Where Is The Newsom Campaign?

A couple of data points puzzle me about the California recall election's progress. The first is that by July 29, there were two polls in quick succession that showed growing sentiment among likely voters to recall Gov Newsom. Since then -- fully two weeks later -- there's been nothing. This is a rapidly developing story, with the September 14 election little more than a month away, and nobody's releasing polls.

In fact, we received our own mail-in ballots in yesterday's mail, something the state is doing for every voter in this election. This means that voting is already under way. The top Republican candidates are actively campaigning via ads on Facebook and elsewhere. But Newsom, who has raised more than $58 million to defeat the recall, three times as much as all his opponents combined, is far less visible than Elder, Cox, and the other Republicans.

Elder in particular is able to leverage appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to get free coverage, but Newsom doesn't seem to be spending much on ads, certainly nothing like his funding would suggest. He actually ran ads last March, April, and June against the signature campaign, but when the effort qualified for the ballot, he seems to have lowered his profile.

Not long ago, he gave a photo op cleaning homeless trash from under a Berkeley freeway bridge, but this is "free" media when he could easily buy ads, and not only that, though free, it points to one of his main vulnerabilities as he belatedly tries to say I'm concerned about the homeless problem, too.

Beyond that, angry unscripted remarks caught on video by the Sacramento Bee went viral on social media.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom snapped last week while talking to reporters, ranting that everyone outside the Golden State is "b----ing" about it.

Newsom, who is facing a closer-than-anticipated recall election, spoke to the Sacramento Bee in an interview last week in which he grew angry at critics of California.

Clips from interview have since gained steam online, where they have been making the rounds on social media.

. . . "I'm a future ex-governor," the governor also said in the interview. "It could happen in a few weeks, it could happen in a few years. I love this damn state."

With viral coverage like that, not only is he not spending his own money, but he's giving aid and comfort to Larry Elder. In fact, his own defeatist messaging and his apparent inability to control his maudlin remarks make me wonder if rumors that circulated a couple months ago that he had a serious drinking problem might be true.

The second data point is that it's hard to avoid an implication in his remarks that the national Democrats -- including Californians Pelosi, Feinstein, and Harris -- are cutting him loose. On August 2, I quoted him saying,

During the interview with the editorial boards of the McClatchy Newspapers, Newsom also noted that he does not think the Democrats are considering the consequences of him possibly losing.

“I don’t think the national Democratic Party’s asking themselves that question,” Newsom told them. “If this was a successful recall, I think it would have profound consequences nationwide and go to not just politics, but to policy and policymaking.”

But just yesterday, I quoted a Democrat consultant who said the national effort would ramp up -- "soon".

"You will see a full-scale war going on in the next few weeks," said democratic strategist Steve Maviglio.

. . . With heavy pressure coming down on the governor, Democrats too are pulling out all the stops.

"I'm receiving texts from the Democratic National Committee, from progressive groups. We have members of our congressional delegation holding press conferences. You'll have national figures flying in," Maviglio said.

Er, what natiional figures? Pelosi appears to be completely wrapped up pushing the next infrastucture bill, bringing the House back two weeks early from its recess and dumping her own vulnerable members in the process. Harris can't be bothered. Feinstein is 88. I can't imagine that second-stringers with a lot of baggage like Swalwell or Maxine Waters can be much help.

And people are voting now, as we speak. Polls aren't being released, but we can be sure they're being made. The lizard people dropped Cuomo. Win or lose, they're dropping Newsom.

Ruminating On Cuomo's Resignation

Well, right up to his resignation, a lot of the smart money said Cuomo would pull a Clinton, keep denying he-said-she-said allegations and hold on until the thing blew over. But Clinton was Br'er Rabbit; Cuomo pulled a Nixon, turning a stubborn countenance to the world and finally collapsing in disgrace. But there was a subtext to Nixon, too. Nixon's ultimate sin was not letting his aides bungle the Watergate fiasco. His sin was Alger Hiss. The lizard people have a long memory.

