After months of uncertainty, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday was handily defeating the recall attempt, a win for Democrats who warned California’s progressive agenda was at stake.

Shortly after 9 p.m., just over two-thirds of voters were rejecting the recall, according to the Secretary of State’s tally of ballots mailed in during the weeks before Tuesday. A final count could take days.

Newsom jumped out to commanding leads in all Bay Area counties and Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties.

And while the second question for voters — Who should replace Newsom? — now appears to be irrelevant with the recall failing, LA-based conservative radio host Larry Elder, with more than 40% support, was well ahead of a pack of 45 other candidates, including YouTuber Democrat Kevin Paffrath and a host of Republicans, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

The governor appeared upbeat throughout the day, thanking campaign volunteers at a San Francisco union hall in the afternoon before returning to Sacramento, where he gave an emotional speech, thanking millions of Californians.

““We said yes to diversity we said yes to inclusion, we said yes to pluralism,” Newsom said, tears welling in his eyes. “We said yes to all of those things we hold dear as Californians.”

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Sept. 14: California Governor Gavin Newsom, with his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom and daughter Brooklynn, campaigns on the final day of the recall election, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021, at an IBEW union hall in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 

The Newsom victory comes after a hard-fought campaign that drew a parade of high-profile Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, to California to stump for the governor. Newsom raised more than $70 million to flood the airwaves and social media with dire warnings about the stakes of the election — not just here but across the country.

Initially considered a long-shot effort, the recall movement was propelled by voters fed up with pandemic restrictions and Newsom’s now-infamous French Laundry dinner, with polling over the summer showing the race as nearly a dead heat. Democrats in the state outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1, but early polling suggested GOP voters were more enthusiastic about the late-summer election, fueling concerns among Democrats that Newsom could become the second governor in California history to be thrown out of office early.

But as Elder, a last-minute addition to the list of contenders hoping to replace the governor, gained in the polls, Newsom and his Democratic allies seized on Elder as the perfect Trumpian foil, highlighting his opposition to mask mandates, minimum wage and Roe v. Wade. With businesses and schools reopening, the GOP declining to endorse a candidate and no well-known Democratic challenger, Newsom appears to have gained the upper hand.

“I think the fact that Larry Elder rose to the top of the Republican pack really helped Gavin Newsom and hurt the recall effort,” said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College. “He’s easier to link to Trump, he’s more extreme in some of his positions, and a lot further away from median California voter attitudes” than a more traditional GOP candidate like Faulconer.

Errol Webber of Costa Mesa carries a large photo of Larry Elder walks amongst supporters for the Republican candidate for the gubernatorial recall election, inside the Pacific Ballroom at the Hilton Orange County in Costa Mesa on Tuesday, September 14, 2021 to watch election returns. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG) 

And while any margin of victory won’t be known for some time, a strong showing for Newsom “will presumably dissuade potential challengers in 2022 and potentially put him on the national stage if in fact he has national ambitions, notably, obviously president,” said longtime Democratic strategist Darry Sragow.

Putting the election in the rearview mirror could also free up Newsom to sign bills on everything from boosting housing density to police reform and pursue policies that might have alienated some recall opponents — including more aggressively fighting the pandemic after tiptoeing around vaccine passports and broad mandates.

“I would anticipate that he takes further steps to mandate vaccines, to take a more aggressive position on the issues California is facing that maybe aren’t as popular,” Michelson said. “It gives him political capital to spend and, in a way, it’s a mandate from the voters of California to say we want Newsom to continue on this agenda and make California the progressive leader among the states.”

Exit polling conducted by Edison Research found that a third of voters said the pandemic is the biggest issue for the state, followed by about a fifth naming homelessness and one in six pointing to the economy and wildfires as the biggest issue. Around 45% of voters polled said Newsom’s pandemic policies were about right, while a third said they are too strict.

As for the Republicans, a defeat will force the minority party once again to reassess its strategy in a California that is rapidly becoming more diverse and more liberal.

Newsom is just the second governor of California to face a recall vote, but unlike in 2003, when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger ousted Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and when Republicans made up about 35% of registered voters, today Republicans make up only about 24% of California’s electorate.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Sept. 14: Governor Gavin Newsom poses for a photograph with Remneek Saini on the last day of the recall election, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021, at a campaign stop at the IBEW union hall in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 

“The California Republicans have faced this identity crisis after every election for the last decade and have confronted this challenge of ‘Can we be relevant in this increasingly diverse state if we’re seen as being unfriendly to the groups that are rising in the population?’,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

But, he said, while there were echoes of Donald Trump and his bombastic rhetoric in the recall campaign, Republicans ultimately didn’t run on a typical anti-immigrant  message, focusing instead on California as a nanny state and problems like homelessness and housing.

“The positive sign the Republican Party can take away from this is they were able to galvanize their base and find issues that connected with the middle and, at least for a time put the scare of the decade into the Democratic Party without basing their appeal on opposition to immigration,” Kousser said. “That’s new.”

But while the GOP succeeded in forcing the unlikely odd-year referendum on the Democratic governor, their attempt at finishing the job felt like a train-wreck, former GOP strategist Jack Pitney said.

“Bizarro California recall strategy,” the Claremont McKenna College politics professor tweeted. “1. Mobilize the NO vote by running an extremist radio shock jock. 2. Suppress the YES vote by telling supporters that the election is rigged, so their ballots won’t matter anyway. Heckuva job, GOP.”

Pitney isn’t alone in his criticism. Other California Republicans have privately questioned the way the state GOP handled the recall, with some pointing to Elder’s baseless comments about the election being rigged — and his campaign’s publication before the polls even closed of a website suggesting the recall lost — as discouraging recall proponents from casting their ballots.

Newsom hit back at election fraud claims as “a crock” during his stop in San Francisco, and again during his thank you speech.

“These people are literally vandalizing our democracy, our trust in our institutions,” Newsom continued. “Guys like me come and go, we’re a dime a dozen…it’s about our institutions.”