POLITICS

Democrats, election officials and voting rights groups have long wondered whether President Trump, upon his return to the Oval Office, would again attempt to overturn an election when his party is trailing.

It’s no longer hypothetical.

Late last week, the president directed his Department of Justice to preemptively contest a potential Republican loss in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska. The department is demanding a court hold up certification of a possible Democratic win until it’s determined whether voters were confused by having two candidates with the same name on the ballot.

Trump followed that by calling for the prosecution of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, based on a New York Times report that her campaign helped recruit someone named Dan Sullivan to siphon away votes from the Republican incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan. The governor has ordered an investigation.

Academics believe the lawsuit is the first time since the Civil Rights era that the federal government has sued to halt certification of an election, a duty the Constitution places in the hands of states.

Trump, for years, has claimed elections are rigged when he or his party loses, and this time is no exception. He has used his midterm rallies to say Democrats cheat, criticize election officials by name and call the ranked choice voting system in Alaska, which might hold the key to Senate control, a scam.

But the certification lawsuit elevates Trump’s crusade beyond mere rhetoric, indicating that he is preparing to use the power of the presidency to try to reverse a possible loss as his party struggles to hold its control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections.

Earlier this week, the president also announced a $1 million bounty for anyone who provides proof of prior or current voter fraud in the country. It wasn’t clear whether or how he planned to follow through.

“For at least the last year and a half, they’ve been laying that groundwork,” said Theresa Lee, a senior attorney with the ACLU. “We’ve been preparing for just as long, if not longer.”

Trump says he’ll accept results if the election is ‘honest’

Trump told reporters this week that he would accept the election results, but with his typical caveat: “If they’re honest elections,” he said.

That follows a pattern. Trump has preemptively claimed that upcoming elections will be rigged and labeled elections he’s lost as stolen. It started with the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, when he came in second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa,” Trump said at the time. “He stole it.”

Democrats and other groups that oppose Trump have been concerned that his words would turn into directives to have his administration interfere in the midterms. They have been running exercises for months and have lawsuits pre-written. They also plan to have tens of thousands of people monitoring the polls on Election Day.

So far, early voting has been quiet, with about 35 million people already casting ballots without any notable disruption.

In that respect, this year’s election so far resembles 2025’s off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and a handful of other states. Democrats braced for possible Trump action then, but the election proceeded with no major issues. But the Justice Department’s more aggressive actions this month already make 2026 different from any election in recent memory.

It has sued California to block it from counting ballots after it alleged the state had 20,000 noncitizens on its rolls and made a similar demand of Washington related to about 400 voters in that state. Both states said the demands came too close to the election to fulfill, and a federal judge Wednesday rejected the federal government’s California demands.

Earlier, the Justice Department seized ballots and election records related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s Fulton County, and the administration launched a sweeping investigation of that vote, though it has yet to turn up evidence supporting Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department does not want to intervene in elections, but had no choice in Alaska.

“We are not doing anything improper,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — (and) President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way, shape or form.”

After the lawsuit was filed, Trump told reporters he was the one who pushed for it: “I’m the one that said do it,” the president said.

Lawsuits seem more ‘impulsive’ than strategic

Though the Trump administration claimed to be acting on behalf of Alaska’s voters in its lawsuit to hold up certification, the president’s Republican allies in the state didn’t appear happy.

Sen. Sullivan would not say whether he supported the lawsuit. Alaska’s Republican-controlled state government filed court papers to try to have it dismissed. The state’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, said the administration “should never have filed” it.

While controversial, the situation in Alaska is not that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on the ballot to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.

Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote that the Alaska lawsuit’s legal argument was “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.” He said that should reassure the public that Trump won’t be able to change election outcomes.

“The notion that there’s going to be something systemic that’s going to thwart the will of the voters seems much more speculative,” he said. “A lot of the conduct seems impulsive rather than strategic and planned.”

The courts have repeatedly rebuffed the administration, in many cases because the Constitution gives the president no direct power over how elections are run. Courts put on hold two Trump executive orders seeking to change voting procedures. The administration also has lost more than two dozen cases trying to get detailed voter information from the states.

That resembles 2020, when Trump and his allies tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and in the process lost dozens of lawsuits.

Can the institutions hold?

Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor of North Carolina, is part of Right Count, a group of conservatives pushing back against election conspiracy theories and intervention in local elections. He said he’s confident the system will hold.

“The only thing that protects us from anarchy is this thin piece of paper called the Constitution,” McCrory said. “That thin piece of paper is, to me, a cement wall.”

It’s one that many analysts expect will continue to stymie Trump in the courts.

“The courts are likely to throw most, if not all, of these charges out,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “But this is a way of intensifying the signal to Trump’s supporters that the elections are rigged.”

The Justice Department in 2020 refused to join Trump’s allies in litigation. In his second term, Trump has pushed out career staff and stocked his administration with people who helped him challenge the 2020 election. That’s led to mounting concern he could deploy immigration agents, the FBI or even the military to the polls or seize ballots or voting machines, although multiple administration officialshave denied they have such plans.

All of that could happen before courts even have a chance to weigh in, said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist.

“The threat is that he’ll take actions that can’t be undone,” Nyhan said.

Riccardi and Swenson write for the Associated Press.

With less than a week until Election Day, Democrats remain divided over their nominee in Michigan’s pivotal Senate race. The question now is whether those divisions will outweigh voter frustration with President Trump and the Republican Party.

Criticism of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has persisted for months, both privately and publicly, since a contentious primary divided voters and party leaders. Rather than focusing solely on uniting the party’s traditional coalition in the aftermath of the primary, El-Sayed has sought to bring new voters — particularly college students and rural residents — into the fold.

But the lingering Democratic tensions spilled into public view again Wednesday, when Jason Turkish, the fiance of El-Sayed’s former primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, told The Detroit News that he would vote for Republican Mike Rogers.

Hours later, Stevens appeared on CNN to reaffirm that she would be voting for El-Sayed, but urged his campaign to “shut out the hate and call it out.”

“Make people who are in my coalition, right, make them feel comfortable about coming to the polls,” said Stevens, who drew significant support from Jewish and Black voters during the primary.

El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel, past remarks and associations with controversial streamer Hasan Piker have long drawn concern from some in Michigan’s large Jewish community. Turkish and others in the Jewish community have said El-Sayed hasn’t done enough to address concerns ahead of the general election.

The latest controversy centered on an ad by Rebellion PAC, an independent left-wing group, that linked U.S. support for Israel to high grocery prices.

“That has nothing to do with our campaign,” El-Sayed said of the ad. “It’s certainly not what I want to be talking about right now.”

Stevens and other Democrats urged him to go further to denounce the content of the advertisement rather than merely distancing himself from it.

Republicans face political challenges of their own, particularly voter dissatisfaction with Trump, the Iran war and high costs. Rogers has remained closely aligned with the president on most issues, appearing alongside him at a Michigan rally Sunday where he credited Trump with bringing manufacturing jobs back to the state.

El-Sayed has sought to capitalize on that dissatisfaction, holding campaign events in heavily Republican areas, including Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His campaign even released an ad featuring clips of prominent conservative figures praising him, including Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host has also been accused of antisemitism, which he has denied.

But that outreach has created another source of friction with some Jewish voters.

Rabbi Aaron Starr of Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield criticized both the Rebellion PAC ad and El-Sayed’s campaign ad during a call with reporters.

“We are one week away from the election, and it feels like the temperature has turned way up,” Starr said. “Instead of things getting better over the last seven weeks, they’ve actually gotten worse.”

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 29, 2026 7:49 AM PT

CEBU, Philippines — The United States and Japan have agreed to establish a Japanese facility for the joint production of advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles, the Japanese defense chief said.

It is the latest move by the allies, which have repeatedly expressed alarm over China’s growing assertiveness in Asia.

Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi made the announcement in a news conference Wednesday night in the central Philippine province of Cebu, where he met U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the sidelines of an annual meeting of Southeast Asian defense chiefs and their major Asian and Western counterparts.

Koizumi renews concern over China’s naval activity

Koizumi raised concern Thursday about China’s increasing naval activity in southwestern Japan. He said that three Chinese destroyers and a coast guard ship together crossed the Osumi Strait south of the southern main island of Kyushu and headed east to the Pacific Ocean this week. It was the first such fleet configuration his ministry has spotted, he said.

Koizumi said he cited the incident as “an example illustrating the challenging security environment in the region” in his remark at a session Thursday. His ministry will keep watching the Chinese activity with high level of interest, he said. Japan has been accelerating military buildup in southwestern Japan to deter China.

The annual meetings aim to avert a major regional conflict and strengthen defense cooperation. On the sidelines of the meetings, however, the U.S. and China and their allies have often traded criticisms.

Japan, US to bolster joint missile production capacity

The missiles that will be produced as part of a joint effort called “Operation Supercharge” are essential for the F-35 fighter jets, Koizumi said. The two sides agreed to build a final assembly and inspection plant for the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, in Japan, he said. The U.S.-made F-35s are one of the world’s most advanced aircraft and are also used by the Japanese military.

During his brief meeting with Hegseth in Cebu, Koizumi said he “shared a sense of crisis … regarding the increasingly severe regional situation and we agreed to strengthen the deterrence and response capabilities of the Japan-U.S. alliance with greater speed and intensity than ever before.”

“We reaffirmed the importance of a free and open international order based on the rule of law, which rejects any attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo through the use of force, coercion or other means,” Koizumi said.

Hegseth reassures U.S. engagement in the region

Hegseth renewed the Trump administration’s repeated assurances of commitment to help deter aggression in the region in a separate meeting on Wednesday with ASEAN defense ministers, who were led by the host, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. Like Koizumi, Hegseth did not mention China by name in expressing his security concerns in the region.

