I know a lot of you think this recall is pretty strange. But you don’t have to go far to find a recall that’s even stranger.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spent the past couple years demanding a recall election. What makes his demand strange, and potentially historic, is the identity of the politician he wants to ask voters to remove: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

When I first heard about López Obrador’s self-recall, I laughed. Then I asked myself: What constitutes a victory when you seek to recall yourself? Are you a winner when your self-recall succeeds and you are forced out? Or are you a winner when the people vote down your recall because they insist you remain in office?

That’s when it hit me: A self-recall is the ultimate win-win (which is why the Mexican president’s political opponents want to deny him a vote that might make himself look selfless and democratic). So why didn’t I—or at least my expensive team of political consultants—think of this self-recall thing first?

In retrospect, my biggest campaign mistake may have been resisting the recall so forcefully. By calling it a massive threat to California, I tapped into fear, not hope. I made the recall seem bigger, and that made it more real. And I made it about me—a big mistake, because I’m not always an easy guy to like.

Instead, I should have welcomed the recall, and what it says about the struggles of this state and its people.

Of course, I would have had to point out that the recall petition’s sponsors were weird Trumpers who hate my policies of supporting immigrants, the poor, and people caught up in the criminal justice system.

But I should have emphasized that I’m a huge believer in democracy and the right of the people to choose their own leaders.

I also realize that this isn’t the governorship I promised you, or that you voted for. It’s certainly not the governorship I imagined.

The pandemic, and the escalating crises in California, from homelessness to fire, are huge. They’re causing people an unprecedented level of pain. More than 65,000 Californians are dead of COVID. School closures have done long-term damage to our children. Businesses and jobs have been lost. Whole towns, plus thousands of homes and other buildings, have been reduced to ashes.

I’ve done my best to respond in big, creative ways. I’m proud of most of what I’ve done, and when I’ve screwed up, I’ve tried to fix my mistakes. But I understand if others feel new leadership is required. My fellow Californians are my boss, and have the right to make a change. So, I welcome the recall vote and the public’s verdict on whether I’m the guy you want to move the state forward.

Honestly, if I had to do it again, I would have embraced the recall right after the French Laundry news broke. Perhaps that would have robbed it of the momentum it needed to qualify for the ballot, or to make the campaign as close as it’s been.

Perhaps it would have been enough if I had said: I take the blame for all the state’s problems. Now let’s focus on solving them. Instead, I’ve added to the political conflict that is making it so hard to convince people across the spectrum to come together to address all the crises we face.

It’s been a mistake to respond to the recall primarily by attacking the motives of those who support it. The more than 1.5 million Californians who signed petitions are not all Trumpers acting in bad faith. They are our neighbors, and we need them now—as partners in ending the pandemic.

I also regret discouraging any of my fellow Democrats from running to succeed me. I love California, and this state’s success means more to me than my own career, which is why I should have recruited a candidate of my own to run as my replacement. I should have given my supporters a clear choice on the second question on the ballot, and that should have been the person I would most trust to lead this state, if the majority of voters no longer want me doing the job.

My messaging—around the recall and the contest to replace me—has helped poison this election, making it more challenging to achieve the higher turnout I need to keep the governorship. When you tell people an election is an illegitimate trick, it’s harder to get them to vote in it.

Let me close with one argument for voting no, and keeping me in office, that you probably haven’t heard. But it’s the one that touches my own lived reality.

The truth is that my own personal life will be better if I get recalled. I could give up the endless headaches of dealing with California’s many crises, and go back to my fabulous home and loving family (who will no longer get criticized for their every masked or unmasked move). I’ll have no shortage of opportunities to make even more money in various business ventures across this state. If I am recalled by a tiny margin, and my replacement is ineffective and unpopular, I could attempt a political comeback—perhaps even in next year’s gubernatorial election.

I understand that many of you want to punish me. So, if that’s your goal, recalling me isn’t the best way to do it. The harshest punishment you could give me would be to keep me in this crazy job, and to force me to keep governing an ungovernable state and to keep presiding over a California apocalypse that never ends.

The post I Should Have Recalled Myself! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Republicans who want to remove Gavin Newsom from office say the governor and his party have ruined California. The Democrats who defend the governor claim that Republicans are determined to seize control of California, so they can reverse its Democratic policies and transform it into a Trumpian nightmare. #KeepCaliforniaBlue is their war cry.

But these pro- and anti-recall messages fundamentally mislead, because they ignore the peculiar and poorly understood reality: Our state is both blue and red. California governance is a thoroughly bipartisan affair … with one important caveat. Our state today is governed both by living Democrats and dead Republicans.

