 Recalls are a very high bar to actually meet. And the reason I think you saw so many Californians because there's a real sense of urgency, we want change now. There's a connection between what's going on in Sacramento and the rising cost of living. There's a connection between what's going on in Sacramento and the fact that people are leaving California for the first time. The recall can send a very clear warning to the rest of the nation, that California is not a model for the nation, it is a warning about the perils of a corrupt government. Those that think this thing is not close, I hate to dispute as you, it is. California Governor Gavin Newsom is in trouble and he knows it. Newsom who's facing a recall vote on September 14th told the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee that his fellow Democrats have been far too complacent about the risk that he faces and how damaging his loss would be to the national party. In Nancy Pelosi's state, in Kamala Harris' with California and the values we profess would be judged in a different light. If this was a successful recall, I think it would have profound consequences. Newsom's concerns are well-founded, according to recent polls. Because of COVID, the state has mailed every eligible California voter a ballot with two questions on it. Shall Gavin Newsom be recalled from the office of governor and which of these 46 candidates should replace him if that were to happen? If the recall succeeds, whichever candidate receives the plurality of votes will replace Newsom until the next governor's race in 2022. Newsom and his Democratic allies portrayed the election as a right-wing plot to take over California's government. Who's behind the partisan recall of Governor Gavin Newsom? Anti-vaccine Q and on extremists, violent white supremacists like the Proud Boys who attacked our nation's capital on January 6th and the same right-wing Republican politicians who supported Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election. But what's actually animating recall voters are issues like rising homelessness, high housing and energy costs, fear of rising crime and COVID policies that have little basis in science like closing beaches, banning outdoor dining and keeping in-person public schools shut longer than any other state. The recall should be as big a wake-up call to the Democratic political establishment as the population exodus that recently caused California to lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history. Everyone loves you. Everyone is talking about how you've handled this. Early in the pandemic, Newsom was second only to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in the adoration he received from celebrities and the media for his COVID response. One of the governors who acted earliest with regards to the coronavirus. You've been getting a lot of praise for shutting things down. The pandemic briefly turned Newsom into a national hero and he touted California as a global beacon. Absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern. And as a model of progressive governance that he claimed would change American politics forever. What's the opportunity to your question for reimagining a more progressive era as it relates to capitalism? But as flattening the curve morphed into indefinite lockdowns. The schools should be closed. The schools will be closed. He says a return to life as normal in that state will not happen anytime soon. We are committed to a process. We've socialized that process and we are leaning in. And the case rates surged regardless. With California announcing a record 71 deaths in one day. Newsom acted as if for him the rules that were paralyzing the state's restaurant and nightlife scene didn't apply. Well, Governor Newsom is telling all of us to have Thanksgiving dinner outside. He's facing some new fallout for that fancy birthday dinner party he went to at the French Laundry. He's implemented rules that we would gladly follow but I don't think he's setting the best example. I think it's highly hypocritical of him. The petition to recall surpassed the required one and a half million signature mark in February 2021 and officially made the ballot in July. If Gavin Newsom were an employee in my corporation I would have fired him a long damn time ago. For Orrin Heatley, the retired Yolo County sheriff's sergeant who started the recall petition six months before COVID hit illegal immigration was a motivating factor. His open border policy giving our tax money to illegal immigrants for housing, food and clothing when our own citizens are on the street, our own veterans are homeless on the street. Newsom, in turn, has pointed to his role as evidence that the recall effort is a plot by right-wing extremists pointing to substantial funding from the California GOP and Mike Huckabee's PAC and highlighting in particular comments that Heatley posted to Facebook that called for microchipping illegal immigrants. People keep going back to this Facebook comments you made about tagging illegal immigrants like herd animal. Absolutely against mandatory chipping of anybody. Okay, that was a hyperbole, statement made in hyperbole to generate conversation. And yeah, it was not well worded and not the right thing to put out there. Heatley cites the more than 1.7 million verified signatures collected as evidence that conservatives like him aren't the only ones who support a recall vote. 49% of independence and of particular concern to California Democrats, half of Hispanic voters support the recall according to an August CBS YouGov poll. Newsom maintains that the recall is an anti-democratic maneuver. One group is suing preemptively to declare the outcome unconstitutional if Newsom loses to a candidate that gets fewer votes than he did in the general election. California's recall procedure dates to 1911 and it was championed by progressive era reformers who wanted to check the power of special interests like the Southern Pacific Railroad. 