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IN THIS ISSUE – “It was about making the campaign a referendum on the opposition, not just a kind of a dunking booth exercise on the incumbent.’’
Team Newsom chief Sean Clegg explaining strategy for derailing the Recall
- “Mad Moms” Made the Recall Happen…Is the Anger Fading?
- Win or Lose on Tuesday, Controversial Bills Pile Up for Newsom’s Signature
- Record Number of Women in Legislature
- Newsom Launches Nation-Leading $6-Billion Health Care Expansion
- Corporate Headquarters Leaving Golden State at Record Rate
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique service.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING SEPT. 10, 2021
“Mad Moms” Made the Recall Happen…Is the Anger Fading?
CalMatters
Cynthia Rojas never had much interest in politics. A mother who owns an online business selling hair accessories from her home in West Los Angeles, Rojas chose Democrats when she voted. But she skipped a lot of elections — and she certainly never glanced at a city council agenda or attended school board meetings.
That all changed after her kids’ elementary school closed down last year amid the pandemic.
“I became very engaged because of my children,” Rojas said. “My son was suffering on Zoom school.”
She started watching school board meetings, reading county public health orders and studying the state’s color-coded tiers of COVID restrictions. After public health authorities said it was safe for children to return to school, Rojas protested with other parents to demand that campuses reopen. And when that didn’t work, she printed out a petition to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“A lot of us were like, ‘Why aren’t the Democratic politicians standing up for us?’ Democrats were always supposed to be for the little guy,” Rojas said.
“It seemed so clear to me that it was to protect the teacher unions, because they didn’t shut down the private schools.”
Rojas and her husband signed the recall petition. Then she sent copies to several friends who also signed, helping recall proponents gather some of the 1.7 million signatures that triggered California’s historic Sept. 14 election — only the second time in state history that voters will decide whether to oust a governor.
Recall supporters say that women like Rojas — fed up with school closures and job losses caused by the pandemic — played a huge role in getting the signatures necessary to launch their campaign. Their activism may reflect the pandemic’s uneven toll on women, who have been disproportionately burdened by unemployment, increased child care responsibilities and, among parents with kids at home, feelings of anxiety and depression. They were so instrumental in organizing the recall that one strategist came up with a special name for them: “Mad Moms.”
“‘Mad moms’ are what we used to call soccer moms,” said recall campaign manager Anne Dunsmore. “You mess around with their daily life or their quality life or what they’re able to do with their children, and they become very grouchy.”
“Mad moms” may have helped spark the recall, but now, with children back in school and the state’s economy rebounding, their power to influence the outcome of the election is less clear.
Polls show that women voters are overwhelmingly on Newsom’s side — with two-thirds saying they’re against the recall in a Public Policy Institute of California poll released last week. But among parents (both mothers and fathers) who have children at home, only half say they’ll vote no. Likely voters overall oppose removing the governor by a 58% to 39% margin.
Historically, California women largely vote Democratic, and Newsom’s strategy of persuading other prominent Democrats to stay out of the recall race has helped him maintain their support — sometimes more because they fear a Republican alternative than because they’re enthusiastic about Newsom.
Shannon Huffaker, for example, said she voted against the recall even though she’s unhappy with Newsom. The nurse practitioner from Albany was livid that her children’s school stayed closed as long as it did. Even now that it’s reopened, Huffaker said the new COVID-19 protocols are chaotic and the school isn’t getting enough support from the state.
“I am so frustrated that I would have considered voting yes if I felt there was any viable alternative, a viable Democrat who had a chance of winning,” she said. “I am angry, but I’m not willing to go so far as to hand the election to someone whose views I find abhorrent.”
Female voters helped elect Newsom in 2018, when exit polls showed 64% voted for him, compared with 55% of men. Aware that women are key to his political future, Newsom is spending the closing days of this campaign trying to ensure that women vote in what could be a low-turnout election.
The governor is highlighting support from powerful Democratic women, campaigning with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar over the weekend in Southern California, and today with the nation’s first female vice president, Kamala Harris, in the Bay Area.
“Governor Newsom understands that California succeeds when we invest in women’s economic futures,” Warren said Saturday to cheers from a friendly audience of Newsom supporters. “He’s worked to close the gender pay gap, to expand paid family leave. Oh yeah, and he believes that basic health care for women includes access to safe, legal abortion.”
She joined Newsom in stoking fears about the rollback of abortion rights by drawing attention to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week not to block a very restrictive Texas law signed by its Republican governor. It’s another way Newsom is contrasting himself with his leading Republican rival, whose retrograde comments on women have handed the governor daily opportunities to pump up his progressive base.
