Seven weeks after lighting a candle at the tomb of Saint Oscar Romero in April, 2019, Gavin Newsom signed a proclamation at the end of May welcoming women from other states seeking abortion to come to California to end their pregnancies.

Eighteen months later, after harsh lockdowns on small businesses, Newsom dined indoors with friends at the posh French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley. Now, that incident, combined with the discovery that California prison inmates were getting over $1 billion in unemployment payments spurred the effort in November and December to recall the California governor.

According to a Dec. 14 story in the Washington Times:

Recall organizers say they have collected more than half the nearly 1.5 million petition signatures needed to place the recall on the ballot, and they have until mid-March to hit the required threshold.

Randy Economy, a senior adviser to the recall effort, said there was a surge of several hundred thousand petition signatures after Newsom‘s restaurant debacle last month. “It has resonated. It’s about the arrogance of power,” he said….

Fox Nation host Tammy Bruce helped lead the recall of Governor Gray Davis in 2003 and has seen the signs before.

“The concern is that Gavin Newsom is doing things that benefit that lobbyist and those interests as opposed to benefiting the people of California,” Bruce told co-host Griff Jenkins.

“How do you know?” she added. “Because the people of California are in dire straits and Gavin Newsom and his friends are not.”

Bruce said “it’s the economy, the handling of Covid, the corruption, this lobbyist guy. Californians don’t like it and I think it’ll be successful.”

Anne Dunsmore, the campaign manager and finance director of Rescue California 2021, told Fox News in December that the effort was a “citizen tide” against the missteps Newsom had taken during the pandemic.

“Closing the beaches and closing the parks really was the beginning, that I saw on the ground, of the beginning of the end for him, as far as people taking the recall stuff seriously,” Dunsmore said.