The Gavin Newsom Rule: Never delegitimize your own election.
Gavin Newsom is supposed to be a smart guy. He sure sounds like one to me. If you read this eye-opening Atlantic profile, you see a California governor who’s thoughtful, caring, and keenly aware of his place in the world. Yet he shows no evidence of comprehending the single biggest outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and he might lose his job and take America with him because of it.
Make no mistake, the California recall is the Maginot Line for democracy. If Newsom is thrown out, every Democratic governor will face this same sort of populist trickery designed to overthrow the will of the people. They’ll say it worked in California, which Newsom calls “America’s coming attraction.” If this script can play in Hollywood, it can play anywhere. If it does, it’s because Newsom ignored how Donald Trump lost the presidency.
Trump wants you to believe he was dealt a losing hand in 2020. To hear him tell it, he was the most popular president ever doing the best job ever. (These are lies.) But then COVID-19 just showed up unexpectedly and killed the economy without him doing anything wrong. (These are also lies.) He would have won by a massive margin over anyone had the world not dealt him those terrible cards, he says.
Here’s the truth: Trump dealt himself a losing hand. In July 2020, when asked by Chris Wallace of Fox News if he would accept the outcome of the election, Trump said, “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.” From that point on, Trump made it clear that his strategy was to tell people the election was rigged before a single vote was cast. He even went so far as to tell people to only vote in person, because mail-in balloting was supposedly fraudulent. He did this in a pandemic. And he lost the presidency and the Senate. Republicans were lucky to win anything.
The election was not rigged. It might not have had the most favorable rules for Trump. But the rules are the rules. The time to fight over the rules is before the election is underway. Once it’s set, you accept the rules or you get out. Trump’s efforts to delegitimize his own election in advance were about the most obviously self-destructive strategy I’ve ever seen in politics. He guaranteed November 7 and December 14 and January 6 with his own actions. It was an unprecedented self-own.
But the California Democrats are coming close to that.
Newsom has faced a half-dozen recall attempts in his partial term, so you can forgive him for not seeing this tsunami coming. One outing to the French Laundry and 12% (!) of California voters asking for a recall later, he’s in a margin-for-error race for his political life. Due to the quirky (read: insane) way California conducts recall elections, Newsom might win 49 percent of the vote and lose to a challenger who gets 17 percent of the vote.
In case your eyes are Roger-Rabbiting at the last sentence, here’s how the election works: There are two questions on the ballot. The first asks if Newsom should remain governor. If he gets 50%+1 votes, question two is irrelevant. But if he doesn’t, question two kicks in. It asks who should replace Newsom. There are 46 names on that ballot, and “Gavin Newsom” isn’t one of them. Even if 80% of Californians write in his name, he can’t win question two. Only someone on the question two ballot can. None of those 46 candidates looks to get more than 20% of the vote. But someone (probably Ron DeSantis clone Larry Elder) will get a plurality. They will become governor in October if Newsom doesn’t get a majority on question one.
Faced with that outcome, Newsom and the California Democrats could have taken the recall seriously from the jump. The lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, had an opportunity to list herself on the ballot when she scheduled the recall for September 14. She did not. She made it clear she supported Newsom and that she believed that the recall was a duplicitous Republican effort to overturn the election.
Which it was! And whining about it does no good at all. The rules are the rules. Republicans played by the rules and now they’re in the game.
Not just Kounalakis, though. No California representative put in their name. No well known Democratic actor or musician or writer. None of California’s great activists thought this was their moment. The California Democratic Party painted running as an act of treason against the party, and everyone bought into it. In fact, they encouraged Democrats to leave question two blank. That is the functional equivalent of telling them to stay home.
In poker, we call cards that allow you to win the hand outs. You want as many outs as you can have. Let’s say you’re playing seven card stud (two cards facedown, four faceup, one facedown, and make the best five-card hand). Each player has been dealt six cards. Your opponent shows four faceup 7s. That’s a monster hand, and everyone else folds. You, however, have three faceup kings of hearts, clubs, and diamonds and a faceup 8 of spades. The card your opponent thinks you are hoping to draw is the king of spades, which will give you a winning four kings. That’s one out.
