POLITICS

NEW YORK — Democrats and outside watchdogs are planning a massive presence at the polls on Election Day driven by concerns that President Trump will further leverage the vast resources of the federal government to interfere with a midterm that could hobble his final two years in office.

They won’t be the only ones there. A sprawling election protection effort on the left that is expected to deploy tens of thousands of monitors will be met by the largest-ever monitoring program by the Justice Department and still more observers from Republican-aligned groups. The result could be unlike anything seen at the polls in modern times.

The effort among Democratic and nonprofit groups includes training volunteers to stand watch outside polling places and report activities they consider concerning. The network includes traditional government watchdogs such as Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union plus a flood of volunteers assembled by state Democratic parties, congressional leaders, national activist groups and organizations focused on protecting democracy.

The Democratic National Committee created a first-of-its-kind cybersecurity unit staffed by former CIA and FBI officials to monitor and report online misinformation, including artificial intelligence deepfakes, said Jane Kleeb, vice chair of the DNC.

That’s as Democratic mayors, attorneys general and secretaries of state host tabletop exercises simulating worst-case scenarios, such as a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at voting locations or the seizure of ballots and voting equipment.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders have assembled a legal team that rivals that of any presidential campaign.

“We’ve never done this before,” Kleeb said of the party’s sweeping efforts. But “we’ve never had to deal with the president of the United States saying that he may seize ballots, put ICE agents outside polling locations and other kinds of very clear direct threats to the voting process.”

The Department of Justice has already filed lawsuits in California and Alaska that could affect ballot counting or certification.

While Trump continues to make baseless allegations of cheating in the election, administration and military officials have said they have no plans to deploy immigration agents or troops to polling sites.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis blamed “radical Democrats” for creating fears about election security by refusing to enact voter ID requirements and other Republican-backed measures.

“President Trump has done more than any other president to ensure we have free and fair elections,” Bis said.

Tens of thousands of volunteers trained to observe

State Democratic parties have trained an estimated 10,000 volunteers to observe polling places and report anything potentially concerning they might see from federal agents. Common Cause has trained roughly 16,000 more volunteers to stand watch at voting precincts, said Suzanne Almeida, vice president of states for the group.

She said a broader Election Protection coalition involving 300 other groups has trained tens of thousands more.

Smaller pockets of volunteers from other groups also are preparing to show up, including roughly 100 organized by Senate Democrats and hundreds more from a Democratic-allied group called Save America, which is training clergy members, veterans, teachers and other local community members. National groups such as Indivisible and MoveOn are activating their own expansive networks.

There are so many organizations working to protect the voting process — including many that cannot legally coordinate with each other — that some officials involved worry about unintentionally creating chaos outside polling locations.

Almeida said Election Day confusion is possible in some precincts but the nature of the threat requires a collective effort.

“It will actually take all of us if some of the threats we are most worried about come to pass,” she said.

Trump administration sends its own team

Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, was asked on CBS’ “60 Minutes” whether the Republican administration is planning to send ICE agents to polling places.

“There is no plan to do that,” she responded.

Still, the Justice Department is planning its largest-ever election monitoring effort, with about 1,000 department staff expected to observe voting and ensure federal laws are being followed, spokesperson Kiersten Pels said. That comes after a primary season in which the department said it deployed more than 100 election monitors across hundreds of polling locations.

At least one of those placements sparked tensions with local officials. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, said the behavior of two monitors during that state’s primary was “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.” A Laramie County clerk said the Justice Department monitors arrived at the polls intending to interview voters, but her office didn’t allow it.

The department disagrees that the monitors did anything improper, Pels said. She added that the monitors are trained to comply with federal law governing conduct at polling places and won’t “interfere with the voting process.”

Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates have raised concerns that the Trump administration’s monitors could intimidate voters or abandon the duty they’ve had for decades to protect against civil rights violations.

The department plans to send them to every state, focusing on high-population areas, jurisdictions that have had problems in the past and districts with close elections, according to a senior department official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.

The Republican National Committee said its operation involves deploying “election integrity deputy state directors” in 22 states, among them Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina.

Those workers are the “eyes and the ears of the RNC in the field” who recruit volunteers and organize trainings, said Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director. Their mission is to surface anything that seems unlawful.

At the same time, the RNC has enlisted nearly 22,000 poll workers and is recruiting poll-watching volunteers for competitive districts. The poll watchers will “observe the process and help ensure election rules are followed in accordance with the law,” Triolo said.

Local election officials prepare for increased attention

While federal monitors have quietly observed elections for decades, largely without incident, some election officials are taking precautions.

Chris Swope, the city clerk in Lansing, Michigan, said he preemptively contacted law enforcement and his attorney in case federal monitors violate election law, although he expects them to abide by the rules.

The Democratic Mayors Association issued guidance to local Democratic officials with detailed instructions about what to do if federal agents appear at polling locations.

It notes that federal law prohibits the presence of federal immigration agents, the FBI or other investigative personnel. It also issued a reminder that federal agents are not allowed to be armed at the polls, nor are they allowed to interact with voters or handle ballots or election equipment.

Justice Department officials have said their monitors won’t be armed and will not interfere with voting. Asked about department monitors being sent to Georgia, Trump told a reporter recently: “They’re not going to do anything other than watch.”

Some of the poll observations have already begun. Mary Corcoran, Save America’s executive director, said her group’s volunteers have been monitoring precincts during early voting in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio to help give voters a sense of security.

“The fear is the point, and we must do something about it,” she said. “Left unanswered, fear does the work of keeping people home without a single agent setting foot at a polling place.”

Peoples and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP writers Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Mich., Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Jessica Hill in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — You haven’t voted yet because the state propositions are too bewildering? I’m with you. There are too many for normal human consumption. But I’ve figured them all out at last.

I’ve concocted my own personal voter information guide that I’ll share here. Heads up: I’m negative on most measures, including some expected to pass.

Anyway, here’s my thinking:

Proposition 1: Affordable housing bond

The state would borrow $11.25 billion for affordable housing programs, mainly to provide below-market rentals for poor people. Students and farmworkers also would benefit minimally. So would military veterans through the CalVet program. The proposal is packed with goodies aimed at drawing broad political support. Which it has.

But it’s an expensive item — costing the state at least $500 million annually for 25 years. Taxpayers already are paying about $6 billion annually to retire $80 billion in bond debt.

This measure is too costly given our fragile, chaotic state budget. There should have been more prioritizing. I’m a “no” vote.

Proposition 2: Doubles the state’s ‘rainy day’ fund

It requires the Legislature to pour money into the state savings account until it reaches 20% of general fund tax revenue, rather than the current 10%. The fund can be tapped when the economy sours and revenue falls.

Sure, save away if you can. Yes.

Proposition 3: Makes high tax rates permanent

This would cement the nation’s highest state income tax rates into the California Constitution — up to 12.3%, affecting the top 2% of earners with incomes above $371,000 for single filers and $743,000 for married couples. (Million-dollar earners pay an added 1%.) The money helps fund schools, healthcare and other state programs.

The high rates were sold to voters as temporary in 2012. Later, voters extended them until 2031.

My hesitancy: Tax rates should not be embedded in the constitution where they can only be altered by voters. The governor and legislators should do their jobs and update our volatile state tax system. Moreover, “temporary” shouldn’t be translated into “permanent.” And there’s no rush. The rates don’t expire for five years. No.

Proposition 4: Repeals ban on public financing of election campaigns

This would allow the state and local governments to create partial public financing systems for political candidates. “Charter” cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco already can.

Look, either wealthy donors and special interests buy the politicians or the public does. Anyway, if a few major cities are permitted to enact public financing, all cities should be. Yes.

Proposition 5: Changes recall elections

Currently, voters decide two questions in a state recall election: 1. Should the official be recalled? 2. Who should be the replacement? Under this proposal, only the first question would be asked. Any replacement would be determined by the normal non-recall process. Depending on the office, that usually ends up in a special election.

This makes lots of sense. Too many shabby games have been played with the present bifurcated system. Yes

Proposition 37: Down payment loans for home buyers

Middle-income buyers could take out a second mortgage to cover most of their 20% down payment on a newly constructed home. They’d need to dig up only 3% in cash. The program would be financed by a $25-billion state revenue bond, repaid by home buyers. Lending institutions would qualify the borrowers and take the risk, costing the state zilch.

This makes sense. Easy yes.

Proposition 38: Medical research bond

The state would borrow $8.4 billion to fund research into cures for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other ailments. The state cost: at least $500 million annually for 20 years.

My hang-up is that the measure was crafted to assure that half the money goes to one institute, whose billionaire founder is the proposition’s chief backer. State money should be available to all potential bidders. No.

Proposition 39: Voter ID

This would force everyone to show a government ID before being allowed to vote. Those casting mail ballots would need to write a four-digit PIN on the back of the return envelope.

There’s simply no evidence of widespread voter cheating anywhere. This measure is unneeded and would just hassle voters and slow the vote count. Flat no.

Proposition 40: The billionaire tax

It would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ worth, probably raising tens of billions of dollars. Ninety percent would go to healthcare to replace federal funding cutbacks.

This is nutty. There’s no such thing as a temporary tax. Proposition 3 is an example. We shouldn’t have a one-time tax anyway. It’s like a sugar high that quickly wears off. Then what? Who’s next to have their wealth taxed? Want a wealth tax? Make it national to keep billionaires from fleeing California with their riches for more friendly states. No way.

Proposition 41 and Proposition 42: Twin poison pills

Ignore their superficial intents, the sole purpose of both measures is to invalidate the billionaires tax.

I don’t like Proposition 40, but I also detest deceptive games-playing with ballot initiatives. They should be discouraged. No.

Proposition 43: Raises vote requirement for local tax hikes

Currently, special tax increases placed on a local ballot by citizen signature-collecting require only a simple majority vote. This measure would increase the threshold to two-thirds, the same as if proposed by a city council or county supervisors board.

It’s ridiculously confusing. But I don’t like two-thirds requirements for taxes because a minority of voters can overrule the majority. That’s undemocratic. No.

The low-profile measure would require local nonprofit clinics caring for poor people to spend 90% of their funds on health services.

This smacks of a failed negotiating tactic by the union sponsor of the billionaires tax. Many clinics say they’d need to close shop. No.

Proposition 45: Regulatory streamlining for building projects

This would substantially overhaul the environmental protection act that has kept California less polluted from development projects. The act also has been sorely abused and used as a tool to stop projects, particularly housing. This measure would make it easier to build, not just housing but many things, such as water facilities, clean energy, giant warehouses and freeway expansions.

It goes too far, enabling sprawl and leaving citizens with fewer weapons to fight projects. The Legislature has been trimming home building regulations and should continue. No on 45.

Happy voting. I’m glad I didn’t vote early so there’d be time to bone up on this hodgepodge.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: “A butter knife against a nuclear arsenal”: Tech billionaires vastly outspend wealth-tax supporters
Against the wind: Hope and despair simmer among California Republicans ahead of election day
CA vs. Trump: ‘This is not normal’: Feds demand California counties set aside ‘likely’ noncitizen ballots

Until next week,
George Skelton

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It was around noon on October 25th when news broke that María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela after almost a year in exile and following her several failed attempts to come back in recent weeks. Then, reports on social media indicated that she was actually in Barquisimeto. Then I confirmed she was in Santa Rosa, a village near Barquisimeto where the Santa Rosa Sanctuary is located.

