In early August of 2021 with six weeks to go and the fate of California’s democratically-elected Democratic Governor on the line, GroundWorks’ teams did what we do best: turned on a dime to put together a rock-solid field program at scale to educate voters about what was at stake and mobilize them to vote. We moved fast, we got to scale faster and stopped a Trump-inspired power grab in its tracks.
“Shock poll shows Gavin Newsom Losing Recall by Double Digits” – SF Gate on August 4th, 2021, referring to a Survey USA/San Diego Union Tribune poll.
In late July and early August of 2021, headlines like this one began to make California Democratic activists a little queasy. A Trump-inspired Republican attempt to oust Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom through the recall process was something that few people had taken seriously in the early part of the year. By midsummer, however, the recall had qualified for a September special election ballot. Emotions and enthusiasm for a recall were riding high among Republican voters up in arms about issues such as vaccine and mask mandates. Democratic voters on the other hand did not even seem to know there was an election happening, although early research showed they would have the Governor’s back once they learned about the situation.
The problem was getting to enough Democratic voters fast enough to make sure they were educated, motivated and ready to roll in numbers sufficient to beat the enthusiastic Republican minority. The “rules of the game” were that every registered California voter would receive a vote-by-mail ballot in the mail by the middle of August, so the race was on! That’s when GroundWorks was brought on board to help quickly rev up the statewide field campaign. With less than two months to go before the Special Election and only weeks to go before ballots would drop, hitting the ground fast at statewide scale with a disciplined team and pitch-perfect messaging was critical.
So we got right to it! Within two weeks, the GroundWorks team had established four offices in areas with some of the most dense concentrations of target voters in Los Angeles County. In this same two-week period, we hired and trained a full leadership team who in turn hired 180 Field Organizers. These Field Organizers were on the ground in record time, knocking on doors and making phone calls to voters – the classic field campaign tactics that GroundWorks has honed over many years. Additionally, we brought on 70 more Field Organizers statewide just one week later to function as a virtual phone team calling target voters all over the state- a field strategy we had developed and perfected in 2020 during the shelter-in-place phase of the pandemic.
The results of the program were immediately apparent. As early opinion research had suggested, once our teams made Democratic voters aware of the situation and what was at stake, they quickly committed to vote NO on the recall and to cast their absentee ballots early. By the end of this lightning-fast, six-week field program, GroundWorks’ teams had knocked on 150,447 doors, dialed 3.35 million phone numbers, talked to 187,351 voters, and were getting 88% of those voters to agree to vote NO on the recall.
In the end, the Republican effort to sneak a Special Election by California Democratic voters was stopped in its tracks. On September 14th, the attempted recall was resoundingly defeated: 62% to 38% – the exact same margin of victory as when Newsom beat his Republican challenger in the last regularly-scheduled General gubernatorial in 2018. In only six weeks, we were able to be part of turning around a potential catastrophe for Democrats in California and stopping a Trump-style move to delegitimize the California democratic process. As Governor Newsom said in acknowledging his win that night: “No is not the only thing that was expressed tonight…We said yes to science, we said yes to vaccines, we said yes to ending this pandemic.”