The campaign to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom has reached 1.8 million raw signatures, says a campaign official.
About 1.83 million signatures have been counted as of Feb. 25, Rescue California’s Anne Hyde Dunsmore told The Epoch Times.
Although Dunsmore said 1.8 million unverified signatures should be enough to trigger the recall election, she said the campaign will continue its efforts and could reach as many as 2 million signatures by the March 10 deadline.
To succeed, the campaign must collect 1,495,709 verified signatures. More signatures are needed as many are discarded during the validation process.
“We’re just making sure we are finishing what we started,” Dunsmore said. “We’re just getting incoming [signatures] and [it] is paying off. All of the work that we’ve done in the timeframe that we needed to do it in, we did. It’s complicated for people to understand that you can’t do these things overnight.”
Volunteers will continue collecting signatures at numerous booths around the state. Meanwhile, the California Republican Party is making calls to people who have received the petition but not returned it.
“We have so much evidence that we’ve done what we needed to do to get to where we needed to be,” Dunsmore said. “And it’s on track. ... Everything we thought we needed to do and did to get to the end game is happening.”
Cole Patterson, who worked as the Republican National Committee’s state data director in the 2020 election, has been tracking the recall efforts.
He shared various trends with The Epoch Times based on the signatures collected.
“Orange County’s actually doing a lot of heavy lifting,” Patterson said. “Orange County has about 8.04 percent of California’s total registration, and they actually have received 16.42 percent of the entire amount of signatures received statewide, so their over-indexing rate is 204 percent.”
In the case of Orange County, the victories of Congresswomen Michelle Steel and Young Kim last November spurred a lot of Republican enthusiasm across the county, which could be one of the reasons for Orange County’s success in getting signatures, Patterson said.
Patterson’s data also revealed that California’s five most populated counties—Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino, which account for 53 percent of total registered voters in the state—account for 55 percent of received signatures.
There are 11 counties—including Kings, Placer, and Calaveras—that have received signatures from more than 10 percent of their 2020 registered voters, meaning that in those counties, more than 1 in 10 people have signed the petition to recall the governor.
Despite the 11 counties accounting for just 5.64 percent of the state’s voter registration, they made up 14.18 percent of recall signatures, Patterson said.
It’s not only a Republican effort; more than 10 percent of registered Democrats and 20 percent of non-party preference voters have signed the petition as well, according to Patterson.
Signature numbers jumped during two distinct timeframes: when Newsom was caught eating dinner with friends at the French Laundry last November, and when he imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on residents in December.
Patterson said, “Then the stay-at-home orders were renewed indefinitely on Dec. 29, and then we saw an increase of 370,000 signatures received by county registrars.”