In recent years, Machado has used such religious elements in her discourse and political persona, which makes the choice of the Santa Rosa Sanctuary as the setting for the formal announcement of her return to be somewhat unsurprising. This is the temple where every January 14 starts the biggest event in Venezuela’s catholic calendar: the procession of Divina Pastora, whose image is precisely in Santa Rosa. 

Shortly after knowing this, I went to Santa Rosa in order to see the public reception. Near the entrance of the town, an unusual number of cars and motorcycles were parked, and people were walking to join the impromptu demonstration. There was already a large crowd gathered at the square in front of Santa Rosa church. Many took pictures with their phones, and some started to sing the national anthem. When it seemed like MCM was about to leave, people shouted to see her without much success. 

The small caravan of vehicles carrying her and her companions slowly made its exit through the crowd trying to get at least a glimpse of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Some carried Venezuelan flags and signs of Vente, her political party. Bystanders moved along, struggling to catch up, while the cars slowly made their way to the town’s entrance. 

There was a very small presence of chavista-governed Lara state police officers, far from the crowd, but the entire atmosphere was peaceful. As the vehicles left, people started to disperse. At that moment, a brief rain came over us. Someone said that we were getting a shower of blessings.

It’s too early to tell what will be the role María Corina will have in the ongoing political situation the country finds itself in right now, but for her supporters that showed up, this was a clear sign that good things are about to come. 

The landmark Casa Vega Mexican restaurant in Sherman Oaks was honored in May with a sign proclaiming its corner of Ventura Boulevard as “Casa Vega Square.”

Mayor Karen Bass was there, and so was City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, whose district is on the other side of the San Fernando Valley. The event was perhaps more notable for who wasn’t there: Nithya Raman, the mayoral candidate whose City Council district includes Casa Vega.

To Raman’s critics, the episode represents what they say is one of her biggest flaws as an elected official: not tending to the parochial needs of her district. Bass has sounded that theme repeatedly during the mayoral election campaign, including calling Raman “contemptuous of her constituents” during their televised debate on NBC4 and Telemundo 52 Oct. 13.

Raman called that “a lie.” Some of Raman’s constituents beg to differ, saying her office has seemed unwilling to help with a broad array of city services, including fixing broken sidewalks and removing homeless encampments.

“She’s just been MIA,” said Jessica Lewis, who owns Dragonfly Cycle and Train, a fitness studio in Sherman Oaks. “I would send photos of what I was experiencing, like human feces at my front door, encampments at the back door … all those emails just fell on deaf ears.”

Raman spokesperson Stella Stahl disputed that contention, saying the council office has “a proactive constituent service team.”

“Our approach is to listen to those who live and work in a neighborhood, then use every tool the city has to fix what they’ve told us is broken,” Stahl said.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, left, and challenger Nithya Raman during their debate before the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Raman co-presented the motion to designate Vega Square, along with Councilmember Rodriguez, according to documents filed in March. Raman was unable to attend the ceremony because of scheduling conflicts, Stahl said, but other Raman staffers were present.

Councilmember Rodriguez said her staff spearheaded the designation, part of her broader work to “enshrining the many positive contributions that Latino families have made throughout our city.”

To be sure, Raman has constituents who are big fans. Marissa Rodriguez said she wasn’t aware of the web of licenses and city permits she would have to obtain before she could open her wine shop in Studio City, Dia Natural Wine. The process felt monumental, she said, and nearly impossible to complete on her own.

She reached out to Raman’s team, and said the council office’s help was integral to Dia Natural Wine making its debut in 2022.

“I thought I could do this myself, and at a certain point, I hit a ton of roadblocks at the city,” Marissa Rodriguez said. “They were extremely helpful in just sort of helping me navigate who I needed to talk to.”

Tyler Simmons, who owns a coffee wine bar, Reunion & Co., on Hyperion Avenue in the Franklin Hills neighborhood of Los Feliz, said Raman and her team have always been receptive to his community’s needs.

In response to complaints of speeding, he said, Raman’s office helped get four speed tables — a flatter, wider version of speed bumps — installed in the intersection near his business last year.

“She’s done her best,” Simmons said. “I think there’s larger systemic issues at play within the city … it’s bigger than a councilperson, unfortunately. I’m hoping, if she wins, she’ll help change all that.”

Sidewalks in disrepair along the 1300 block of Ventura Blvd on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, in Sherman Oaks, California. Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega, claims that Nithya Raman, Councilmember, Fourth District, has been unhelpful and ignored her requests to get certain city services, including street sidewalk repairs and addressing homelessness in her parking lot. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)

A street in disrepair along the 1300 block of Ventura Blvd on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, in Sherman Oaks, California. Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega, claims that Nithya Raman, Councilmember, Fourth District, has been unhelpful and ignored her requests to get certain city services, including street sidewalk repairs and addressing homelessness in her parking lot. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)

On the other hand, Casa Vega owner Christy Vega rattles off a long list of complaints when discussing Raman and her office. She said she’s spent years seeking help from Raman’s staff, including to make repairs on sidewalks and pavement outside the restaurant, and to remove a homeless encampment that sprang up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With Raman’s office, they viewed me as a nuisance rather than someone who’s trying to keep her employees safe,” Vega said.

Vega is supporting Bass in the Nov. 3 election, and she sits on on the board of Thrive LA, an advocacy group backed by business and community leaders that is running ads against Raman in the mayoral race and also ran anti-Raman ads during her 2024 City Council reelection campaign.

Vega says she’s not supporting Raman because of her experience seeking help from Raman’s council office for problems her business encountered, including cars being broken into in the restaurant’s parking lot and muggings on the street out front. One employee was stabbed at a nearby bus stop, and another fell because of the potholes in the alley behind her restaurant, she said.

At one point, Vega said, she called Raman’s office to ask for help in fixing the curb near her restaurant that was damaged during a street racing incident.

Vega said she was told by Raman’s office that she would need to fix the curb herself, meaning she’d have to pull permits, hire a contractor and pay out of pocket for the repairs Vega said she pushed back, and a staff member suggested she move to another district.

Raman’s office didn’t comment on that assertion, but Stahl said that the Bureau of Street Services isn’t funded to repair damaged sidewalks, and the responsibility falls to the adjacent property owners.

“Every constituent who contacts our office deserves a response, and we take Ms. Vega’s concerns seriously. People often reach out to us on their hardest days,” Stahl said. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to accommodate it at that time. Telling constituents no to basic service requests is frustrating for residents and for us, and it’s part of why the council member ran for office.”

Councilmember Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, said she’s stepped in to help business owners in Raman’s district over the years. Most recently, she helped Vega with permitting issues on the restaurant’s outdoor patio.

A sign for L.A. Councilmember Nithya Raman’s district office on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

“I’ve heard some of the same frustrations and stories from many people. … It reflects a pattern,” said Rodriguez, who is backing Bass for mayor. “If this is your audition [for mayor] based on your performance in your own district, I think it’s an example of the responsiveness of what people can expect.”

Sophia Brodetsky, who owns the Valley Inn restaurant with her husband in Sherman Oaks, isn’t happy with either mayoral candidate, but said Bass’ office has been more receptive to her needs.

Brodetsky has endured robberies, property damage and homeless encampments that have disrupted her restaurant that dates back to 1947, she said.

“They’re running for office right now. They promise you an arm and a leg, but they don’t deliver,” Brodetsky said.

According to Vega and Lewis, owner of the Dragonfly gym, a number of Sherman Oaks business owners reached out to Bass after she was elected mayor in 2022 to voice their concerns about Raman’s stewardship of the district.

The mayor met with a group of business owners in the area in 2023 and she convened weekly safety meetings between business owners, district leaders and local law enforcement to address their concerns, Vega said.

Vega said it was Bass and Rodriguez who helped her navigate the permit process when she sought to open an outdoor patio for her restaurant last year.

“I wasn’t a supporter of hers. I wasn’t someone that she owed any favors to,” Vega said of Bass. “She answered the phone immediately, and she heard the panic of my voice and my tears, and she said, ‘I’m on it.’”

Lewis, however, said she and others felt betrayed by Bass when she endorsed Raman for reelection in 2024.

“That just felt like a huge slap in the face,” Lewis said.

Lewis said she plans to vote for Bass, but reluctantly. Keeping her business afloat has felt nearly impossible at times, she said, but getting help from both the council and the mayor’s office has been an even tougher hurdle.

“The council office would blame the mayor’s office. The mayor’s office would blame the county,” Lewis said. “It was like everyone was just pointing fingers at someone else, and no one was actually doing anything about it.”

My fellow Californians, let us begin with an intelligence test.

Our great state has been voting since early October. Folks have been mailing in their ballots, dropping them off at collection sites and even showing up at in-person centers.

So raise your hand if you know — or even just assume — elections officials have been doing something with those ballots as they arrive, other than just throwing them in a pile.

Congratulations, hand-raisers. You are now officially smarter than the entire U.S. Department of Justice. Or at least more honest.

On Sunday, the lawyers for the DOJ managed to get a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to convene a rare emergency hearing because, OMG, people are actually voting and California is processing ballots!

Who could have possibly known?

Even though it’s literally law that counties count ballots in a timely manner; even though it’s happened in every other election; even though the daily tallies of how many ballots are received are posted online by the secretary of State; even though there are live camera feeds of ballots being processed in Los Angeles — somehow the U.S. government didn’t know this normal election procedure was happening, it claimed.

It wasn’t until late Friday, when DOJ lawyers read a filing by California DOJ lawyers laying out that L.A. is, like, actually opening mail-in ballots, that the U.S. DOJ realized that ballots are being opened. About 600,000 so far in L.A.

That seemed “absurd on its face,” argued California Deputy Solicitor Gen. Samuel P. Siegel.

Armed with this previously unknowable information, Trump’s lawyers were begging the appeals court to take their flimsy, constitutionally questionable case away from the judge who had already promised to rule on their requests on Tuesday and immediately give them an injunction to further their election conspiracy claims.

Most folks are aware of the background of this drama, but here’s the quick recap.

President Trump for years has falsely but incessantly claimed that Democrats are colluding with undocumented people to help them sneak into the country in exchange for illegally voting in mass numbers for Democrats. This is not happening, but the president is obsessed with this conspiracy, so much so that he is weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack states, California in particular, in a bid to prove his delusions correct, and perhaps as a bonus, undermine democracy.

A few months ago, the DOJ came to the state of California and claimed it had a list of 190,000 people it believed were illegally registered to vote. That list has since dropped to 20,000. But with all the investigative power of the government hard at work on this, only 28 people in California have been indicted by the feds during this no-holds-barred effort, and it looks as though not all of those cases will hold up.

Undeterred, Trump lawyers tried to get a California judge to order the state (and Los Angeles) to set aside ballots that it claims to have doubts about. They asked the judge in that case for a temporary restraining order forcing L.A. County to do that, and the judge agreed to rule on that request early next week, in an already-expedited fashion.

But then the Trump lawyers learned about all that ballot processing and demanded the judge instead rule by Saturday afternoon — though the reasoning here seems iffy. When the federal judge assigned to the case didn’t rule by Saturday, an absurd ask that didn’t even allow enough time for lawyers to file briefs, the feds ran to the 9th Circuit, claiming that failing to rule on Saturday was a de facto denial of their request.

