Good job. Although in the end, I don’t think our postcards were the difference between winning and losing. The Republicans got stomped beyond my most optimistic prediction. (Margin is 27 at the moment.)

I want to point out three data points that are not getting the attention they warrant.

First, the recall is losing in Orange County by 6 (it was over 10 in the early mail ballots). In 2018, the big Democratic year where we flipped the OC Congressional seats with several upsets, Newsom won Orange County by 0.4. I am excited about our prospects to re-take some of the seats that the GOP took back in 2020.

The Republicans have no one to run against Newsom in 2022. Our second datum is 44%, Larry Elder’s share of the replacement vote. He crushed his pre-election polling and humiliated real politicians like Kevin Faulconer and John Cox. Elder is doubtless salivating over the new, even more lucrative, media earnings that will be bestowed on the leading Black White Supremacist. But a great many people didn’t make any choice for the replacement. Whether it’s Elder against Newsom in 2022 or another Trump follower, it’s clear the GOP base is all in on promoting someone who will capture at most one-third of the statewide vote.

The LA Times has spared me the effort of doing the following chart myself. Basically, the Recall Map by County is the same as the COVID–19 Map by County.

As an alternate way of seeing the data, maps from the NY Times.

[N.B.: Yes, Biden won Orange County by even more than the recall, while the Dems lost House seats there. But that was before the full identification of state and local Republicans with Trump.]