When I posted on Cuomo's problems last week, I raised questions that have also turned up in independent media: ultimately, Cuomo was accused of run-of-trhe mill offenses: "non-consensual touching" and "sexist remarks" leading to a "hostile work environment". Forget Clinton, Biden is on film doing the same frat-boy stuff, in full view and far more often. Nobody brings this up any more, because it won't go anywhere.

The other objection is that Cuomo was forced out due to the gropery, not the thousands of nursing home deaths. One answer, of course, is Stalin's insight that one death is a tragedy; millions are a statistic. But nevertheless, COVID is a factor, it's just a subtext that nobody wants to acknowledge directly. But acknowledged or not, the Democrat handling of COVID -- lockdowns, social distance, masking, closed schools, public events foregone, with no demonstrable success after 19 months of red light-green light controls -- is proving a major liability.

A few independent commentators like Don Surber have understood the issue. Surber thought Cuomo should stay:

Suddenly this summer everyone just discovered Cuomo is a cretin?

Spare me the self-righteousness.

I want this son of a gov to stay in Albany, win a fourth term, and stand as a symbol of the corruption of the American political system, which includes the media. \

This YouTuber has a take that follows up on why a Don Surber wanted him to stay:

The Democrats had to drop Cuomo, because, acknowledged or not, the COVID nursing home scandal, with the larger context that draconian controls work no better than no controls at all, was an attack from the right, which is proving successful.

And, in the wake of disturbing polls on the California recall last week, we've heard nothing new. No new polls, the legacy media just sort of carefully lowering expectations without them:

It's the battle most people didn't see coming.

As ballots are being sent out to every registered voter across California, polls show Governor Gavin Newsom locked in a tight race for next month's recall election.

"You will see a full-scale war going on in the next few weeks," said democratic strategist Steve Maviglio.

. . . With heavy pressure coming down on the governor, Democrats too are pulling out all the stops.

"I'm receiving texts from the Democratic National Committee, from progressive groups. We have members of our congressional delegation holding press conferences. You'll have national figures flying in," Maviglio said.

Right. Flying in. In just a few weeks, wait and see. Who're they gonna fly in? Kamala Harris? Nancy Pelosi? Maxine Waters? Why aren't they here now? The Republicans are campaigning right now. Cuomo's resignation is a national event. So's the California recall.

Nothing's Clear, And They Like It That Way

I posted yesteday about the imprecise language Drs Fauci and Walensky use in discussing COVID. In one sentence on last Sunday's talks, Dr Fauci used "infected" with two different meanings. Infected-a meant only that antibodies were detected in tests irrespective of symptoms. Infected-b meant someone "had" COVID, i.e., symptoms, like someone "has" cancer or the flu. This has been a basic problem with how COVID has been discussed from the start, and it's led to the widespread fear that a positive test is a death sentence.

So this leads to another question that nobody really answers: what's the likelihood that someone who tests positive will develop symptoms at all? As of July 2020, this site published an official CDC estimate:

Asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, or those who do not experience any symptoms, unknowingly contribute to the spread of COVID-19, infectious disease experts say. Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new guidance that raises the estimate of asymptomatic carriers to 40 percent of people who have COVID-19.

Previously, the CDC estimated asymptomatic carriers at 35 percent, a figure reported in late May. The agency concedes that “asymptomatic cases are difficult to identify and transmission is difficult to observe and quantify.”

The CDC had estimated that the chance of transmission of COVID-19 from asymptomatic people was 100 percent. But that figure has been revised downward this month to 75 percent. That means that the CDC now says asymptomatic individuals are less likely to transmit infection, compared to symptomatic individuals who have a 100 percent chance of transmission.

But in January 2021, the CDC published different results using (oh, boy) a model.

Overall, the model predicted that 59% of coronavirus transmission would come from people without symptoms, including 35% from people who were pre-symptomatic and 24% from those who never showed symptoms at all.

Jay Butler, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases and co-author of the study, admitted the researchers used "a fairly simple mathematical model" for such a complicated and continually evolving pandemic, but they were nonetheless "surprised how well it held up under a broad range of base assumptions."