Basically, it seems the Trump lawyers were arguing two things. First, that once ballots are counted, they can’t be uncounted, and if there are illegal ballots, that hurts all voters. Sure, OK.

But again, there is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion, and the lists of potential vote scofflaws compiled by the government have been shown to be error-ridden. They may also involve the use of a mysterious non-government “third party” to gather the information that not even the Trump lawyers could identify Sunday.

DOJ lawyers also claimed they had just learned that once a ballot is taken out of the envelope, there was no way to reconnect that ballot to the voter who cast it — because our votes are anonymous. Therefore, the 20,000 ballots had to be grabbed before they were separated from the documents inside.

The lawyers did not explain why they needed to know how a person voted to confirm they illegally voted. The envelopes are retained by county elections officials, but apparently the Trump lawyers feel it’s critical to tie them to particular votes.

But here’s the thing — there are simply not enough illegal voters to sway a Los Angeles election, or a California one for that matter. We have a system to ferrets out problematic ballots right now, and a separate criminal system that can hold illegal voters accountable. Two weeks before an election isn’t a time to demand ballots be withheld — unless you’re trying to undermine trust.

The appellate judges did not seem impressed by the federal laywers’ arguments, questioning more than once if the 9th Circuit even had jurisdiction since states are in charge of elections, not the federal government. There was even some reading of the 10th Amendment. You know, the one the don’t-tread-on-me types love that reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States.”

We should expect a ruling sooner rather than later, but the real question remains, why the emergency? The DOJ is involved in another voting lawsuit in Washington, D.C., where the plaintiffs, led by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, have asked for a restraining order of their own stopping the government from creating national lists of who it thinks should vote, and using janky, secretive information gathering to do it.

It’s also true that the original case was reassigned from a Trump-appointed judge to one appointed by Bill Clinton. There has been speculation the switch may have been viewed unfavorably by the feds, though the Clinton-appointed judge, David O. Carter, was given the case because of his experience in the subject matter.

The D.C. restraining order could be decided in the next few days. I’m not saying the cases are related, or that the judge should or does matter, but the Trump DOJ’s argument in California is basically that its list of 20,000 is really solid, reliable information.

If the D.C. federal judge rules first that the government information gathering is potentially both an overreach and sloppy, it makes it that much harder for another judge, or the appellate court for that matter, to rule that the list is so critical that they must step in.

So maybe there is an emergency.

Just not the one the government is claiming.

WASHINGTON — At first glance, President Trump’s decision to relax U.S. sanctions on Russia despite its continuing invasion of Ukraine was a dramatic break from principles that guided American foreign policy for most of a century.

Since the end of World War II, U.S.-Russian relations have oscillated between hostility and friendship, but one element was consistent: When Russia tried to take over one if its neighbors, the United States pushed back.

This time, though, the United States appeared to favor the aggressor, not the victim.

“The Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of being an honest broker,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department official under then-President George W. Bush, wrote last week. “It has gone all in on Russia’s side.”

The break from long-standing tradition was real, but it should not have been entirely surprising.

Trump has long expressed admiration for Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin — part of a syndrome one of his former aides, Fiona Hill, has called “autocrat envy.”

“He wants to rule like them,” she said, referring to the president’s bromances with Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and other strongmen.

Meanwhile, Trump often expresses disdain for democratically elected leaders of smaller countries, and he reserves a special loathing for the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.

He has repeatedly said Zelensky was foolish to resist Russia’s 2022 invasion because, in his view, the larger country is almost certain to win the war.

“Russia is a massive country,” he said this month. “Even if it loses a million soldiers, it still has a million more. Ukraine doesn’t have that kind of manpower.”

Moreover, Trump has long believed U.S. companies could reap an economic bonanza from Russia’s resource-rich economy. As a real estate magnate, he spent 30 years seeking deals in Moscow; in 2008, his son Donald Jr. said Russians had provided the Trump Organization “a lot of our assets.”

In the short run, the president hopes to boost Republican prospects in next week’s midterm elections by buying diesel fuel from Russia — a move aimed at lowering prices at the cost of bolstering Putin’s war economy. (It hasn’t worked; the price of diesel has risen slightly since Trump’s decision.)

But he has a longer-term goals as well. He has long believed better relations between the United States and Russia would be good for both countries, no matter who’s in power in Moscow. And he has long yearned openly for a Nobel Peace Prize — and one way might be to arrange a durable ceasefire in Ukraine.

All those factors have led Trump to overturn two major elements of traditional U.S. foreign policy.

Instead of supporting Ukraine, the victim of a foreign military invasion, he’s been pressing the Zelensky to accept Putin’s demands for territory.

“President Trump still wants a personal relationship with Putin, and he wants to change the nature of the bilateral U.S.-Russian relationship. Ukraine is in the way. So what President Trump is trying to do is get Ukraine out of the way. … President Trump wants Zelensky to capitulate,” Hill said.

“Zelensky has to want to settle this war, and if he doesn’t, I think it’s going to be a very bad thing,” Trump said last week.

As he issued that advice, Ukraine’s army was experiencing interruptions with three forms of U.S. military help: Starlink, the communications system it uses to guide its anti-drone missiles; U.S.-provided early radar warnings of Russian missile attacks; and supplies of Patriot anti-missile weapons. U.S. officials claimed the three incidents were not deliberate — but to Ukrainians, they felt like a warning.

Meanwhile, instead of putting pressure on Putin through the traditional means of economic sanctions, Trump said he was trying to entice the Russian leader to negotiate by giving him preemptive rewards.

“I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” he explained on Truth Social. “Great progress is being made.”

But signs of that progress were hard to find. In St. Petersburg last week, Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, presented Putin with a ceasefire proposal that the Americans negotiated with Ukraine and European countries. A top Putin aide dismissed the document, saying it “contained little of real value.”

Instead, the Russian president offered to increase Russian fertilizer exports to U.S. farmers. And he said he hoped Trump would join him at a summit meeting in China with Xi.

Ukraine has not been invited to that meeting, which prompted Haass to resurrect an old diplomatic aphorism: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

Haass and other veterans of U.S. negotiations with Russia fear that Putin is merely stalling for time and pocketing Trump’s concessions while he tries to grind Ukraine down with missile attacks on Kyiv and other cities.

“If Trump and Witkoff were serious, they would give Putin 15 days to say yes to their ceasefire proposal — and if he doesn’t, they would impose new and tougher sanctions,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “There are still a lot of things they can do that would put Russia in a corner.”

But that has not been Trump’s inclination so far.

The irony, Hill said, is that even if Trump gets his way, that may not produce the victory he appears to expect.

“Putin and Trump are not the only actors in this,” she said. “Ukraine is not anybody’s to give. Its not Putin’s to have, and it’s not Zelensky’s. … This whole war is about Ukrainians wanting the right to determine their own future. It’s not Putin’s right or anyone else’s. It’s not Donald Trump’s to give away.”

In a rare Sunday hearing, a federal appeals court judge appointed by President Trump questioned how the Trump administration’s request to intervene in California’s ongoing midterm election in order to force state officials to set aside 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship it questions squares with the U.S. Constitution.

Judge Mark J. Bennett said that while the executive branch is “unhappy” with what California law requires for ensuring voters are citizens, the state has the right to determine the manner of its elections under the Elections Clause of the Constitution and Congress has not challenged that process, despite having the ability to do so.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law the California legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett said. “How can we do that?”

Matthew Donnelly, a Justice Department attorney, said the Trump administration has good reason to believe those ballots are from ineligible noncitizen voters, and has the legal right under seperate federal criminal law to challenge their tabulation until state officials can prove otherwise.

Donnelly said both federal criminal law and state election law bar noncitizen voters from casting ballots, but “the problem is that California isn’t interested in enforcing that provision.”

The exchange came during an hour-long hearing before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, over the Justice Department’s unprecedented emergency request that the court order California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan to immediately stop counting ballots from the 20,000 flagged voters until they can definitively prove those voters are U.S. citizens.

The appellate panel — on which Bennett was joined by circuit Judges Patrick J. Bumatay, another Trump appointee, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, an appointee of President Biden — did not issue a ruling, though a decision is expected soon given the emergency nature of the appeal.

How it will rule is unclear, though both Bennett and Sanchez hammered Donnelly with questions about how the Trump administration’s position squared with the law.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Sunday that the court seemed “very likely to reject” the Trump administration’s appeal, with Bennett and Sanchez having “expressed great skepticism on both jurisdiction and the merits.”

In addition to questioning its constitutionality, Bennett also questioned how the appellate court even had jurisdiction over the case, given that the Trump administration appealed the matter to the appellate court before the lower district court had a chance to assess the facts in the case or issue an order.

“How do we have jurisdiction when the district court has said it’s going to rule expeditiously?” Bennett said. “I don’t see how we have jurisdiction.”

Bennett also questioned why the appellate court should ignore the claims of state elections officials that having to comply with the Trump administration’s demands in the few remaining days before the Nov. 3 election would be catastrophically disruptive to the election, given that the lower court has had no chance to assess those claims.

“Isn’t that sufficient to give us pause as to whether we should do exactly what [a state expert] avers is going to cause a catastrophe?” Bennett asked.

Bennett’s questions evoked many of the arguments made by the state in its own filings in the matter, which were repeated by California Deputy Solicitor Gen. Samuel P. Siegel during the hearing.

Siegel said there was “nothing” for the appellate court to review, given there has been no fact finding and no order out of the lower court, and that the administration’s demands were unconstitutional and illegal. He said the court did not have to wrestle with many of the arguments being put forward by the Trump administration, because it should simply reject the appeal for lack of jurisdiction and send the matter back down to the lower court.

Bumatay appeared most interested of the three judges in the damage done when noncitizens do vote, and the underlying question of how the state should handle objections to alleged noncitizen voters when they arise.

Siegel and Seth Waxman, an attorney for Logan, said there are existing processes for that — which require the challenger to present extraordinary proof, which they said the Trump administration has not done for the 20,000 voters it has flagged.

Sanchez repeatedly questioned the provenance of the administration’s list, asking which third parties were involved in providing the data. Donnelly could not answer, which Sanchez said raised questions about the reliability of the list.

The Justice Department appealed the case after a lower district court judge declined to immediately rule last week on its request for a temporary restraining order barring California officials from tabulating the flagged ballots.

In court filings, the administration argued that once mail ballots are removed from their envelopes in California, or a ballot has been cast in person, there is “no way to associate the voter with the ballot” or resegregate it from other cast ballots.

Attorneys for California, Weber and Logan have argued the demands are illegal, impossible to comply with before the Nov. 3 election and based on deeply flawed federal immigration and third-party data sets shown to be inaccurate and inclusive of legitimate voters.

In court filings, they have argued that the Trump administration’s argument “rests on mere suspicion, aroused by suspect data,” and that its lawsuit is at best “a reckless political stunt” and at worst “threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election.”

Independent elections experts have said the Justice Department’s efforts break with longstanding department policy of not wading into election-related issues within 90 days of an election, to avoid disenfranchising legitimate voters.

They also have said the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizen voters and its authority to intervene are both questionable, including because the U.S. Constitution empowers states to run elections with oversight from Congress, not the executive branch.

The Justice Department sued California, Weber and Logan on Oct. 15, two days after Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote to Weber and Logan giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots for the 20,000 flagged voters — whom McCotter claimed were “likely noncitizens.”