“Women are smarter in politics, smarter in civics, they’re smarter in economics,” Newsom said as he campaigned in Los Angeles over the weekend.
“Women rule.”
It was a clear dig at Larry Elder, the Republican frontrunner in the recall race, who wrote an article 20 years ago about an academic study that reported women know less than men in those subjects.
During his long career as a conservative commentator, Elder has also written that sexual harassment doesn’t hold women back at work and that women should “overlook some boorish behavior by men,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elder said on past radio programs that he has been accused of sexual harassment, but when CNN asked him about the comments last week, Elder said he didn’t remember making them. And Elder wrote in a 2002 book that employers should be able to ask women if they plan to become pregnant, which is prohibited by workplace discrimination laws. He stood by that opinion when the AP asked about it last month.
All of it has helped Newsom define himself for voters, something he struggled with in earlier phases of the campaign, said Democratic political consultant Katie Merrill.
“Larry Elder’s out-of-step positions should help the governor’s effort to get women to vote,” she said. “Gavin has the perfect foil.”
Elder’s comments about women have also drawn criticism from some of his Republican opponents.
“His attack on working women is unconscionable,” Kevin Faulconer, the GOP former mayor of San Diego, said at a recent debate.
“To all the working moms out there, know that when Kevin Faulconer is governor, I’m going to support your right to raise a family, to have a career.”
The next day, Faulconer announced plans to back a new paid family leave law that would give parents full pay while caring for a new baby. California’s existing law pays parents as much as 70% of their normal salary while on family leave, while a pending bill would gradually increase that to 90%.
More:
https://calmatters.org/projects/newsom-recall-voters-mad-moms/
Win or Lose on Tuesday, Controversial Bills Pile Up for Newsom’s Signature
CalMatters
Win or lose the recall, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political challenges won’t end after Sept. 14.
State legislators – who adjourn today for the year – are sending a stack of controversial bills to the governor’s desk, adding to a pile that already contains such contentious proposals as eliminating single-family zoning statewide and mandating gender-neutral toy sections in large department stores. Newsom has until Oct. 10 to sign or veto the bills lawmakers – in the unlikely event he loses the recall, he will remain governor for about 45 days.
Today is the deadline for state lawmakers to send bills to Newsom’s desk — and they almost certainly will not be extending California’s eviction moratorium, leaving those protections to expire on Sept. 30, CalMatters’ Manuela Tobias reports.
Lawmakers won’t reconvene in Sacramento until January 3 — although some may return to the Capitol after the Sept. 14 recall election to hold a twice-postponed hearing on the state unemployment department’s progress on crucial reforms.
Here’s a look at key proposals legislators sent to Newsom on Thursday, as well as some that didn’t make it through:
- Passed:Bills that would take on companies like Amazon by requiring them to disclose quotas or work speed standards; ensure cost-free COVID-19 testing; massively expand California’s chief college financial aid program and ease transfers to UC and Cal State; boost paid family leave payments; end the subminimum wage for people with disabilities; crack down on debt settlement firms; restrict the use of the recycling symbol on plastic products; require public colleges to provide free period products; legalize jaywalking; phase out the use of gas-powered leaf blowers; ban the practice of paying signature-gatherers for initiative, referendum and recall petitions by the signature; and set privacy safeguards for personal data gathered by genetic testing companies such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
- Dead for the year:A bill that would have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into fixing California’s crumbling canals — and a bill that would have given judges discretion over whether defendants need to post bail in order to be released while awaiting trial. The latter bill was held after a Sacramento woman was allegedly raped and killed by a homeless man with a lengthy criminal history who had been released on zero bail.
Here’s a look at some key proposals that passed Wednesday:
- A bill that would allow the state’s law enforcement accrediting body todecertify police officers for serious misconduct. A similar proposal failed last year, and although this year’s version was watered down to mollify critics, it’s still formally opposed by some law enforcement groups, CalMatters’ Robert Lewis reports.
- A bill that would makeethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. Newsom vetoed this idea last year, citing uncertainty about the appropriate curriculum. But in March, after four drafts and more than 100,000 public comments, the state Board of Education unanimously approved a model curriculum.
- A bill that wouldlimit police use of rubber bullets and other less lethal weapons at protests and demonstrations.
- A bill that would make it harder for prosecutors tocharge defendants with sentence enhancements for belonging to criminal street gangs.
- A bill that wouldmake it a misdemeanor to intimidate, harass or obstruct patients and workers leaving or entering a vaccination site.
