With voter restlessness serving as one of the big electoral points globally, it is no surprise that local voters throughout the U.S. once again looked to recalls to remove a large collection of elected officials.
At least 108 recalls went to the ballot in 2024, with 77 resulting in removal and 31 officials surviving the vote. Sixteen officials resigned in the face of a serious recall effort, and one official in Flint, Mich., died before the recall vote was held.
This was similar to the totals in 2023, when 77 of the 99 officials who faced a vote were ousted and 31 others resigned. Recalls have recovered from a Covid-related drop that occurred from 2020-2022.
2024 did see a falloff in the number of recalls attempted, going from 428 to 385. The fewer attempts could be due to a number of factors, including a drop in newspaper coverage (thereby preventing tracking) and a higher percentage of offices facing the end of the term in a presidential year (thereby leading recall proponents to wait until Election Day rather than collecting signatures).
One other possible explanation is that proponents are less likely to threaten a recall unless they feel there is a good chance of getting to the ballot.
Recalls are generally undertaken due to policy issues, not partisanship. These policy issues are usually hyperlocal, with hiring and firing city officials and development plans among the headlines.
But some recalls do reflect national trends. In 2020-2022, recalls over Covid-related issues, especially school shutdowns, were one of the main drivers of recall attempts.
The most prominent recalls this year fit that bill. They were the ones in the overlapping California jurisdictions in Alameda County, where the county District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao were both kicked out on Election Day. These two were the largest local recalls by jurisdiction population since 2011.
The recalls were focused on criminal justice issues, with Price being tagged with being too lax on sentencing. Price is just the latest progressive prosecutor to be ousted from her position. She joined former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who lost a recall in 2022, as targets for voters who are looking for a more traditional prosecutor.
While those were the most noteworthy recalls, one subject that received an enormous amount of attention on the national stage also seemed to push forward in recalls: transgender and sexual identity issues, especially in school board races.
A mayor in Calexico, Calif., became the first transgender official to be ousted by a recall, and the subject of gender was at least a part of the battle. The big fight though was at the school board level, where the questions that initiated the recalls ranged from what school curriculum to use to whether pride flags could be flown.
Voters were quite successful at removing officials who took conservative stands — mainly in California, but also in places such as Oklahoma, where a council member, who was removed for allegations of white supremacist connections, tried to make that a focal point of his campaign. But that is not the end of the story, as one of the California recalls shows.
A school board in Temecula, in southern California, saw recalls launched after board members took several controversial votes on LGBTQ issues. Those included rejecting the state’s social studies curriculum due to mentioning Harvey Milk, banning any flag from being flown — seemingly in order to stop the flying of the Pride flag — and requiring school officials to notify parents about transgender students.
Temecula school board President Joseph Komrosky was tossed out in a close June recall (losing by fewer than 200 votes). However, five months later on Election Day, Komrosky roared back to win the seat by 200 votes. As we’ve seen with other recalls over the years, even an ouster was not enough to end the fight.
Much as we should not expect any rest on the national level, local officials will also spend 2025 concerned about recalls. Just one week into the new year, two officials in Brookville, Ohio, will face the voters trying to survive a recall vote.
Joshua Spivak is a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.