Recall of Governor Newsom
Keep Newsom as governor. A recall risks putting Larry Elder in charge, the worst major candidate by far.
By far, the most comprehensive analysis of this election comes from Kyle Bogosian of eapolitics.org. Bogosian approaches elections from an Effective Altruism angle of quantifying the importance of each issue, scoring candidates on their stances, and combining it with other quantitative factors to project how much good each candidate would do. Bogosian’s election guides are exceptionally rigorous, and I recommend following him and reading his work.
Bogosian weights issues ranging from education to taxation to guns, with the top issues being animal welfare, housing, and air pollution. He also estimates the probability of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s death, and the amount of Senate years the next governor will therefore appoint (0.37), as well as candidates’ general fitness for office. I agree with about 90% of his assessments, which cover Newsom and the three top challengers: Larry Elder, Kevin Paffrath, and Kevin Faulconer. His conclusion?
Overall, Newsom gets a merit score of 0.76, Elder gets -1.34, Paffrath gets 0.48 and Faulconer gets -0.02.
Clearly, Newsom is the best of the major candidates, justifying a NO vote for the recall. But the case is stronger than these numbers suggest, because they don’t consider polling and Newsom’s likely replacement should the recall succeed.
Based on the pollster accuracy and recency of 18 polls, FiveThirtyEight estimates that California voters reject the recall by 1.2 percentage points. They also estimate that, should the recall succeed, Elder would receive 19.3% of the vote, Paffrath would receive 9.1%, Cox would receive 6.1%, and Faulconer would receive 4.8%. Participants in the PredictIt betting market consider Elder the most likely replacement for Newsom, with roughly a three in five chance, followed by Paffrath with a one in four chance and Faulconer with a one in twenty chance.
Combining Bogosian’s estimate of each candidate’s merit score with the betting market probabilities shows that the expected score for the two recall options are:
- NO: 0.76 (just Newsom’s score)
- YES: -0.67 (-1.34 * 58% for Elder + 0.48 * 23% for Paffrath + -0.02 * 5% for Faulconer)
Should the recall succeed, the most likely outcome is Governor Larry Elder, the worst major candidate, and the expected outcome is significantly worse than any candidate other than a certain Elder.
Even if you may be frustrated with some aspects of Newsom’s performance, as I am, I urge you to read Bogosian’s summary to see how much worse Larry Elder would be.