“He came from their world, and that’s why they embraced him without hesitancy and over and above everybody else,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times. “They didn’t need to interview him. They knew what he stood for.”

In contrast, Larry‘s is very much a self-made story. His father, who he sees as a role model, grew up in the Jim Crow south, worked two jobs as a janitor and eventually opened a small coffee shop. Elder ended up with a law degree from the University of Michigan and then launched his media career. He may be an inveterate capitalist, but there are few magnates in his corner.

This poses a challenge for Newsom and other Republicans, but perhaps not an insurmountable one. Newsom outspent the entire GOP effort by 200 to 1 in July. But in an era of low cost social media, many African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, all of whom are surprisingly sympathetic to the recall, will see in Larry as someone closer to their experience. He is a man more akin to their aspirations than the union officials, tech oligarchs and Hollywood types rallying to Newsom’s defense.

But the recall and Elder still face enormous odds. Besides money and a first-class union-led get-out-the vote effort, he cannot expect much sympathy from a media that, with few exceptions, will roll over on their bellies for any Democrat. Getting largely anti-Trump Democrats and Independents will be key here since the GOP base has shrunk since the last recall in 2003 from over one-third to barely a quarter of the vote.

Inevitably Larry, if he continues to lead in the polls, will be found to have baggage. His occasionally rigid libertarian positions, for example on public education, could offer ripe targets for political consultants who see an ever-expanding welfare state as the ticket to a permanent majority. Yet even if it loses closely, the recall will be a reminder to the Democrats that even here, in the ultimate blue utopia/dystopia, a large number of Americans look forward to a future that promises something more than high-tech feudalism.

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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