Gov. Newsom Gets First Major GOP Challenger As Recall Effort Gains Momentum

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, going through a rising recall marketing campaign, obtained his first main GOP challenger on Tuesday: former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

Faulconer, a Donald Trump supporter who completed two phrases as mayor final yr, introduced his plans to run within the 2022 election however will run earlier if the present effort to recall Newsom takes off and lands on the subsequent poll. 

The ex-mayor kicked off his announcement with an attraction to voters who’re upset with Newsom’s closures through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“No science behind it. It needs to be based on science,” Faulconer stated, referring to outside eating and playground closures in current months, which have since been lifted throughout the state.

“Like each of you, my family knows what it’s like to have our lives turned upside down,” he stated. “My wife’s business was devastated by the pandemic.”

Faulconer spent a lot of his announcement expressing his outrage that California’s public faculties have been nonetheless closed to in-person studying whereas personal ones have been allowed to open, blaming Newsom for the choice. But the difficulty is extra sophisticated than that. Public faculty closures have been largely pushed by lecturers unions, which don’t need their members to return till everybody has been vaccinated. Newsom has stated that benchmark would possibly not be realistic. 

Newsom’s chief strategist, Dan Newman, dismissed Faulconer as an opportunist.

“Trying to exploit a global pandemic to advance a political career exposes his craven ambition, as does making the same ‘I’m running!’ announcement at the start of each month, waiting in vain for people to pay attention,” he stated, referring to hints Faulconer has made in current months about his plans to run. 

Newman additionally knocked Faulconer for the excessive price of coronavirus cases in San Diego. 

“While Faulconer and other Trump supporters like John Cox and Michael Cernovich compete in the Republican primary,” Newman stated of others planning to run in opposition to Newsom, “we’ll stay focused on distributing the vaccine and providing relief and recovery to families and small businesses harmed by the virus.”

Faulconer has painted himself as a centrist, saying Tuesday that somebody outdoors the Democratic Party wanted to step up. “Our problem isn’t with our people,” he stated. “Our problem is with our government, with one-party rule that is out of touch with reality.”

Faulconer has left-leaning viewpoints on many key points within the state. He helps marriage equality, believes in human-caused local weather change and helps a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But his feedback on these points might ring empty to voters once they discover out he voted for Trump in November, saying that he thought Trump “was going to be the best for the economy.”

Faulconer and different challengers with their eyes set on a recall election take pleasure in a California voters that’s more and more vital of Newsom. He’s now contending with voters who’re offended about enterprise shutdowns, voters who’re offended concerning the current reopenings amid excessive case counts and voters from each of these teams who’re offended concerning the stalled COVID-19 vaccine rollout. His legacy additionally continues to be haunted by an ill-fated journey he took to the French Laundry restaurant late final yr when coronavirus instances have been growing. 

There’s been a “big shift in public sentiment from last year when large majorities approved of the job Newsom was doing,” a University of California, Berkeley, poll revealed Tuesday. Currently, the ballot discovered, “fewer than half of voters initially say they would vote to endorse Newsom if a recall election is held later this year.”

The campaign to recall Newsom says it has collected 1.3 million signatures to this point. It has till mid-March to hit 1.5 million, the required threshold to qualify the proposal for the poll.