SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The deadline for signatures is just two days away in the effort to recall Governor Newsom, but now in response, Newsom and the California Democratic Party are launching their own ad campaign against the recall.
This stop the Republican Recall campaign is coming just two days before the deadline for recall signatures to be collected.
The governor's campaign against the recall highlights the matter as a partisan and extremist issue.
"Who's behind the partisan recall of governor Gavin Newsom? Anti-vaccine Q-anon extremists, violent white supremacists like the proud boys who attacked our nation's capitol on January 26th."
It's the first ad opposing the Recall Governor Gavin Newsom campaign, funded by the California Democratic Party.
"Instead of helping fight the pandemic, national Republicans are coming to fight Californians."
The campaign is dubbed "Stop the Republican Recall" Newsom posting the "campaign website on Twitter saying in part "I won’t be distracted by this partisan Republican recall, but I will fight it." It's the first time Newsom addressed recall efforts that directly, asking Californians to join him.
"I just have one thing to say to governor Gavin Newsom, welcome to the campaign buddy, you finally have arrived."
Randy Economy is the senior advisor for the Recall Newsom campaign, he viewed the opposition campaign video and says he's surprised the recall effort is being pushed as a Republican-led initiative. when there has been a large portion of Democrats also signing the petition to unseat the governor.
randy "The fact is that 38% of the people who signed this recall paper so far have been Democrats and "decline to state" voters and that's a pretty big number," said Economy.
The number of signatures the campaign has garnered so far is in the millions
"We collected more than 2,060,000 signatures."
23ABC political contributor Allen Bolar believes that figure is the driving force behind the recall efforts.
"It signifies that they expect there to be a real partisan fight at this point."
That's a key strategy, according to Bolar, to make this about politics and less about the handling of the pandemic pushed by recall efforts.
"Because if the voters become convinced that this is a party issue then the party is larger and is likely to have the advantage because it's the Democratic Party."
23ABC also spoke to the head of the local Newsom recall efforts, she says that they've turned in 54,000 signatures. Again, more than 2 million signatures have been collected state-wide, those need to be verified by state officials and the deadline is Wednesday.
