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Welcome to the Commentary magazine Daily podcast today is Wednesday, September 15, 2021.

I'm John Pothor. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always senior writer Christine Rosenhykristin. Hi John.

See associate editor Noir Rothman. Hi, John.

A group of maybe able to join us in the world of podcasts, but we got to go ahead without him.

So two big stories today. One is that Gavin Newsom, the governor of California survived the recall effort against him pretty much in a blowout landslide.

So what was originally seen as a exotic effort to use California's bizarre recall provision against the governor against the guy who had gotten almost 60% of the vote in his first election has proved in the end to be as quicksotic as it seemed at first the polling over the summer had somehow suggested that he was really in trouble and there seemed to be various ideas of what was going to happen.

So how he got himself out of trouble. Clearly everybody in the Democrat Party was worried he was in trouble. There was a huge push on his behalf in the last couple of weeks Joe Biden was there with him on Monday and generally it appears that when you asked whether you would like to have Gavin Newsom recalled people this summer fed up with various things said a lot.

Enough people said, yeah, sure to make it really worrisome when the focus of the recall moved to Larry Elder, the conservative African American radio talk show host and Democrats and Newsom were able to focus it on the idea that there was basically a choice between him and Elder.

He got the Democrats who outnumber Republicans to the one in the state to turn out in sufficient numbers to comfortably turn back this effort to oust him from office. What are the are there larger political implications the fact that new come survived Newsom was survived this recall.

My first in sync sir, yes and no. So yes, so there are there aren't there are in there aren't is this a broader indication of how Republicans will perform in 2022. No, and I don't think anybody should make that kind of extrapolation.

There will be temptations to do that knows, but yeah, I think it's pretty much a localized case. Yeah, is this was is a referendum on COVID mitigation measures and have the general public perceives them. No, I don't think so, even though I think this election probably turned a lot on that issue.

That's more California oriented than otherwise, but I don't know if there's no implications here in part because the and I think rather defensively the narrative in major news media outlets has turned on the notion that Gavin Newsom didn't necessarily save himself but was saved by Larry Elder being a bad candidate.

I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's true. I think Larry Elder performed reasonably well as a candidate. However, there is something to be said for the fact that as somebody with as a talk radio show host did a talk radio show for 20 years with a voluminous record of statements associated with that vocation.

You talk about everything all day long and say whatever comes to mind. He was a trove of comments that made him easily polarized and a figure that could be all that context could be removed from his remarks. So there were more than a handful of news cycles that were favorable to him based on what he had said in the past.

There was the question on the exit polling that I think is is relevant here when asked how did you vote in the election for governor if Gavin Newsom is removed from office was the second question.

The first question is should Gavin Newsom be removed from office? Yes, no.

The second question how would you vote and the exit polling suggested that while Larry Elder got 49% of the vote total and 97% of people who voted yes, Gavin Newsom should be removed also voted for Larry Elder.

56% of people who voted no voted for Kevin Falconer who is San Diego's former mayor, the more established materian candidate, a much more boring candidate from the perspective of culturally oriented Republicans.

So the thesis that I'm leaning towards and it's I don't think it's 100% really well supported, but it is nevertheless there are some indications towards it.

I'm going to explore it later today is that Republicans might have done a lot better in this race.

Had they picked a boring, normal, quote unquote, Republican managerial figure rather than somebody who's a cultural lightning rod who, you know, speaks to the basis instincts, which are entirely cultural and not very political conventionally political.

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