- A bill that would make it illegal toremove a condom without consent during sexual intercourse.
- A bill that wouldreform California’s penal code to punish “spousal rape” as seriously as the rape of a non-spouse.
One idea that won’t be moving forward, however: a proposal that would have established legal protections for employers who require workers to get vaccinated or submit to regular COVID-19 testing. “We unfortunately ran out of time,” said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblymember Evan Low of Silicon Valley, who noted the proposal would have also extended paid sick leave for workers infected by COVID-19.
California’s expanded paid sick leave policy — which required many employers to offer 80 paid hours off for COVID-related illness — is set to expire Sept. 30, the same day as the state’s eviction moratorium.
Record Number of Women in Legislature
Associated Press
Women now make up nearly a third of the California Legislature — an all-time record, according to an advocacy group that recruits female candidates.
The milestone comes with Tuesday’s swearing-in of Assemblywoman Mia Bonta after a special election last week in the San Francisco Bay Area’s 18th Assembly District.
She replaces her husband, Rob Bonta, who left in April after being appointed state attorney general. Mia Bonta bolsters Democrats’ supermajority in the closing week of the legislative session, which ends Friday.
Thirty-nine of the state’s 120 lawmakers are now women, or 32.5%.
That’s a record and up 11% from just four years ago, when the state hit a 20-year low and women made up only about one in five California legislators.
Newsom Launches Nation-Leading $6-Billion Health Care Expansion
California Healthline
Over the next five years, California is plowing nearly $6 billion in state and federal money into the plan, which will target just a sliver of the 14 million low-income Californians enrolled in Medi-Cal: homeless people or those at risk of losing their homes; heavy users of hospital emergency rooms; children and seniors with complicated physical and mental health conditions; and people in — or at risk of landing in — expensive institutions like jails, nursing homes or mental health crisis centers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is trumpeting the first-in-the-nation initiative as the centerpiece of his ambitious health care agenda — and vows it will help fix the mental health and addiction crisis on the streets and get people into housing, all while saving taxpayer money. His top health care advisers have even cast it as an antidote to California’s worsening homelessness crisis.
But the first-term Democrat, who faces a Sept. 14 recall election, is making a risky bet. California does not have the evidence to prove this approach will work statewide, nor the workforce or infrastructure to make it happen on such a large scale.
Critics also fear the program will do nothing to improve care for the millions of other Medi-Cal enrollees who won’t get help from this initiative. Medi-Cal has been slammed for failing to provide basic services, including vaccinations for kids, timely appointments for rural residents and adequate mental health treatment for Californians in crisis.
Yet the managed-care insurance companies responsible for most enrollees’ health will nonetheless be given massive new power as they implement this experiment. The insurers will decide which services to offer and which high-needs patients to target, likely creating disparities across regions and further contributing to an unequal system of care in California.
“This will leave a lot of people behind,” said Linda Nguy, a policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty.
“We haven’t seen health plans excel in even providing basic preventative services to healthy people,” she said. “I mean, do your basic job first. How can they be expected to successfully take on these additional responsibilities for people with very high health needs?”
This revolution in Medi-Cal’s scope and mission is taking place alongside a parallel initiative to hold insurance companies more accountable for providing quality health care. State health officials are forcing Medi-Cal managed-care plans to reapply and meet stricter standards if they want to continue doing business in the program. Together, these initiatives will fundamentally reinvent the biggest Medicaid program in the country, which serves about one-third of the state population at a cost of $124 billion this fiscal year.
If California’s experiment succeeds, other states will likely follow, national Medicaid experts say. But if the richest state in the country can’t pull off better health outcomes and cost savings, the movement to put health insurers into the business of social work will falter.
When Newsom signed the “California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal” initiative into law in late July — “CalAIM” for short — he celebrated it as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to completely transform the Medicaid system in California.” He declined an interview request.
Beginning next year, public and private managed health care plans will pick high-need Medi-Cal enrollees to receive nontraditional services from among 14 broad categories, including housing and food benefits, addiction care and home repairs.
The approach is known as “whole person care,” and insurers will be required to assign patients a personal care manager to help them navigate the system. Insurers will receive incentive payments to offer new services and boost provider networks and, over time, the program will expand to more people and services. For instance, members of Native American tribes will eventually be eligible to receive treatment for substance misuse from natural healers, and inmates will be enrolled in Medi-Cal automatically upon release.
The insurers — currently 25 are participating — will focus most intensely on developing housing programs to combat the state’s worsening homelessness epidemic. The state was home to at least 162,000 homeless people in 2020, a 6.8% increase since Newsom took office in 2019.
