This morning, California wakes up to find Gavin Newsome will remain their governor, according to the projections from the major media outlets.
But at one point, the polling was very tight. Newsom was barely hanging on and looked very beatable. Why did the polling shift?
In short, it was Larry Elder’s inability to run a proper campaign.
There are three things you should be able to do when running for office. The first thing you should do when running for office: Run for the right reasons and make the race about what you can do for the voters and for the state.
There’s a collection of essays from a Chinese military leader called Mastering the Art of War, where the leader spends a great deal of time writing about leadership. This line from the early essays is very relevant to the California recall.
Confusius said that an enlightened ruler does not worry about people not knowing him, he worries about not knowing people.
Elder’s mistake in this election was to be focused on the audience knowing him rather than knowing what he was for. He basked in the media limelight, positive or (more often than not) negative. He was fine with it all because he didn’t see a problem with shifting the focus. He thought the race was about him.
The second, as Erick Erickson explained this morning, is to stay on message. In order to be successful in taking down an incumbent, you need to first lay out why your opponent is unfit for the job. Larry Elder allowed the shift in the narrative to focus on him rather than on Newsom’s policies.
When the issues come up and the media asks the candidates what they stand for or what they'll do differently, again, they make the indictment on Newsom. "Gavin Newsom kept people locked up at home while he was out at restaurants. He made your kids mask up while his kids didn't. He treated the elite of California differently from the rest of California. I won't do that."
By allowing the media to steer it to a Newsom v. Particular Candidate, the media was able to shape the contrasts. Again, if you're not in campaigns, you think that is inevitably going to happen. But smart campaigns know how to deflect back on message. The Elder campaign couldn’t help but ride the conservative free media wave. Newsom made sure his voters knew it. Newsom made sure his voters knew Elder would go on Fox, but bypass mainstream California news outlets.
The last thing is to know who your voters are. In the state of California, your voters are people who are not necessarily the most conservative, but people who are tired of the overbearing state government led by Newsom that has negatively impacted them while he has been unencumbered by his own mandates.
The polling showed that when the race was about Newsom, he was at risk of losing. When the race became about Elder, and really when Donald Trump was added to the mix, it shifted back to Newsom because it was no longer about his policies. The voters did not want to be involved with someone who was going to be Trump-like in any way.
Larry Elder was far more concerned with the voters knowing him and who he was and how he and Trump were tight. He did not understand how to stay on message, know his voters, and why he was running.
As a result, the Republicans were not able to keep Democrats on their side. They were afraid of their own local Trump rather than the horrendous governance of Gavin Newsom, and it led to Newsom keeping control of the state.
Now, in the long run, this may actually hurt Democrats if they misread their win here. But Elder absolutely crushed the Republicans’ chances to win in the first place. His behavior toward the end of the race allowed the media to draw a direct line between him and Trump. He made the race not about recalling Gavin Newsom. He made it “The Larry Elder Show Runs For Governor,” thinking that all the media coverage he was getting was good because in the radio business (which is where Elder gained his fame before running in this race), the more people listen to you whether they like you or not, the better you’re doing.
But that doesn’t work in electoral politics. It is exactly what made Trump misread his victory in 2016 and why he lost in 2020. No clear message at all. Just looking for the spotlight and fighting whatever battles came your way because the voters just want a fighter.
Except that is not at all what they were looking for. They wanted a reprieve from Newsom. Their option, thanks to the media and Elder’s embrace of the media’s framing, was to get exactly what the country voted against in 2020. That hasn’t and won’t work, especially in a state like California, which is nowhere close to a Republican stronghold, much less a far-right one.
The Republicans did have a chance. A slim one, but a chance nonetheless. Larry Elder screwed them on that chance.