Looking to oust the governor? Ed Brown has just the right merch for you.
Camouflage Recall Newsom hats and Recall Newsom masks. He’s gotRecall Newsom yard signs. A stack of Recall Newsom pamphlets.
But just days before California voters decide whether to push Democrat Gavin Newsom from office, the trailer off Golden Chain Highway was mostly a shrine to former President Trump.
“As far as I’m concerned, Trump is the president,” said Brown, 67.
And as for the recall election?
“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”
The Republican-backed recall election could not be more consequential for California. Set amid a deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with record-breaking wildfires and a relentless drought drying fields and faucets, it gives the GOP its best shot in over a decade at governing the nation’s most populous state.
And if there’s a symbolic heart of recall mania, it may be here in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, where about 1 in 5 registered voters signed petitions to give Newsom the boot. That’s the highest concentration in California.
The most fervent support for the recall has come from Northern California, where rural conservatives say that their voices are drowned out in Sacramento by urban Democrats and that they would be better off seceding to form their own state called Jefferson.
And yet, in many ways, this election is still about a man named Donald J. Trump.
Conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. By and large, they refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing his false claims that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many won’t trust the results — just as they didn’t after Trump lost.