Jumping To Conclusions

Remember all the pre-election hysteria from Democrats about how the recall election was unfair? They gave many reasons:

1. The whole state elected Davis in 2002, while a handful of radicals were hijacking the state by pushing a recall which would be supported by only a few people.
   
2. There would be hundreds of candidates and someone could get elected with only a small percentage of the vote.
   
3. Davis could get more votes than the guy who replaced him and still "lose" to that guy.
   

There were probably other arguments, but those were the ones I heard regularly.

Surprise! None of those things came to pass.

In fact,

• More votes were cast in the recall election -- 7.9 million so far -- than were cast in the November 2002 general election that let Gray Davis remain as governor (about 7.5 million).
  
• There were a large number of candidates, but not "hundreds," and the winner got 48.5% of the vote. Which was, in fact, a higher percentage than Gray Davis got in 2002, when he received 47.3% of the vote.
  
• Schwarzenegger got more votes in this election to win the job (3.7 million) than Davis did in the recall portion of the election to retain the job (3.5 million).
  

One can still argue that recall elections are a bad idea for one reason or another, but this should hopefully serve to demonstrate that most of the frantic pre-election Oh-my-god-they're-trying-to-subvert-democracy cries we heard in this instance were just partisan fearmongering. Perhaps this was less of a "circus" than the media had hoped it would be.

So adding up Arnold and McClintock, plus dropouts like Ueberroth and lesser known people, more than 62% of the vote went to Republican candidates. What does that say about the state of politics in California? (I have no idea. It wasn't a rhetorical question.)

By the way, the award for quirkiest vote total: in ninth place was "George Schwartzman." Who? I hate to be cynical about voters, but given that he got almost as many votes as more prominent candidates like Gary Coleman, Mary Carey, and Larry Flynt, it's hard not to conclude that there are a substantial number of retardsCalifornians who thought they were voting for Schwarzenegger, not Schwartzman.