Hurt by Lockdowns, California’s Small Businesses Push to Recall Newsom

It doesn't help that their behavior leads to the public asking "what do they know that I don't?" or to wanton disregard in general.

Clandestine salon visits, maskless restaurant gatherings, trips to Cancun during a statewide crisis, calling your broker after an intelligence briefing, public ridicule of scientific experts, and more. All of these set very poor examples for the majority of citizens who are being asked to endure extremely difficult circumstances for months at a time.

Not just COVID has sunk his career, I think the extreme social shift leftward of the American left has also become a liability for many formerly stable Democratic politicians.

Gray Davis thought he was on a similar path to the presidency before he was recalled as well.

I stayed in southern California the first few months of Covid and Newsom took every opportunity to get on camera, and almost never did he say anything that needed to be said by him, it was all fluff, and what wasn't fluff was rambling of what should have been two sentences turned into what felt like an hour of him talking. I think he may have failed even without covid.

The rules for the replacement election (FPTP with no primary, held on the same ballot as the yes/no on the recall) are particularly perverse and chaotic, and are both the main reason we don’t see more recalls with how easy they are (because even if you know you can recall the target, the replacement selection process is both poorly representative and unpredictable even with a solid knowledge of popular preferences) and the main motivation for factions that are convinced they can't compete in regular elections to seek them.

> Those 1,495,709 signatures aren't cheap.

20 years ago I remember valid signatures on California recall or ballot petitions were pretty consistently about $1/signature in signature gathering expenditures; even if that's gone up since then, it's not that expensive, especially considering the potential impact.

Okay so the 50 cent words made people mad so here let's do this again:

Seems like people who are their own boss are not happy with the current political situation; a deep fear that they'd have to give up their business and become a regular worker.