LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — With Gov. Gavin Newsom’s fate at stake, Californians on Tuesday cast the last of the ballots that will decide whether he continues to lead them or if the nation’s most populous state veers in a more conservative direction amid anger over his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newsom, a Democrat who is leading in polls, is only the fourth governor in U.S. history and the second in California to face a recall. He was elected in a landslide less than three years ago.

“I’m feeling good, as long as we can get out that vote,” Newsom said after greeting volunteers in San Francisco hours before the polls closed.

A recall election has a less predictable dynamic than a regular election, he said.

“They designed this to catch us while we’re sleeping,” Newsom said. “But I think you’ve seen in the early voting Democrats have been coming out strong, and I’m just humbled by that.”

The leading Republican candidate is conservative talk show host Larry Elder, who is seeking to become California’s first Black governor.

Newsom got a final push late Monday from President Joe Biden, who warned that the contest could shape the country’s direction on the pandemic, reproductive rights and the battle to slow climate change. The results also are likely to influence the 2022 midterm elections, when control of Congress will be in play again. The party that controls the White House historically loses seats in midterms.

Biden said the issues that defined the 2020 presidential race have been resurrected in California, with potentially disastrous results if Newsom is removed. Speaking to hundreds of cheering supporters during a twilight rally in the coastal city of Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, Biden referred to Elder as a “clone” of Trump.

“The eyes of the nation are on California,” he warned. The recall vote is “going to reverberate around the nation and … around the world.”

Elder staged his capstone rally in nearby Orange County, where he urged supporters to reach out to friends and neighbors to vote. The GOP will need a heroic Election Day turnout to catch Democrats, who have been turning in mail ballots in larger numbers. Nearly 8.6 million of California’s 22 million voters already have cast mail-in ballots.

“Make sure you have your friends vote, vote, vote, and try and get 10 more friends to vote. And hit every call, make every call, knock on every door. We’re going to win this thing if we turn out the vote,” Elder said from a hotel ballroom in Costa Mesa.

U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, called the election an opportunity to change course in a state where Democrats hold a nearly 2-to-1 advantage among registered voters. He cited homelessness, rising crime and the wildfire-driven closure of national parks, which he said was due to “forest mismanagement.”

“And you want to reward that?” McCarthy said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends.

In 2003, Californians removed Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. The “Terminator” actor won re-election in 2006, the last time a GOP candidate won statewide office in California.

This recall was fueled largely by anger over Newsom’s actions during the pandemic, which included imposing the nation’s first statewide shutdown order. Critics said he was heavy handed, shuttering businesses and keeping children out of classrooms for longer than necessary. Newsom said his actions saved lives.

“I am angry. It should be a freedom of choice. What is this? A dictatorship?” asked Janet Webb, a 69-year-old Lafayette resident who voted for Elder.

She said squabbles over Newsom’s handling of the pandemic have split her family and friends and may prompt her to move out of state.

“I can’t live here like this if they’re going to force everyone to get a vaccine,” Webb said.

California voters have just two questions on Tuesday’s ballot: Should Newsom stay in office? And if not, who should replace him? There are 46 replacement candidates to choose from. If voters keep Newsom, the results on the second question are irrelevant.

Briana Mendoza, 30, said the last thing California needs is more turmoil. She voted to keep Newsom.

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Why would we recall the governor who has been really trying to curb the spread of the virus?” the San Diego social worker said.

Mendoza does not believe Newsom brought the recall upon himself by attending a birthday party at an upscale Napa Valley restaurant last fall in violation of his own administration’s coronavirus rules. Instead, she thinks the effort to unseat him is a backlash by a small minority of Republicans in a firmly Democratic state.

“We don’t want Elder in office,” she said. “This is ridiculous. We just got Trump out. We don’t want a Trump puppet.”

Beyond Elder, other prominent Republicans in the race include former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner and businessman John Cox. The best-known Democrat is Kevin Paffrath, a financial adviser with a large YouTube following.

How California votes could determine how aggressively Democrats campaign on COVID-19 restrictions that many Republicans have decried as unnecessary and overly burdensome.

Newsom’s ouster would be a stunning rebuke in California, where the Democratic Party controls every statewide office and dominates the Legislature and the congressional delegation.

His advisers expressed increasing confidence that the governor would survive the effort to drive him out more than a year before the end of his first term. The campaign had 25,000 volunteers on the streets over the weekend and has sent 31 million text messages to voters.

Republicans have criticized him relentlessly for high taxes and housing prices that are out of reach for many in the working class.

In recent days, Elder suggested the results of the recall election could be skewed by unspecified “shenanigans,” echoing Trump’s baseless claims of voting fraud in his 2020 race with Biden.

There has been no confirmed evidence of widespread fraud. Elder’s campaign website has linked to a “Stop CA Fraud” site where people can sign a petition demanding a special legislative session to investigate the “twisted results,” well before any results were announced.

Newsom said he would accept the election results and urged Elder and others to do the same. “As an American, I’m ashamed. I’m disgusted by it. Stop. Grow up. These people literally are vandalizing our democracy and trust in our institutions,” he said.