55 California governors have faced recall petitions to date and this is the second time that an effort to recall the governor has made the ballot. The first time was in 2003 when Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gray Davis. This has been in the California Constitution for 110 years. Frankly, you might even ask why the other 30 states don't have a recall mechanism like we do. People that are now complaining had a lot of time to change the Constitution if they felt it was so wrong. Where were they? We have heard I'm running for governor of California. Talk radio host Larry Elder is a self-identified libertarian running as a Republican. With his high name recognition and popularity among conservatives, Elder immediately became the front runner upon entering the race. Elder who has never worked in government says his years of analyzing California politics on the radio have prepared him for the job. My opponent, Gavin Newsom, has had plenty of political experience. He was two term elected mayor of San Francisco. He had eight years as lieutenant governor of the plan, what he was gonna do as governor. He's been governor for two years, look what we have. A gentleman came out of Hollywood who was not a talk show host, who has not spent 27 years talking about these issues. His name was Ronald Reagan. He became a pretty decent two-term governor and a pretty decent two-term president. Elder says his top priorities as governor would be reducing the cost of housing, second highest in the nation, by rescinding California's lengthy environmental review process, ending the state's rolling blackouts by halting the closure of the state's last nuclear facility and reauthorizing gas and oil drilling, ending worsening droughts by investing in desalination technology, increasing police funding to combat crime and more school choice. An issue that he says is particularly dear to his heart because of his experience growing up in South Central Los Angeles. I attended an inner city school called Crenshaw High School. That was a school that was featured in that movie Boys in the Hood. I just checked only 2% of kids from Crenshaw High School are math efficient. Now the polls showed the majority of black and brown parents living in the inner city one school choice. The teachers union, the most powerful union in this state, the largest funder of my opponent's campaign is adamantly opposed to choice. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is actually the largest donor to the campaign to keep Newsom in office with a $3 million contribution. But Elder is right that the California Teachers Association is a major backer of Newsom with a $1.8 million donation. Over his decades long career, Elder has given his opponents plenty to attack him on. Such as his assertion in an article published in 2000 that women know less than men about political issues. Elder has also been criticized for his view that the minimum wage should be abolished because it cuts off opportunities for low skilled workers. Economists disagree about a lot of things, but the consensus about the damage done by the minimum wage is overwhelming. But my priority is not to do that, my priority is to deal with crime, to deal with homelessness, to deal with the outrageous cost of living and to follow the science going forward regarding how we're gonna navigate ourselves through this pandemic. An LA Times column labeled Elder the black face of white supremacy for the stance, as well as for his promise to repeal mask and vaccine mandates and for his rejection of critical race theory. And Newsom who didn't respond to reasons multiple interview requests says that Elder would be an anti-science disaster for California and has called him a climate change denier. What I am is a climate change alarmist denier. I don't believe as AOC says that our planet is gonna be destroyed in 12 years, whatever it was she said, if we don't make dramatic changes. I also believe that this force-feeding of our economy from a fossil-based one to a renewables-based one does not appreciate trade-offs. While Elder leads the polls among Republican challengers, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulkner is the only candidate with executive governing experience, which helped him earn the grudging endorsement of the LA Times, which suggested in its editorial page that voters hold their noses and select Kevin Faulkner after saying the entire recall election would be comical if the stakes weren't so high. They basically said Kevin Faulkner is gonna be probably our least disastrous choice. What did you think of that endorsement? Well, I wasn't too surprised, but I mean, look, I think it just goes to show you. People know that this governor is in trouble. And even those folks that are different sides of the spectrum know it's time for new leadership. Faulkner touts his record on homelessness, which declined in San Diego after he spent $6.5 million on temporary shelter that had been earmarked for permanent housing. He also strictly enforced anti-camping laws. We took dramatic action in San Diego. I did not allow 10 encampments on the sidewalk. Why? Because if you allow 10 encampments on sidewalks, people are gonna die on our sidewalks and we're better than that. We set up a series of shelters in San Diego and I insisted that people use them. Faulkner's critics say his tactics were inhumane and that the