If your facedown cards are the 8s of hearts and clubs, though, you have another out: the 8 of diamonds. That’d get you a winning four 8s. Since two of your 8s are facedown, your opponent doesn’t know you have doubled your chances of winning. Unlike in baseball, in poker two outs is better than one.
California Democrats believe that in 2003, having Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante on the question two ballot helped Gov. Gray Davis lose question one. Which it might’ve. But you know what helped more? Having Arnold Schwarzenegger on the ballot. The incredibly popular Republican actor would’ve stomped the weak-spined Davis in a real election. If you wanted a Democrat to win, you needed a candidate that could beat the best the Republicans had to offer.
This time, any Democrat at all could beat the best the GOP has to offer. Larry Elder is a talk show host, and not even a very good one. The top Democrat is a 29-year-old YouTube shill named … I forget, really. You put Katie Porter or Ted Lieu or Katie Hill or anyone of any consequence on there, you win question two in a landslide. You keep the governor’s mansion for the Democrats either way.
Screw Gavin Newsom. What matters is COVID policy and abortion rights and voting access and everything else that’s on the ballot. What matters is the ability to replace 88-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein if she can no longer serve. What matters is not Gavin Newsom, but the things Gavin Newsom believes. The things you believe. You get those things if you win. You lose them if you lose. The way to win is to have as many outs as possible. By not running a candidate in question two, the California Democratic Party has cut its outs in half. That’s not playing to win.
Texas is shining its star right at you, California. It blocked voting access and won the right to ban abortion in the same day, among 666 laws (say, that’s quite a number) that took effect yesterday. You can be Texas if you want, California Democrats. If Newsom doesn’t hold, all you have to do is leave question two blank.
When you’re in an election, you want all the votes possible for your side and as few as possible for the other side. If you delegitimize the election for your own people when the other side is fired up, you will lose. Trump made that unshakably clear. Yet California Democrats didn’t notice.
The rules are the rules. You might not like them. No one cares whether you like them. When you are on the ballot, you muscle up and say, “We’re aiming to win this thing with everything we’ve got.” Newsom never did that. Instead, he treated it as a test of his allies’ loyalty to him. So, he’ll have that if October comes and he’s looking at the governor’s mansion from the outside.
Now he knows he’s in trouble, and is changing his tune with the ballots in people’s houses. His political future depends on them sending them in. I have no idea if that will happen. Californians got stimulus checks yesterday, and Newsom got some encouraging polls this week. Could be good news for America. My gut says Democrats need to lead polls by a lot to win, and he’s within the margin of error, so shrug? In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1, it should not be close. It’s real close.
I write this not to save California, because that ship will sail (or not) depending on what Newsom does and says in the next couple weeks. I write it because if the recall succeeds, it will happen in every state in the union that has a Democratic governor. I want Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and all the rest to read this and know where the California Democrats went wrong. If they lose.
The rules are the rules. Play to win or let someone else play the game.
This is the 70th installment of a series on politics and game theory. It has covered impeachment of Trump, Russian collusion, white supremacy, abortion, guns, nuclear war, debt, Colin Kaepernick, sexual harassment, the Mueller probe, taxes, Trump’s first year, the Clinton Foundation, immigration, parades, the Democrats, hope, family separation, trade wars, the midterms, the Times op-ed, Justice Kavanaugh, Speaker Pelosi, lame ducks, the GOP legacy, the stock market, the Democratic field, shutdowns, third parties, the Virginia scandals, in-party impeachment, the Trump mafia, college admissions, William Barr, Brexit, Iran, the Mueller Report, Joe Biden, Oregon’s standoff, the environment, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s lies, Pelosi’s strategy, the impeachment inquiry, political outsiders, Rudy Giuliani, the Berlin wall, protest art, Boris Johnson, religion, engagement, Bernie Sanders, progressive unity, the Democratic nominee, the pandemic, unemployment, rioting, the Klan, the Confederacy, the GOP 2020 strategy, Biden’s strategy, the wildfire crisis, civil war, Kamala Harris, Trump’s COVID diagnosis, Biden’s case, Native Americans, the insurrection, and Blizzard. Most of these appear in my new edition of my book Game Theory in the Age of Chaos, which you can order from our store.
