The California Recall

Background

THE CALIFORNIA RECALL

On October 7, 2003, for the first time in California and only the second time in American history, voters decided to recall a sitting governor. For better or for worse, the hopes and burdens of the Golden State now rest in no small part on the broad shoulders of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

BACKGROUND

Credit or blame for the recall, as with so much of California government, goes to the Progressive Movement, which transformed the state’s political process early in the last century. The City of Los Angeles led the way, adopting the recall in 1903. In 1911, after Hiram Johnson had been elected governor and Progressives had gained control of the state legislature, California became one of the first states in the country to adopt the recall on a statewide basis. (Oregon was first in 1908.)

Note that recall differs from impeachment. In California, the latter requires that an official must have engaged in “misconduct in office” (California Constitution, Article IV, section 18). This term is vague enough, but any grounds at all will do for a recall. In fact, the state constitution (Article II, section 14) specifically stipulates that “sufficiency of reason is not reviewable.” The recall has been used frequently against local officials such as members of school boards and city councils. Sometimes the targets of recall efforts have allegedly engaged in corrupt or otherwise improper behavior, but in other cases they have been challenged simply because of policy differences or even personality clashes.

Today, California is one of 18 states, most of them west of the Mississippi, that provide for the recall of statewide elected officials. Until 2003, however, only one governor had ever been successfully recalled. That dubious distinction belonged to Lynn Frazier, who was removed as governor by the voters of North Dakota in 1921. (Frazier managed to land on his feet, however; the following year he was elected to the U.S. Senate.) In California, despite numerous attempts, no one had ever been able to gather enough signatures to petition for a recall of a governor. Efforts to recall Governor Gray Davis seemed likely to meet a similar fate until a Republican congressman named Darrell Issa contributed over a million dollars of his own money to jumpstart the drive against Davis.

In California, calling a recall election of a state official requires a petition of registered voters equal to 12 percent of the number of votes cast in the most recent election for the office involved. If a recall qualifies for the ballot, voters are then asked to decide two questions. The first is “Shall _____ be recalled (removed) from the office of _______?” The second is “Who should replace the incumbent if the recall is successful?” The first question is decided by a simple majority. The second is decided by a plurality; whoever receives more votes than anyone else (not necessarily a majority of votes cast) wins the office. The incumbent is not permitted to be a candidate on the replacement portion of the ballot.

For the Davis recall, 897,158 signatures of registered voters were needed to qualify the recall. Since some signatures on petitions turn out to be invalid, organizers of recall drives try to obtain enough signatures to provide a needed cushion. By July, more than 1,600,000 had been gathered. On July 23, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley certified that the requirement had been met, announcing that more than 1.3 million valid signatures had been submitted.

It then fell to Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante to call the election. The state constitution (Article II, sections 15 and 17) provides that “an election to determine whether to recall an officer and, if appropriate, to elect a successor” shall, in the case of a recalled governor, be called by the lieutenant governor. For a time, Bustamante weighed the possibility of calling only for the first part of the election, reasoning that, since the constitution provides (Article V, section 10) that the lieutenant governor becomes governor when the latter office is vacant, a vote on a replacement for Davis would not be “appropriate.” A more straightforward interpretation of this provision would take it to mean that choosing a replacement is appropriate if and only if a recall is successful, and in the end Bustamante decided to call for the two-part contest and set October 7 as the date of the election.

The Candidates

THE CANDIDATES

Those wishing to replace Davis then had until August 9 to file as candidates. Qualifying for the ballot in a gubernatorial recall is remarkably easy. All that is needed is a $3,500 filing fee and signatures of 65 persons registered with the candidate’s party. (The filing fee can be waived if 10,000 signatures are submitted.)

While hoping to defeat the recall, Democrats needed a “Plan B,” an alternative to Davis should the recall succeed. They hoped it would be popular U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. Despite considerable pressure to run, she declined, and in fact became one of Davis’s most active supporters. This surprised some observers, in light of the fact that Davis compared Feinstein to Leona Helmsley, a very wealthy and widely disliked businesswoman infamous for saying that “only the little people pay taxes,” when both were seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 1990. Another Democrat, California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, did file for candidacy, but withdrew his name prior to the deadline once Bustamante announced that he would run. Bustamante thus became the only prominent Democrat on the replacement ballot.

In addition to Feinstein and Garamendi, another prominent non-candidate was Republican Darrell Issa, who had spurred the recall in the first place and was widely assumed to be seeking the office for himself. After a great deal of negative media coverage (including the fact that, though never convicted, he had years earlier been indicted for auto theft), Issa, realizing that he had little hope of victory, decided not to run.

In the end, 135 people did qualify for the replacement portion of the ballot. They included comedian Leo Gallagher, best known for smashing pumpkins as part of his act; former child-actor Gary Coleman, who had played Arnold Drummond in the 1970s television situation comedy “Diff’rent Strokes”; porn star Mary “Mary Carey” Cook (who lost whatever chance she might have had to get the votes of middle aged women when she announced that she hoped to run for president when she turned 35, by which time she would, in addition to meeting the U.S. Constitution’s minimum age requirement for the presidency, be too old to get by on her looks); long aspiring actress Angelyne (no last name), locally famous for displaying her voluptuous figure on southern California billboards; and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Name recognition enabled all of these candidates to finish relatively high. (Angelyne finished in 29th place, Gallagher was 16th, and the others were all in the top 10.) George B. Schwartzman finished 9th with 11,814 votes, for no apparent reason other than the similarity of his last name to that of the eventual winner.