Butler added, "I have no doubt that we'll still have people say, 'Well, what if you did X, Y, or Z?' But hopefully being able to adjust the variables will help address some of those concerns, such as what we did."

According to Butler, CDC wanted to do a study on asymptomatic spread because "[u]nfortuantely, there continues to be some skepticism about the value of community-wide mitigation efforts for preventing transmission such as masking, distancing, and hand hygiene."

Except that the real-world data from millions of people throughout 2020 showed that lockdowns, social distancing, and hand hygiene had absolutely no effect on transmission despite near 100% compliance. And even among semi-official sites, the numbers are all over the place. Gunderson Health, without citing any source, says,

One of the questions I get most frequently is how many people develop symptoms and how many people remain asymptomatic. We believe that the number of asymptomatic infections ranges from 15 to 40 percent of total infections. COVID-19 causes a wide range of symptoms. Some have mild symptoms like a sore throat or a runny nose that can be confused for allergies or a cold. Others grow more ill and develop shortness of breath, pneumonia or require hospitalization. We don't know why some people never get sick, have only mild symptoms or require hospitalization.

It can be challenging to keep up with constantly changing information. We encourage you to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The recommendations are based on current science and updated regularly.

OK, but when I do web searches for CDC numbers, I get nothing but the vague, heavily qualified answers you see here after 18 months of the pandemic.

One of the formative experiences of my life cane early in my freshman year at an Ivy League school. I was told that due to my test scores, I could opt out of freshman comp. Something deep inside told me I shouldn't do this, I should sign up for the course. (This was the sort of thing that gave my parents fits.) My papers came back with red scribbles all over, "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel", and so forth. I'd been told I was a good writer, I should look into it as a career, and here, without having to do it, I'd taken this course and gotten a C-minus, which trashed my GPA. My parents were livid.

Meanwhile, pretty down over how the comp course had gone, I would read the campus paper each morning. The staff there were the real people who were going to go on to real journalism careers, the Jake Tappers, the Laura Ingrahams. They were already junior members of the elite. I would read their pieces and suddenly see the same stuff that came back to me with "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel". This threw me into something not quite depression, just something more like a crisis over how the world worked. The dean of freshmen, who liked me, was never able to help. He dropped dead of a heart attack anyhow.

It took me quite some time to realize this isn't a bug, it's a feature. I'd inadvertently learned there are two kinds of writers, those who actually write, and those who don't. It was an early lesson in the Ivy League and the elites and my place in them.

Fauci and Walensky are supposed to talk this way. They've been taught this from early youth.

Parsing Dr Fauci

I once had a friend who started out in blue-collar work at the phone company. His superiors saw that he had a lot of promise, and they sent him to courses to prepare him for supervisory and management jobs. Among them were courses in speaking and writing. I never thought he had problems with communication skills, but at minumum, it showed how important at least some corporations thought they were -- indeed, they'll likely now pay lip service to diversity and inclusion, but they'll still want people who can communicate effectively. The need for those leadership skills doesn't go away.

So it's all the more intriguing that our public health authorities in the midst of a pandemic express themselves so poorly. Let's take Dr Fauci's appearance yesterday on Meet the Press. He answers a question from Chuck Todd with a remarkable tautology:

CHUCK TODD:

. . . How dangerous is this Delta variant for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI:

Well, it's extremely dangerous for the unvaccinated because, if they get infected and if they stay unvaccinated and don't wear masks, ultimately they're going to wind up getting infected.

It's extremely dangerous, because if they get infected, they're going to wind up getting infected. He may have meant something else -- he may have meant to say that if they get infected, they might wind up getting sick -- but that's not what he said. But then he goes on:

If you are vaccinated, you are very well protected against getting infected.

