California Recall election

Oct 1 16:31 UTC 2003

If the latest polls are to be believed, it looks like Gray Davis's days as
governor of California may be numbered.  The latest Los Angles Times poll
puts the numbers at 56% yes (to recall) and 42% no (don't recall), and in
the recall race has Arnold beating Bustamante 40 to 32%.  So Arnold could
be the next governor of the largest state in the country.

There are a lot of factors which could affect the outcome though.  One of
which is the large number of absentee ballots that have already been sent
in.  Arnold did well in the debate last week and is getting a big surge,
but that won't help with those who may have already voted "no" by
absentee.

I'm betting that it will end up being really close.  It still doesn't seem
fair to Davis that essentially for him to stay in office, he must get 50%
on the yes/no question, but Arnold or Bustamante can get elected with a
simple majority (even if its less than ten percent)  So Davis might in
fact have more support statewide than Arnold-- were they meeting in a head
to head contest where the person with the most votes wins Davis might win.
But here Davis has to meet a much higher threshold.  49% of the state's
voters might support him, but he has to get 50%.  I think California's
recall system needs overhauling.
y

response 2 of 130:

Oct 1 17:02 UTC 2003

If Arnold pulls a plurality of 40%, he'll have a claim to legitimacy as 
good as Clinton's.   The California recall system is kind of wacky; 
a winning percentage in the 40s is about what you can expect if you have 
more than two competitive candidates and no runoff system.
 
But I don't know what Arnold will be able to accomplish.  The twisted
California rules will still allow the GOP minority to block tax 
increases with only 1/3rd of the legislative seats, while the Democratic
majority will have zero incentive to cooperate with Arnold in
destroying social service spending.  

response 4 of 130:

Oct 1 18:12 UTC 2003

I read a quote from Gray Davis saying the Democratic leadership has 
already promised another recall in retaliation if this one succeeds.  
If they do, I wonder when it will occur?  Will they start the process 
of filing it immediately, or wait a year, or wait until after the next 
election that they don't win?

I don't think anyone can govern effectively in California after this 
recall election.  I'm still hoping the recall fails, because it looks 
to me the turmoil which would follow a successful recall is even more 
unbearable than the current situation.  It might well never end.

response 6 of 130:

Oct 1 18:53 UTC 2003

if Davis gets 49% on the recall question, and is recalled, and Arnold wins
the recall ballot with 35%, then who has more support?  Davis could be the
candidate with the most support, but he has this higher threshold so he could
lose.  I think Davis should have, as he had requested, been allowed to have
his name on the recall ballot as well.  It is theoretically possible that he
could lose the yes/no recall question, but would still have won the recal
ballot race.  As it is, Davis's supporters are screwed, they have a candidate
who has a much higher hurdle to get over than any other candidate.  How is
that fair?

response 8 of 130:

Oct 1 21:45 UTC 2003

(...followed by Texas [where everything's bigger]...)

response 10 of 130:

Oct 2 06:51 UTC 2003

of 31 recall attemts, a single one has goten this far. as for another
immediate ah-nold recall, fuggetaboutit - it's a pipe dream.

response 12 of 130:

Oct 2 17:26 UTC 2003

Hey, with a little bit of organization, Californians could combine the 
recall and replacement elections of Davis and Schwarzenegger!

response 18 of 130:

Oct 2 19:37 UTC 2003

  re #15: 
  > Given what the economy did, could he have done any better?

  He didn't have to base California's budget on the clearly unrealistic
  growth projections of the dotcom boom years and he badly, badly screwed
  up trying to end the Californa "power crisis" a few years ago.

  The fact that a lot of other governors got into similar crunches by
  basing revenue expectation on wildly overoptimistic projections doesn't
  make it any more excusable in my opinion.  The fact that energy producers
  and traders may have been trying to game the system in California's
  strangely deregulated energy market made Davis's position difficult
  but even above and beyond that difficulty he managed to achieve a 
  spectacularly bad "solution" that combined the worst of both worlds.

response 20 of 130:

Oct 3 00:46 UTC 2003

I think any recall begun before the man took office would be thrown out in
court.  How can you try to throw him out of an office he has not yet held?

response 22 of 130:

Oct 3 04:11 UTC 2003

heh-heh, yeh, they even tried davis again last november - silly ppl

response 24 of 130:

Oct 3 07:07 UTC 2003

The Davis campaign was running commercials with a collage of pictures of
recall candidates in the background, and arguing that if Davis were recalled,
one of those candidates could win with "as little as 15% of the vote."  It
wasn't at all clear to me where they got the 15% number.  As others have
pointed out here, the theoretical minimum with well over 100 candidates was
a lot lower than that, and as a practical matter, given that the two major
parties were each lining up behind single candidates, the actual winner was
going to get a lot more than that.  The 15% number had the appearance of being
completely made up.  Furthermore, Davis has until very recently been
campaigning against a group including Larry Flynt ("and even a porn king"),
rather than against Schwarzenegger.  The whole recall defense movement hasn't
seemed very credible.

I'm becoming generally disgusted with the campaign skills of the California
Democrats this time around.  It seems obvious to me that in such a non-level
playing field situation, the obvious strategy would be to try to get everybody
who was voting no on the recall to also vote for a good backup candidate, but
that strategy appaears to have ripped apart the Democratic leadership, such
that Gray Davis has now gone back to not acknowledgeing the candidacy of the
Democratic replacement candidate, Cruz Bustamonte, and the Davis Campaign has
been urging Bustamonte to drop out of the race.  Perhaps it doesn't matter.
Schwarzenegger is starting to look like he might get more votes than Davis.

Meanwhile, the other big thing on the ballot is Proposition 54, which bans
the state and local governments from collecting racial statistics.  The
obvious argument against this seems to me to be that the very idea of the
proposal is flawed.  Rather than preventing discrimination, it makes it
impossible to tell if discriminatino is occurring.  Instead, the campaign
against it seems to have concluded that such an explanation is too complicated
for the voters, and is instead running with a rather contrived seeming
argument that such a regulation would impair medical research.  A more recent
set of ads, which are turning into a big fundraising scandal, features Cruz
Bustamonte speaking agianst Proposition 54.  At least, he appears to be
speaking against it, but the Bustamonte speech in the commercial is being
entirely drowned out by cheering, a cheering crowd seemingly oblivious to
what's being said.  Of course, these are really creatively funded Bustamonte
campaign commercials, not anti-Proposition 54 commercials, but the idea
appears to be that if we see images of large crowds erupting in non-stop
cheering at the site of Bustamonte, maybe we'll conclude that he's a fat
balding middle-aged star or sensation, rather than a not all that telegenic
politician.

I haven't actually met anybody who will admit to planning to vote for
Schwarzenegger, but maybe my part of the state is weird that way.

Meanwhile, the Schwarzenegger scandals continue.  During the only debate he's
taken part in, Arianna Huffington accused him of disrespecting women, and he
responded by offering to stuff her head in a toilet.  His popularity went up.
Today he apologized for his bad judgement in groping or trying to pull the
clothes off six different women, all of whom were working for him, on several
different occasions.  His popularity went up, with people saying they were
impressed by the apology.  He's still refusing to answer questions about how
he'll fix the state's problems, other than saying that he'll fix them, and
his popularity is going up with people saying they're impressed that he's not
letting the media push him around.  I don't get it.