Prebunking the California Recall Election Worked
Gavin Newsom won his recall election. Actually, he crushed it. The votes are still being counted but it looks like Newsom will come out 20–30 points ahead.
If you live in reality Newsom’s win was fairly straightforward. After early reports suggesting the Newsom might be in trouble, the polling and conventional wisdom, in the end, was that California voters would not vote to recall. However, if you live in the MAGA Cinematic Universe Newsom’s victory might be suspect, and all that voter fraud leading Republican candidate Larry Elder and Donald Trump warned you about may have come to pass.
Claiming voter fraud before the election even happens is now a staple of Republican campaigns. Trump has actually been running this play since the 2016 election when he claimed that it was rigged against him long before election day. In 2020 Trump and his allies made preemptive claims of voter fraud and rigging from the start of his reelection campaign, and as a result, his base was primed to believe that Joe Biden had somehow stolen the election, a view that persists to this day in MAGA-Land.
But while the Big Lie debunked conspiracy lives on, the California version of it fizzled almost immediately. And unlike Donald Trump, Larry Elder actually conceded the race. Why did the GOP’s voter fraud myth collapse so quickly from the…