The more serious candidates, listed in reverse order of their eventual finish, included:

· Bill Simon. Republican Simon had lost the 2002 gubernatorial election to Davis less than a year earlier. Despite running one of the most mistake-plagued campaigns in memory, he ended up trailing Davis by only five points. Nonetheless, he withdrew from the recall race on August 23, by which time it had become apparent that he had no chance of winning and would only split the Republican vote. He eventually endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The names of Simon and other candidates who withdrew before election day remained on the ballot, and Simon ended up in 12th place.)

· Peter Ueberroth. Ueberroth, another Republican, had headed the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and was widely credited with their success. He did less well later on as commissioner of major league baseball. During his time in office, baseball owners were found to have engaged in illegal collusion in an effort to hold down player salaries. Ueberroth’s main problems, however, were that he had been out of the headlines for a long time, and that he gave a lackluster performance in a September 3 debate. Less than a week later he announced his withdrawal, but still finished the race in sixth place.

· Arianna Huffington. A well-known political commentator, Huffington had once been a Republican and a staunch supporter of conservative U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich. In recent years she had moved steadily to the left, and ran in the recall election as an independent. Her polling numbers never came close to reaching double digits, and most voters were unimpressed by her performance in a nationally televised, and widely watched, debate held at California State University, Sacramento on September 24. On September 29, she withdrew, announced her opposition to Davis’s recall, and endorsed no other candidate. She finished fifth.

· Peter Camejo. As the Green Party candidate for governor in 2002, Camejo had won five percent of the vote, and hoped to better that figure in the recall race. Though he performed well in debates, however, his campaign never caught fire. He did not withdraw from the campaign, but did indicate that he would understand if his supporters voted for Bustamante in order to prevent a Schwarzenegger victory. He finished fourth.

· Tom McClintock. State Senator Tom McClintock had been the GOP candidate for state controller in 2002. Despite being heavily outspent by his Democratic opponent Steve Westly, McClintock did better than any other Republican candidate for statewide office, losing by a margin of only 0.3 percent. Like Camejo, though at the opposite end of the political spectrum, McClintock had performed well in the debates. He also largely avoided attacks from other candidates. Republican leaders, anxious to avoid antagonizing their base, praised the conservative McClintock while arguing that Republicans should rally behind Schwarzenegger as the most electable candidate. Democrats were equally kind, but for the opposite reason: they hoped that, if he did relatively well, McClintock would draw votes away from Schwarzenegger. According to a poll by the Los Angeles Times, 62 percent of voters said that they had a favorable impression of McClintock, and only 25 percent had an unfavorable opinion. These figures, especially his low unfavorable ratings, put him ahead of his rivals. Though he finished a distant third in the contest to replace Davis, McClintock may have been one of the few participants to emerge with a reputation enhanced rather than diminished by the experience, and he may become a force for the California GOP in the future. On the other hand, when he seeks reelection to the state senate in 2004, as he has announced he will do, he may be one of the few incumbents to have a difficult time, since his district has become more competitive as a result of reapportionment.

· Cruz Bustamante. A former speaker of the state assembly, Cruz Bustamante was elected lieutenant governor in 1988 and reelected in 2002. In this election, his campaign was plagued with problems.

Bustamante’s performance in the debates was generally perceived as weak. He was also criticized for his membership, as a student at California State University, Fresno in the 1970s, in MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán). The organization’s philosophical proclamations, found on various chapter websites, include support for ethnic separatism, and even (in some interpretations) for the creation of a sovereign Chicano nation (Aztlán). Defenders of Bustamante argued that, in reality, MEChA has functioned largely as a self-help organization for Latino students, and that the notion of an Aztlán nation is intended to be more a symbolic statement than a concrete political goal. Nonetheless, Bustamante’s failure to clearly distance himself from the organization’s stated positions may have hurt him with moderate voters, and at the very least helped keep him “off message” in his campaign.

More serious was Bustamante’s handling of campaign finance support from Indian tribes. In recent years, tribal gaming interests have become major players in California politics. In 1998, tribes and their allies spent a record $66 million to support a measure legalizing casino gambling on tribal lands. For the recall, tribes contributed amounts to Bustamante’s campaign well in excess of what is permitted under a campaign finance reform initiative approved by voters in 2002. Bustamante argued that he could avoid this limitation because the money had been contributed to a campaign committee that he had set up before the proposition went into effect. Faced with mounting criticism of this strategy, he then announced that he would spend the money for ads opposing the Racial Privacy Initiative (Proposition 54), one of two measures that had qualified for the October 7 ballot. Proposition 54 would have prevented the state from gathering most information about a person’s race or ethnicity. Bustamante’s ads featured him prominently, and were clearly designed to help his candidacy, but did not directly refer to it. When a judge declared this approach to be illegal, and ordered Bustamante to return the money, his campaign argued that the ads had already been purchased and could not be cancelled. The net effect of all of this was to put Bustamante on the defensive regarding his ethics, and make it easier for opponents to paint him as a captive of special interests. He ended up in second place, well behind Schwarzenegger.

· Arnold Schwarzenegger. A native of Austria, Schwarzenegger began his career as a body builder, winning the “Mr. Olympia” title seven times. Beginning with Pumping Iron, a documentary on his 1975 victory in that contest, he transformed himself into a movie star who would set a record for box office earnings. Though married to journalist Maria Shriver, daughter of former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver and niece of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy, Schwarzenegger is a Republican. His politics are generally libertarian, with liberal positions on such issues as gay rights and abortion and conservative views on economic issues such as taxation.