The effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) has lots of momentum and the governor should take it seriously, Rep.-elect Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said on Saturday.
There's "huge momentum" building, Issa said on "Fox & Friends," noting support for the effort both inside and outside the state.
"I think the important thing is that somebody has to have a wake-up call for the governor, or we’re going to go exactly down the road I saw in 2003, where Gray Davis didn’t understand and the people demanded a change, and they got a pretty radical change with Arnold Schwarzenegger."
Davis, a Democrat, was the first California governor to be recalled.
Schwarzenegger, who ran as a Republican, received the most votes to replace Davis.
Issa at the time was a huge backer of the effort to recall Davis, pouring money into the signature gathering campaign.
In order to put a recall effort to a vote, campaigns to recall governors must garner the support of voters equal in number to 12 percent of the last vote for the office.
If they do so, a recall election is scheduled. A majority vote in that election recalls the official in question.
"I think if he doesn’t take this very, very seriously, a recall is inevitable," Issa added.
Issa was elected as part of a red wave in California that saw Republicans flip a number of seats Democrats had wrested away in 2018.
Leaders of the recall effort announced this month that they'd collected 800,000 signatures, over half of the 1.5 million they need.
“Today our efforts to Recall California Governor Gavin Newsom have entered a dramatic new phase, and we cannot be prouder of everyone who is working tirelessly to remove America’s worst governor from office,” Orrin Heatlie, the lead proponent of RecallGavin2020, said in a statement.
An extension on the deadline to get the signatures by was granted by a judge on Nov. 6. Proponents now have until March 17, 2021.
Rachel Potucek, spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Orange County, told The Epoch Times in an email: “It is highly unlikely that a recall would ultimately succeed. This is clearly a political stunt.”
Asked about the recall during an event last week, Newsom declined to answer directly.
He instead talked about the pandemic and the closures he ordered, saying that "as soon as we extinguish this virus, soon as this virus is eliminated, as soon as this pandemic is behind us, this state will recover more resilient, more vibrant than ever."
"And so the most important thing we can do from an economic perspective is focus on public health, focus on mitigating the spread of this virus, eliminating this virus. And the most important thing, non-pharmaceutical intervention, we can do is wearing face coverings. The most important pharmaceutical intervention is getting a vaccine when it's available. So we're encouraging everyone to do that when it becomes available," he added.