Asked to provide evidence of any suspicious voting activity, Elder spokeswoman Ying Ma said the campaign wants “every proper vote to be counted” and “whatever shenanigans there are will not stand in the way of him becoming the next governor.”

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — On a single day last November, two events helped set the course for just the second recall election against a governor in California history: Gov. Gavin Newsom dined with 11 friends and lobbyists at one of the country’s most expensive restaurants as he pleaded with Californians to stay home, while those looking to kick him out of office won four more months to qualify for the ballot.

Photos of the maskless dinner showed the Democratic governor going against what he had been urging for months to combat the coronavirus: don’t gather in groups, keep your distance, wear a mask. That it was happening at the French Laundry — where the cheapest meal is $350 — fueled the idea Newsom was out of touch. The dinner turned up the heat on the fledgling recall, and the extra time allowed it to reach full boil.

By March, organizers had more than the 1.5 million signatures they needed to force a vote on whether to remove the first-term Democratic governor in the nation’s biggest blue state.

“We had a perfect storm with the judge’s ruling, with the French Laundry incident, with the greater environment of COVID and the economic disaster,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California.

Voters will have the final say next Tuesday. A majority of voters would need to mark “yes” to oust Newsom more than a year before his term ends.

If they do, they would chose from a list of 46 replacement candidates — many of them unknown, but others with some recognition, including conservative talk show host Larry Elder and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer. Reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner also is running but has failed to gain traction.

Because so many people are running, the winner would likely become the next governor of the nation’s most populous state with 25% or less of the votes. That’s a far cry from the landslide that swept Newsom into office in 2018.

In California, a state where ballot initiatives thrive, many governors have faced recall drives under a century-old reform that created a mechanism for voters to remove them mid-term. But only one other effort tapped into enough frustration to make the ballot: Voters recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 over an energy crisis and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last California Republican to win statewide.

A loss for Newsom, 53, would be a shocking twist in his relatively charmed political career and would almost certainly install a Republican governor in the nation’s chief laboratory for progressive policies. A slight majority approve of his job handling, according to a recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California that also shows the recall failing.

The results will be picked apart for clues on how voters are feeling heading into the 2022 midterm elections, when control of Congress and more than half of governorships are up for grabs.

“The outcome of this election is going to be fuel for 2022, period,” Romero said.

Amateur political organizer Orrin Heatlie launched the recall in February 2020, before coronavirus became a full-fledged public health crisis in the United States. He was upset about Newsom’s support for immigrants in the country illegally and other liberal policies.

By the time he began collecting signatures, the coronavirus dominated.

Newsom was the first governor to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, and when he dined at the French Laundry eight months later, the state had gone through whipsaw reopenings and closings that left small-business owners, parents of schoolchildren and others overwhelmed and confused.

California was facing an uptick in infections and hospitalizations, and Newsom’s administration was urging people not to gather with more than three households. While Napa County, where the French Laundry is located, allowed outdoor dining and limited indoor seating, the dinner party brought together a dozen people from more than three households.

News of the Nov. 6 dinner broke a week later, on a Friday when Newsom had no public appearances. In a statement, he said he and his wife “followed the restaurant’s health protocols and took safety precautions” but “should have modeled better behavior and not joined the dinner.” When he appeared in public that Monday, Newsom said it was an “outdoor restaurant” but acknowledged he made a “bad mistake.”

The next day, a Los Angeles TV station obtained cellphone photos calling into question that the dinner was outdoors. The photos showed the table set back in a space with three walls and one side open with a sliding glass door. Newsom and the other guests were sitting close together and not wearing masks.

Anne Dunsmore, campaign manager for the pro-recall group Rescue California, said it reinforced the narrative that Newsom says one thing and does another. It also aligned with the image that Newsom’s detractors have pushed — that he’s an out-of-touch politician.

“The French Laundry was an incredible boost to the effort,” Dunsmore said.

The recall campaign similarly tagged Newsom as elitist when his children returned to class in person at a private school while most public school students were stuck with virtual learning.

Ace Smith, Newsom’s longtime political consultant, disputes the dinner’s importance in the recall’s march to the ballot. He views the presidential election, also that November, as an important marker, saying Donald Trump’s loss created fresh anger for the recall campaign to seize on. Six million people in California voted for Trump.

“They realized that they had bottled up this intense anger among the Trump base, and the trick is they only needed a fraction of the Trump base to get this thing qualified” for the ballot, Smith said.

Neither explanation would have mattered had recall organizers not won four more months to pitch voters. A judge granted the extra time because the coronavirus stalled traditional in-person signature gathering outside stores or at farmers markets.

Newsom’s team never appealed the judge’s decision, a move widely seen as a tactical mistake. Then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla had said recall organizers were not showing signs of a serious campaign.

The judge sided with recall organizers in a tentative ruling, and neither side showed up to argue it in court on Nov. 6, making it final.