“The approach we’re taking, we describe as strong, quiet and clear,” Hegseth told the ASEAN defense chiefs. “Strong enough to deter coercion and aggression, quiet enough to avoid needless escalation or public theatrics to let our actions speak for themselves.”

His message is “clear enough that our friends, our partners and potential adversaries understand precisely where the United States stands and that we will defend our interests and the interests of our allies and partners,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth has assured the Philippines, the oldest treaty ally of Washington in Asia, that the Trump administration will build a robust deterrence against China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Beijing claims the busy waterway, a key global trade route, virtually in its entirety.

Australia shows commitment to defend the rule of law in the Pacific

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his country’s forces, along with allies like the U.S., will press on with efforts to defend the rule of law despite China’s increasing assertiveness, including in the South China Sea. Australia protested last year after a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft released flares and passed within 100 feet of an Australian P-8 Poseidon surveillance jet over the disputed waters.

“That doesn’t deter us from doing what we need to do and that’s essentially asserting the rules-based order here in the end of the Pacific,” Marles told The Associated Press in Cebu on Wednesday. “Freedom of navigation on the high seas is profoundly important for Australia.”

The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, all ASEAN member states, along with Taiwan, also have overlapping claims in the South China Sea. Confrontations have particularly escalated between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and navy vessels in disputed shoals and outlying waters.

Washington has warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

Beijing and Tokyo have a separate dispute over tiny Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea, with both sides often accusing the other of infringing on their maritime territory.

Gomez and Calupitan write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Aaron Favila in Cebu, Philippines, and Haruka Nuga in Bangkok and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

It’s finally election day and you’re ready to head to the polls to cast your ballot in California’s 2026 midterm, but you don’t know where the nearest polling location is. Or perhaps you misplaced your ballot.

Here are some common last-minute election-day hiccups and how to navigate them so you can earn your “I voted” sticker on Tuesday.

I forgot to register to vote

You can still register as a conditional voter on election day through the “same day” voter registration process.

Eligible citizens who need to register or re-register to vote within 14 days of an election can complete this process at county elections offices, polling places or vote centers.

If you’ve become a U.S. citizen fewer than 15 days before the election, you may register to vote by visiting your county elections office anytime before the polls close on election day. You must bring proof that you are a U.S. citizen and sign a form saying you are eligible to vote in California.

For all those registering, the application requires a state driver’s license or California identification card number, or you can use the last four digits of your Social Security card.

If you don’t have any of those, you can still register. You’ll be assigned a unique identifier to validate your registration.

With same-day registration, you are “conditionally” registered to vote, and your ballot is provisional. Once officials have confirmed you are registered to vote in that county, your ballot is then processed and counted.

I don’t know where my polling place is

You can look for the nearest polling place by entering your address in the “Find your polling place” tool on the California secretary of state’s website.

The Los Angeles County office of the registrar-recorder/county clerk has a vote center locator that includes the wait time to cast your ballot.

I’m here at the polling place but forgot my ballot at home

You can request a provisional ballot at any polling place in the county in which you are registered to vote.

A provisional ballot is a regular ballot that is placed in a special envelope prior to being put in the ballot box.

It’s counted once election officials verify that you are a registered voter in that county and haven’t already voted in the election.

I can’t submit my mail-in ballot myself

You can have someone else submit your ballot.

Anyone can drop off your mailed ballot as long as you authorize them to do so and they do not get paid on a per-ballot basis, according to the secretary of state.

You and the person you’ve authorized to submit your mailed ballot must fill out and sign the outside of the ballot envelope.

I forgot my check-in code for in-person voting

Los Angeles County election officials say you can check in at a vote center by scanning your “quick check-in code” — a number that verifies your voter registration.

Your unique code can be found on your mailed sample ballot and vote center postcard. Take either of those hard copies to the vote center.

If you forgot the hard copies, you can find the code online. You retrieve it by verifying your voter registration here. You’ll need to input your last name, birth date, the house number of your residential address and your ZIP Code. For assistance call, (800) 815-2666, Option 2.

I’ve heard about touch-screen voting machines not working

It’s a common issue: You touch your voting machine screen, and it doesn’t show your intended selection.

Election officials say touch-screen challenges are commonly caused by user error or an easily fixed screen miscalibration.

Flag a poll worker if you’re having difficulty. If you’ve already printed a ballot that doesn’t reflect your intended selections, don’t cast it; notify a poll worker who will follow procedures for replacing the ballot.

How late is too late to put my ballot in a ballot box?

There are three ways you can submit your mailed ballot on election day:

• You can put it in a ballot drop box. The cutoff time to do so is the same time that polls close, 8 p.m.
• Drop it off at a polling place, vote center or county elections office by 8 p.m.
• Drop it off at a United States post office. To ensure your ballot is postmarked by election day, mail it at least by Thursday — five days before Tuesday’s election. If mailing on election day, get a hand-stamped postmark from a postal employee at a U.S. post office.

Where is my nearest ballot box?

The Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office has an online tool here to help you find a ballot box near you.

I think I forgot to sign my mailed ballot envelope

If you turned in your vote-by-mail ballot and forgot to sign it, your vote will still count.

Your county elections official will notify you by mail, phone or email. You can also be notified by way of the “Where’s My Ballot?” tracking tool, which offers automatic notifications that will ping you if there are issues with your ballot.

To remedy the issue, your county elections office will provide you with a form to fill out and return completed.

The form will be given to you two days prior to the day your county certifies the election, so be sure to fill it out and return it to your county elections office right away.

How late is too late to vote at the polls on election night?

In California, any voter who is in line at 8 p.m. when the polls are scheduled to close is allowed to vote, according to the secretary of state.

If there is a line when the polls close, a poll worker stands at the back of the line to let people who arrive after 8 p.m. know that the polls have closed.

Any voter who arrives after the polls have closed may not be allowed to vote, even if voters who were in line to vote before the polls closed are in the process of voting.

As California decides whether to slap billionaires with a special tax, the Golden State’s swarm of social media stars is chiming in — and increasingly getting paid to influence voters.

Unlikely influencers, from foodies to mothers to retirees, are weighing in on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires and on other ballot measures created to cancel it.

Campaigns try to team up with and sometimes compensate key content creators, as their endorsements often hit harder than traditional political ads.

Between cheery Instagram videos about budget-friendly trips to a playground, a Halloween house and zoo with her kids, Bartley Chavez posted a video opposing Proposition 40 to her more than 47,500 followers.

“Look, I’m all for trying new things. A new recipe? Sure. A crazy haircut? Go for it. A quirky movie with the kids. Why not? But when we’re talking about California jobs, our family’s financial future, and the state’s economy, that’s not something I want to experiment with,” she says in the October video.

The video’s caption states the campaign opposing Proposition 40 paid her to post.

Getting political online does come with risks. In the video’s comments, one Instagram user said they unfollowed Chavez’s account, and another called her a “sell out.” Others backed her position. Chavez didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Los Angeles author and political influencer Leigh McGowan has built an audience of more than 3.5 million followers on different platforms with her no-nonsense takes on politics and other issues. She was already a supporter of the wealth tax when the Proposition 40 campaign started to pay for some of her posts.

“No one is punishing the rich. They are doing just fine,” she said in a sponsored video on Instagram. “We are simply asking them to pay an outstanding one-time tax that’ll help the rest of us.”

Campaigns have been paying attention to influencers as younger people turn to them for news, said McGowan, who’s known for pontificating from her kitchen. Many people distrust traditional media and want regular people to break down complex topics.

“We don’t know who to believe anymore, and there are just so many lies out there,” McGowan said in an interview. “The people who take the time to say authentically this is what they believe in, that’s who people believe.

In California, political ad spending in the 2026 election cycle is projected to approach $1 billion, more than any other state, according to political advertising intelligence firm AdImpact. Roughly $114 million is expected to go to digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat and X.

The campaign opposing Proposition 40 has plenty of money to spend on political messaging in what’s become one of the most expensive ballot fights in California’s history. Billionaires such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin have donated millions to Building a Better California, a group funding ads against the wealth tax proposal. More than $350 million has been contributed to fight the billionaire tax and support two propositions — 41 and 42 — that could block it.

Campaign finance forms show how much groups spend on digital media, but they don’t say how much of that goes to influencers. While the data are limited, campaign leaders and other experts say social media stars are playing a bigger role in how brands and political movements advertise.

“Any modern campaign that wants to win needs to be active in spaces where voters get information — and that’s exactly what the No on 40 coalition is doing,” said Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the coalition opposing Proposition 40.

Some political influencers broadcast their views independently or talk to campaigns without compensation. Others are paid a few hundred dollars or even up to $30,000 per post, according to an October report from the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Communication Technology Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

Influencers will post content for political campaigns to make money, but “genuine belief in political issues or candidates can — and often does — coexist with compensation,” the report said.

One Los Angeles influencer, The Speech Prof, who has more than 1.7 million combined followers on Instagram and TikTok, said he refused money to stop the billionaire tax.

The creator, also known as Professor Chesko, talks about everything from parenting and misogyny to politics. In September, he posted a viral video in which he says he rejected a large amount of money to oppose the billionaire tax.

This month, he posted a new video backing the billionaire tax, noting that the Proposition 40 campaign paid him to make the content. “It’s not nearly as much, but they’re a healthcare union and not corporate oligarchs. Plus I already said where I stand for free,” he said in the October video.

Professor Chesko didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The storm of new voices chiming in on the political debate, delivered through people’s personalized social media feeds, could be causing confusion, said Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA.