Jacey Cooper, the state’s Medicaid director, said all Medi-Cal members will eventually be eligible for housing services. Initially, though, they will be available only to the costliest patients. State Medi-Cal expenditure data shows that 1% of Medi-Cal enrollees, many of the homeless patients who frequently land in hospitals, account for a staggering 21% of overall spending. And 5% account for 44% of the budget.
“You really need to focus on your top 1% to 5% of utilizers — that’s your most vulnerable,” Cooper said. “If you generally focus on that group, you will be able to yield better health outcomes for those individuals and, ultimately, cost savings.”
State officials do not have a savings estimate for the program, nor a projection of how many people will be enrolled.
The plan, Cooper said, builds on more than 25 successful regional experiments underway since 2016. From Los Angeles to rural Shasta, big and small counties have provided vulnerable Medi-Cal patients with different services based on their communities’ needs, from job placement services to providing a safe place for a homeless person to get sober.
Cooper highlighted interim data from the experiments that showed patients hospitalized due to mental illness were more likely to receive follow-up care, obtain treatment for substance abuse, avoid hospitalizations and emergency department visits, and see improvements in chronic diseases like diabetes.
She argued that data — even though it is not comprehensive — is enough to prove the initiative will work on a statewide scale.
However, studies of similar programs elsewhere have yielded mixed results. New York provided housing services to high-cost Medicaid enrollees with chronic diseases and mental health and substance use disorders and found major reductions in hospital admissions and emergency department visits between 2012 and 2017, and saw a 15% reduction in Medicaid spending.
Corporate Headquarters Leaving Golden State at Record Rate
Hoover Institution
Align Technology is a $2.47 billion business revolutionizing orthodontics. Darvis is an artificial intelligence firm creating safer and more efficient hospitals. Moov is the first interactive platform for buying and selling high-technology equipment.
The common thread? These remarkable companies are among the 74 known California businesses that have relocated their headquarters to another state in the first six months of 2021—double the rate for each of the three previous years. We have identified 265 headquarters relocations out of California since 2018.
When company headquarters migrate out of California, significant economic costs affect not only the state but also communities as well-compensated employees depart and no longer patronize local businesses or pay taxes. Moreover, when advanced technology companies move their headquarters, centers of innovation move with it.
Our just-completed report “Why Company Headquarters Are Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers” is the most comprehensive and up-to-date documentation and analysis of headquarters relocations among California businesses and their destinations. Prepared by combing through governmental reports, media stories, and other sources, our report shows that the rate of California headquarter relocations has more than doubled compared to recent years.
And since most business relocations fly under the radar (most are not reported by the media, nor are there requirements to file relocation compliance reports), the number of businesses leaving the state is much greater than we have counted, perhaps as much as five times higher, according to professionals in the business relocation industry.
These exits are occurring across virtually all industries—manufacturing, aerospace, financial services, real estate, chemicals, and health care—but perhaps most disturbing is the large number of high-technology businesses that are leaving. After all, the tech hubs of Silicon Valley (Apple, Google, Facebook) and San Francisco (Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb) are among the most productive locations on the planet, filled with creative inventors and with venture capital ripe and ready to fund those inventors.
California policy makers have always thought tech would stay, no matter what. But even tech firms are leaving the Golden State at an accelerating rate. These headquarters exits range from big-tech legacy firms including Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Oracle to smaller, rapidly growing firms such as Darvis, the AI business that is helping hospitals manage room utilization and complex protection protocols.
Losing small but rapidly growing businesses is a death knell to an economy, because long-run economic growth requires new, transformative ideas that ultimately displace old ideas. And the transformative ideas almost invariably are born in young companies.
At one time, Kodak and Litton Industries were Fortune 20 companies. Now they are afterthoughts. Out with the old, in with the new.
Some of the small businesses of today will become the blockbusters of tomorrow, and California is losing far too many of these potential game changers. California is also losing the gifted creators of these businesses, creators who may start additional transformative businesses in their lifetimes. And if they do, these new businesses will not be launched in California.
The primary reason why California businesses are leaving is economics, plain and simple. California is too expensive, too regulated, and too heavily taxed, both for companies and for the workers they hire. These businesses are predictably moving to states with lower costs, fewer regulations, lower taxes, and a higher quality of life for their workers, in which families pay far less for a home.
Texas is the number-one state favored by these relocating companies, snagging 114 California headquarters since the beginning of 2018, with Tennessee and Arizona following in the ranking.
https://www.hoover.org/research/california-business-headquarters-now-leaving-twice-fast-no-end-sight