Rather than defending his record, Mr. Newsom turned his stump speech into a chapter-and-verse recitation of Mr. Elder’s comments disparaging women, minimizing climate change and questioning the need for a minimum wage.
He also invoked the specter of red states and their leaders, scorning Republicans’ handling of Covid, voting restrictions and, in the final days of the campaign, Texas’s restrictive new abortion law.
While House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the most prominent California Republican, kept his distance from the recall, Mr. Newsom was regularly joined by Democratic members of Congress, who linked the recall to Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede defeat and to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
“A different type of insurrection in California,” as Representative Karen Bass put it at a rally in Los Angeles.