What seemed, just a few months ago, to be a quixotic attempt to recall California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has suddenly begun to gain serious momentum and is getting financial support from high rollers.
A campaign to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom is picking up steam after individual donors offered tens of thousands of dollars each, while $500,000 was being given from an Irvine-based consulting firm.
Prov 3:9 LLC contributed $500,000, and Sequoia Capital’s Douglas Leone and his wife Patricia Perkins-Leone contributed roughly $100,000.
The feeling is that those two large donations might well spur other angry Californians with deep pockets to come on board.
The beneficiary of this cash is Rescue California. In the spring, this group began circulating petitions for Newsom’s governorship to be recalled and a special election to take place, well before the next governor’s race in November 2022.
Anne Dunsmore, the campaign manager and finance director of Rescue California 2021, said the effort was a “citizen tide” against the many costly missteps Newsom had taken during the pandemic.
She continued, “Closing the beaches and closing the parks really was the beginning….of the end for him, as far as people taking the recall stuff seriously.”
Dunsmore said things came to a head with the mask-less governor’s ill-advised dinner at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, an establishment that features a white truffle and caviar dinner for $1,200 per person.
Harmeet Dhillon, the co-chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association, also believed the governor’s hypocrisy has greatly increased a general discontent in California that has allowed the recall effort to gain momentum.
“The hypocrisy of allowing lobbyists secured exemptions –like film crews get to operate, but restaurants don’t get to operate –these types of inequities are really fueling the energy behind this grassroots movement.”
Rescue California needs a minimum of 1,495,709 valid signatures to recall the governor, and the group says it’s collected some 800,000 so far. They have 3 more months to reach that goal.
Suddenly, what may have appeared to be a feeble citizen’s “tilt” at a seemingly indestructible, autocratic political windmill no longer looks all that quixotic. There are now a growing number of real-life, reality-based “Don Quixote’s” in the Golden State preparing to dispatch Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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