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A., has claimed federal authorities have “overwhelming evidence” that tens of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, and has defended the methods used to identify those voters. He and other federal prosecutors in the state also recently charged 28 legal permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, including illegally registering to vote.

On Friday, the Justice Department sent letters to county elections offices statewide with demands that they segregate ballots from voters the Trump administration believes are noncitizens, drawing from the same list of 20,000 at issue in the case against Weber and Logan. In those letters, the Justice Department gave the county officials 48 hours to comply, and threatened them with criminal punishment if they refuse.

State officials have said neither Essayli nor other Trump administration officials have provided proof to back up their claims, and that their list of 20,000 voters is clearly inaccurate. Logan said a preliminary review of a subset of those voters found many were born in the U.S., weren’t registered and had never voted.

More than 3 million people have already cast ballots in California — and more than 500,000 have already done so in Los Angeles County.

The challenge to the 20,000 ballots in California is just the latest Trump administration attempt to intervene in state-run elections ahead of the midterms.

Federal judges in dozens of states have rejected Justice Department lawsuits demanding the states turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. Federal judges also have rejected multiple Trump executive orders trying to institute national voter ID and citizenship checks, and his administration’s attempt to empower the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots.

Other cases — including over the Trump administration using unproven and inaccurate federal data sets to question the citizenship of state voters — are pending.

Democrats and voting rights groups are also bracing for fresh litigation from the Trump administration to challenge the outcome of pivotal election results the president doesn’t like — and are already defending against a lawsuit the Justice Department brought at Trump’s urging in Alaska, preemptively challenging a Democratic win in the Senate race there based on a third candidate sharing a similar name as the Republican incumbent.

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s lawsuit to block certification of Alaska’s Senate results if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses the race, arguing that the legal challenge was a necessary step to avoid confusing voters in the closely watched midterm race.

Some election experts have said the move is another attempt by the Trump administration to meddle in the Nov. 3 midterm elections in the event Republicans don’t fare well. Democrats as well as some Republicans have criticized it.

Blanche, however, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Trump — who said Friday in reference to the lawsuit that he was “the one that said do it” — is not trying to overturn state election results “in any way, shape or form.”

“We wish that we didn’t have to do this. We hope for a resolution that works,” Blanche said.

Republicans fear that a second candidate on the ballot who is named Dan Sullivan — a retired teacher and school administrator from the tiny fishing community of Petersburg — could siphon away votes from the GOP senator and tip the outcome in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman. Because Alaska has ranked-choice voting, there are more than two candidates on the general election ballot.

A day after the lawsuit was filed Thursday, Peltola called it “just flagrant, flagrant corruption, in my opinion,” and a diversion tactic by Republicans. Alaska’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, also criticized the lawsuit in a social media post.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he believed the ballot was illegal because it was unfair and that Sen. Sullivan should be identified to voters as the sitting senator. Courts, however, have ruled otherwise, upholding both Sullivans’ spots on the ballot.

“At least let him use the name Sen. Dan Sullivan as opposed to incumbent, because a lot of people don’t know what incumbent means,” Trump said.

Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent” on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” is listed without party affiliation.

Blanche represented Trump as a personal attorney — including the case in which Trump was convicted of felony fraud — before the Republican president appointed him to lead the Department of Justice, which filed the lawsuit in Alaska. Blanche defended Trump in his election inference case before voters elected Trump to a second White House term, effectively ending the criminal prosecution.

Blanche told CNN host Dana Bash that it was “crazy” for her to ask him if Trump was trying to lay the groundwork for the same sort of election challenges that occurred before a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the source of the election interference case, in which Trump was indicted on felony charges, and for which he was impeached.

“We are not doing anything improper. We’re not doing anything we’re not allowed to do. And we have to let the process play out,” Blanche said. “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.”

The lawsuit, Blanche said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” is meant to “put guardrails in place” to preserve possible evidence of voter confusion at the polls.

“It’s not saying, ‘Don’t certify.’ It’s saying, ‘If a court ultimately determines that it was decided because of confusion and not the will of the voters, then we do not think the states should certify.’ And that’s consistent with federal law and consistent with even Alaskan law, if that happens,” he said.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Peltola, and her family suffered minor injuries in a car crash while driving to a campaign stop, her campaign said Sunday.

Peltola required medical attention after the accident Saturday, which happened when another vehicle crashed into the one transporting Peltola and her family, the campaign said. The family was on their way to the Alaska Federation of Natives Annual Banquet in Anchorage.

Peltola, an Alaska Native and former congresswoman, is challenging Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, hoping to become the first Democrat in nearly two decades to represent the state in the Senate.

Both candidates have tried to rally support from Alaska Native voters, a key constituency in the high-stakes race that has become one of the most watched in the nation.

On Friday, President Trump — who held a rally in support of Sullivan earlier this month — said he told his administration to sue to block certification of the race if the incumbent loses. The lawsuit cites potential confusion with another candidate who is listed on the ranked choice ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

Peltola’s campaign manager, Cheryl Bruce, wrote in a statement that the candidate was in “good spirits” following the accident, but her medical providers recommended she reschedule events Sunday and Monday to recover.

The incident delayed what her campaign announced as the “Alaska Always Tour,” an eight-stop push through the last week before election day. Her campaign said she will resume events Tuesday, with a stop in Homer, Alaska.

The ad was repugnant.

You know the one I’m talking about — Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack on opponent Amy Acton using her clearly troubled mother, who failed to protect Acton as a child from her rapist stepfather and instead abandoned her kids to stay with the now-deceased pedophile.

Wow. Even in 2026, that’s a lot.

The ad, released last week on the internet and set for a television blitz through the election, has sparked condemnation even from Republicans. Some anyway. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance (a close friend of Ramaswamy’s) have defended it, much to the chagrin of decent people everywhere who have labeled this a make-it-or-break-it moment for the Grand Old Party.

Trump called getting Acton’s mom on camera “hitting pay dirt.”

“Why shouldn’t somebody use that?” Trump said Friday. “To me, that’s something that’s very much fair game.”

Trump’s right, in his world anyway. His faithful may not like the ad, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

The appalled, left and right, are wrong on this one — this is not a turning point for the Republican Party or the moment it realized its soul was in the frying pan.

When Ramaswamy loses — and he’s likely going to lose, if polls are right — it won’t be because Republican voters finally believe the party has sunk too low, lost its way or lacks morals. And when the postmortem happens on the right, it won’t examine whether exploiting victims of sex abuse is a smart move. (Full disclosure: One of my relatives is an advisor of Ramaswamy.)

Instead, the ad will eventually be seen as a great gift to Donald Trump for two reasons.

First, it allows Ramaswamy — his endorsed candidate — to lose without it being the president’s fault for starting a war, tanking the economy and generally being entirely unpopular with average Americans. Get ready, because if Ramaswamy goes down, Trump will spin it that Democrats and the corrupt media misrepresented the ad and lied about Ramaswamy. Not Trump’s fault, just further proof of why his battle is righteous.

Second, it allows him to test the loyalty of his MAGA acolytes ahead of 2028, and folks, I’m sorry to say it’s a test they are likely to pass with flying colors. Vance laid this out clearly in his defense, reserving his scorn for Republicans who dared to be anything but steadfast.

“Stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days,” Vance said in response to a question about the ad. He added he was “disgusted” that his fellow Republicans were seemingly more upset about the ad “than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”

For all the angst about sexual abuse, even of minors, the forever Trumpers honestly don’t care as long as their candidates win and maintain power. Just ask Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Ask E. Jean Kelly. Ask Victim A in the Matt Gaetz allegations, or Christine Blasey Ford if you can remember that far back. The list goes on.

MAGA diehards may holler and stomp about how much they hate pedophiles, but they hate Democrats more. Trump has told these voters to ignore the ad and vote Ramaswamy. I predict more of them do it than decency permits — because we’ve seen this MAGA mental split before, where they somehow set aside all of their so-called outrage when Trump tells them to do something.

These voters are clear that the Trump regime presents a real opportunity to remake the country into a conservative bastion in ways that will be hard to undo, and they will overlook even the indecency of exploiting childhood rape.

“Vivek is Great, there is no one better for Ohio. That’s a wild story,” responded one supporter on Truth Social after Trump posted a defense of the ad.

“I love how Vivek does not hesitate to call out wrongdoings,” wrote another.

Others tried to turn the topic to their conspiracies about Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, two bogeyman of the right for their race and religion. The responses of Trumpers to his post were exactly on brand — deflecting or blaming media and disinformation for skewing the issue. (Trump and Ramaswamy are claiming that the ad isn’t about sexual abuse, but only about whether Acton is truthful.)

With that veneer of justification, it’s likely his most devout base in Ohio, led by the 20% of voters who consider themselves white evangelicals, will stick with their guy. Nearly 8 in 10 white evangelical Protestants support Trump, and they are motivated voters who have disconnected the Trump reality from the Trump promise for years.

Despite all the outrage across the country about the ad, it’s likely the final tally in Ohio will remain largely as it would have been before the kerfuffle. Ramaswamy was down in the polls before he dove into the muck of the past few days. A reliable Cook’s poll put Acton ahead 49% to 44% — one of the reasons Ramaswamy was desperate enough to try this last-ditch smear.

I’ll bet an Ohio buckeye the final count isn’t far outside that margin, with no sign of a massive drop in Republican support of Ramaswamy, despite all the posturing and hand-wringing. If he loses, it is likely more about the surging racism against Indian Americans, especially with young conservatives, than one ugly ad.

But those Republicans who denounced the ad will face the president’s punishment. The ad is not a mistake. It is an inadvertent test. By embracing the ad even as it’s disparaged nationally, the president is discovering exactly who he can, and can’t, trust as he heads into the two most difficult years of his decadelong rule — the part where he stops pretending to be anything but what he is, a corrupt and greedy man intent on maximizing power and wealth. The part where he challenges elections.

We are watching the last of the old-guard Republicans being purged thanks to the ad. Republicans who have gathered up the tattered shreds of their integrity and courage over this ad are shredding them to nothing on this moment, giving Trump insight into who might stand up to him when the protection of our democracy is on the line.

Trump has started lashing out already, making sure those potential last-round conscientious objectors are damaged.

After current Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called for Ramaswamy to stop airing the spot, labeling it “deeply troubling,” Trump attacked him — even though DeWine said he continued to support Ramaswamy as his replacement. (DeWine is facing term limits.)

“Mike DeWine, who I unfortunately helped get elected years ago, when he was losing by 16 points prior to my doing a Rally for him was, as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on social media.

DeWine was far from alone.

Trump’s days of conning himself into a coalition are behind him — well into his second term, is now consolidating power behind his core, public opinion be damned.

The independent voters that may indeed not vote or change votes because of the ad were just as likely to switch over gas prices or wars.

The ad was never for them, but rather just for this outrage, this push to motivate the base with just the sort of grimy bullying Trump does best — I believe him when he says he wishes he could make an ad like this. Trump will rally in Ohio this week with Ramaswamy, and it’s likely most Republicans will somehow have transmuted their outrage into support by the time he appears in person.

His base understands his support of the ad is an expression of power. His base understands the trade they are making. His base doesn’t care what happened to Acton, because she will never give them the America they want.

His base likes the ad, even if they won’t admit it.

Oct. 25, 2026 10:03 AM PT

ANCHORAGE — A little more than one week before the midterm elections, the leading candidates in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race are trying to rally support from Alaska Native voters, a key constituency.

