As someone who is relatively conservative, the GOP completely fucked this up. I would be shocked if Newsom is recalled. The state has real problems that I don't think have been properly dealt with for a generation, but running your campaign on repealing covid mandates and continuing to make the main issue Gavinor going out to dinner was just stupid. You had to get moderates on your side to make this work and Elder with his annoying cadence and bad ideas was not the guy.

It was also smart to manipulate the polling data to sound the alarm that the race was close, when it probably never was, then quietly note that there had been a problem with your data collection a month later, but that's not "fraud".