The two main recall committees raised roughly $2 million in November and December, five times what the effort had raised before, and ultimately collected 1.7 million valid signatures.

Newsom launched his “Stop the Republican Recall” campaign in March, weeks before the signature gathering ended, painting the effort as one driven by Trump-supporting extremists. He’s made the state’s response to the pandemic and the economic fallout a central theme of his campaign.

The highly contagious delta variant blunted his early message of California “roaring back,” and in the final weeks before the election, he’s warning that the choice before voters is “a matter of life and death.”

Elder is the target of much of Democrats’ attention. They warn the conservative talk radio host would roll back mask and vaccine mandates and reverse progress on a host of liberal issues.

It’s part of a calculation by Newsom’s team to turn the recall from a referendum on the governor and his actions into a choice between Democratic and Republican values.

“If you sit around and let it become a referendum on the person in office, it doesn’t matter how good or how positive they are, you’re always at a disadvantage because you’re playing defense,” Smith said. “We need to be in a place, very simply, where we’re playing offense.”

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California election officials are spending $16 million in a four-week ad blitz to educate people about voting in the recall that could remove Gov. Gavin Newsom, a campaign that’s officially nonpartisan but could benefit the first-term Democrat as he pushes for high turnout.

Through billboards, radio and digital ads, television spots and more, the campaign is designed to make sure voters know about the recall and understand how to cast a ballot. Every registered voter received a ballot in the mail, but many people might be confused or unaware of the race because it’s happening in late summer in an off-election year.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber has said her goal is to increase voter participation across all political affiliations.

“My goal is 100% voting, and why? Because I think everyone has a voice that needs to be heard,” Weber said on a recent call with reporters.

California has almost twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans. That makes it hard to untangle the public policy goal of urging people to exercise their right to vote from the reality that Democrats are likely to benefit, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School with a focus on government ethics.

“It’s probably just difficult to structure any big get-out-the-vote effort in California without it looking like you are also supporting Democrats,” she said.

Weber, who was joined on the call by Attorney General Rob Bonta, also a Newsom appointee, said promoting voter turnout was not in service of a partisan aim.

“I would always ask the question: What is the alternative to it? To suppress the voting because you think there may be more Democrats registered in California than others?” she said.

California lawmakers approved $35 million for the secretary of state to spend on voter education in a party-line vote in June. It was part of a bill that allowed for an earlier recall, which Democrats hoped would help Newsom defeat it.

Weber’s office set aside half for the statewide education campaign and chose The Sax Agency of Los Angeles from among four applicants. The agency has won other government contracts, including on census efforts and a public awareness campaign about masking during the coronavirus.

Sax worked on behalf of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2020 on a project aimed at motivating Black voters, according to its bid. All other listed work was nonpartisan.

The California Republican Party claimed the agency is pro-Democrat. It pointed to Sax’s work with the DCCC and an Instagram post after the 2020 presidential election featuring President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with the caption, “No words, just a big sigh of relief.”

“It is right to take action to encourage all voters to cast a ballot but hiring a Democrat firm at taxpayer expense only reinforces that Gavin Newsom’s partisan priorities come first,” Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement.

Stacey Legay, the account manager for Sax, said the campaign will target voters across demographics, locations and political ideologies. As an example of the campaign’s cross-party appeal, she said it put up billboards in a heavily Vietnamese area of Orange County, noting those voters tend to lean Republican.

“Frankly, we don’t care what happens, other than that we want everyone to come out and vote,” she said.

A 30-second ad shared by the campaign explains that every registered California voter will get a ballot and details how people can track theirs through the secretary of state website. The campaign plans to target specific populations, including Black, Asian and Latino voters, veterans and members of the military and formerly incarcerated people, as well as voters across age groups and all 58 counties.

It’s part of an effort called Vote Safe California, adopted during the pandemic when the state started sending mail-in ballots to all California voters. Previously only some counties mailed everyone a ballot.

A similar campaign ahead of the 2020 presidential election was mired in controversy after the state partnered with SKDK, a Washington-based firm whose managing partner, Anita Dunn, was a senior adviser to then-candidate Joe Biden, a Democrat. That prompted outcry from Republicans and even some Democrats.

Though the Legislature approved the money in June, the secretary of state did not award the contract until mid-August, just as recall ballots were hitting mailboxes. That’s left the group with a short window of time to get out their messaging ahead of Election Day on Sept. 14.

“Reminding people to go out and vote in September is like asking someone to have a new behavior,” Legay said. “We’re trying to drive a behavior change campaign in four weeks. I don’t think there’s a precedent of that.”

Ballots have two questions: Should Newsom be recalled, and if so, who should replace him? Voters have 46 possible replacements to choose from. If a majority of voters want Newsom gone, the replacement with the most votes will become the governor.

Newsom’s campaign and the state Democratic Party are urging voters to vote no on the recall and ignore the second question. The idea is to diminish interest in an alternative to Newsom but that’s drawn criticism even within the Democratic Party from those who say it disenfranchises voters.

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