Quick take: The California gubernatorial recall election

 To the surprise of nobody who lives in empirical reality, Gavin Newsom remains Governor of California.  To the surprise of nobody who lives in empirical reality, the GOP claimed voter fraud before election day, which makes no sense to anyone who lives in empirical reality.  So, if the polls show that you are losing, and you lose, that means there's voter fraud.*  Behold... the party of Trump.  The funny thing is, you can go and listen to Larry Elder, and before COVID, and Trumpian election lies, he was an interesting, if provocative person.  If you are a woke college kid, you won't agree with him, but he is was a smart and interesting guy.  Now... this.  This is our world.

Anyway, one of the common claims I keep reading is that Elder was a weaker challenger than Schwarzenegger, which gave Newsom an advantage that Davis did not have in his recall contest.  Well, yes, but there is much more here.  Elder is pretty far to the right, which is far from the median of California, and the median voter theorem does have predictive power, but the bigger thing here is the old Achen & Bartels research.  Voters blame incumbents for things way beyond their control, including floods... shark attacks... and even pandemics!  Achen & Bartels even looked at the influenza epidemic.  So here's what they argued.  The extent to which voters blame incumbents for natural disasters is conditional.  It isn't literally that voters think that the incumbent has a shark-controlling device, or that the incumbent concocted the virus in a lab (although GOP-ers seem to think that Fauci made COVID in a lab, but they're fucking crazy).  Rather, incumbents can be blamed if there is a disaster that they don't handle well.

Davis was blamed for an energy crisis, which led to rolling blackouts in California.  It was also unique within the country.  COVID is a worldwide phenomenon, making it easier to ask if Newsom did better or worse comparatively.  For example, compared to some illiterate, COVID-denier governor from some backwater state.  That comparison gave Newsom a much stronger position than Davis had.

Did Elder make for a strong candidate?  Not especially, and California is a Democratic state, but when circumstances are bad, the incumbent is often blamed.  Conditionally, and that can flip a state.  Calling a state "blue" does not mean there are zero Republicans there.  It just means it is majority Democratic.  In the right circumstances, a Republican can win there.  These just weren't the right circumstances.  Was Elder a part of that?  Yeah, but so was the old Achen & Bartels argument.

*And yes, this means if anyone might have gone looking for voter fraud in 2016, it should have been Clinton.  No, there was no voter fraud.  This is all just lunacy, and I'm sick of having to say that.