By Justin HAGER

California Gov. Gavin Newsom won’t need to pack his bags quite yet, after surviving a multi-year recall effort that was widely viewed by liberals as a battle against the far right and by conservatives as a referendum on his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, with 100% of precincts reporting, 63.9% of voters chose not to recall the governor while 36.1% said that the governor should be recalled. Only 9.1 million of California’s 22 million registered voters and 25 million eligible voters participated in the election.

After the election was called by the major network news organizations,

Newsom appeared at the California Democratic Party headquarters where he said he was “humbled and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians [who] exercised their fundamental right to vote and express themselves so overwhelmingly by rejecting the division, by rejecting the cynicism, rejecting so much of the negativity that’s defined our politics in this country over the course of so many years.”

Had he been recalled, Larry Elder, the conservative talk radio host, garnered the highest number of votes and would have replaced Newsom. He received the plurality of votes in every county in the state except for San Francisco County, which selected Democratic YouTube celebrity Kevin Paffrath with a 21% plurality. Despite early indications that his campaign might challenge the results of the election, including a campaign website pre-emptively declaring the election to be fraudulent, Elder conceded on Tuesday night and implied that this may not be his last run at the governor’s desk.

“I can’t think of anything that this man has done in the last two years that suggests he deserves another day in office,” Elder said, referring to Newsom. “Let’s be gracious in defeat … We may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war.”

Newsom will serve the remainder of his term until the next gubernatorial election in 2022.