Where Do Politics Stand After The Fires?

Karen Bass was at a cocktail party while the Palisades burned. https://t.co/xjk1BcncKd pic.twitter.com/qgeulSklac

— Eric Spiegelman (@ericspiegelman) January 15, 2025

Efforts to recall or defeat political figures like Gov Newsom, Mayor Bass, or others have been generally feckless in recent years. Los Angeles County voters failed twice to secure enough signatures to recall soft-on-crime district attorney George Gascon before they ultimately did vote him out in his reelection bid last year. A 2021 effort to recall Gov Newsom failed, and he was reelected in 2022:

Gov. Gavin Newsom sailed to reelection Tuesday night, easily defeating Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle in an outcome seen as so inevitable that he barely campaigned for reelection.

He's term limited now, and he has to find a new job, possibly running for president in 2028, if he wants to continue his career. Mayor Karen Bass won her first mayoral election against developer Rick Caruso in 2022 by about 10%. Two years later, even before the fires, Caruso was flirting with the ides of running against her again:

Real estate developer Rick Caruso made it clear two years ago that he wouldn’t run again for Los Angeles mayor if he lost to Karen Bass.

But lately, Caruso has been behaving a bit like a candidate.

He's shown more energy since the fires:

Amid a flurry of largely right-wing backlash of California public officials’ handling of the deadly wildfires near Los Angeles, the billionaire Rick Caruso, who unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for Los Angeles mayor, emerged as the most notable critic, tearing into his former opponent in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and earning the support of the world’s richest man and GOP megadonor Elon Musk.

. . . Caruso, whose criticism differed from the likes of President-elect Donald Trump, who swiped at California Gov. Gavin Newsom for not greenlighting a fictitious “water restoration declaration,” led a band of local politicians critical of the city, including Traci Park, the city council member representing the neighborhoods worst hit by the fires, who told the Los Angeles Times she has “more questions than answers” on how what she called the “chronic under-investment” in infrastructure contributed to the fire’s severity.

But whether Caruso will actually run again or even back a recall effort is still unclear. Other efforts to recall Bass or somehow force her resignation are so far just wishful thinking:

More than 86,000 outraged Los Angeles residents demand the ouster of lefty Mayor Karen Bass in a new petition, ripping her “gross mismanagement” in her disastrous response to the devastating wildfires ravaging the city.

“We . . . urgently call for the immediate recall of [Bass] due to her gross mismanagement and failure to effectively respond to the devastating 2025 fires in and around the city,” reads the Change.org petition created Wednesday, which had amassed more than 65,000 signatures by Saturday morning.

Bass was 7,400 miles away in Africa, at the inauguration of Ghana’s president, as flames began engulfing the City of Angels.

However, a Change.org petition is nothing but a Change.org petition. In California, a recall petition must be formally filed as part of a legal process, and it must have the verified signatuires of at least 10% of the voters. As of last year, Los Angeles City had 2,130,581 registered voters, which means a successful recall petition would need at least 213,058 verified signatures. The two unsuccessful recall petitions against George Gascon were thrown out by machine judges who rejected tens of thousands of signatures, and we may assume any such petition against Mayor Bass would have the same result.

At least there's a slightly less Quixotic effort against Gov Newsom:

A recall attempt to knock California Gov. Gavin Newsom out of office is underway as he faces sharp criticism for his handling of the Los Angeles wildfires — with opponents labeling his leadership a “series of catastrophic failures.”

Organizers against Newsom vowed to file papers in the next two weeks in hopes of jumpstarting the process that could lead to the Democrat’s ouster in the middle of his second term in the governor’s mansion.

. . . A notice of intent needs to be filed first and then recall supporters must collect about 1.3 million signatures in five months, according to the outlet.

. . . Newsom, 57, easily survived the 2021 recall vote in a state where Democrats hold a clear advantage in voter registration over Republicans.

A spokesperson for Newsom dismissed the latest attempt to throw the Dem out of office, insisting to Newsweek that the governor is “100 percent focused on the fires, ongoing rescue efforts and the recovery process — not politics.”

“Readers still should have the context that the same group of far-right Trump acolytes have launched six different recall attempts against the governor since he’s taken office, each of which have failed spectacularly,” spokesperson Nathan Click said in a statement.

The only hope for a new recall attempt, if Newsom repeats his 2021 strategy to characterize the organizers as Trump supporters, would be to rely on a general shift in opinion about Trump and hope it rubs off in the local context. Last November, Trump was able to benefit from a view that electing Biden in 2020 was a mistake. Now we have people like Dr Soon-Shiong saying endorsing Bass for mayor was an equivalent mistake. But for such a movement to succeed, it will need much more than Change.og petitoins and wishful thinking.