This is, as far as I can tell, simply incorrect. Dr Walensky came somewhat closer to correct in what I quoted from her yesterday when she said what vaccines "can't do anymore" is prevent transmission, although this is actually another example of remarkably poor expression at the top. Vaccines don't prevent infection. They induce the body to produce antibodies against the virus when it infects. This has never changed. What Dr Walensky seems to think she's saying is that as of last week, the CDC has changed its messaging to reflect this. But Dr Fauci is still groping for what this may mean:

Since no vaccine is 100% protective, there will be what we call breakthrough infections. That's the bad news. The good news is that almost invariably that will be an infection that is either without symptoms or minimally symptomatic, which means the vaccine still protects extremely well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and deaths. But the interesting and unfortunate thing that we found out that gets to the mask issue is that this virus is so easily transmissible that, if a vaccinated person gets a breakthrough infection, which will happen, Chuck. You can expect that because no vaccine is 100% effective.

I was astonished that as of yesterday, Dr Fauci used the term "breakthrough infections". Everyone, vaccinated or not, can get infected with the virus. What the vaccine does is allow the body to produce antibodies that attack the virus and in most cases keep the body from developing symptoms. The infection isn't the breakthrough, it's the symptoms. "Breakthrough illness" might be a better term, but "infections" is more panic inducing, I guess. He goes on,

Now, we're finding that the level of virus is really quite high, which means one of the bad things about all of this is that even though you're protected from getting severe disease, if you're infected, you can transmit it to someone else even if you're vaccinated. And that's the fundamental basis of now saying people should be wearing masks in indoor public places when you're in a region that has a high level of infection.

I'll leave aside the question Chuck Todd didn't ask, which would be, "But cloth and paper masks are ineffective against the way COVID is apparently transmitted. We saw that throughout 2020. What good will they do now if they didn't work then?" If Todd were to ask it, Fauci would simply reply with the sort of word salad he's been giving throughout the interview.

But in fact, the medium here is the message. On top of the vagueness, the tautology, the ponderous and repetitious verbosity, is the thick New Yawk accent. This, at least in the mind of the elites, gives Fauci authenticity. He's so bright, he's reached the top in spite of his poor communication skills. Listen to what he says! Or at least, try to listen.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. They change what they say week to week, because last week what they said didn't work. But if they make what they say impossible ever quite to understand, it doesn't matter.

"We're Not Going To Lock Down Our Economy Or Our Schools"

This is part of what Jen Psaki said in a press briefing on Friday. A more complete account had this:

"We are not going back. We are not turning back the clock," Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

"This is not March 2020 or even January 2021," she added. "We're not going to lock down our economy or our schools because our country's in a much stronger place than when we took office."

But the account continues with a more realistic caveat:

The promise came as some teachers unions aligned with the Democratic Party call for the school year to begin with virtual classes, not in-classroom learning.

Just this past week, of course, the administration reversed itself on the COVID eviction moratorium, so there's no assurance that any equivalent promise from Ms Psaki will have weight. The issue pretty clearly hinges on who's able to reach the senile regent and bamboozle or bully him into whatever policy they want.

Meanwhile. the institution that's actually driven what's locked down and what's not, the CDC, has contradicted itself again on policy. Did Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, inadvertently argue this week against controversial vaccine-verification systems, such as the one being used in New York City. [Shouldn't the copy editor have added a question mark here?]

. . . During an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on Thursday, Walensky explained the CDC changed its mask guidance because fully vaccinated people can allegedly transmit the delta variant as readily as unvaccinated people.

That is when she claimed the vaccines do not prevent COVID-19 transmission.

"That was the reason that we changed our guidance last Tuesday," Walensky said. "Our vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well with delta with regard to severe illness and death. They prevent it."

"But what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission," she added.

Walensky then followed up by recommending people wear face masks indoors if they are surrounded by unvaccinated people or those who could be more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Except that it's generally acknowledged that neither paper nor cloth face masks are effective in preventing COVID transmission anyhow. And Dr Fauci has also reversed himself:

Medical experts have shifted their views on asymptomatic spread over the course of the past year. Asymptomatic transmission means an individual can spread the disease without realizing it, and the phenomenon has led to many of the severe lockdowns this year, according to CNBC. The World Health Organization says people can even spread while they’re pre-symptomatic, or just before they begin to display symptoms, the outlet reported.

