to block the recall, by convincing enough voters who signed the petition to withdraw their support, but even Mr. Newsom’s aides have called that outcome unlikely. The Legislature’s joint budget committee will also have to sign off on a California Department of Finance report on the cost of the special election, which Mr. Newsom’s supporters estimate could be $100 million or more.

If those hurdles are cleared, as is widely expected, the recall would present Mr. Newsom with more political challenges and scrutiny than he has ever faced. Over the winter, the recall supporters were already capitalizing on his every move.

As schoolchildren struggled with online instruction, the supporters accused Mr. Newsom of coddling teachers’ unions. As small businesses withered, they pointed to Mr. Newsom’s success as a wine merchant. When Mr. Newsom implied that his own children were being schooled virtually and it turned out that their private school had actually resumed in-person classes, his critics heckled his daily livestreams, accusing him online of French Laundry-style elitism.

Nor was he helped by a wave of fraud in the state’s pandemic unemployment insurance program in which death row inmates and international identity theft rings stole an estimated $11 billion to $30 billion. Or by a string of high-profile political vacancies that forced him to choose appointees from his own party’s competing political factions.

The recall effort needed only to tap a portion of the six million Californians who voted to re-elect Donald J. Trump — more Trump voters than even in Texas — to meet the signature qualifications. But actually recalling Mr. Newsom will prove far harder.

If the blue line of the Democratic Party holds for the governor, the pro-Trump Republican base would be easily outnumbered, and Mr. Newsom has been able to keep Democratic rivals off the recall ballot. The ultimate test would be turning out his voters, which would require not only the help but also the enthusiasm of critical constituencies such as organized labor.

Polls show a solid majority of support for Mr. Newsom, though some surveys indicate his standing may be soft among Latino voters. And some policies, such as a recent vow to gradually ban new fracking permits, have already put him on a collision course with unions that view the state’s fossil fuel industry through the lens of the higher-paying jobs it offers.

“California’s politics are far left, but the state is predominantly blue-collar,” said Erin Lehane, a Sacramento political consultant who works with unions. “Those working families — those essential workers who have been out there this whole crazy year — will decide the vote in this recall.”

Recall attempts are a political pastime in California, which, as a result of Progressive Era reforms passed in 1911, has some of the nation’s most generous rules for removing public officials from office. But initiatives to recall governors rarely manage to gather the support needed to make it onto a ballot.

California is enormous, with a population of nearly 40 million, and the funds and effort required to campaign statewide tend to thwart all but the most moneyed and determined critics. Only one other California governor, Gray Davis, has ever faced a recall election, which he lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. That initiative struggled until Representative Darrell Issa, who had hoped to replace Mr. Davis, donated $2 million to the campaign.

Mr. Newsom was a target almost from the moment of his election. Three groups had made five recall attempts against him by the time his critics began the current campaign. Their initial complaints were ideological. The lead proponent of this recall bid, a retired Republican sheriff’s sergeant named Orrin Heatlie, took issue with the governor’s policies on the death penalty and immigration.

For a recall to qualify for the ballot, critics needed to gather valid signatures from 12 percent of the voters in the last election for governor. None of the petitions against Mr. Newsom came remotely close to that threshold until Judge James P. Arguelles — at that pivotal November hearing in Sacramento Superior Court — gave Mr. Heatlie and his California Patriot Coalition an extra four months to pass petitions.

“This was the sixth recall attempt,” said Nathan Click, a former spokesman for the governor who is now helping run the campaign to defend him. “Elections are about money and time. They would not have raised the money to get the signatures they did if the judge hadn’t given them that extension. Without the time piece of this, there’s no recall.”

As the recall has become nightly grist on talk radio and conservative cable news shows, Mr. Newsom has gone on the offensive, guided by the veteran Democratic strategist Ace Smith, who has handled past campaigns for Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Brown.

In March, Mr. Newsom delivered his State of the State address, a usually bland affair, with an empty Dodger Stadium as his backdrop, blasting the recall effort as a power grab by right-wing extremists trying to game the political system. And he has been touting his own successes. A shelter-in-place order issued early in the pandemic initially kept case rates remarkably low, and a program that leveraged federal money to provide quarantine space in motels for homeless people now offers thousands of Californians permanent supportive housing.

Helped by a Democratic White House and a multibillion-dollar state surplus — a result of the state’s heavy reliance on the kind of high-income earners whose jobs were generally untouched by the pandemic — he has dispensed state coronavirus relief worth $7.6 billion, rolled out more than 29 million vaccine doses and recalibrated health guidelines to prod teachers back into classrooms.

“Governor Newsom thinks time is his best friend,” said Joe Rodota, who worked as an aide to the former Republican governors Pete Wilson and Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Already, the state is recovering, as are Mr. Newsom’s approval ratings. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that about 56 percent of likely voters in the state do not support the recall. Unemployment, while high, has fallen steadily, Disneyland is set to reopen on Friday and the rate of new coronavirus cases in California is among the nation’s lowest.

Meanwhile, his allies, including those in the Biden administration, have managed to keep Democrats in line — a feat that Mr. Davis was unable to pull off. Some influential Republicans, too, are remaining on the sideline. Mr. Schwarzenegger has said he will remain neutral.

“We have 40 million people in this state,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said last week in an interview. “I think they’re smart enough to figure out which direction to go. And how far they want to go — is this just going to be a threat? ‘Get your act together and we’re going to back off?’”

If so, he added, the recall proponents “were, in a way, very successful — because he definitely got more engaged in the last few months.”