“If I’m seeing a completely different reality than you, whether it’s through influencers, AI or social media microtargeting,” he said. “Then it’s impossible to have a common basis for making decisions or choices.”

While the anti-billionaire tax war chest is much bigger, groups behind the tax say they’re still winning on social media.

“Despite being heavily outspent, the Prop. 40 campaign has been beating the billionaires on social media content and impact,” said Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the SEIU-UHW, the healthcare union backing the billionaire tax.

She said influencers support the tax even when they’re not paid because they understand that “California needs functioning hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires.”

Some sponsored influencers are avoiding direct criticism of the billionaire tax and instead signaling support for a ballot measure that could nullify Proposition 40 even if voters approve it.

Proposition 42 prohibits new taxes on “retirement holdings, individually-owned assets, and other forms of personal savings,” but it conflicts with the billionaire tax proposal. If voters approve both, the one with the most “yes” votes generally would become law.

Karen Clay-Fenderson, a Los Angeles mom and retired teacher with more than 120,000 Instagram followers, has posted videos about Proposition 42.

“I did my research on 42, and I did see something about the billionaire tax. But I want to keep my retirement and my life savings. I don’t want that taxed,” she said in an interview.

She disclosed that the Proposition 42 campaign paid her for the videos, but didn’t go so far as to tell people how to vote.

“They understand that we have influence, and people listen to what we have to say,” she said. “That’s why I’m very cautious. This is what I’m doing, but you need to make your choice.”

In California, influencers must disclose that they are being paid by a political campaign. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that would penalize influencers who failed to disclose that they were paid to post political content. Influencers could face fines of up to $5,000 per post.

Social media platforms also have their own rules. Instagram allows paid political ads, but TikTok doesn’t — though enforcement has been an issue.

Nathan Click, a spokesperson for Proposition 42, said their partners disclose they are paid and follow all campaign laws.

“Creators play an important role in the political conversation,” he said. “And campaigns across the country partner with them to ensure their audiences understand what’s at stake in the election.”

California voters are souring on a Nov. 3 ballot measure to impose a one-time tax on billionaires to help fund healthcare programs, a proposal that has triggered one of the most expensive political battles in state history.

Half of likely voters plan to vote against Proposition 40, the proposed wealth tax on billionaires’ assets, while 42% support it, according to a new poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies that was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. The findings mark a significant decline in support of the measure, which was crafted by an influential California healthcare union to compensate for an estimated $100 billion in federal healthcare cuts approved by President Trump and congressional Republicans.

The survey also found that a solid majority of likely voters opposed Proposition 39, which would require Californians to provide identification when voting and election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens. The findings come as the Trump administration continues to attack California as a haven for voter fraud, including unfounded allegations of rampant illegal voting by undocumented immigrants.

Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director, said previous surveys showed support for Proposition 40 has been fragile, and the most recent shows its prospects have dimmed as election day approaches.

The increase in opposition to Proposition 40 is “broad-based and spans virtually all major segments of the electorate,” DiCamillio said. The ballot measure was leading in a Berkeley poll conducted just six weeks ago, albeit by a slim margin, so its reversal of fortune is significant, he said.

The declining support comes after an onslaught of money spent opposing Proposition 40, including a torrent of television and social media ads airing everywhere from NFL games to “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns. Nearly $368 million has been contributed to efforts opposing the billionaire tax, while $36 million has been donated to support the proposed levy.

Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires who resided in California as of Jan. 1, with some exceptions. Democrats and their allies are splintered over the proposal. Some, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, argue it will prompt the wealthy to flee California, further harming its volatile budget, which is dependent on the state’s richest residents. The California Democratic Party and leading progressives support the measure, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calling it a modest tax necessary to help Californians struggling because of cuts imposed by Republicans to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy.

While Republican voters overwhelmingly oppose Proposition 40, nearly two-thirds of Democrats support it and more than a quarter opposing it. There is also a generational divide, with 6 out of 10 voters 65 years old or older opposing the measure, while more than two-thirds of those under 30 supporting it, according to the poll.

The findings are similar to a Public Policy Institute of California poll released Tuesday, which found 52% of likely voters would vote against Proposition 40, while 46% supported it.

The campaign against the wealth tax, funded by some of California’s richest tech moguls, is centered on three intertwined ballot initiatives: Proposition 40 and Propositions 41 and 42, both of which would undercut Proposition 40 through a series of changes to state tax laws and spending restrictions.

Proposition 41 would cut wasteful government spending by requiring audits of new state special taxes and would bar new state taxes that are exempt from a state spending limit. Proposition 42 would prohibit new taxes on retirement holdings, individually owned assets and other personal savings. Both Propositions 41 and 42 would nullify the billionaire tax if it passes, provided either measure receives more votes.

A plurality of voters oppose Propositions 41 and 42, a reversal from just six week ago, according to the poll.

In mid-September, voters were closely divided about Proposition 41 — 37% in favor and 33% opposed — with a large number of undecided. In the current poll, 38% of likely voters favor the measure and 47% oppose it. Proposition 42 led by 9 percentage points in the Berkeley/L.A. Times poll in September — 43% in favor and 34% opposed. Now, 43% of likely voters support it and 45% oppose it.

DiCamillo said backers of a ballot measure also should be concerned any time support registers below 50%, since voters who are undecided or unsure tend to vote no.

“It’s below 50%, and it’s trending down. Both of those are ominous signs,” DiCamillo said. Proposition 42 is “still very close. I’m not saying it’s definitely going down, but it’s moving in the wrong direction late in the campaign, and usually movement in a late poll is even more significant than the actual numbers themselves,”

He added that while many voters were unaware the two proposed ballot measures were designed as poison pills to kill the billionaire tax, among those who knew, the opposition was significantly greater.

If all three measures fail, that still would be a victory for the billionaires who spent aggressively to tank the wealth tax.

Another notable finding was voters’ support of Proposition 3, which would make permanent a higher income tax rate on the wealthy that funds education. A majority of voters — 54% — support continuing the levy, while 37% oppose it, according to the poll. DiCamillo says the disparity in support of the proposed billionaire tax and the extension of the existing wealth tax has been consistent in IGS’s polls, and is likely because of the differing foundations of the levies.

“Proposition 3 is already in place, and if you read the fiscal impact, if this were to pass, it maintains $5 billion to $15 billion of annual funding,” he said, “It’s a big revenue generator, and I think that is something that’s already in place.”

“Voters kind of understand the progressive nature of California’s tax system, and they kind of support that, but they don’t support nearly as much the idea of some new kind of tax, the wealth tax, which is taxing assets rather than income,” he said. “So that’s the distinction.”

These ballot measures are among 14 that voters will decide on Nov. 3, as well as statewide, congressional, local and judicial elections.

Among the other controversial measures is Proposition 39, a measure pushed by Republicans that would require all voters in future elections to show government-issued identification every time they vote in person or provide a special PIN or the last four digits of their Social Security number when submitting mail-in ballots.

The measure also would require the California secretary of state and county election officials to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens by “using government data,” which according to supporters could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, jury summons information and other government records.

Nearly 6 in 10 likely voters oppose the effort, while more than a third support it, split largely along party lines. More than half of voters who are registered as “no party preference” or with a smaller political party oppose the proposal, which DiCamillo said was an indication of trouble for the proposition given the state’s Democratic majority electorate and the proximity of the election.

“It’s hard for Republicans to push something over the finish line by themselves,” he said.

Other prominent ballot measures:

• Proposition 43, which would prohibit local governments from imposing certain new special taxes unless two-thirds of voters approve the proposal. Such proposals need a simple majority vote to be approved. While 46% of likely voters oppose the proposal, 36% support it, challenging numbers this close to election day, DiCamillo said. “It needs to get to 50,” he said. “We’ll see how you do that this late in the campaign.”

• Proposition 4, which would repeal a prohibition of public financing of campaigns, allowing state and local governments to support candidates if they abide by several rules. Likely voters are evenly split about the proposal, with 41% supporting it and opposing it, and 18% undecided. “It’s close, but it’s still below 50%. Most voters tend to vote no in the late going if they’re not convinced,” DiCamillo said, adding that he viewed the lack of support among voters who do not affiliate with a political party as a signal of potential failure.

The poll of 2,787 registered California voters was conducted online in English and Spanish Oct. 19-25 and has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points in either direction.

WASHINGTON — In the final days before an election that will decide control of Congress, President Trump’s closing argument — buoyant, digressive and characteristically off-script — is at times running headlong into the economic anxieties of the voters Republicans most need.

With a war in Iran driving up gas prices for Americans, Trump is boasting to supporters that the conflict is making the country rich. At a rally in Georgia, he said his aides had urged him not to brag about the billions of dollars the United States was earning on oil from the war, since Americans are “paying a little higher” in costs because of it. But he did it anyway.

“I said, I don’t give a damn,” Trump said. “We are making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”

The moment underscores the gamble at the core of Trump’s final pitch to voters. With polls showing an overwhelming majority of Americans unhappy with the economy, the president is offering a portrait of national prosperity that many voters do not recognize, and pairing it with jokes and digressions that can seem to make light of their struggles.

Tuesday’s results will be the clearest test yet of whether that message still moves his base, or whether the president has become a liability for a party at risk of losing Congress in part because of his sinking popularity.

Signs of GOP anxiety are reflected in where Trump is spending his final days campaigning. Rather than courting swing voters in battleground states, he is leading rallies in Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina and Kansas — states that have long been Republican strongholds but where the party now worries its voters may stay home.

Still, the president is insisting to voters that the country is succeeding, and he is making the election a referendum on his agenda.