Last January, America’s top infectious disease expert, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, said that asymptomatic transmission historically has never been the driver of outbreaks.

“The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person,” Fauci said at the Jan. 28 [2020] White House press briefing. “Even if there's a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers."

Dr Walensky's remarks on CNN are still confusing in that she said, "But what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission." The "anymore" would suggest that at one time, they did prevent transmission, which in context might make the listener think this is something new, caused perhaps by the insidious delta variant.

As far as I can tell, the actual situation is far more uncertain, since there's no reliable statistic on how many "cases" of COVID are asymptomatic. This in turn is a product of the general redefinition of "case" that's taken place over the past 18 months: prior to then, a "case" of a disease was by definition a person with symptoms leading to a diagnosis. An asymptomatic case was an oxymoron. Since COVID, a "case" is a positive test for antibodies, no symptoms needed. But the vaccine also functions by causing the body to produce COVID antibodies. From a policy standpoint, this is gobbledygook.

Definitiomins change. Policies change with changing definitions. "The Science" changes on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Nothing these people promise is reliable at all. A good part of it is who's able to whisper in the senile regent's ear this week.

What's In It For Dr Walensky?

The phenomenon of Drs Fauci and Walensky, with the surrounding cast of characters like Drs Baric, Collins, and Daszak. has fascinated me from the start. They're clearly members of the credentialed elite, unelected and unaccountable, in many ways impervious to the sorts of scrutiny to which even powerful politicians are subject. In the past two weeks, Dr Walensky has had editorial calls for her removal amid clear indications of public incompetence, but this is unlikely. It brings me back to Ferdinand Lundberg and the sense that such decisions are made by people largely unknown to us and well above our pay grade.

If they're actually lizard-like humanoids, well, maybe so for all we know. (I realized the other day that the lizards in our back yard only speak Spanish, the way police dogs only understand German. I'm studying Spanish so I can talk to them.)

In the last several weeks, I've run into two articles about Dr Walensky that nobody else seems to have noticed. The first, by Sam Faddis, is CDC Head Rochelle Walensky Knows What She’s Doing – She’s Selling Vaccines. The other, by Scott Hounsell, is CDC Director Walensky's Husband Received $5 Million in HHS Grants - and That's Just the Start of It. The takeaway from both is that Dr Walensky in particular sits atop what appears to be a multibillion-dollar public health boodle involving big pharma, grants, preferences, approvals, policy advantages, and inevitable baksheesh.

The Faddis piece gives important bacground on Walensky's rise:

Walensky came to her current job as head of the CDC from Massachusetts General Hospital where she was the head of the Infectious Disease Department. Mass General is the original teaching hospital for Harvard University. It includes the Mass General Research Institute, which is the largest hospital-based research program in the nation. It conducts $1 billion in operations yearly and employs 9500 researchers that work in more than 30 institutes, centers, and departments.

Mass General has a host of contracts with U.S. government agencies. Almost a decade before the COVID-19 outbreak, Mass General investigator and Infectious Diseases Physician, Mark Poznansky, MD, Ph.D., received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a platform for accelerated vaccine development in the event of a rapidly spreading infectious disease. The focus of this work was on the development and deployment of a vaccine on a timeline not previously considered possible.

In other words, over a decade ago DARPA and Mass General were laser-focused on confronting any new emerging disease via the deployment of a vaccine on an extremely short timeline. They were not discussing or planning for the treatment of individuals affected or the employment of other measures to mitigate the spread of the disease and/or to isolate those infected. The answer to a pandemic would be the deployment of a new, essentially experimental, vaccine.

. . . In the first quarter of 2021 alone, Mass General Brigham, the umbrella entity of which Mass General is the largest piece, earned in excess of $1 billion dollars. Pfizer alone stands to make in excess of $26 billion just this year from sales of its vaccine.