Those living Democrats you know; they occupy most state offices, elected and appointed. But they don’t govern with a free hand. They labor under a complicated and often dysfunctional governing system constructed over more than a century of Republican rule.

Almost every significant feature of our state—from the agencies that regulate us to the formulas that dictate our local government services, our budgets, and our taxes—were created by Republican officials and voters who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Given the constant talk about California being the bluest of blue states, people can be forgiven for not knowing that this state is a Republican project. California and the GOP were launched by the same man, John C. Fremont, at roughly the same time. The Republican Leland Stanford linked California to the country by the railroad and established the private university that educates an outsized portion of our governing elites.

Our complicated system of powerful and independent commissions and agencies was produced by progressive Republicans in the early 20th century, and expanded upon by Republicans from Earl Warren to George Deukmejian. As governor, Ronald Reagan, with a boost from President Richard Nixon, established our regime of environmental regulation. Reagan, with his presidential amnesty, also set the template for today’s more welcoming California immigration regime.

But those are just the things that dead Republicans might brag about, if they were around to brag. There’s bad stuff, too. The housing policies that drive homelessness, the systems that can’t pay unemployment, our faltering and incendiary electricity system, and the Prop 13 tax system that distorts democracy and public investment in today’s California are all poorly constructed Republican inventions. They’re also currently being poorly managed by Democrats. But, to be fair to the living, it’s not easy to run a system when you need to hold a séance to communicate with its creators.

The recall is itself a product of this bipartisan collaboration across the River Styx. The recall is a tool of our system of direct democracy, first advanced by the Republican governor Hiram Johnson in 1911, and used aggressively ever since by the GOP. And Newsom’s use of California’s nearly dictatorial gubernatorial authority in emergencies—which has fueled the recall backlash—is the result of efforts by generations of Republican governors, most recently Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to enhance the power of the office.

The resulting ironies run deep, all the way to the molten core of the recall. The Republican candidates are calling California a failure, even though the state is mostly of their own making. And Democrats are defending a California governing system as their progressive model, even if it isn’t theirs, or particularly progressive.

If you internalize these ironies, you’ll understand that it may not matter much whether the recall succeeds or not. And that’s not just because any Republican who takes the governor’s office this fall is all but certain to be replaced by a Democrat in the fall 2022 elections.

(The recall’s one great potential impact would come in Washington, D.C. If 88-year-old U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein—whose outdated political positions often seem to occupy the netherworld between living and dead—should die during a short Republican governorship, her replacement would flip the 50-50 U.S. Senate to the GOP.)

The recall is a paradox: a contest to rule a state that no one person or party can rule. Whatever the result, living Democrats will still dominate public office in California—they hold three-quarters supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, as well as every other significant arm of state power. And the dysfunctional governing system, willed to us by dead Republicans, will remain firmly in place.

What really needs to be recalled is not one politician, but that system. Perhaps this recall will inspire Democrats, finally, to stop accepting governance by ghosts and to join with independents and some Republicans in creating what California desperately needs: a new, modern state constitution that gives democratic power to us, the living.

The post Does the Recall Matter if Republicans Already Run California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Consider the paradox, if you will, of this moment of democratic triumph, which is also a moment of democratic defeat.

It has never been easier to vote in California than it is right now.

And it has never been harder to figure out what to vote for.

In one sense, the March elections in California represent the culmination of several years of herculean efforts to extend Californians’ voting rights. Not long ago, California had one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country; in 2014, our June election saw record low turnout. But state officials, county election registrars, and non-profits have managed to reverse that trend.

Their main strategy was to make voting more convenient. So you can now register to vote online. You also can register to vote at any time, including on election day itself. And under a new law, you can change your party registration whenever you want as well. If you have questions about any of this, you can get answers not just in English and Spanish and Chinese—those are easy—but in seven other languages, including Khmer.

Today you no longer have to get out and find the one particular precinct that will accept your vote; this year, in 15 counties, you can go to any of hundreds of vote centers. The centers are open for several days before election day—including on weekends, when most people don’t have to work.

If you don’t feel like going out, California has embraced voting by mail. That allows you to have a party with your friends, sit with your spouse, or enjoy a margarita by the pool as you fill out your ballot. Heck, you can vote on any mountain, in any valley, or on any beach in this big and beautiful state! Doing your civic duty has never been more glorious.