“The world is falling apart, and we are doing better than we’ve ever done,” he told a crowd in Mississippi on Monday. The next day, during a stop in Texas, he joked that the $5,000 he has promised Americans if Republicans win would not be enough for his supporters to eat a meal at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“You will be my guest at Mar-a-Lago. The problem is that for $5,000 the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert,” Trump said, laughing. “I’m not even sure you could buy that.”

Democrats have criticized the president’s remarks, calling them dismissive of voters’ concerns. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Trump boasting that the country was making money out of the Iran war was a “fitting” slogan for Trump’s White House.

Trump’s personal oil and gas holdings are now estimated to be worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, up from $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of last year, according to a report released this week by congressional Democrats.

Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, rejected the idea that the president has dismissed voters’ financial pain.

“The president, I think, shows empathy about what we’re going through, and he is fighting like hell,” Gruters said in an interview.

Asked to sum up Trump’s closing message, Gruters framed it as a choice between “common sense vs. crazy.” When pressed on the economy, Gruters pointed to Trump’s push to limit federal taxes on tips and overtime pay, to create investment accounts for children and to bring back manufacturing jobs.

“He has transformed the Republican Party into the workingman’s party,” Gruters said. “He is all about trying to bring back jobs that will bring up real wages across the board.”

But that message can be overshadowed with the off-script riffs that have long defined Trump’s rallies. During a rally in Ohio, while praising Sen. Jon Husted, Trump detoured into remarks about the Republican senator’s backside as well as rapper Nicki Minaj’s.

“I looked at his ass and I’ve never done that with a man before. It’s true. Off the record: Women, yes, men, no, OK?” Trump said. “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before, Nicki Minaj.”

At a separate rally, Trump turned his attention to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, saying that if elected, El-Sayed should be forced to pass through a metal detector before entering the U.S. Senate chamber.

“Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said of El-Sayed. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate.”

In those moments, the message is aimed squarely at his base, which over the last decade has celebrated his unfiltered style. And it is that base, more than swing voters, that Trump has spent his precious time courting in the final stretch of the campaign.

On Monday, Trump rallied supporters in Mississippi, a state he carried by 23 points two years ago. On Tuesday, he went to Texas for the fourth time this month to make the case for Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee trying to stave off what could be the first statewide Democratic victory there in three decades. Then on Wednesday, Trump was in Ohio for the third time this month, playing defense in a state he has won every time he’s been on the ballot. And on Saturday, Trump is heading to Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932.

Gruters said the red state swing reflects the need to get Republicans to the polls.

“You can’t take anything for granted. You have to fight hard in every single state, and remind people why they need to go vote,” he said. “This is a turnout, turnout, turnout race. And we’re doing everything we can as a party.”

Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, said it is still surprising to see the party deploy the president in Republican strongholds so close to the election.

“It really reflects, not just the tilt toward Democrats, but also the lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters for this election,” Haider-Markel said.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Kansas, but there is a possibility that Democrats can win if Republicans stay home, he said. One of the biggest assets the party has to mobilize the MAGA base is having Trump talk to them in person, he argued. But so far, it is unclear whether his closing message will resonate.

“I don’t think that he’s really speaking to the issues that voters care about, but I don’t think he’s coming to change people’s minds,” Haider-Markel said. “He’s looking for lines that get him applause and praise.”

In rally after rally, Trump has turned the event into a show about himself. In Iowa, congressional candidate Joe Mitchell presented Trump with a “man of the century” certificate. In Texas, Trump bemoaned that he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. And in several events, he has shown the crowd a video of a CNN analyst saying that among GOP voters, Trump is more popular than Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.

But in the end, he also tried to appeal to his base with nostalgia.

“We’ve been doing this together for 11 years, and there’s never been anything like it and there probably never will be anything like it again politically or otherwise,” he said. “So let’s go out and do what we do best and that is win on Nov. 3. We gotta win!”

Following a series of scandals that shook public trust in local government, Los Angeles City Council launched a massive charter reform to boost accountability across city departments. Charter PRT emerged from that reform.

McOsker, who co-sponsored the amendment, said it would offer greater public access and participation into government processes. He believes it is important that those overseeing LAX and Van Nuys understand how neighboring communities are affected by airport decisions.

“The folks that live and work and drive around and experience the impacts of the airport operations should have some say in the future of airport operations,” McOsker said. “They know the best of what the impacts are on the tens of thousands of folks that live around each of those facilities.”

McOsker stressed that the port is on public land and another space that residents should have greater insight into by offering transparency into how leaseholder agreements affect the local economy.

The two sides disagree sharply over what the changes to the law would mean in practice.

Dan Dunmoyer, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Assn., a trade group supporting the measure, said the state is the slowest in the nation when it comes to reaching a conclusion about whether projects can be built. Per Dunmoyer, it’s one of the top two reasons housing here is so pricey.

Supporters point to accumulating interest on loans, shelling out for litigation and rising costs for materials.

Dunmoyer believes the measure would make the review process faster and easier. He estimated it will reduce the cost of building single family homes by $75,000 a pop.

“We think … it will allow us to provide more housing of all types, not just for sale, but for rent and legally defined affordable housing, even homeless shelters, more quickly than under the current environmental review process,” he said, “and we think that’s beneficial to Californians who very much want a place to call home.”

Proponents of the measure characterize the effort as procedural: It will firm up timelines, but projects still will be reviewed. But those fighting it, as well as some legal experts, say the 41-page proposal essentially guts CEQA for projects that qualify.

Aruna Prabhala, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group opposing the measure, said it would eliminate the need to analyze a project’s specific impacts, such as how it affects people living nearby. Instead, the process would become a “checklist” to see if the project complies with existing environmental laws.

The measure also states it “should be interpreted and implemented to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and realization of, essential projects.” Prabhala and others believe it flips the purpose of CEQA to approve projects, rather than protect the environment.

“So much of what’s in the initiative mirrors what we’re seeing from the federal level and the Trump administration from rolling back environmental review, from really limiting public participation,” she said. “For not only failing to enforce protections for our air and water quality, but making it that much harder for agencies to do that.”

In California, fuel prices often are higher than anywhere else in the country, a reflection of the state’s high cost of living that voters want their next governor to address.

The two candidates running to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom — Democratic former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra and Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton — have vastly different views on climate and energy policy.

Here is where they stand on gas prices, electric vehicle mandates and California’s long-delayed high-speed rail project.

Gas prices and California’s refineries

California is the most expensive gasoline market in the nation, according to AAA, with an average price of $6.01 per gallon. Nationally, the average price was $4.28 per gallon, and this month was expected to become the most expensive for gas prices on record, according to AAA.

Becerra and Hilton both blame the high costs on the opposing political party — Becerra says President Trump’s war in Iran has increased prices by $2 per gallon, while Hilton blames California’s prices on policies pushed by Newsom and Democratic lawmakers.

Hilton has made the promise of $3 a gallon gasoline at California’s pumps a central plank of his affordability campaign. He argues he can achieve the target by repealing “outdated” environmental regulations and issuing more drilling permits in California.

Pumps in the McKittrick oil field, just north of the town of McKittrick on State Route 33.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

“We could be producing most of it here in California, [in] Kern County, and sending it to the refineries in a nice clean pipeline,” Hilton said during an August town hall in Modesto. “Instead of that, we’re shipping it halfway across the world, and giant super tankers spewing out carbon emissions. It’s insane.”

While he has expressed a desire to lower costs, Becerra has released scant details about how he would do it.

He took heat from fellow Democrats during the primary for defending Chevron after the oil producer donated half a million dollars to a committee supporting his campaign. He clarified that his statements were about keeping oil refineries in California, especially since several have shut down in recent years.

“We need to continue to have refineries so that we can process the petroleum, so we can have gasoline, so we don’t have prices that are even higher than what they are right now,” Becerra said during an August event with Politico.

EVs and car regulations

The next governor will decide whether to continue Newsom’s ambitious plan to accelerate the transition to zero-emission vehicles by banning the sale of new gas cars in California by 2035.

While Becerra supports transitioning away from gas-powered vehicles, along with California’s broader carbon neutrality goals, he has raised concerns about costs.

“The goal is great. What we have to do is make sure that goal matches the reality of our families,” he told CalMatters this year. “And if our families can’t afford to keep pace with the goal, then what good is the goal?”

Becerra would be open to revising or delaying the goals to prioritize affordability.

Hilton would end the state’s climate goals, which he blames for driving up energy and other costs.

A car charges at an EV station.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“I’m not against reducing carbon emissions,” Hilton said during a town hall with The Times and LAist this month. “I just want to do it in a way that both helps with the fight against climate change, but doesn’t hurt working people and small businesses.”

He argued that increasing domestic oil production and overhauling vegetation management to reduce the risk of megafires would reduce emissions more effectively than decades of heavy-handed climate rules.

Hilton has railed against “nanny-state” regulations, including new fuel efficiency standards for car tires.

“We are gonna shut it all down, rein it in, merge all of these regulators so we have common-sense regulation instead of this out of control, costly bureaucracy,” he said, standing outside a state office building in August to protest the tire regulations. He also has pledged to abolish the Department of Motor Vehicles and reduce registration fees to $73.

High-speed rail

The Tied Arch Bridge construction site, which will take high-speed trains over State Route 43 in Fresno County.

(Godofredo A. Vásquez / Associated Press)

Hilton would “cancel” all high-speed rail funding, which he said would save more than $3.7 billion per year.

While supportive of high-speed rail, Becerra is concerned by the project’s delays and cost overruns. He would “clean shop” at the authority, which signed off on hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses that should not have been approved, according to a recent audit.

“If we build, it’s gonna be because we can get this done the right way. We’re not gonna have this overspending, we’re not gonna have this misspending,” he said during a recent campaign stop in Sacramento. “California is the fourth-largest economy, with the most innovation. We can get it done too, but it won’t be done this way.”