Walensky was chosen then not because of some unique track record in curing disease and saving lives but because she is a representative of perhaps the single most important institution in a giant complex involving huge quantities of taxpayer’s money, research institutions, and scientists getting rich off of their discoveries. This complex decided years ago that its approach to combatting the emergence of a virus – like COVID – would be the development and marketing of a vaccine on an accelerated timetable. It has worked toward that goal ever since.

The only possible fly in the ointment for such an approach would, of course, be “vaccine hesitancy.” Developing a vaccine and manufacturing is pointless if people will not take it. Walensky recognized this problem long ago.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer; I got the shots months ago. I don't give medical advice. On the other hand, one thing that's pestered me from the start of the year is that the late 2020 COVID surge peaked and began its sharp decline in mid-January 2021, only weeks after any vaccines were available at all, and well before anyone had been "fully vaccinated" with two shots and weeks of waiting between them. There may be a good explanation for this, but I haven't heard one.

And it's worth noting that the delta surge, wildly overhyped in the media, is being attributed to "vaccine hesitancy", but nevertheless people are being told to revert to the ineffective paper and cloth masks as well. There's a folk medicine atmosphere to the whole thing. And again, much as people like Dr Scott Gottlieb predicted, the delta surge is in the process of peaking weeks before those who've been induced to overcome their hesitancy are "fully vaccinated".

The Scott Hounsell piece on the Dr Walensky who's married to Dr Walensky is also revealing:

Walensky, who took over as director with Biden’s inauguration, is married to Loren D. Walensky, a renowned pediatric oncology researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard. In October 2019 Loren Walensky became the scientific co-founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Lytica Therapeutics, “an early-stage biotechnology company working on an innovative platform for developing next-generation antimicrobials.”

Just four months later, Walensky’s Lytica received a $16.9 million dollar HHS grant to “develop antibacterial peptides with broad activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria.” Only $5.3 million of that money was initially disbursed to Lytica, and the remaining $11.6 million is scheduled to be disbursed upon the achievement of “certain development milestones.” I have previously worked in the world of grant writing and can tell you most agencies will not give grants to organizations that have existed for less than a year and organizations that have no other stream of funding. In this particular case Crunchbase, which monitors funding for corporations and non-profits, shows that the only funding that Lytica has received to date is the $5.3 million allocated from the grant received.

. . . While Walensky received the grant prior to his wife becoming director of an HHS-governed organization, his wife was directly associated with HHS for more than a decade when his company was awarded the grant. Rochelle Walensky served as the chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council, which put her in close contact with Dr. Antnony Fauci, and as a member of the US Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents (again, with Dr. Fauci). In fact, when “insiders” were surprised that Walensky was picked, it was revealed that Fauci had a lot to do with her appointment[.]

. . . The fact that Walensky’s grant was not disclosed as a portion of his wife’s appointment amounts to a massive lack of transparency. In her financial disclosures, submitted January 13, 2021, she lists her husband’s interest in Lytica Therapeutics as a “spousal holding,” but doesn’t indicate that he is the co-founder of the company and ostensibly working there since he is the inventor of the technology subject to the CARB-X grant. She also doesn’t indicate in that filing that his company is receiving a federal grant from the very agency in which she’s being appointed to a leadership position – and the agency that still has to make decisions on whether to award the additional $11.6 million.

Director Walensky had a responsibility to report this conflict of interest upon taking office, however, no records exist of her doing so.

Having spouses and other relatives collect what amount to bribes is a long-established technique practiced by families like the Clintons and Bidens. My guess would be that serious inquiry would lead to other connections between Walensky and Fauci, and other income to Fauci and other figures that violates what we would expect to be transparency.

And this leaves aside the clear circumstance that NIH and CDC money went to the Wuhan lab that was the cause of COVID in the first place.

Newsom's Dilemma

California Gov Newsom is the second nationally prominent Democrat governor in danger of removal from office. His current predicament is an illustration of how the political environment is shifting. Last spring, the movement to recall Newsom looked like a long shot, although the signatures on the recall petition far exceeded the required minimum. The mid-July entry of Larry Elder, best known as a second-string Salem Radio talk show host with no electoral experience, immediately transformed the race.