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola both spoke at last week’s Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage.

The organization previously endorsed Peltola, who is Yup’ik, during her House races in 2022 and 2024, but it did not issue endorsements this year.

Both candidates have highlighted support from Native organizations and leaders ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Sealaska Corp., a regional Native corporation in southeast Alaska, has endorsed both of them, calling it a way to “honor their contributions and commitment to our communities, and to honor the diverse positions of our shareholders.”

The race is among the most closely watched nationally, with control of the Senate at stake. On Friday, President Trump — who held a rally in support of Sullivan earlier this month — said he told the Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the race if the incumbent loses. The lawsuit cites potential confusion with another candidate who is listed on the ranked-choice ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

Sen. Sullivan is listed as a Republican and the incumbent, while Sullivan Jr. is listed without a party designation. U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche wrote on social media that the lawsuit is necessary to make sure officials “have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or [misled].”

Many voting rights advocates and Democrats have pointed the lawsuit as an improper political use of the Justice Department and an example of Trump’s interference in the upcoming election, following up on his threats to assert federal control over the vote.

Alaskan Natives represent about one-fifth of the state’s population, but they can face challenges to voting in remote communities. Advocates have raised concerns in recent years with polling locations in some villages opening late or ballots not arriving on time to be fully counted due to mail delays.

There’s also cynicism about whether participating in elections will make a difference.

“There’s legitimate hesitations about whether whoever they vote for is actually going to impact them,” said actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth, who is Bdewakantunwan Dakota and Dine and came to Alaska to encourage conference attendees to vote. “And our job is to say, hey, whether that matters or not, there’s an opportunity for you to make sure that your voice is counted. And I want to encourage people just to take the opportunity as much as possible.”

Sheri Buretta, who chairs the board of Chugach Alaska Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, introduced Sullivan to the conference Thursday as “one of our strongest champions.”

Sullivan, speaking as part of a congressional delegation update, said he’s learned important lessons from Native leaders. He cited work he’s done on issues such as pushing to ensure that Alaska Native Vietnam War-era veterans have access to land allotments.

Peltola, during a candidate forum Friday, became emotional speaking about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people and said additional law enforcement resources are needed. She also expressed support for fisheries. Subsistence fishing is critical in many Native communities.

“I will always fight to restore our fisheries. I feel like working on fish issues is my life’s work,” she said.

Energy is also a crucial issue in Alaska, including within Native communities.

Peltola recently said Alaskan Native people were being “absolutely crushed” by high costs from the ongoing war with Iran, which Sullivan has supported. Many rural communities rely on diesel for electricity and to heat their homes.

Sullivan has argued the war against Iran is temporary and that the “forever war is the Democrats’ war against Alaskan energy.”

Many Native leaders on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope see oil drilling as crucial to their region’s economy, and they believed their voices weren’t heard while President Biden was in office. His administration sought to restrict drilling in places like the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but Trump and the Republican-led Congress have rolled those efforts back.

Peltola has said she supports expanded oil and gas drilling and would work with Trump to accomplish that. But Sullivan and his allies have tried to align her with what they refer to as “Lower 48 liberals” who oppose more drilling.

Bohrer and Daley write for the Associated Press. Bohrer reported from Juneau.

Many of us were running errands, working out, or having breakfast when, in true 2026 Venezuelan fashion, one event we expected happened: María Corina Machado came back to her country.

She reappeared in the middle of a Sunday mass at the Santa Rosa basilica, a church near the city of Barquisimeto, home to the most popular Virgin Mary cult: la Divina Pastora. 

Surrounded by churchgoers and members of her party, Vente Venezuela, Machado joined the mass and embraced people, in a public demonstration of prayer, faith, and hope, in line with her religious persona that made her massively popular in 2023 and 2024, when she crossed the country meeting the communities more affected by mass migration and economic collapse. 

Now, many questions arise. 

How did Machado come back? For the region where she is now, in western Venezuela, we can speculate she took a private plane or a boat from the Dutch islands near the Falcon coast, on a route similar to the one she made during her clandestine trip to Oslo to collect her Nobel Peace Prize in December 2025.  

What will the chavista regime, and their Washington sponsors, do? As we described many times in our Political Risk Report, the chavista regime was preparing for this for months, speaking as if it wasn’t their fault that Machado wasn’t there, as if they would not have persecuted her and charged her with several crimes. Donald Trump just said that she is nice because she gifted him the Nobel Prize, so he hopes she is right. 

What can happen now? Machado will organize pressure to accelerate the complicated roadmap towards rebuilding the institutions and hold elections, including a presidential one where she is finally allowed to compete. At the same time, we expect Machado to channel the public ire about blackouts and inflation, and lead a more coherent and productive campaign towards a true democratic -not only economic- transition. With the appointment of the committee that will choose new justices for the Supreme Court, while the repressive apparatus led by Diosdado Cabello continues to show muscle by harassing activists, we must expect more street action and political negotiation. This is a challenge to both Machado and Delcy Rodríguez, and a shock to the dead calm chavismo was trying to settle. 

More to come. But Venezuela will get frenzied, and be interesting to global media, again. 

McALLEN, Texas — The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda’s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center’s vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows of cars, a tally of patients who gather here to sit with chemotherapy needles or lie on radiation machines.

The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda’s right breast, and she still didn’t know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat.

“I’m more of a positive person myself,” Banda said, now sitting with a white wristband in a dim waiting room. But the bills are harder to dismiss, and the single mother with six children in her care repeated something like a mantra. “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.”

That’s true for many Americans, as rising healthcare costs leave more families with a sinking feeling after seeing the bill for surgery or medication. Heading into the Nov. 3 midterm elections, about half of registered voters said healthcare costs are a major problem for them and their families, up from a little more than one-third four years ago, according to a Fox News poll from September.

With party control of Congress at stake, registered voters are nearly twice as likely to say they trust Democrats over Republicans to handle healthcare, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from the same month. Those frustrations, combined with broader concerns over rising prices, have sapped support for President Trump and his Republican Party.

Banda knows how that feels. She backed Trump in each of his three campaigns, motivated by her opposition to abortion. But when cancer came, the ensuing scramble to make ends meet was painful enough to rearrange her priorities, and she started to think about voting Democratic for the first time.

The 46-year-old was ushered into a sterile room for her appointment, her phone lighted up with a text. “Please contact TD Auto Finance.”

“This one’s $1,300,” she said of the car payment bill. “I have to go back to work.”

She had been on sick leave for a year from her job selling internet service, and she needed the income to support her three children and three more she had taken in after her sister’s death.

The doctor said her reconstruction surgery could be scheduled early next year. “I was hoping for maybe December,” Banda said, “only because I’ve met my deductibles.” Come January, she would have to pay down the $7,500 again. Earlier may be possible, the doctor replied, if the skin around her surgical scar loosens.

The evening had cooled slightly by the time she walked back through the rows of parked cars, their ebb and flow marking the tide of sickness, survival and death in a small corner of a colossal healthcare industry that saves lives while taking in over $5 trillion every year.

Banda paid $8 for parking as she left.

Confronting death and debt

Two weeks later, Banda was back at work, making door-to-door rounds to sell Spectrum’s Wi-Fi in McAllen, her city along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley. Banda, holding blue fliers, walked along a row of storefronts, some that closed since she last was in the area.

She hadn’t had a sale and commission since October of last year, after the biopsy and diagnosis.

The doctor who gave her the news had hugged Banda, and she sobbed even though, she says, she never really sobs in front of other people. During chemo, her children took turns buzzing off her wispy hair. When her 9-year-old daughter’s hand quivered, a teenage cousin helped guide the clipper over her mother’s scalp.

Banda’s first impulse was to maintain normality, stability, for the children.

But that requires roughly $7,000 a month for utilities, mortgage, car payments and groceries, along with the two water leaks. Then, even with insurance through her job, the surgeries, chemo and radiation added up to over $25,000 that she’s been paying off, making Banda one of tens of millions of other people in the United States in medical debt.

Banda tries not to dwell on death and debt.

“It’ll consume you,” she says. She smothers those thoughts beneath her bubbly demeanor and avoids being alone. But that truce, between her insistence on positivity and the fears that it covers, is brittle.

Certain thoughts still arrive uninvited. Banda’s late sister, Melissa, didn’t have life insurance. Banda makes sure it’s a payment she never misses.

“Sometimes I think, and I shouldn’t think like this, but I’m worth more gone than here,” she said one day. “Obviously, the goal is not that, the goal is to beat it,” she continued, “to keep the house and keep the cars.”

So far she has, with the help of others.

On top of child support, the father of Banda’s 9-year-old often pays $400 a week for a nanny to help with the kids. Banda’s own father sent her $700 before for her recent Houston appointment, one of his many cash infusions. Her high school classmates, whom she hadn’t been in close touch with in decades, fundraised by selling grilled chicken, rice and beans from a roadside tent. Two GoFundMe fundraisers collected nearly $30,000, and Banda rented her late sister’s house while putting her own in forbearance.

But months of insecurity takes its own, sleepless toll. She needed to sell some internet services to catch up.

After sticking the Spectrum Wi-Fi fliers onto empty storefronts, she drove to pick up her kids from school. The following day she had a morning meeting at a barbershop for what would be her first sale back at work.

Turning on Trump

A lifelong Christian, Banda had voted her antiabortion stance in past elections. When her sister was kidnapped and murdered by her ex-husband in 2020, Banda retreated from religion. The cancer brought her back to church with an apology to God, but it also made her rethink her politics.

She voted for Trump in 2016, and his first four years seemed steady, she said, so she voted for him again in 2020. President Biden’s tenure, including a global pandemic and related inflation, felt like bedlam, so she voted for Trump to return to the White House in 2024.

But two years later and fighting an expensive disease, she had found no respite from high prices.

So when James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, visited one of Banda’s fundraisers — speaking about his diabetes and his work in the Texas Statehouse to lower the price of insulin — it moved her. “Imagine if he can do that for the cancer,” she said.

Talarico and his Republican opponent, state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, have different approaches to healthcare. Talarico wants all Americans to be able to join Medicare; Paxton proposed a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses.

Talarico also supports a law guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, which Banda has voted against for years. But after she slid into debt to stay alive, after her grocery bills mounted and the high school had to comp the kids’ soccer gear she couldn’t afford, Banda’s antiabortion concerns have been superseded by worry about costs.

“Because it’s what I’m living,” she said. “I’m living it.”

Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico. “Never voted Democrat before today!!” she wrote in a text with blue heart emoji.

Awaiting news

Banda had just started a new cancer-targeting medication that cost $16,000 a month, reduced to $500 by insurance. By the afternoon, she was nauseated and fatigued, unable to eat. The malaise would keep her home the next day. She would miss the meeting with the barbershop to close her first deal since getting sick, though she felt confident it was in the bag.

But Banda pushed through the discomfort one evening to join her family as they replaced the flowers at her sister’s tomb.

She drove past the headstones and oak trees in the evening’s slanting light, and the family gathered around Melissa Banda’s tomb in an open-air mausoleum. There was no speech. Their eulogy was her father, Fidel Banda, methodically clipping and arranging the flowers for his daughter.

Banda walked along the wall of tombs. She will find out on election day whether the cancer is in remission or whether it’s spread to her organs.

“This one’s for me,” she said, pointing to a blank tomb next to her sister’s.

“Mom!” said her daughter with the huffiness of a 9-year-old. “Why would you say that?”