More California statewide elections

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Oct. 28, 2026 7:16 PM PT

MINNEAPOLIS — Conservative activists James O’Keefe and Cam Higby were charged Wednesday with unlawful voting and identity theft after a Minnesota prosecutor said they gave false names to poll workers during the state’s primary election. The men recorded the exchanges for a video to expose what they say are vulnerabilities in the state’s voting laws.

Hennepin County Atty. Mary Moriarty announced the felony charges at a news conference. She said O’Keefe, 42, of West Palm Beach, Fla., and Higby, 26, of Covington, Wash., wore costumes and used the names of registered state voters while starting the “vouching” process in the Aug. 11 primary. The process provides a way for unregistered voters who lack proof of their current address to register and vote after signing an oath of eligibility.

Poll workers were suspicious and reported their behavior. Moriarty said the situation shows that “the system for identifying misconduct and responding to it functioned well during the primary.”

O’Keefe, who founded and later was ousted as leader of Project Veritas, gained notoriety by publishing undercover sting-style videos such as the one made at the Minnesota polling places. He was not immediately available for comment, and court records do not name an attorney to comment on his behalf.

Higby did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment and did not have an attorney in court records. Neither of them has had an opportunity to enter a plea.

Minnesota allows registered voters to “vouch” for another voter in the same precinct by signing an oath attesting to the second person’s identity and that they live in the precinct. The person being vouched for also must sign an oath attesting to their identity and eligibility to vote, and must also provide their Minnesota driver’s license or identification card number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

The process is rarely used but is most commonly done by older adults who have not updated their address on a driver’s license because they no longer drive. In the November 2024 election, fewer than 0.6% of votes cast used the process, according to the Minnesota secretary of state’s office website.

Workers flag ‘strange behavior’

In their video that was posted to YouTube on Aug. 13, O’Keefe, Higby and others dressed in costumes similar to attire worn by some Muslims and used fake accents while asking about the vouching process at multiple Minneapolis voting sites. Higby’s face was covered, and when talking to poll workers, O’Keefe referred to him as his wife.

Moriarty said both men “identified themselves using names of registered voters in the precinct without those voters’ knowledge or permission.”

The poll workers noticed the “strange behavior” and flagged it to election officials, who asked police to investigate, Moriarty said. The men stopped short of signing the oath required for vouching, but Moriarty said that giving false names and starting the process was enough to justify the felony charges.

“Free and fair elections are the bedrock of democracy, and their protection is one of our highest priorities,” Moriarty said.

O’Keefe’s organization, O’Keefe Media Group, posted a statement and the video on its website and said the men presented “an intentionally extreme scenario to expose what they see as the lunacy of the state’s ‘vouching’ system.”

“The team wanted to determine how election workers would respond, what safeguards they would describe, and how far they would allow the vouching process to proceed,” the statement said. “Not every election worker reacted the same way. While several workers explained how the undercover team could proceed under the vouching rules, others became suspicious of the group and took issue with the investigation. Some workers communicated concerns about the team over their radios.”

David Becker, a former Justice Department official and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said he wasn’t aware of any examples of vouching leading to organized or widespread fraud. But he said there have been more efforts recently by those pushing voter fraud claims to commit questionable acts themselves.

“Impersonating another voter is a very serious crime,” Becker said.

Voter ID laws vary

Voter identification laws vary from state to state. Thirty-six states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but that identification can range from a photo ID to documents such as a utility bill or bank statement.

In the remaining 14 states and Washington, D.C., voters can cast a ballot without showing ID. They must verify their identity in various other ways, such as signing an affidavit or providing personal information such as birth date, name or address.

Some states, such as Minnesota, allow election officials or other registered voters to vouch for people without a current ID. Alaska and New Hampshire, for instance, allow officials including a clerk or a supervisor to verify a voter’s identity if they know the voter personally. North Dakota allows people who lack ID cards because of a disability to have an attester certify that they are a qualified voter. West Virginia allows an adult who has known a voter for at least six months to sign a sworn statement verifying the voter’s identity.

Vancleave and Boone write for the Associated Press. Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. AP writer Ali Swenson contributed to this report.

A federal judge in Los Angeles denied a Trump administration request Wednesday to immediately block California elections officials from counting the ballots of 20,000 voters whose citizenship the administration questions in a blistering opinion.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled that the administration’s allegations were “not credible” and that the intervention it sought would violate a host of federal laws, sow chaos in the ongoing midterm election, likely lead to the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters and foster future political meddling in elections.

“This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections,” Carter wrote. “If [the Trump administration’s] last-minute request for relief were granted, either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process.”

Carter, an appointee of President Clinton, wrote that never in American history “has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” and that, in bringing its suit, the Trump administration was asking the court to “believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign.”

“But California and its people are sovereign, too,” Carter wrote.

Carter’s ruling was the second to deny the Trump administration a temporary restraining order against the state and Los Angeles County this week, after a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government’s emergency request in a separate order Monday.

Carter ruled following a 3½-hour hearing Tuesday, where a slew of attorneys for the state, county and independent voting rights groups argued against the administration’s demands.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli — who is the top federal prosecutor in L.A. and argued for the Trump administration at Tuesday’s hearing — did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling Wednesday. After Tuesday’s hearing, he suggested the administration was likely to appeal Carter’s ruling if it didn’t immediately halt the counting of the flagged ballots.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The race for mayor of Los Angeles is a dead heat as the campaign draws to a close, with a new poll showing incumbent Karen Bass erasing the double-digit lead previously held by Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Raman and Bass now each have 40% of likely L.A. voters in their camps, with 19% still undecided ahead of the Nov. 3 election, according to the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times.

The neck-and-neck contest is a big change from September, when Raman jumped out to an 11-percentage-point lead with support from 39% of likely voters compared with Bass at 28%.

It follows weeks of relentless attacks on Raman by Bass, whom some analysts had predicted would need to campaign more aggressively to close the gap with her challenger.

“It’s certainly a breath of fresh air for Bass to see the race close. She’ll probably feel the campaign is having the effect she wants it to have, which is to put more focus on Raman and put Raman on the defensive,” said Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll.

Mayor Karen Bass greets phone banking volunteers at her South L.A. campaign headquarters.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The survey released Wednesday was conducted online in English and Spanish with a sample of 2,197 likely city voters between Oct. 19 and Oct. 25. It has a margin of error of about three percentage points.

“The momentum in this race is with Karen Bass,” said Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign. “Ever since Angelenos got their ballots, Nithya Raman has made headlines for all the wrong reasons — voters know they can’t trust her on public safety and other key issues.”

The Raman campaign cited high unfavorable numbers for Bass in the poll, and noted that the mayor “still can’t get ahead” in voter surveys.

“Bass hasn’t led a poll since August and an aggregate of all publicly available polls continues to show Nithya in the lead,” the Raman campaign said in a news release.

The leveling off of the race, along with the sharp decline in undecided voters, was spurred largely by conservative voters who chose Republican Spencer Pratt in the primary deciding to vote for the mayor in the runoff, said DiCamillo.

In the September Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll, 22% of Pratt voters said they planned to support Bass, while 16% said they favored Raman. That left a whopping 63% of Pratt voters undecided still.

In the new poll, Bass shot up to 41% of the Pratt vote, while Raman dropped to 14% and 45% were still undecided. Pratt hasn’t endorsed either candidate in the race and continues to bash both Raman and Bass on social media.

“The Pratt voters are the biggest insertion,” DiCamillo said. “The question remains, since we’re looking at Pratt voters, 45% remain undecided. Will they vote?”

Raman trailed Bass in every poll during the primary campaign. Neither candidate had ever cleared 40% in any of the polls conducted by Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times.

In the June 2 primary election, Bass received 34% of the vote while Raman received 29%. Pratt placed third with 26%.

In the new poll, Raman shed support in key areas, including among groups that previously appeared to be leaning toward her.

Councilmember and mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman, center, with supporters at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

In the September poll, Raman led among Latinos by 24 percentage points, 45% to Bass’ 21%. In the October poll, Bass was up to 40% and Raman fell to 43%, leaving the two within the margin of error for that key constituency.

DiCamillo said part of that change had to do with the likely voter population becoming more clear as the election neared, and older Latinos appeared to be a larger portion of the electorate.

“The Latino likely electorate now includes more older Latinos; that benefits Bass,” he said.

Black voters, long considered the backbone of Bass’ coalition, solidified behind the mayor, with 71% of likely Black voters supporting her compared with 13% supporting Raman. While Bass led among Black likely voters in the September poll, the already wide margin was much slimmer at that time, at 48% to 20%.

The poll also affirmed a widely held belief among the Bass camp that the San Fernando Valley would tilt toward the mayor over Raman.

Raman was leading in the Valley in the September poll 34% to 26%, but that number flipped on its head over the past month, with Bass now in front of Raman 44% to 33%.

Bass’ surge in the poll was more notable because the mayor’s favorable ratings — which have been in the tank since the January 2025 wildfires — remained underwater, with 65% of Angelenos viewing her unfavorably compared to 64% in the last poll. Only 32% had a positive view of the mayor, up four percentage points from September.

Bass’ attacks on Raman appeared to be having a significant effect on voters’ opinions of the challenger.

For the first time in a poll by Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times this cycle, Raman posted a higher unfavorable rating than favorable, with 49% of likely voters saying they viewed her unfavorably compared to 42% who had positive views of her.

The mayor, her campaign team and her surrogates have stepped up their offensive toward Raman, seizing on any opportunity to hammer the council member over remarks she has made on the campaign trail that they argue make the her unfit for the mayoralty and “not ready for prime time” — a slogan the mayor and her allies have deployed against their rival.

