‘I don’t feel like it’s a loss’: Resignation and a glimmer of hope in California’s most pro-recall county

SAN ANDREAS, Calaveras County — For months, the Pickle Patch, a popular lunch spot in this small town in the Sierra foothills, became a hub in the drive to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.

During weekly Trump Tuesday parties in the lead-up to the presidential election last year, where diners were invited to wear their MAGA gear, volunteers from the local Republican Party set up a booth to collect signatures for the nascent effort to remove Newsom from office. Long after Donald Trump lost a race that many residents here believe was stolen, the deli kept recall petitions on hand for customers to sign.

It was an unexpected thrill for owner Gretel Tiscornia, 50, this spring when the recall qualified for the ballot, giving voters an opportunity to toss a governor who she believed had failed to lead on problems like California’s severe wildfires and drought.

“You would just think that you would be a little more concerned with the actual issues of the state and not so much your hair,” she said on a recent morning as she prepared for the usual lunchtime rush, the smell of bacon wafting from the kitchen. “If you are not doing your job, I don’t think that there is any reason why we should all just sit on our hands and shake our heads.”

Then came election day; the recall was crushed. Newsom is on track to hold on to office by an even larger margin than he won the governorship in 2018.

In Calaveras County, where voters signed the petition to remove Newsom at a higher rate than anywhere else in California, the defeat has been met with a sense of resignation that the effort never had much of a chance anyway.

The rural county, a former gold mining community of about 40,000 perhaps best known for Mark Twain’s story about a jumping frog, favored the recall with nearly 65% of the vote. But supporters say that by the time the campaign ended last week, they knew the governor would win. The obstacles — a huge Democratic registration advantage, the tens of millions of dollars Newsom raised, mail voting — were simply too great.

“It all felt so willy-nilly,” said Cecilia Allen, 37, co-owner of Liberty Guns & Ammo in nearby Valley Springs, which also set out recall petitions in the store and turned in stacks of signatures every week. Read more >>>