A July 23 poll, taken shortly after Elder won a court case to put him on the ballot, had 43% of likely voters in favor of recall. An August 3 poll put the number at 46%. By August 5, the number in favor of removal had risen to 51%, with only 40% in favor of retaining Newsom. Elder's entry into the race clearly focused public interest.

But an August 4 debate among four Republican recall candidates, sponsored by behind-the-curve Salem Radio and moderated by NeverTrump Salem host Hugh Hewitt, included neither Elder nor the target of the recall, Newsom. Assemblymember Kevin Kiley of Sacramento suburb Rocklin, 2018 gubernatorial candidate John Cox, NeverTrump former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, and former Sacramento-area U.S. Rep. Doug Ose were present. Faulconer and Cox had briefly led polls in late July, but they quickly faded with Elder's entry. '

However, a new poll that concluded the same day as the debate showed that none of those conventional Republican candidates is now a serious contender.

The poll came from Survey USA and the San Diego Union Tribune, and was conducted among 1,100 Californians from Aug. 2 to Aug. 4. It found that 51% of respondents were in favor of recalling Newsom, while only 40% wanted to keep him in power.

. . . The new poll's other shocking finding is a new leader on question two ("Which candidate should replace Newsom if he loses question one"): YouTuber Kevin Paffrath, the most high-profile Democrat on the bottom of the ballot.

. . . Paffrath received 27% support, with conservative radio host Larry Elder, who led three separate polls released in recent weeks, at 23% support. The only other candidate with double-digit support was businessman John Cox (10%).

Paffrath definitely comes out of left field. Wikipedia describes him as "an American YouTuber, landlord, and real estate broker". He is a 29-year-old self-promoter whose YouTube channel up to the current election had focused largely on flipping houses and the real estate market. Faulconer, the only professional politician in the field, who'd led early polls, was no longer anywhere near the top. In addition,

As in the [August 3] Emerson College poll, a majority of Latinos said they would vote to recall Newsom; in the new poll, a majority of whites said they would do so as well.

The poll also asked vaccinated voters about their preference, and a majority favored recalling Newsom, 47% to 43%.

Once I heard of Paffrath, I went to his YouTube channel Meet Kevin and his campaign site stopthebullship.com to get a sense of his political views. He definitely isn't running on the current Democrat brand. His issues include Crime and Community Policing, Enforcing our Laws, Traffic, No Lockdowns, and Ending High Taxes. These are middle and working class issues, clearly opposed to the alliance of wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat that dominates the Democrat establishment, which Newsom represents.

I don't know if Paffrath is some kind of outlier result in the most recent poll, but he represents the same range of views that supports Elder, and which the current electorate clearly doesn't trust members of the Republican establishment to support. If the recall election were held today, it's likely that either Elder or Paffrath would replace Newsom. This does make me more than a little nervous; the first people who walk into the new governor's office in such a case could well try to bully or panic him into imposing new lockdowns, for instance. I would have somewhat more confidence in Elder with such an outcome in view.

Newsom, meanwhile, has had little to say over the past several weeks. Yesterday, in a Zoom call with campaign volunteers,

Newsom hit out at Elder, calling him a major Trump supporter — a rallying cry in a state won overwhelmingly by President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Newsom also accused Elder of being a threat to abortion rights established under the landmark Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973.

The problem is that if he's talking only to campaign volunteers, he's preaching to the choir and not to the majority of Californians who now want him out. And at this point, he's running in the 2020 election, not in 2021, where the major issues are things like crime and lockdowns, not Donald Trump. And unlike 2020, where the issue was in fact Trump, the 2021 recall is about Newsom. If he attacks Elder -- indeed, even if he gets the LA Times to issue a hit piece tying Elder to a kiddie porn ring or something -- the electorate has over 40 other choices to replace Newsom. It's not either-or; it's we're sick of one, and we'll try others.

And as Newsom himself has put it, this is a national election. Salem Radio isn't the only one who's behind the curve.