Here's why Gavin Newsom thinks his recall playbook could save Speaker Pelosi in the midterm elections
Gov. Gavin Newsom's landslide victory in the California recall may offer Democrats a roadmap going into the 2022 midterm elections.
Democrats have a favorable Senate map in 2022, but there are fears Republicans could regain control of the House of Representatives due to redistricting gerrymandering and voter suppression laws passed in multiple states.
NBC News analyst John Heilemann, the executive editor of Showtime's "The Circus," discussed his coversation with Newsom that will air Sunday evening.
"As you know, this is my home state and I've watched Gavin Newsom kind of fight through this whole thing and paid pretty close attention to it," Heilemann said. "There's no doubt, I was with Newsom a couple of hours ago, and there's no doubt the people around the governor have been saying prior to when Joe Biden instituted the vaccine mandate last week they were telling Washington you need to be more militant about that, it's the right thing to do for public health, and there's a winning hand to play here politically."
"Gov. Newsom continues to put steel in Joe Biden's back. In the end, that is the best politics and you can survive some opposition from a small minority, and that's what was the case here in California. To Jonathan Martin's point, I think what Newsom would say — and he did in fact say in his interview, he said, yeah, it's true that we played the Trump card, that Larry Elder was caricatured as a kind of mini-Donald Trump here in California, but many Republicans fall into that category — that is where the core of the Republican Party is right now on the question of vaccine mandates and on masks and other things, and so that may be a more broadly applicable strategy than just the blue state strategy or just the California strategy given where the Republican Party is," he said.
"And that is, again, what I think California Democrats are trying to say to the Biden administration and to those 535 races to say to Democrats there's good politics in doing the right thing on public health. It's a 75% issue, go for it," Heilemann said.
Watch:
EDITOR'S NOTE: The author of this article worked political campaigns for Gavin Newsom in San Francisco during the governor's time as a city supervisor.
Leave a Comment