What California's Recall Election Can -- And Can't -- Tell Us About The 2022 Midterms
Last Tuesday’s gubernatorial recall election in California was the campaign that launched a thousand takes: It was a good sign for Democrats in 2022; it was a good sign for Republicans in 2022. But we at FiveThirtyEight urge far more caution before taking away any national lessons from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s victory. To be sure, Newsom’s win was decisive, and with 89 percent of the votes now counted,1 we can dive a little more into what the results mean. But what they mean is very much up for interpretation — if they mean anything at all. After all, this was just one election and it was conducted under unusual circumstances to boot.
One thing we do know is that turnout was really high: More than 13 million people voted.2 That means more than 50 percent of California’s 26 million eligible voters cast a ballot — a remarkably high turnout rate for an off-year election. In fact, it’s higher than the 49 percent turnout in California’s regularly scheduled 2018 gubernatorial election, which was a historically high-turnout midterm.
It’s possible that this eye-popping figure means the high level of interest voters had in the previous two elections (the 2020 election had the highest turnout for a presidential election in over a century) is here to stay. But there are also other possible explanations for the recall’s high turnout. First, under a pandemic-inspired voting law, every registered voter was automatically mailed a ballot — a reform that political scientists say can significantly increase turnout. Second, recall elections may inherently generate a lot of voter interest (which makes sense, given that there needs to be strong grassroots passion on at least one side to force a recall in the first place). In two of the three previous gubernatorial recall elections in U.S. history, turnout was higher than in the respective state’s previous gubernatorial election, though this is admittedly a very small sample size.
The second thing we know about this year’s California recall is that the polls were off by quite a bit. The recall is currently failing by 26 percentage points (63 percent to 37 percent), and while that margin may tighten a tad more given the slight Republican trend in the count, it still marks a substantially more pro-Newsom result than FiveThirtyEight’s final recall polling average, which gave keeping Newsom in office a 16-point lead. This 10-point miss was about twice the size of the average polling error in gubernatorial elections dating back to 1998, and more than twice the size of the polling error in the 2020 presidential election, when Biden led by 8.4 points in FiveThirtyEight’s final polling average but won by 4.5 points. Notably, too, unlike the national polls in the 2020 presidential election, the polls in California were biased toward Republicans and not Democrats, which fits into a pattern where polls in very blue states have at times underestimated Democratic performance, particularly in the 2016 presidential election. As we’ve noted previously, it’s hard to predict the direction of polling errors because their movement is inconsistent from year to year — something to remember in 2022 and 2024.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-californias-recall-election-can-and-cant-tell-us-about-the-2022-midterms/
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