In early October, the Bass campaign slammed Raman over a video she posted with a leftist influencer in which she urged viewers to “stop fascist liars” as a photo of Bass flashed on the screen. Raman criticized both Bass and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell in the video.

Bass accused the council member of calling the city’s police officers fascists. A Raman spokesperson said she was referring to the “Trump administration’s violent kidnappings” as fascist, not the mayor or police chief or officers. The story dominated headlines for days.

The Bass camp also needled Raman that week after photos surfaced of the council member attending a happy hour on the day federal immigration authorities began raids in Los Angeles last summer, though Raman said she attended a protest that same day.

The Bass campaign sent out a news release calling it “Nithya Raman’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.”

The attacks continued the next week after Raman said during the mayoral debate that the “gold standard” for LAPD’s noncooperation with immigration enforcement took place during the tenure of former LAPD Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Gates, a controversial chief accused of racist remarks during his tenure, headed the department during the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King and Bass said Raman’s comments showed she was “not really familiar with L.A., especially the Black community.”

Raman retorted that Bass was twisting her words, but later apologized, saying that mentioning Gates was painful for people across L.A.

The poll also asked respondents for the top priorities for the next mayor to address. Reducing the number of homeless encampments was by far the top answer, chosen by 43% of likely voters.

Tied for second place among top concerns was ensuring public safety and building more affordable housing, selected by 29% each.

Protecting immigrant communities was the third-most cited concern, with 21%, followed by balancing the city budget at 17%.

In the race for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman will need to win over a substantial portion of the 218,000 Angelenos who voted for Spencer Pratt in the primary and who are concentrated in certain neighborhoods.

In the June 2 primary, Bass earned more than a third of the vote, while Raman was close with 29%. Reality television personality Pratt finished third with 25.5%. The votes for him are nearly five times the 44,800-vote gap between Bass and Raman. This voting bloc could be key to either candidate securing the mayoral race.

Pratt carried 20% of the city’s 739 precincts, mainly in the West Valley — Woodland Hills, Encino, Granada Hills, West Hills, Chatsworth, Northridge and Tarzana — along with Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and San Pedro, according to a Times analysis of certified election results. In comparison, Bass had the most votes in 49% of the precincts, while Raman had 30%.

According to the latest Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll, Raman and Bass are in a dead heat, each with the support of 40% of likely voters. Polls show 45% of Pratt voters are undecided.

In the primary, Pratt had the most votes in 24 of the city’s 113 neighborhoods. All but three of those 24 neighborhoods heavily favored developer Rick Caruso over Bass in the 2022 mayoral race.

This week, Caruso said he will vote for Bass.

Voters in precincts that voted heavily for Pratt also turned out more than others. Turnout there was 46%, compared with 37% in the rest of the city, more than in past mayoral primaries.

There is a large pool of potential voters for Bass and Raman to cast ballots through Election Day Tuesday. Pratt’s support stretched well beyond the places he won. About 125,000 of his votes came from precincts that Bass or Raman won.

Pratt had his weakest showing in the city’s 43 majority-Latino neighborhoods, where he got 22% of the vote. Bass did well in 35 of them. The only one Pratt did well in was San Pedro, where Latinos make up just over half the population.

Pratt’s stronghold neighborhoods

Pratt’s largest base stretched across the west and north San Fernando Valley, from Chatsworth and Porter Ranch in the northwest corner through Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Encino. He was the leader in 76 precincts there, which together cast about 120,000 votes.

Pratt got 40.5% of the vote in those precincts. Bass finished second in all but one of those areas. Raman got 19%.

This month, Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath endorsed Raman, giving her a strong ally on the Westside and in the Valley and possibly new inroads in those areas.

On the Westside, Pratt swept the wealthy neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Bel-Air. Pratt’s home in the Palisades was destroyed in the January 2025 fire. His strongest showings were in the Palisades and Bel-Air, where he got about 50% of the vote.

Raman ran ahead of Bass in some of Pratt’s precincts, including ones in Pico-Robertson, Brentwood and Beverly Grove.

In the northeast Valley, Pratt did well in the foothill communities of Sunland, Tujunga and Shadow Hills. It’s a small part of the city’s electorate, with 38,000 registered voters. He got 44% of the vote, Bass 28% and Raman 18%.

At the city’s southern tip, Pratt did well in 11 precincts in San Pedro and parts of Harbor City with 42% of the vote. Raman had her weakest showing, with 16%.

Raman came within 5 percentage points of Pratt in only a handful of his precincts, including ones in Valley Village, Pico-Robertson and West Los Angeles.

You have until 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 3, to cast your vote in California’s general election. The Times has answers to last-minute questions about the voting process.

Here’s what you need to know:

What are the key races to watch?

1. The California governor’s race has narrowed down from six contenders to two top candidates: Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who has a long résumé in California electoral politics and received an endorsement from outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom. Steve Hilton is a Republican immigrant, an ally of President Trump and a former senior advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron. Your guide to the race for California governor can be found here.
2. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Karen Bass faces a reelection challenge from Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was, until recently, a close ally of the mayor. In October during the only televised debate between the candidates, Bass portrayed Raman as someone who wasn’t ready to lead the city; Raman continues to allege the mayor is “missing in action” and that a vote for Bass would put the city in a position of further decline. Your guide to the L.A. mayor’s race can be found here.

What is on the ballot?

There are several races, ballot measures, local district seats and statewide races that Southern Californians must decide on.

Most of the attention will be on the races for California governor and mayor of Los Angeles.

Residents of the city of Los Angeles have several other items to consider, including:

Los Angeles County residents will be asked to vote on:

On the ballot are 14 statewide propositions including:

Voters will decide on six local congressional district seats and other statewide races including:

Six state congressional district seats are on the ballot including:

Is it too late to vote by mail?

No. You can return your vote-by-mail ballot by:

1. Dropping it off in the return envelope at a secure official drop box now through the close of polls on Nov. 3.
2. Dropping it off in person at a polling place, vote center or county elections office by 8 p.m. on Nov. 3.
3. Dropping it off at the post office. To ensure your ballot is postmarked by election day, mail it at least by Thursday — five days before Tuesday’s election. If mailing on election day, get a hand-stamped postmark from a postal employee at a United States post office.

What is the deadline to return a vote-by-mail ballot?

To be counted, vote-by-mail ballots must be postmarked on or before election day, Nov. 3, and received by your county elections office by Nov. 10.

How do I check if I’m registered to vote?

To find out if you’re registered to vote, visit the secretary of state’s website. You’ll need to enter a California driver’s license or identification number or the last four digits of your Social Security number.

How do I register to vote? Can I register on election day?

The deadline to register to vote was Oct. 19.

If you’ve failed to meet the deadline, you can register as a conditional voter through the same-day voter registration process.

Eligible citizens who need to register or re-register to vote within 14 days of an election can complete this process at county elections offices, polling places or vote centers and fill out their ballot the same day.

To find an early voting location, use the secretary of state search tool here. You can find your local polling places here.

Your submitted ballot will be processed and counted once the county elections office has completed the voter registration verification process.

Where is the closest drop box?

Secure ballot drop-off locations opened Oct. 5. You can visit the Los Angeles County Office of the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s website here to find a ballot box near you.

How do I track my ballot?

Once you cast your ballot, you can track it here.

More election news

Oct. 28, 2026 9:44 AM PT

MINNEAPOLIS — The parents of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti said the federal government is shielding the immigration enforcement officers involved in their son’s killing, and no one from the government has reached out with any substantive information for nine months.

Michael and Susan Pretti on Tuesday called for the Department of Justice to hold accountable those who shot their 37-year-old son during President Trump’s ramp up in deportations targeting Minnesota. Federal prosecutors disclosed in recent court filings they had stopped sharing evidence with Minnesota authorities who are investigating the January killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal officers.

“The federal government went on TV and lied about Alex,” said Susan Pretti, his mother. “They tried to slander his memory to cover up their crime. Not only was it wrong, it was shameful.”

Within moments of his Jan. 24 death, Trump administration officials sought to portray Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse at a veterans hospital, as an armed disruptor intent on doing harm to federal agents when he brought his own gun to a Minneapolis street where officers clashed with protesters. Kristi Noem, the then-Homeland Security secretary, painted the Veterans Administration hospital nurse as a domestic terrorist who violently resisted federal agents. Court records show he had no criminal record.

Video shot by bystanders that day showed Pretti only had a mobile phone in his hand. No footage has since emerged showing him brandishing a weapon or attacking federal agents in the moments before he was killed.

The Prettis spoke Tuesday at a news conference organized by an attorney representing the family, calling their treatment by the Trump administration “cruelty.” They said they decided to speak out after being “stonewalled” by U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Atty. Dan Rosen.

“At every turn, they have ignored us, misled us, and shielded Alex’s killers,” said Michael Pretti, his father. “We are a family who love this country. We trust in the institutions of this country. We believe in the rule of law — and that people should be held accountable through that law.”

After months of reaching out to Rosen’s office, the federal prosecutor agreed to meet with them in July. But the family and their attorney, Steve Schleicher, said that meeting raised more questions than answers, with Rosen refusing to provide even basic information about the status of the federal investigation into Pretti’s death.

A spokesman for Rosen’s office had no comment when reached by the Associated Press on Tuesday. The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Pretti family’s remarks.

Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March for access to materials they said they needed to independently investigate the shootings of Pretti and Good. The Trump administration has suggested that state prosecutors don’t have jurisdiction to investigate federal officers, while Minnesota officials have said they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself.

