Newsom, a Democrat who has been California’s governor since 2019, is locked in a battle over a Republican-led attempt to remove him from office. The election will take place next Tuesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who represented California in the U.S. Senate and previously served as the state’s attorney general, will travel to the San Francisco Bay Area to campaign for Newsom on Wednesday.
In a tweet last month, Biden urged voters to reject the recall attempt, calling Newsom “a key partner in fighting the pandemic and helping build our economy back better.”
Harris and Biden are the latest high-profile Democrats to lend their support to Newsom and urge voters to reject the recall. Before being elected governor of the nation’s most populous state, Newsom was California’s lieutenant governor, after serving as San Francisco mayor from 2004 to 2011. His name has frequently been floated as a potential presidential contender.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who ran for president in 2020, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who also sought the Democratic nomination that year, both appeared alongside Newsom at campaign events over the weekend.
A new poll from the Public Policy Institute of California last week showed the recall attempt is likely to fail. Voters will answer two questions on the ballot: whether Newsom should be recalled and, if so, whom they would pick to replace him. If more than 50 percent vote in favor of the recall, the candidate with the most votes on the second question will replace him.
Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder has been polling as the lead Republican in a crowded field that also includes reality-TV star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and businessman John Cox, who ran for governor against Newsom in 2018.
Newsom’s critics and supporters of the recall effort have cited a number of grievances, including taxes, homelessness and his response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Newsom’s campaign, meanwhile, has blamed the recall attempt on “a partisan, Republican coalition of national Republicans, anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists and anti-immigrant Trump supporters.”
Newsom’s campaign is backed by the California Democratic Party, the Democratic Governors Association and a long list of prominent Democrats.
If the effort is a success, Newsom would become the second governor in California’s history to be removed from office through a recall election—following Democrat Gray Davis, who was replaced by movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, in 2003.
