When Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was facing a referendum on his leadership, public opinion polls showed the Democrat in danger of being recalled. But after making Tuesday’s recall election a test of voter willingness to be governed by Republican candidate Larry Elder, whom state media outlets shamefully and successfully demonized, Mr. Newsom won in a landslide.

Joel Kotkin writes at UnHerd that California voters will be the real losers:

Californians...

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Photo: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was facing a referendum on his leadership, public opinion polls showed the Democrat in danger of being recalled. But after making Tuesday’s recall election a test of voter willingness to be governed by Republican candidate Larry Elder, whom state media outlets shamefully and successfully demonized, Mr. Newsom won in a landslide.

Joel Kotkin writes at UnHerd that California voters will be the real losers:

The lopsided defeat of the effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom in California assures that, for the foreseeable future, the progressive gentry and their public sector allies remain firmly in charge of the world’s most important technology and mass entertainment economy. Yet if things look good now for the coiffed Chief Executive, they may be taking a turn for the worse in the years ahead.
It certainly means hard times for the state’s middle and working classes. Newsom’s win will lead to ever more stringent energy policies that have already decimated the state’s industrial sector. Ever since California decided to lead the “war” against climate change in the past decade, the Golden State has lost its ability to create well-paying private sector jobs. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego—sit among the bottom ten.

Californians suffer one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and the state holds the country’s largest unsheltered homeless population. Those who figure that Sacramento cannot get any more hostile to job creation should remember that the Tax Foundation ranks the Golden State as home to only the second worst tax climate in the country. This week’s Newsom victory gives California the chance to seize New Jersey’s crown.

It’s tempting to wonder what Tuesday’s vote total might have looked like if it had included ex-Californians. About two weeks before Election Day Soumya Karlamangla noted in the New York Times that the flight from California began long before the incumbent became governor:

If there’s one thing the candidates vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom can agree on, it’s that too many Californians are fleeing the state.
While kicking off her campaign, Caitlyn Jenner shared that a fellow private plane owner was “packing up his hangar” for Arizona because he couldn’t stand to see any more homeless people. Kevin Paffrath, a YouTube star running as a Democrat, began his candidacy announcement by listing reasons for trading in “broken” California for Florida’s greener pastures.
In a recent debate, the Republican candidate Kevin Faulconer said that if you named a state, any state, Californians were headed there.
Sure, there’s some truth to what’s been called the “California exodus”: More Californians are relocating to other states than are moving here from elsewhere in the country. But that’s by no means a new trend — it’s been that way for more than 30 years

This doesn’t mean the people who haven’t left yet are satisfied. Concluding that Mr. Elder was not their choice doesn’t mean California is working for them. Mr. Kotkin notes:

The dissatisfaction is there, particularly among key Democratic constituencies like young voters, Latinos, and blue-collar workers, all of whom have expressed deep dissatisfaction with the state’s direction. Before the massive media and organising campaign, these voters favoured the recall, and also tend to be those who contemplate leaving. Even before Covid, 53% of Californians were considering a move out and almost two-thirds thought the state’s best days were behind it.

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The Science and Politics of Masks

Not that private institutions in California are perfect, either. Carl Heneghan of Oxford and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff write in the Federalist about a Stanford colleague under pressure to conform to the faculty consensus:

Last week, anonymous posters with the portrait of Stanford University Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya were plastered on kiosks around the Stanford campus, linking him to COVID deaths in Florida. Even though cumulative age-adjusted COVID mortality is lower in Florida than in most other large states, these smears appeared.
Taking it one step further, the chair of Stanford’s epidemiology department, Professor Melissa Bondy, circulated a petition among faculty members demanding that the university president exercise his obligation “to clarify for the faculty the limits of public pronouncements when proclaiming on public health policy.”
The petitioners are upset that “several Stanford faculty members have publicly advocated for policies for others that are contrary to those the university has adopted” and that “these recommendations are disturbing and contrary to public health standards; they foster uncertainty and anxiety and put lives at risk.”
While insidiously not naming anyone, the petition explicitly targets Bhattacharya by quoting his answer to a question from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about masks on children. He responded that “there is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the disease from spreading.” To deserve trust, scientists must be honest about what is and what is not known, and we agree with Bhattacharya.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, the pressure to conform to the political consensus on masks is even more intense. In the Chicago Tribune Tracy Swartz reports:

A panel of state lawmakers is asking the Illinois State Board of Education to clarify the process of punishing schools that don’t follow Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 mask mandate.
“You should have due process in place for all schools, all parents who are invested in these schools, whether public or private, and most importantly, the children that attend,” Republican Sen. John Curran of Downers Grove said at Tuesday’s hearing of the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.
ISBE defended its authority to revoke a school system’s recognition status for failing to comply with the mask requirement, a move that means loss of access to state funding and the ability to participate in Illinois High School Association and Illinois Elementary School Association athletic competitions. Nine Illinois schools are “nonrecognized” and four school districts are on probation as of Monday because of mask disobedience, according to the most recent state data available online.

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Knowledge Is Good

Perhaps not all academic research has become politicized garbage. Great innovations often come from people operating outside the academic mainstream. But from America’s oldest university comes a case for research informed by scientific literature. Avery Forman writes for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge:

“Fail fast” has become the corporate innovation mantra, but new research suggests that inventions that build on science, with its systematic observation and methodical experiments, may deliver more value to companies.
US patent filings that cite journal articles bring 26 percent—or $8.7 million—more value to companies than patented inventions developed without citing scientific research, says a paper co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Joshua Lev Krieger, University of Munster professor Martin Watzinger, and Monika Schnitzer, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Grounding innovation in science also results in more unique products. For companies with thousands of patents, the value difference quickly adds up...
“If you are willing dive into the frontier of scientific journal articles, the rewards of science-based innovation are really high,” says Krieger, an assistant professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. “I hope it opens some eyes to the value of hard, risky, in-the-weeds science for commercial innovation, as opposed to ‘let’s just go build the thing and make it work on the fly.’”

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Wes Van Fleet.)

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