The state is still seeking the cellphones of the officers involved in both shootings and recordings of key interviews.

Pretti’s parents recounted how they first learned of his death when they were called by a reporter for the Associated Press.

“We learned about his death from the media as we saw him being shot repeatedly in the back after helping a woman from his community, a fellow Minnesotan, who had been shoved to the ground viciously,” Michael Pretti said. “No one from the federal government called us on that horrible day, but they did go on TV to tell lies about Alex. No one from the federal government has called us since.”

He said the videos of his son’s killing haunt his family every day.

“I think it haunts many Americans to see a U.S. citizen who was peaceful and in his community shot multiple times on the back, in the back, while on the ground,” the father said, calling his family heartbroken.

“We wish we didn’t have to be here,” he said. “We wish Alex was alive. We wish we were simply in Minneapolis to visit with Alex. For he and I to chat about cars, hiking, biking or anything that came to our mind. This administration has taken that away from us forever.”

Biesecker and Vancleave write for the Associated Press. Biesecker reported from Pittsburgh.

ATLANTA — Keisha Lance Bottoms talks a lot about the policies she would pursue as Georgia governor. The Democratic nominee is less likely to talk about the history she would make by winning the job.

Never has a Black woman been elected governor in any state. The former Atlanta mayor and onetime White House adviser to Democratic President Biden is trying to do it in a Deep South state where her lineage extends back to antebellum enslavement.

“I am at least a fifth-generation Georgian,” Bottoms, 56, says as she campaigns. “I say ‘at least’ because we can only trace our family back five generations to a plantation in Crawfordville.”

Bottoms rarely if ever mentions slavery, Jim Crow segregation or even race explicitly. But that story — hers, Georgia’s and the nation’s — shadows her battle with Republican nominee Rick Jackson.

The billionaire, a 72-year-old white man who grew up in Atlanta but now lives on a sprawling suburban estate, has hammered the former mayor as a failure, painting her four-year tenure as a crime-ridden decline. Other Republicans, up to Donald Trump, have joined in, with the president accusing Bottoms of ruining a once-great city.

“It’s a long-standing playbook to paint Atlanta as this big bad place,” Bottoms said, dismissing the Republican frame as ridiculous for a town that once hosted the Olympics and recently staged eight World Cup soccer matches.

One of her most recent ads pushes back by featuring clips of the news conference she held with the city’s law enforcement leaders during the peak of 2020 street protests of police violence in Atlanta and nationwide against Black men. “If you care about this city, then go home,” she said. “We are better than this.”

Bottoms would have her chance to answer Trump and Republicans at a rally Wednesday headlined by Barack Obama, the first Black U.S. president.

Some Black women see the attacks as loaded

Republican coalitions in most states, and certainly in Georgia, are overwhelmingly white and anchored in suburbs, smaller cities and small towns. Those are places where many voters look skeptically, even scornfully, upon big cities and the people who run them. But some of the rhetoric directed against Bottoms is steeped in the specter of race and gender in a state where all 83 governors since 1776 have been white men.

Jackson’s TV ads, a deluge funded by more than $200 million of his own money, feature footage of the demonstrations and violence in Atlanta in 2020, along with grainy images of Bottoms. The protests followed the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man, by a white Atlanta police officer.

The Republican campaign effort has not gone unnoticed among some Bottoms supporters, especially other Black women.

“It’s easy for people to attack Atlanta and Mayor Bottoms based on their own biases,” said retired educator Beverly Rice, a Bottoms supporter.

Bottoms’ bid marks the third consecutive time that Georgia Democrats have nominated a Black woman for governor. Stacey Abrams lost in 2018 and 2022 to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who is leaving office in 2027 after eight years due to term limits. Abrams came as close to winning a governor’s race as any Black woman before her.

In an interview, Abrams was reluctant to assign race and gender as the deciding factor in her defeats. But she said Black women running for governor face a higher bar because there is no example yet for voters who place a special emphasis on executive experience. Abrams, also an Atlantan, had served previously as state House minority leader, a role Republicans minimized as insufficient experience.

Abrams said that executive standard “does not apply equally across candidates” in politics. She said Bottoms “has a sound argument” because she has held the executive’s role. Before that, Bottoms was a City Council member, magistrate judge and prosecutor. That resume, Abrams and others said, is why Republicans have so aggressively criticized Bottoms’ experience.

“Bad mayors don’t make good governors,” Jackson has said over and over in the closing stretch of the campaign.

He has taken special notice of her decision not to run for a second term as mayor, instead joining Biden’s White House as a senior adviser – a move Bottoms said she deliberately put off to finish her four-year term. In Jackson’s telling, Bottoms “turned her back on Atlanta.”

Republicans say Atlanta ‘burned’ in Bottoms’ tenure

Other conservatives have gone further than Jackson.

“Keisha Lance Bottoms let Atlanta burn,” top Jackson surrogate John King, a former Atlanta police officer and now state insurance commissioner, sometimes says at the candidate’s rallies.

That is a reference to protesters setting fire to a Wendy’s fast food restaurant close to where Brooks was killed. The reference carries an extra weight in a city whose symbol is a phoenix rising from the ashes — a symbol adopted because Union forces burned parts of a young Atlanta during the Civil War.

At a Trump rally last weekend in Macon, a smaller city in middle Georgia, the president hammered away, too. Bottoms “destroyed Atlanta with her crime and filth and constant riots,” Trump said, echoing the kind of sometimes profane attacks he has leveled against many places with large or majority Black populations.

“I always viewed Atlanta as a great city,” he insisted. “It’s not considered that anymore.”

In a 2017 dispute with then-U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Trump called the civil rights icon’s district, which includes Delta Airlines’ and Coca-Cola’s world headquarters and the Georgia Institute of Technology, “crime-infested” and said it was “falling apart.”

Bottoms counters with a more complicated reality

Atlanta did see a crime spike during Bottoms’ tenure, but it was not an outlier alongside the COVID-19 pandemic surge across the country, according to federal statistics. After the pandemic waned, U.S. and Atlanta crime rates dropped significantly. Bottoms did sign an executive order blocking the Atlanta jail from holding federal immigration detainees.

Republicans have exaggerated her action on bail. Bottoms signed a city ordinance that eliminated cash bail for certain nonviolent crimes, intending to reduce the jail’s population and what she and other city officials deemed excessive punishment for low-grade offenses.

Her latest advertising retort follows a surge of fundraising that she did not have throughout Jackson’s summer advertising onslaught. “When a national crisis poured into Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms stood up,” a voice-over says.

Besides her exhortation for people to leave the streets, the mother of four said, “Above everything else, I am a mother, so you are not going to out-concern me and out-care about where we are.”

Her aides see the ad — and the reality of how she handled the matter in real time — as depicting a political figure who is tough and empathetic, aware of public safety concerns and the realities for Black Americans.

But Bottoms’ advisers, and the candidate herself, also say they want Georgians to make their decisions on tangible policy distinctions, most notably her emphasis on addressing economic struggles and expanding Medicaid insurance eligibility — a move that would reach urban and rural populations across racial lines.

That is the point of the governor’s office, said Rice, the retired educator.

“I have 100% faith that she can win if people just judge her with their values,” she said. “I don’t look at her and see a ‘Black governor.’ I see a governor for all the people.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

MINNEAPOLIS — A man who played a major role in defrauding a federal food program in Minnesota was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison, the latest punishment in a sprawling scheme to collect millions of dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic by claiming to have fed needy children.

The depth of fraud in Minnesota — dozens of people have been convicted — has repeatedly drawn the attention of President Trump, who ridiculed the Democratic governor for failing to stop it and partly cited it as grounds for an extraordinary immigration crackdown in the state’s largest cities.

Salim Said operated Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which specialized in dishes from Somalia. He was accused of vastly overstating the number of meals when seeking payment for providing food. The government said he was responsible for $44 million in fraud, some of which was committed by others he recruited.

Said was claiming a “ridiculous daily distribution of 6,000 meals” while FBI cameras showed 40 people a day collecting food, prosecutors said in a court filing.

“The defendant and his sites did not serve thousands of children; he served a calculated, lucrative lie,” prosecutors said in court documents.

Said, a native of Somalia, denied the allegations while testifying at trial in 2025. He described his restaurant as a go-to spot for Somali immigrants in “Little Mogadishu” and said many meals were delivered.

“If you’re making good food,” Said told the jury, “people will come to you.”

Said’s attorney didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on the decades-long sentence ordered by U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel. A sentencing memo filed ahead of the hearing by his lawyer, Samuel Savage, was unavailable to the public.

COVID-19 brought changes to a federal program that typically fed children through schools. Restaurants could participate, and food distribution was extended to places outside schools.

“For 21 consecutive months, Said made thousands of fraudulent reimbursement claims, day after day, month after month,” prosecutors said. “Each submission represented meals purportedly provided to underprivileged children, yet the listed children themselves were entirely fictitious.”

The government said Said hit the jackpot: He bought a $1.2-million home, commercial real estate and an $87,000 pickup truck.

Said was convicted of a raft of charges in 2025, along with Aimee Bock, the leader of a Minnesota nonprofit, Feeding Our Future. She is serving a 42-year prison sentence for devising the overall plan to recruit Said and others to join the federal food program during the pandemic.

State auditors found that the Minnesota Department of Education received numerous complaints about Feeding Our Future, but often told the group to police itself. In January, Gov. Tim Walz said he would not run for reelection after being pounded by Trump about theft in programs that rely on federal cash.