Banda smiled and added, “in a hundred years.”

Bedayn writes for the Associated Press.

As Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy came under fire for releasing an attack ad featuring his Democratic competitor’s estranged mother, a mysterious news site was running a Facebook ad boosting the controversial video.

The Buckeye Bulletin, which bills itself as an Ohio-based news platform committed to “reliable journalism” and “strong editorial standards,” popped up suddenly this spring and began pumping out a steady stream of pro-Ramaswamy content.

The publication’s articles have no bylines. There is no list of staff. The website does not feature digital advertisements, nor does it prompt readers to subscribe, but there is also no disclosure of who is funding it.

A closer look at the Buckeye Bulletin’s Meta advertising data shows that its Facebook and Instagram accounts are managed by the Lincoln Media Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Orange County-based Lincoln Club — the oldest and largest conservative donor organization in California. IRS documents show that the club and foundation are associated organizations and share at least two key executives.

Meta’s advertising data shows that the Lincoln Media Foundation manages the Instagram and Facebook accounts for the Buckeye Bulletin.

(Meta)

The Buckeye Bulletin, Lincoln Club and Lincoln Media Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

The Bulletin appears to be a partisan site posing as a local news outlet ahead of the midterm elections, a strategy political scientists refer to as “pink-slime” journalism.

This is not the first time a “pink-slime” outlet has been linked to the Lincoln Media Foundation. In 2024 Max Read, director of civic innovation for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, identified seven such alleged outlets.

With the exception of one Los Angeles-focused site, those outlets all targeted critical states for the 2024 presidential election such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Read reported that the media group had spent more than $63,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads, resulting in up to 18 million impressions during the last election cycle.

“[The sites were] very clearly designed to try to influence the information environment ahead of the presidential election,” Read told The Times. “They had all been started early in the year and used advertising on Meta platforms to juice their engagement numbers.”

When asked by The Times to take a look at the Buckeye Bulletin, Read said it appeared to be “pretty much copy and paste the same tactic that they used in 2024, even down to the aesthetics of the Facebook page and Instagram account.”

“It seems like they realized this worked at some level in 2024 and is worth doing again this year,” he said.

Earlier this year, CalMatters identified another outlet tied to the Lincoln Media Foundation called the California Courier, which had been circulating Facebook advertisements criticizing Gov. Gavin Newsom and the statewide redistricting ballot measure Proposition 50.

Since the Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram pages launched in March, the outlet has shared posts touting endorsements of Ramaswamy — a biotech billionaire and former presidential candidate — as well as his platform for addressing Ohio’s healthcare crisis and his stance on religious freedom in schools.

Simultaneously, the outlet’s social media posts have highlighted the refusal of his opponent — Amy Acton, Ohio’s former public health director — to debate, comments on how she “shut down” the state’s economy during the COVID-19 pandemic and a video with a watermark from right-wing political activist Laura Loomer.

This week, the outlet turned attention to Ramaswamy’s controversial campaign ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and urges voters not to support her.

However, the ad did not acknowledge that Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather, Arthur’s husband, was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child — an omission that drew fierce condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans, including Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Others, including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, an Ohioan, have defended the ad.

Arthur and her husband fled to Pennsylvania after his 1978 indictment where he died in 2004 without having been brought back to Ohio to face the charge.

Peppered in between political content on the Bulletin’s social media feeds is a smattering of reels related to non-political news, often featuring videos lifted directly from local TV stations. These other posts are used to create a “veneer of genuine local journalism,” Read said.

The language on the Bulletin’s About Us page displays markers of artificial intelligence such as generic mission statements, polished but repetitive phrasing and vague claims about journalistic standards with no details about the publication’s staff.

Of the last 30 posts shared on the Bulletin’s Facebook as of 5 p.m. Friday, 21 were about state or national politics and 10 were about the gubernatorial race. Engagement on the posts dealing with Ramaswamy and Acton is consistently strong for a page with around 5,600 followers.

For example, a Wednesday post on Ohio State Medical Assn.’s PAC endorsing Ramaswamy received more than 770 likes, 260 comments and 150 shares. Another video posted Wednesday with the label “Amy Acton refuses to debate, says mother is lying about her” received more than 4,800 likes, 1,500 comments and 500 shares.

Meanwhile, a non-political Wednesday post on a chemical explosion in Toledo received two likes, no comments and no shares.

The unassuming social media scroller or person who clicked onto the website would have no clue of the Buckeye Bulletin’s apparent connection to a group of wealthy Southern California Republications.

The Lincoln Media Foundation was started by leaders of the historic Lincoln Club, which was founded in 1962 and once counted John Wayne and former President Richard Nixon as members.

Today, the club describes itself as being home to “the most prominent business and thought leaders” in California and says it offers members the opportunity to meet world leaders and “experience their hobbies come to life through a combination of extravagance and leisure.”

The foundation notes that it uses a digital approach to reach communities left out of the national conversation, but its website does not disclose providing funding to any news outlets.

IRS records show that the nonprofit’s financial activities kicked up dramatically in 2024, the latest year for which data are available. The Lincoln Media Foundation reported $3.88 million in revenue in 2024, compared with $738,000 in 2023, $453,000 in 2022 and $415,000 in 2021.

The Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have spent just over $10,000 boosting posts this year, according to Meta’s ad library.

That’s barely a drop in the bucket in Ohio, where hotly contested races for governor and U.S. Senate have drawn hundreds of millions in spending. But presenting a slanted political view under the guise of local news tends to offer more bang for your buck than traditional advertisements, said Georgia Kernell, an associate professor in the departments of communications and political science at UCLA.

“Voters are so sick of ads; they’re getting tons of clear paid advertisements on the radio, on the television and on their social media feeds now,” she said. “Anything that can kind of look different is going to be more likely to keep their attention.”

Presenting as a traditional news source also increases the likelihood of viewers believing that the information presented is well-researched, she said.

Nik Usher, associate professor of communications at the University of San Diego, said it’s unclear how much influence pink-slime journalism is having on voting behavior, but political strategists are willing to try any new approach to possibly make a difference in tight races.

“This is one strategic effort to throw more spaghetti at the wall, hoping it’ll stick,” Usher said.

Creators of these partisan sites further stand to benefit from the fact that artificial intelligence tools are constantly scraping content from news websites without paywalls.

Researchers at NewsGuard recently found that leading AI chat bots are citing pink-slime websites nearly half the time when users ask questions about candidates and issues in the midterm elections.

Democrats and Republicans have increasingly leveraged pink-slime journalism to influence voters in the past few election cycles.

In 2020, the New York Times identified a network of 1,300 news sites that paid freelance writers to produce biased content for Republican groups and corporate public relations firms. In 2024, the left-leaning Star Spangled Media group used a site called the Morning Mirror to promote down-ballot Democratic candidates, according to research from Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

More recently, the evolution of AI has increased the ease with which these websites can be populated with content, eliminating the need to pay writers and automating the production of social media posts.

Usher described pink-slime websites as “explosive bombs for public trust” that take advantage of the gap created by the loss of independent local papers and further diminish expectations for news to be fairly reported.

“Once these sorts of sites are pointed out to the public it further undermines distrust in political institutions, political parties, the news media,” Usher said, “especially when AI is associated with this kind of stuff.”

On television, ads for UCLA Health show up behind the Dodgers’ home plate and in the background when Justin Herbert, the Chargers’ quarterback, speaks after a game.

At the Lakers’ training facility, the health system’s logo appears on the court and throughout the building, under a marketing partnership that cost the university tens of millions of dollars.

The ads are part of the public university health system’s strategy to increase the number of Southern Californians using its providers at its fast-growing number of clinics and hospitals.

University officials say its expansion to five hospitals and 300 clinics — up from 150 locations a decade ago — has given more Southern Californians access to its academic medicine.

Lakers championship banners hang from the rafters and trophies are on display in an office overlooking the news conference as Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka, left, speaks while Lakers coach JJ Redick listens at the UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Last year, the system’s clinics and hospitals recorded 4.2 million outpatient visits — more than five times the number in 2015.

“As a public institution, we’re trying to make sure that patients within our community have access to care,” said Dr. Robert Cherry, UCLA Health’s chief medical and quality officer. “That’s the primary and overriding concern, because there’s an acute demand for our services.”

Yet healthcare economists point to repeated studies showing that hospital consolidation — where health systems expand, take over competitors and hire more of a region’s physicians — has become a leading driver of escalating health costs and insurance premiums, while doing little to raise the quality of care.

Glenn Melnick, a USC professor of healthcare finance, has documented how hospital consolidation in Northern California caused health costs to escalate. He said the mergers and acquisitions have continued, including with UCLA Health and other hospital systems in Southern California. UCI Health acquired four community hospitals in 2024.

One consequence, Melnick said, is surging insurance premiums for employers, which leave companies with little money for wage increases, while employees end up paying more for their health insurance and out-of-pocket medical costs.

“We’re now, I think, at a breaking point,” he said.

UCLA executives said the aim of the expansion was not to increase revenues the health system receives from commercial insurers. And they say they don’t believe UCLA Health is large enough to influence health costs.

“We actually represent only a small fraction of the inpatient capacity, physicians, clinics and resources available across the large and complex healthcare market in L.A.,” said Johnese Spisso, UCLA Health’s president, in an interview.

Nonetheless, the system’s expansion and its other recent financial decisions have led to protests by some of the university’s own staff and faculty, who point out the new clinics have been added mostly in wealthier neighborhoods, including Malibu and Montecito, where the majority of families have commercial insurance.

None of its clinics are in South or East Los Angeles, where more residents are covered by Medi-Cal, the state program for low-income people.

Cameron Carr during a news conference at the UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.

(Arwen Clemans/Los Angeles Times)

University of California system officials say Medi-Cal’s reimbursements are so low that they don’t cover the cost of care at the state’s five UC medical centers. Those losses, they say, must be covered by charges to those with commercial insurance.

Last month, dozens of medical residents and interns protested outside a UC Regents board meeting after UCLA Health failed to renew a Medi-Cal contract that had covered thousands of low-income patients. The doctors waved signs with slogans “Corporate Greed” and “Keep UCLA Health public.”

Dr. David Schriger, UCLA professor emeritus of emergency medicine, said that given the mission of the state’s public university, he questioned why the expansion had not included neighborhoods such as South Central L.A.

“The public should be making these decisions,” Schriger said. “It should not be at the whim of some executives.”

Santiago Munoz, UCLA Health’s chief strategy officer, said officials don’t consider neighborhood income levels when deciding where to open clinics. Instead, he said, the system has been adding clinics along freeways running north and south.

“We’re staying close to the 405 and the 101 because driving to locations in Los Angeles is inevitable, and it’s very difficult to get to Westwood,” he said.

Munoz noted that UCLA had recently leased a 20,000-square-foot space for a clinic in Inglewood, has locations in downtown Los Angeles, and provides physician services at two of L.A. County’s public hospitals.

“We are trying to go to where patients are,” Munoz said.

Worries about crowding

Nurses at the university’s flagship hospital Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood say the expansion has created crowding that has caused what they describe as an ongoing, daily crisis in the emergency room.

Patients coming from the 300 clinics for hip replacements, heart surgeries and other procedures at Ronald Reagan often wait one or two days in the emergency department until beds become available upstairs in the hospital, according to UCLA officials.

