California's Recall Election for Governor Gavin Newsom Is a Warning Sign for Democrats

“We have to care more than just about ourselves,” Jennifer Aniston wrote in an Instagram Story, responding to backlash from an InStyle profile in which she discussed cutting ties with unvaccinated friends. The quote resonated with me. The pandemic has been hard, but what I didn’t expect was for it to be so politically divisive. Then again, this is America, and I should have known better.

On August 14, on the south lawn of city hall in downtown Los Angeles, several hundred people gathered, protesting against vaccine and mask mandates. The protest turned violent; a reporter was attacked and at least one person was stabbed. The rally came as California governor Gavin Newsom issued several vaccine mandates, and the L.A. City Council passed legislation to have an ordinance drafted requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for indoor activities.

Tensions are high, and while we should be having a conversation about what is best for all of our collective health, the conversation instead has become about individual freedoms.

Caught in this political predicament is California. After getting caught at a fancy maskless dinner last November, during a time when the state had a mask mandate in place and social gatherings among multiple households were discouraged, Governor Newsom made himself an easy target. Republicans seized the opportunity.

A petition to recall the governor gained steam in the wake of the mask mishap, earning enough signatures to trigger a special election. Now Newsom — and the Democratic Party’s response to the pandemic more generally — is on the ballot for a September 14 recall election. The polls don’t look great for him, and I’m not sure many Californians even know that the race is happening. The sorry series of events should be a warning to Democratic lawmakers as the 2022 midterm elections draw closer.

The right has long used the strategy of fear. Fear of “the other” and fear that their freedoms are being taken away are not new to the GOP’s playbook, but now they have a source of fear to exploit that goes beyond the usual political lines: the pandemic.

In California we are currently grappling with a multitude of crises: drought, wildfires, unaffordable housing, and the pandemic. Newsom’s decision to enforce statewide restrictions and mask mandates — and more recently vaccination mandates for health and school employees — is at the heart of this election.

His top GOP challenger in the race is Black conservative radio host Larry Elder. According to the Los Angeles Times, Elder allowed an anti-vax doctor on his syndicated radio show to spread misinformation on vaccines, writing that Elder “didn’t object when the physician implied that Bill Gates might have backed the ‘experimental’ immunizations as a form of ‘population control.’” Elder also posted the interview on his website with the lead-in, “You’ll want to hear this physician’s take on the vaccines.”

Elder is against any sort of government-imposed mandates, saying on his site, “Californians who assume the risk of not wearing a mask or not getting vaccinated should not be forced to do so.” In response to a Daily Mail article about Newsom comparing not wearing a mask to drunk driving, Elder retweeted in all caps, “ONE HAS A RIGHT NOT TO WEAR A MASK.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have encouraged mask use as a way to prevent the spread of COVID-19, especially in light of the more contagious Delta variant.

Along with the do-as-you-wish approach to the pandemic, Elder is against the minimum wage and thinks that Roe v. Wade was the “worst” Supreme Court decision “hands down.” And while California continues to have catastrophic wildfires every year, the candidate says he is “not sure” whether they are caused by climate change.

But the real threat to Newsom is that Republicans, especially those who voted for Donald Trump, seem to care about this race more than his own party does. These are the kinds of people who have shown up to anti-lockdown and vaccine mandate protests and recent “America First” rallies hosted by right-wing lawmakers like representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. An August CBS News poll found that the recall effort is only trailing by 4%, and that 72% of Republicans are motivated to vote in the election compared to 65% of Democrats.

By doubling down on pandemic resentments, the right may have landed on a winning strategy. That’s bad news for Democrats and those who are hoping for an end to this pandemic.

In the South, anti-mask mandates and anti-vaccine hysteria continue to be used as political ploys despite the spike in positive COVID cases. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to withhold salaries for school board members who defy the ban on mask mandates, even as the state suffers from a surge of hospitalizations and deaths.

Even Florida’s agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, one of the Democrats challenging DeSantis in 2022, said that she does not support statewide mandates, stating, “Every county needs to make their own decisions.” One has to wonder if that is how she truly feels or if it’s just political cowardice in a time when mask mandates have become such a hot issue.

And for Democrats who do want to stand firm as the party of masks, vaccines, and public health, they need to practice what they preach. Earlier this month, President Obama held a lavish, celebrity-filled 60th birthday party at his home on Martha’s Vineyard and was pictured dancing maskless. The optics weren’t great. So conservatives of course jumped at the chance to criticize Obama, as they did with Representative Rashida Tlaib after a video was posted of her attending an event maskless around the same time she criticized Senator Rand Paul for a video in which he proclaimed he would not wear a mask. Is it cheap politics? Yes. But it also resonates with the feeling that the powerful and the elite have experienced the past 17 months differently than the rest of us.

Newsom learned the risk of seeming out of touch with voters at his fancy maskless dinner. What Democrats should be focused on, both in California and across the country, is a multipronged approach: vaccines and mask mandates, immediate economic relief, and messaging campaigns that communicate these policies clearly to voters and help shore up their trust. President Biden has spoken out against the recall, and there’s a possibility that both the president and Vice President Kamala Harris will do in-person campaigning. The burden will be on Democrats to get people to vote against the recall, and at a time when people are feeling political and COVID fatigue, that might be hard.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue