California Gov. Gavin Newsom was facing a tight race. Then Larry Elder came along.

Earlier this year, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom was searching for the right message to convince disengaged Democrats to vote against the effort to oust him in Tuesday's recall election, it would have been impossible to imagine a more perfect foil than conservative talk radio host Larry Elder.

In this deep blue state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1 and only one governor has successfully been recalled, few progressive voters had viewed the recall of their governor as a real possibility until late July, when the polls tightened. The Delta coronavirus variant was taking hold, angering many vaccinated Californians, who had thought the worst was behind them. And Elder, who had announced his candidacy earlier that month, emerged as Newsom's chief opponent, promising that one of his first acts would be to eliminate the governor's mandate for state workers to get vaccinated or else face weekly testing.

Many Democratic voters in a state that President Joe Biden won by nearly 30 points had not engaged or paid much attention as Newsom made an amorphous argument that the recall was an attempted Republican takeover by acolytes of former President Donald Trump and a symbol of the enduring hold of "Trumpism."

But in Elder, Newsom gained a direct target who he could argue was "to the right of Donald Trump" and who would take California "off the Covid cliff," citing the experiences of Florida and Texas and their conservative anti-mask-mandate governors as the model Elder would follow in responding to the pandemic. Elder's long history on the radio and as a columnist provided reams of controversial statements for opposition researchers and journalists to scrutinize on other topics, like his disparaging comments about women -- a key demographic for Newsom.