California has lurched from crisis to crisis during the pandemic, and one result if the state government’s ham-fisted response is a concerted effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

The effort got little traction initially. But as the state’s woes have multiplied, the recall effort has picked up considerable momentum. Supporters say they are roughly two-thirds of the way to their goal of gathering more than 1.5 million signatures on recall petitions. The reasons people are signing the petition vary – but more are doing so every day:

“We’re starting to get 100 signatures a day at a location like this. When I first started, I was getting 10, 20 a day,” Scheye said as he held up a “Recall Gavin Newsom” sign across the street from the Costco in Antioch.

Scheye has been volunteering every day to gather signatures for a recall ever since he lost his engineering job to the COVID-19 shutdown. He said a wide range of people are signing the petition.

“They’re people whose business has shut down, small businesses,” Scheye explained. “They’re mad about big businesses getting preferences over small businesses. People that want to go to church. They’re not allowed to go to church; that’s a big thing.”

California Democrats are calling the effort a “coup” backed by an array of bad people.

California’s recall process is both quite legal and entirely constitutional.  It was used to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 – 11 months after Davis was re-elected – and was said to be “an expression of frustration by an electorate fed up with dysfunction in Sacramento.”