To accommodate those patients who’ve been admitted but don’t have a room, the hospital has installed dozens of beds in what was once the emergency department’s waiting room and in adjacent spaces. That has forced people waiting for emergency care into a large white tent outside, which was put up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“How do you do a good exam in a tent? It just doesn’t work,” said Dianne Sposito, a nurse who works in the emergency department. “I feel patients are in grave danger right now. Accidents are bound to happen.”

LeBron James has fun with his daughter, Zhuri, as son, Bronny, looks on during a G League game at UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo.

(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

A university spokesperson said the system has “extensive strategies to keep patients safe and decompress our emergency departments.”

At the September Regents committee meeting, Spisso, UCLA Health’s president, told board members that the system needs to add as many as another 400 hospital beds so that newly-admitted patients no longer have to wait.

For months, rumors have circulated that UCLA will soon buy Providence St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, which would make the university the only hospital operator in that city. UCLA bought the city’s other hospital in 1995.

UCLA officials declined to say whether they were talking about acquiring the hospital. “We’ve found it’s best not to talk about discussions we may or may not be having unless or until we have something to announce,” Phil Hampton, a university spokesperson, said in a statement.

Consolidation hikes costs

The California Health Care Foundation found in a 2021 study that hospital markets were reaching “monopoly levels” in many of the state’s counties. The consolidation was increasing prices with “little to no improvement in quality” of care, the report said.

The study also detailed how physicians often change their referral and prescribing patterns after their practices are acquired by hospitals, sometimes requesting imaging or other procedures that are not needed.

Melnick, the USC professor, noted that when UCLA acquires physician practices and “re-designates them as hospital-outpatient departments,” the clinics can begin billing insurers for an additional “hospital facility fee” for routine office visits, imaging and minor procedures.

He added that insurers often consider UCLA as a “must-have” network, allowing it to negotiate higher reimbursement rates. When the insurer folds UCLA’s new hospitals and clinics into their plan, he said, it often agrees to raise rates at the newly-acquired providers to match what UCLA is receiving as an academic system. Patients get the same care, he said, “but there is a new name on the door.”

Munoz said that UCLA Health was adding facility fees to some bills, including for imaging, but not for physician care. “We’re running a fairly lean operation in the community when it comes to physician services and not collecting the facility fees that others are,” he said.

More income from patient charges

UCLA is not the only hospital system expanding in the L.A. region. For example, Cedars Sinai has also been adding clinics and buying hospitals.

Price data shows that insurers and patients often pay more for care at UCLA Health and Cedars.

Anthem, Southern California’s largest commercial insurer, this year is paying $20,265 to UCLA for a total knee replacement at Ronald Reagan, according to data gathered by Serif Health, a San Francisco firm that collects data from hospitals and insurers. That price is 9% higher than last year and doesn’t include physician fees, the implanted device or anesthesia.

Anthem pays Cedars more than twice as much for a knee replacement, according to Serif’s data, while it pays Providence St. John’s 22% less. Cedars’ current negotiated reimbursement is $42,559 — an increase of almost 17% over last year.

University executives said that because UCLA Health is an academic health system it provides a high volume of complex care that is more costly than care at non-academic hospitals.

UCLA’s expansion strategy has been financially successful, according to the health system’s annual report.

Last year, UCLA Health operating revenues grew by nearly 20% to more than $5 billion. After paying for expenses, its operating income was $793 million, a margin of almost 16%. That compares to the median operating margin of 1.5% for 45 academic medical centers across the country, according to a 2024 study by McKinsey & Company.

UCLA officials said the operating margin was not a good comparative measure because it doesn’t include a $496-million transfer to the university’s medical school to cover other operations including the training of physicians.

“Education, research, and clinical care are all part of our mission and our responsibilities to really train that next generation of healthcare professionals,” Spisso said.

Expansion continues

The university is now spending nearly $300 million to renovate a 170,000-square-foot building that sits on nine acres near Los Angeles International Airport. Purchased in 2024, the campus’ many offerings will include a sports medicine institute with physical therapy and advanced imaging, as well as an ambulatory surgery center with 10 operating rooms.

The university also plans to soon open a new 119-bed psychiatric hospital in L.A.’s Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. The facility was once the 204-bed Olympia Medical Center, where most patients were Black, Latino and underinsured. Olympia shut down after the university purchased it in December 2020.

The renovated hospital allows UCLA to relocate and expand the 74-bed Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which is currently on the fourth floor of Ronald Reagan Medical Center.

“We have patients waiting for mental healthcare so we made a $650-million investment in this new facility,” Spisso said. “We will probably lose around $50 million a year just operating it, but we saw it as one of the most underserved areas.”

UCLA then plans to add 103 beds to Ronald Reagan by renovating its fourth floor, increasing the medical center’s capacity by 23% to ease the overcrowding.

In 2024, the university bought the 260-bed West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley from HCA Healthcare.

Last month, Spisso told the Regents committee that the hospital, now known as UCLA West Valley Medical Center, and its surrounding clinics, were making more money than officials had expected.

LAS VEGAS — Five days after settling back into the White House, President Trump embarked on a political victory lap that took him to a rally in downtown Las Vegas.

Joined by Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, Trump told boisterous supporters that, as a first order of business, he’d directed every member of his Cabinet “to marshal all powers at their disposal to defeat inflation and bring down the cost of daily life.”

That hasn’t happened — not even close — and that failure is one big reason that Nevada’s governor is fighting for his political life.

Democrats, still smarting from their loss four years ago, have made Lombardo their No. 1 gubernatorial target this election season. Republicans are battling to keep their top-of-the-ticket foothold in a state that will, once more, stand at the center of the presidential campaign.

With just over a week to go — and with more than 335,000 ballots already cast — the contest could go either way.

After a career in law enforcement and eight years as sheriff of Clark County — home to Las Vegas — Lombardo made the leap to governor in 2022 in a pandemic-fueled backlash against Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak.

Reserved by nature and a political civilian most of his life, Lombardo has spent the last four years focused on the basics — crime, education, job growth, economic development — and largely steered clear of the country’s incendiary culture wars.

Unlike other Republican lawmakers, Lombardo has also shied away from the provocations and flamboyant pugilism of the MAGA movement.

Still, Trump hangs like an anvil around Lombardo’s neck — a fact his Democratic opponent, Aaron Ford, exploits at every turn.

Appearing last week at a gas station two miles off the Las Vegas Strip, Ford cited record-high fuel prices — and the knock-on effects they’ve had on tourism, groceries and online shopping — and said Nevadans were suffering for no other reason than Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran.

“And where,” Ford asked rhetorically, as traffic whooshed past, “is our current governor? As usual, he’s at Trump’s feet, serving as his doormat.”

Nevada Democratic gubernatorial candidate and current Nevada Atty. Gen. Aaron D. Ford arrives at a get-out-the-vote event on Oct. 7 in Las Vegas.

(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

Ford, who’s bidding to become Nevada’s first Black governor, has one of those up-by-the-bootstraps biographies that campaign consultants see as spun gold.

He grew up in Dallas in a family that struggled to stay above water and, as a single father in his early 20s, relied on Medicaid and food stamps to get by. He worked as a waiter and a teacher to pay for law school and a Ph.D. in education before moving to Nevada in 2007. After six years in the state Senate, Ford was elected in 2018 to the first of two terms as the state’s attorney general.

Like Democratic candidates everywhere, Ford has made affordability a key component of his campaign.

Standing on the sidewalk outside a Circle K — where regular was going for $5.35 a gallon — Ford squatted to sign a blown-up copy of a “letter” to Trump demanding a $2,000 “pain-at-the-pump” rebate for every Nevada household. A line was provided, obligingly but obviously unnecessarily, for Lombardo’s signature.

Four years ago, Ford noted, when gas was around $4.68 a gallon, his Republican rival wrote on social media that hard-pressed Nevadans needed “leadership that ensures our families and businesses are protected from these disastrous policies.”

“But once he got in office,” Ford said, Lombardo “stopped fighting for us in Nevada and he started working for Trump full time.”

A few hours later, at a country-themed nightclub in northwest Las Vegas, the governor took to the stage to extol his performance these last four years.

Small-business creation and job growth are up, he told a crowd of supporters gathered on the dance floor. Teachers are better paid and more people are working in Nevada than ever before. “Kicking butt,” he said, referring to either himself, Nevada or both; it wasn’t clear which. “Kicking butt.”

Also, Lombardo added, Nevada’s crime rate has fallen for both violent and property crimes — “without any help from the attorney general.”

The words “Donald” and “Trump” never passed the governor’s lips.

Lombardo has had a somewhat mixed relationship with the president.

He kept his distance during the 2024 campaign and has occasionally, selectively, taken issue with the administration since Trump returned to office. The governor, for instance, spoke out against cuts to Medicaid as well as the shuttering of wind and solar projects in Nevada.
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But Lombardo didn’t help himself in the least when Trump came to town in August for another rally, this one at the Red Rock Casino. He heaped praise on the president and defended, of all things, the care and feeding of Trump’s plutocratic pals.

“Quite often when the press and the media runs him down, they think about, you know, he’s taking care of his billionaire friends,” Lombardo said. “Those billionaire friends provide jobs. Unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent.”

Naturally, the moment showed up in a campaign ad, showing the grinning governor alongside a smirking Trump and ending with the tagline: “Joe Lombardo. For Trump, Not Nevada.”

For his part, the governor has portrayed Ford as feckless and borderline corrupt.

He’s seized on the attorney general’s abundant out-of-state travel — for official business, Ford says — to portray him as a high-flier beholden to the special interests that financed his jaunts.

Lombardo has also accused Ford of being weak on crime, citing, in particular, the case of a Nevada inmate convicted of manslaughter in the killing of a pregnant woman. Ford placed the inmate’s bid for clemency on the agenda of the state pardons board — an example, Lombardo claims, of the way Ford treats criminals.

The Democrat said he was merely following procedure and would have opposed the clemency request had he not missed the board’s meeting due to an unspecified family emergency.

With a big financial advantage and the benefit of a highly practiced campaign team, Lombardo has kept the race close despite the rough political climate. But to a considerable degree, his fate is beyond anything that Lombardo can control. The key question is how big the Democratic wave is on Nov. 3 and how strong the Trump undertow.

Those forces of red and blue — more than anything either candidate says or does — will determine the winner in this most purple of states.

The 16 candidates vying for three seats on the board that overseas the Los Angeles Community College District have diverse backgrounds and varying ideas — and near unanimous agreement that district leaders need to do more to meet the basic needs of students struggling to pursue their higher education goals.

The candidates include those with experience both within and outside the district, with many citing the need to better connect students in the largest community college district in the nation with good paying jobs after they graduate. The seven-member Board of Trustees are managing a 2022 voter-approved $5.3 billion bond-funded construction boom to revitalize aging campuses and build student housing and at the same time are grasping to find ways to meet the basic needs of students, the majority of whom are low-income, juggling school with jobs.

Members of the board are elected to at-large seats and do not represent a specific area. The 900-square-mile district includes the city of Los Angeles and nearby cities, including Culver City, Montebello and Burbank.

Seat 2

In Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres is being challenged by three candidates: writer Robert Payne, business owner Kristina Irwin and educator Adriana Cabrera. Roy Payan is also on the ballot for Seat 2, but told The Times he has suspended his campaign.

