Recalls are back in the news in California.
The same groups that put an ultimately unsuccessful recall of Governor Gavin Newsom on the ballot in 2021 are trying again. They’re fueled by polls showing that less than half of likely voters believe the state is headed in the right direction or approve of Newsom, who increasingly travels outside the state seeking national media coverage.
Recall Newsom, Part Deux is very unlikely to succeed, but its reemergence speaks to a revival of anger against politicians who are seen as ignoring voter concerns.
Nationwide, more than a hundred elected officials were recalled by voters or resigned from office in the face of recall votes last year, the highest number of public officials given the boot in more than a decade.
Recall efforts are popping up in places where they’ve never or rarely been tried before.
In Washington, D.C.’s Ward 6, which covers Capitol Hill, many residents, most of them black, are making progress in collecting enough signatures to oust their councilman, Charles Allen, a Democrat who has backed Defund the Police efforts and tried to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses. Violent crime in Washington rose by 39 percent last year, and the city saw 958 carjackings or attempted carjackings.
In Orange County, which has nearly a tenth of California’s 40 million people, voters have grievances about accountability.
Al Mijares, the elected superintendent of the Orange County Board of Education, has gone radio silent since he was reelected in 2022. A month after he won another term, Mijares attended one board meeting, but he has not been seen since. His office has declined to respond to any media inquiries about him and has not even issued a statement.
Mijares makes over $350,000 a year, including very generous benefits, and you’d think he would show up to monthly board meetings or at least attend by Zoom.
The refusal of Mijares to explain his invisibility (perhaps taking notes from an episode at the national level, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vanished without informing the president or even his second in command that he’d been hospitalized) allows him to remain in office and continue to support the agenda of the teachers’ unions, who are his primary backers. The only word out of his office on his activities has been a brief comment from Ramon Miramontes, his deputy: “Al is a man of integrity focused on doing the right things for all students.”
As long as Mijares remains in place, the conservative Orange County Board of Education members cannot even exercise effective oversight, much less appoint a successor who will show up.
Before his disappearing act, Mijares was active on one front: trying to reduce the power of the conservative board by backing a bill in the state legislature that would have added two additional seats and made it more likely for union-favored board members to gain a majority. Though his effort failed, it focused attention on the extent to which Mijares was obsessed with politics rather than improving the state of several woefully underperforming inner-city school districts in Orange County.
Local residents are talking about a recall effort against Mijares. At a minimum, a recall effort might actually force the superintendent to talk to the media or answer questions from the board members he is supposed to report to.
Governor Newsom, who admits he didn’t take the 2021 recall seriously at first, is singing a different tune about the latest effort against him. “I don’t dismiss these things lightly at all,” he told public TV station KQED last week. “I take this one very, very seriously.”
The mere act of collecting recall signatures could have two separate purposes: It could potentially bring about the removal of a public official who has misbehaved or is derelict in his duties, but even before that happens, it could serve as a blunt warning to that official that the public demands he pay attention to their concerns.