Oct. 28, 2026 11:15 AM PT

JUNEAU, Alaska — The Democratic campaign for Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat was involved in efforts to place on the ballot a candidate with the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan in a bid to confuse voters in a race that could determine which party controls the chamber, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The newspaper obtained text messages between members of Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign discussing recruiting other people with the same name as the two-term Republican their candidate was running against. They eventually landed on a retired schoolteacher in the small fishing community of Petersburg named Dan J. Sullivan. He made it through the state’s August open primary and is one of four candidates on the ranked vote ballot for Tuesday’s general election.

Dan J. Sullivan has long denied he was running at Democrats’ behest and said he had no contact with Peltola’s campaign: “Zero, none, zilch,” he said in June after announcing his run.

He did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment from the Associated Press.

A top state elections official ruled Dan J. Sullivan ineligible for the ballot after he declared his candidacy, claiming it was “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

The case went to the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled he was qualified to run. The U.S. Constitution sets out only age, citizenship and residency requirements to run for the Senate.

“Alaskans deserve the truth,” said Nate Adams, a spokesperson for Sen. Sullivan’s campaign. “Mary Peltola, her campaign and her senior advisers colluded with the DSCC, national Democrat lawyers and Alaska Democrat operatives to recruit candidates to deliberately confuse and deceive voters.”

The campaign for Peltola, a former congresswoman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Democrats, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, repeatedly have denied they were involved in any campaign trick.

“The DSCC is not involved with Dan J. Sullivan,” the organization said in a statement Wednesday. The Times report said DSCC staffers were on texts with the Peltola campaign discussing the second Sullivan.

Legal experts said the report about Democrats appearing to recruit Dan J. Sullivan as a way to potentially confuse voters will have no impact on a lawsuit filed recently by the U.S. Department of Justice. President Trump directed the department to file a lawsuit seeking to halt certification of a possible Peltola win, citing the presence of the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot.

“It’s a dirty campaign trick, and it’s good reason the Alaska Supreme Court should have permitted the candidate to have been removed from the ballot,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor. “But now it’s in the hands of the voters, not litigation.”

It’s not the first time a candidate’s appearance on the Alaska ballot has been questioned. In 2024, the state Democratic Party sued to keep off the U.S. House ballot a man with no apparent ties to the state who is serving time in a federal prison in New York. A divided state Supreme Court allowed him to remain on the ballot. The man is running again, also in the House race, and is on the Nov. 3 ranked vote general election ballot.

The Times story about the recruitment of Dan J. Sullivan is based partly on interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, who was fired in August amid a campaign shake-up. The newspaper said she tried to retract her comments last week.

As of Monday, 46,204 ballots had been cast in Alaska, according to AP data. Sen. Sullivan is marked on the ballot as the Republican incumbent. The other Sullivan is listed as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation.

Bohrher and Riccardi write for the Associated Press. Riccardi reported from Denver.

Groups that provide legal services to immigrants filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to stop the Trump administration’s new policy of hiding the locations of tens of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.

The policy, adopted suddenly last month to expedite deportations, interferes with immigration lawyers’ rights by making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to locate their clients, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston. It asks a judge to issue an order blocking the “unlawful and inhumane” change.

“No one should be denied a meaningful opportunity to defend their rights because the government has made it impossible for their lawyer to find them,” said Jacquelynne Bowman, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services, one of the four groups listed as plaintiffs. “This arbitrary new administrative change leaves hundreds of thousands of people at risk of potentially life-altering consequences without essential legal help.”

The lawsuit challenges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision, first reported by the Associated Press, to remove the locations of people facing final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System and to instruct staff not to reveal their whereabouts. As of last month, the move affected more than 16,000 of the nearly 69,000 detainees who were in ICE custody.

ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The agencies have not publicly confirmed the change, but have said they are prioritizing people with final removal orders for deportation. They have also said they are facing a “historic number of injunctions” from courts blocking their efforts. The agencies have denied that they are disappearing detainees, saying they remain free to make phone calls.

Since 2010, lawyers and family members have used the online system to track detainees as they get moved from facility to facility through ICE’s sprawling detention network.

Approximately 1.4 million people living in the U.S. are subject to final orders of removal, which means an immigration judge has ruled they should be deported and the decision has been upheld on appeal or not appealed.

Those individuals still have several options to challenge the conditions of their detention and looming deportations, including asking to reopen proceedings, seeking relief from removal to third countries and challenging violations of their rights. Federal judges have ruled thousands of times that detainees should be released or granted bond hearings.

Since the change went into effect, lawyers have been unable to find clients and potential clients and have spent “significantly more time” tracking down others, the lawsuit says. Calls to ICE, including to its Detention and Removal Information Line, “lead to long wait times on hold, sudden hang-ups, a general lack of information or no answer at all,” it says.

As a workaround, some lawyers have tried to find their clients through an ICE program that schedules legal calls, but only a small percentage of detention centers use it, the lawsuit says. The result has been delayed or missed legal filings and fewer cases taken, according to the organizations.

The lawsuit argues the change violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it was adopted without explanation and the First Amendment, which protects lawyers’ ability to advise people of their legal rights and seek prospective clients.

Foley writes for the Associated Press.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.

“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”

Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.

The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.

Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.

The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.

Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, in order to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.

Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano through her leave from full-time work with the union in the late 1980s.

It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall, to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down the picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant, as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.

Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. Their obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders and organizing stagnation, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.

Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.

In 1999, the 69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life she still toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunt red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.

In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers. “They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the 95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.

Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.

Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.

To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”

A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was the devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, Cesar’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)

Her relationship with Cesar Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowleged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.

The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San Jose — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.

It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home one day and said, “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.

Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.

But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.

“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”

During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.

Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.

In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

An Echo Park mural features Dolores Huerta alongside artist Frida Kahlo.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Medina left the Chávez-Huerta led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.

Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.

But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.

Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.

The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.

In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.

“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.

At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.

Dolores Huerta at rosary, standing next to the body of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) at rest in the pine coffin in Delano, Calif., on Wednesday, April 28, 1993.

(Jose Galvez/Los Angeles Times)

As Chávez’ son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.

At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”

The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.

Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed — a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.

Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.

But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.

Those setbacks would not be forgotten.

Dolores Huerta in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

(Associated Press)

After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Soon she met Ross and Chávez and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.

Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.

In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.

Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured the images of a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez‘s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.

Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 13 children, counting the two fathered by César Chávez.

Among her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.

Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.

“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, a Central Valley activist.“She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

He and several other of the Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.

In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”

At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”

Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. Take me too, she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.

More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden, during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.

In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.

President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012; the one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.

“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”

Olvera, the family spokesman, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

Oct. 28, 2026 8:08 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday failed to secure a grand jury indictment against a former White House staffer who provided dramatic but disputed testimony against President Trump before a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A grand jury in Washington rejected prosecutors’ request to return an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson, said the people, who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case. It’s the latest setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to persuade grand jurors in the nation’s capital to bring politically sensitive cases.

Details of prosecutors’ allegations against Hutchinson were not immediately clear, but Republican lawmakers had accused her of lying under oath in her explosive testimony in 2022 about Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the congressional certification of his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

The effort to indict Hutchinson was hardly isolated. It is part of a surge in politically sensitive actions by the Justice Department in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections targeting perceived adversaries of the president, including a new attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and a search by federal agents of the home of outspoken Trump critic and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

It’s highly unusual for grand juries to decline to return indictments, but the Justice Department under Trump has been rebuked by citizens in the nation’s capital in a number of high-profile cases. A grand jury in Washington earlier this year declined to indict Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video they recorded urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful.

Hutchinson declined to comment through her lawyer on Tuesday.

Hutchinson said Trump was angry and defiant on Jan. 6

Hutchinson’s testimony, at a surprise hearing announced just 24 hours earlier, was seen at the time as particularly compelling given her proximity to power as special assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.

She described an angry, defiant president who was trying to let armed protesters avoid security screenings at a rally that morning to protest his 2020 election defeat and who later grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to let him go to the Capitol. And when the events at the Capitol spiraled toward violence, with the crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” she testified that Trump declined to intervene.

Trump at the time denied on his social media platform, Truth Social, much of what Hutchinson said. He called her a “total phony” and “bad news.”

Hutchinson’s description of the altercation inside the presidential SUV was regarded as particularly explosive, even as she acknowledged during her testimony that she was relaying what she had heard from a White House security official and did not have firsthand knowledge of the episode because she was not there.

Her account was quickly disputed.

In March 2024, House Republicans released a previously undisclosed transcript of the Select Committee’s interview with a Secret Service officer who drove the presidential SUV. That transcript of the presidential limo driver contradicted some of Hutchinson’s testimony but corroborated other aspects of her account, including Trump’s attempt to join the mob scene at the Capitol.

The driver described the president as insistent on going to the Capitol but said he did not see the altercation that Hutchinson described. The driver said Trump “never grabbed the steering wheel” and also said: “I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”

Hutchinson has alleged that members of Trump’s inner circle dangled job opportunities and financial assistance while she was cooperating with the committee. She also testified in a closed-door interview released by the committee that a former lawyer of hers — a former ethics counsel in the Trump White House — told her “the less you remember, the better.”

“It feels ridiculous, because in my heart I knew where my loyalties lied, and my loyalties lied with the truth,” she told the committee. “And I never wanted to diverge from that.” The former attorney has disputed that account.

The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2021 on allegations that he incited the mob that attacked the Capitol, but he was later acquitted by the Senate. The Justice Department under Biden charged Trump with felony offenses, accusing him of illegally working to overturn his 2020 election loss in the run-up to the Capitol attack, but then-special counsel Jack Smith abandoned the case after Trump’s 2024 presidential victory. Longstanding Justice Department policy says sitting presidents cannot face criminal prosecution.

Hutchinson, a native of Pennington, New Jersey, previously worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs and interned for Republicans, including Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press.