In many counties, you don’t even have to request a mail ballot—they automatically send you one. And you no longer have to get your mail ballot in ahead of time. Just have it postmarked by election day, or turn it in at a vote center, and it will be counted.

If you’re a Californian, be proud of all this. At a time when the rest of the country and world are having doubts about democracy, California has become a bastion of greater participation. More Californians—beyond 20 million—are registered to vote than ever before. And turnout has been up, especially among non-whites and the young.

Is this a great democratic state or what?

The answer to that question, unfortunately, is: Or what.

After decades of failures and missed opportunities, this California election represents yet another defeat for democracy.

All that new infrastructure to get people to vote has not been accompanied by infrastructure to help people inform themselves about how they vote. To the contrary, people are more misinformed than ever.

California newspapers, which once were the primary independent sources for news and context to inform voters, are in decline or gone. Most election races on the ballot don’t get covered at all. Most ballot measures are also ignored—even though such measures are getting longer (routinely more than 5,000 words) and more complicated. At the local level, candidates don’t even have their parties listed on the ballot, so we voters don’t even have partisan cues. Voting in this realm is pure guesswork.

With more candidates and measures, ballots have grown in size and confusion. The state’s Official Voter Information Guide doesn’t cover all the races on the ballot, and it sometimes has significant omissions. This March, for example, the text of Prop 13, which is a school bond (and not the famous 1978 tax initiative), omits perhaps the biggest risk associated with the measure: that its passage would lift local school debt limits, when many school districts are already at risk of insolvency.

When voters do get information, it’s often from social media, which means it may be full of hatred, errors or deliberate misinformation. And in contrast to all the efforts to get us voting, very little has been put into helping us sort through the nonsense. Our informational infrastructure is so weak that most Californians don’t even know all the ways that voting has been improved. In the 15 counties with new, highly convenient voting centers, a poll showed that more than 60 percent of voters don’t know about the changes.

Why? Our state government and our media have failed to explain, accurately and memorably, how our elections have changed. And the state and media don’t bother to get very basic things right—like the very name of the elections themselves.

Ten years ago, California eliminated primary elections for state offices. To replace primaries, voters approved what’s called a “top two” system, where the first-round election is actually a general election, when candidates from all parties appear on the ballot and voters have the most choice. The second round is a run-off for the top two finishers in the general election. Once you understand the logic of the “top two,” it’s clear that the more important election is the first one, when voters have lots of choices, rather than the second.

Still, the state and elite media persist in calling the first round, inaccurately, a primary. This is a clear mistake, with real consequences, since California voters—especially the younger and diverse voters who are registered independents—are less likely to turn out for primary elections than general elections. But the state won’t fix the problem, and the media won’t correct the error. Outlets from the New York Times (slogan: “The Truth Is Worth It”) to KPCC (“democracy needs to be heard”) continue to perpetuate the mistake.

In the March 3 elections, the mislabeling adds another dimension of confusion to an already long and confusing ballot. Because political parties still hold primaries in California for president, the presidential contest actually is a primary—and it is the rare primary in which independent voters can participate, because the California Democratic Party allows non-partisans to request a Democratic ballot in primaries. Unfortunately, while three-quarters of independents want to vote in the presidential primary, fewer than one-fifth have managed to obtain a ballot.

At the same time, all the other races on your ballot—everything from state assembly and senate to city council—will be general elections. So between the presidential primary and the state general, March 3 will be, quite literally, a tale of two elections.

Unfortunately, Dickens isn’t writing this story. Our election tale is now being told by national media who don’t understand California, and by leading American politicians like
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom have made false attacks on California’s election system. That may be why polls show 20 percent of likely California voters saying they are not confident that their ballot will be counted.

Those doubters are distressingly wrong. California is so committed to counting every ballot that the count will go on for weeks after election day. For the crime of being inclusive and careful in the count, California, of course, will be savaged by the national media, political elites, and online trolls, demanding to know, “What is taking so long?”

In the near term, there is little we can do to counter the avalanche of lies told about our elections. But in the long term, we need to construct new processes of deliberation to serve our growing population of voters. We could really use a more comprehensive voter guide, for starters. And it would be fantastic to have election juries made up of regular citizens chosen at random to study the most complicated ballot questions and races, and report back to the rest of us on what they find.

Such reforms have drawn little interest from our elected leaders, who are reluctant to change the systems that elected them. But we voters undeniably need more support and better information.

Until we get that, California elections may be events where nearly everyone votes, and no one knows what they’re doing.

The post Are California Elections a Triumph of Democracy—or a Defeat?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.