decline in the city's unsheltered homeless may partially be an accounting anomaly because during his tenure, the count stopped including people living in RVs. Your critics have said that they changed the way that they counted and you kind of just pushed people out of the city into the greater San Diego county. What's your reply to those criticisms? Yeah, the facts are that homelessness actually went down in the city of San Diego and in the surrounding county. Again, it's a mechanism that works. And I took strong, strong action. And in fact, before COVID struck, we had 13 different cities from all across the country that came to look at the tough changes that we made in San Diego. Why? Because those changes worked. Like all the leading GOP candidates, Faulkner uses tough on crime rhetoric and he has accused Newsom of being overly sympathetic to the defund police movement. Don't ever confuse me with the defund police movement. I am not one of those people that think you can smash someone's window or knock over some grandma and somehow have a slap on the wrist. Polling shows that rising crime is a top concern among voters. Homicides and gun crimes did spike in LA in San Francisco in 2020, though overall crime rates were fairly steady in the state at large. We have a huge prison population in California and that was behind the effort to do criminal justice reform. How do you balance those concerns? I think what we're seeing is is that you have to have consequences for actions. And what's happened is in California those consequences have been taken away. Other leading GOP contenders are businessman John Cox and reality star Caitlin Jenner. Reason extended interview requests to all of the leading candidates and Cox and Jenner were among those who didn't respond to our emails. The highest polling Democrat in the race is 29 year old real estate investor and YouTuber Kevin Paphrath who's running as a liberal centrist. Why does California, the fifth largest economy in the world, struggle with crime, schooling, homelessness and can't even keep the power on or supply our farms with enough water? And then there's Kevin Kiley, a state legislator and the only candidate currently holding elected office. He wrote a book making the case for recalling Newsom that focuses on allegations of corruption and competence and disregard for the rule of law. As I've been fighting in everywhere I can against Gavin Newsom's one man rule. Kiley sued the governor for using his emergency powers to change California voting law and circumventing the state legislature though lost on appeal. Newsom had issued 58 executive orders over the course of the pandemic at that time drawing pushback even from some fellow Democrats. The LAO has a couple quotes that I thought really summarized our feelings quite well. We are very troubled by the degree of authority that the administration is requesting that the legislature delegate. Kiley says Newsom exploited the pandemic to amplify his own power and boost his national political profile while ignoring the science of how COVID actually spreads. I turned to the recall really as a last recourse for what was an extraordinary abuse of the public trust where he took extraordinary emergency powers and abused them for personal political gain. What he's done is he's taken all of the problems that were already there with our state government and has put them on steroids. I mean, he's taken California's long-term decline and brought it to this total free fall. And so I think that by throwing him out in a popular citizen's movement, it's a chance to actually turn the page on this whole era of corruption and failure. People want our schools open. They want our economy to get back on track. They want to reduce homelessness. They want to see crime go down. All of these factors I think are what you're seeing and why this recall qualified. There's one point Newsom and his challengers agree on. If he's recalled on September 14th, it'll mean dramatic changes are coming, not only to America's largest state, but to the nation at large. You can eliminate the masking requirement for public schools. You can eliminate the vaccine requirements for public health care workers. So many of the things that I signed through executive order can be done overnight. And also you have the bully pulpit of the fifth largest economy in the world. Consequences are pretty extraordinary. Newsom has said that, you know, there are profound national implications and I would have to agree with him on that because he's tried to suggest that California is somehow a model for the Biden administration. He even wrote this delusional letter to Joe Biden on the day of his inauguration saying California is the roadmap to success for his administration. And so I think that the recall can send a very clear warning to the rest of the nation that California is not a model for the nation. It is a warning about the perils of a corrupt government. What happens when you have a government that doesn't actually serve the people of the state? We're in this moment right now where we've had unprecedented government control. In California, it's been the worst, but it's been true in many parts of the country. Citizens have had their freedoms, their liberties restricted. So I think it's really, really important right now in this moment that we actually get the pendulum swinging back the other way, that we turn the page on this dark era of government control by lighting a new spark of liberty and self-government. And I think that if California, the state where it was the worst, responds by recalling its governor through a citizen's movement, then that can truly sweep across the rest of the country.