Veres has served on the Board of Trustees for multiple terms and also works as a staff director and policy advisor for state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who previously ran the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and will soon take a seat on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In responses to a Times questionnaire, Veres said during his 13 years on the LACCD Board he’s been able to strengthen job training programs, improve graduation rates and helped push to give students access to free and discounted food and emergency housing shelter.

Veres has the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment, including Durazo, Mayor Karen Bass and the county Democratic party. Four members of the board of trustees support him, as does the district’s faculty and staff unions.

Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, a campaign committee sponsored by the faculty union has paid for nearly $150,000 worth of slate mailers in support of Veres, according to campaign finance records.

An online database of campaign finance records show the other candidates, Payne, Irwin and Cabrera, have not received campaign contributions. Those candidates did not respond to a request for comment about their fundraising.

Seat 4

Seat 4 is an open race, with seven candidates running. Incumbent Sara Hernandez is stepping down and running for state senate.

The most well-funded Seat 4 candidate is Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, who recently started teaching a class on student skills at Santa Monica College, which is not an LACCD campus.

Harris has the support of a wide swath of Democratic politicians and organizations, as well as labor unions and six of seven current LACCD trustees.

Others running for Seat 4 include environmentalist and former board member Nancy Pearlman; therapist Adam Bruno; healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz; sign language educational interpreter Priscilla Umana; fire department employee Isidro Armenta; and business owner Jason Aula, who in response to the Times questionnaire, as well as in a recent press release, included comments about the Chinese Communist party and cannibalism.

Seat 6

Perhaps the most contested race is Seat 6, where incumbent Gabriel Buelna is facing off against Randall Winston, who serves as deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Bass.

Buelna failed to gain a key endorsement of the district’s faculty guild, whose executive board endorsed Winston.

James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision to endorse Winston, but said the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.

AFT 1521A, the guild representing district clerical and technical staff, issued a dual endorsement of both Winston and Buelna and has given money to both campaigns.

“I absolutely really love both,” said Andrea Edwards, president of the staff guild. “I could not choose.”

Others running for Seat 6 are community college professor Roberto David LaCarra and realtor Tonia Arey.

Buelna and Arey have accused Winston of misleading the public by listing architect as his occupation on the ballot, as well as describing himself as an educator and a teacher at West L.A. college during the campaign.

“The public doesn’t understand who he really is,” Buelna said.

Arey, who was endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., has vowed to ensure there’s more transparency and accountability surrounding the district’s nearly $10-billion annual budget.

Asked in an interview why he didn’t list deputy mayor of infrastructure as his occupation when it’s his day-to-day job, Winston said “architect seemed to resonate the most and architect is my first professional degree and fundamentally part of still how I think and act.” Winston said he is currently licensed to practice architecture but doesn’t practice day to day.

Winston said he will also start teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College later this fall and is currently helping to teach a workshop at the college on climate solutions. He also said he has mentored UCLA students.

“I believe I have met the qualifications of an educator,” he said.

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk‘s Office disagreed and declined to allow Winston to list educator as his occupation on the ballot, according to an Aug. 27 email from the registrar’s office to Winston.

Winston said that at the time “West LA College was still completing the administrative processing for my adjunct instructor appointment.”

Before becoming deputy mayor, Winston also ran the California Strategic Growth Council, which helps fund sustainable development.

McKeever of the faculty union said he saw Winston’s long experience in development as an architect, deputy mayor and head of the growth council as an asset to the district as trustees deal with the bond-funded building program.

“This will help maintain the integrity of the bond process as the district moves forward with new construction projects,” McKeever said.

Despite not receiving the endorsement of the faculty guild, Buelna retains the support of a number of faculty members, including the president of the academic senate, Angela Echeverri.

Echeverri said Buelna “really cares about students and education” and helped successfully push for state legislation to make it easier for students to take courses in languages other than English.

The law “really opened up community colleges to people who previously couldn’t access education,” she said.

WASHINGTON — N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) has spent years trying to answer a question that has vexed the United States since the abolition of slavery: What would it actually look like to repair the damage?

In Evanston, Ill., she helped turn that question into a $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. Now, Rue Simmons is spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country.

But as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a formidable hurdle: President Trump’s administration.

The administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and its broader efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history, have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work.

Those reversals come while at least part of the world community is reexamining the past. In March the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution — only three voted against it — Argentina, Israel and the U.S. Fifty-two, including England and 27 members of the European Union, abstained.

“Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons, the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, told the Associated Press.

For more than 3½ centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million didn’t survive the journey.

Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the U.S. and their enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery, treating the enslaved and their children as property, until abolition in 1865.

Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth that is still largely concentrated among white families.

From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule, to modern-day reparations proposals, initiatives to address the legacy of slavery are entering a new era of political uncertainty.

“I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word,” said William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen.

“Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility,” he added.

“They want to steal your money for reparations,” Trump told his supporters during a speech in September. “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. … The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”

Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at UCLA, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs come in the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments.

“It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” he said.

The Trump administration disagrees and has entered the legal fight in Evanston to stop it from happening.

The Republican administration’s attacks on modern-day repayment efforts include a lawsuit in Evanston, which was initially filed by Judicial Watch.

Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, says the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without specific harm identification. He argues the city’s program is unlike historical reparations programs.

“The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Beshka told the AP.

The Justice Department this month received a federal judge’s permission to intervene in the case, alleging that the city’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, N.C., contemplating creating their own programs.

Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement to the AP that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.”

“Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them,” she said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

Georgetown University was one of the leaders, offering admission consideration for the descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’ past, an effort that has continued despite Trump’s crackdown on campus DEI efforts.

But across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders.

“People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said.

Some Virginia universities have quietly been taking steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. But otherwise there has been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office, said Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery.

The Georgetown initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana.

The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to the descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments to individuals vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity.

“We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached, said Nicky Burridge, the seminary’s spokeswoman.

“The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one,” said Ebonee Davis-Hayes, its director of reparations.

Hussein, Fields and Binkley write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — In September, just weeks before Americans were set to vote in this year’s midterm elections, a sudden panic over the dangers posed by artificial intelligence caught the White House off guard. A whistleblower had gained viral attention warning the technology could soon pose an existential threat.

President Trump was quick to dismiss concerns, evoking urgency in the U.S. race to achieve global dominance in superintelligence. He rejected calls to negotiate guardrails on the most advanced AI models with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, weeks later, during a prime opportunity to do so in Washington.

Privately, the president expressed concern that public hysteria over AI could jolt markets that have become excessively concentrated in AI-related stocks. He had already seen fresh polling that showed widespread bipartisan opposition to the boom in construction of AI data centers, a push by Trump that has cannibalized chips and energy from other sectors of the economy, driving up costs.

Now, on the campaign trail in the final days before the vote, Trump is vowing to expand a “golden age” of prosperity through the end of his presidency. But experts say his policies on AI have set the U.S. economy up for a period of tremendous risk over the next two years.

Some of the world’s leading financiers are sounding increasingly alarmed about an AI bubble. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that AI stocks have become detached from financial fundamentals, pushing markets to precarious highs. Ken Griffin, the world’s richest hedge fund owner, said last week that AI is “almost certainly” fueling a market bubble that could be on the verge of a burst.

Economists warn that Trump has overseen fiscal policy that would give the federal government fewer tools than it has had in the past to respond to a crisis.

“Trump could easily run into a financial crisis before his term is up,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard. “It is entirely plausible to have a 30% — or more — drop in the stock market, and in the context of an economy so dependent on AI, this in turn could easily lead to a recession and widespread financial distress.”

Spending on data center infrastructure last winter and spring accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to independent analyses. Without it, growth would have slowed to a mere fraction of a percentage point, leaving the economy nearly stagnant and flirting with recession.

The Nasdaq 100 has about 70% of its index weight in companies that depend on AI, from semiconductor manufacturers and Big Tech giants to cloud platforms and software providers. Anthropic, one of the top AI industry leaders, plans an initial public offering next month, while its chief rival, OpenAI, expects to go public next year.

From left, Chris Painter, president of the Model Evaluation and Threat Research, Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, Paul Ohm, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Kurt Gaudette, senior vice president of Dragos, and Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the AI Futures Project, are sworn in to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks,” in Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“Because government finances are already strained, with the national debt on a patently unsustainable trajectory, there is no guarantee of a sharp drop in long-term borrowing rates for the government,” Rogoff continued. “So the options for bailing out the financial sector, or fighting recession, could be much more constrained than during the global financial crisis.”

While doubling down on the promise of an untested, frontier technology, Trump’s other economic policies may be hobbling its growth. Tariffs have raised the costs of imported chips, servers, networking equipment, metals and electrical components, and visa restrictions have tied the hands of industry leaders trying to secure the world’s best talent. Runaway federal deficits have driven long-term bond interest rates, adding pressure on AI firms already strapped with debt.

Servaas Storm, an economist closely following the AI sector at the Delft University of Technology, said the industry is already facing severe financial headwinds that could precipitate a panic.

Prices for energy, chips and minerals are driving up the cost of doing business, while early AI adopters such as Microsoft, Meta and Walmart are scaling back its use as employees spend too much time correcting errors, cleaning up low-quality output and addressing security lapses.

Slower adoption could further complicate the search for revenue, particularly for companies already struggling to monetize the technology. For now, hyperscalers are shouldering the cost of financing frontier AI labs that, as Storm put it, “do not have a credible path to profitability.”

“There is indeed an AI bubble in the stock market and in data center construction, which could pop rather soon, as rising debt loads and elevated interest rates could prove too much to sustain it,” Storm said. “That moment is not imminent, but it is approaching — and it will very likely happen before the end of Trump’s presidency.”

An economy already under duress from Trump’s other economic policies — from tariffs and tax cuts to the Iran war — could precipitate further pain, said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Leading AI companies are already running “day-after” drills in anticipation of an AI-related crisis within the next year, according to Axios.

Americans head into election day deeply pessimistic about the economy, with 77% rating it fair or poor, according to a Fox News poll. A separate CNBC survey found that just 34% approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 35% of Republicans disapprove — a record high within his own party.

Inflation has fallen sharply from its 9% peak in 2022, during a pandemic-era surge, reaching 2.9% by the end of Biden’s presidency. Under Trump, it has climbed once again to 3.7%, driven by rising energy, transportation and housing costs — among the top concerns for voters entering next month’s vote.

Persistent inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated, squeezing borrowers. And those rates — paired with high government spending and concerns over mounting deficits — have pressured the bond market, pushing 10-year Treasury yields to levels not seen since the early 2000s.

“Financial crises, by their nature, are virtually impossible to predict,” Duffie said, asked whether he shared concerns of a potential AI bubble.

“If we know we are going to be in a crisis soon,” he added, “markets advance the crisis to now.”

BAKERSFIELD  — Top Democratic and Republican leaders are sweeping through California as the Nov. 3 election approaches, evidence of the state’s pivotal role in deciding which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives and the fate of President Trump’s final two years in office.

Seizing on their party’s momentum nationwide, Democrats rallied crowds from Orange County to the Bay Area this past week. They blamed Trump and the Republican-led Congress for rising gas and food prices, massive cuts to healthcare funding, deceitful attacks on the elections process and the vilification of immigrants.

In the Central Valley, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday evening appeared alongside Randy Villegas, a Democrat challenging Republican incumbent David Valadao of Hanford in a Latino voter-heavy district in the state’s agricultural heartland. The population of the district is one of the youngest in the country, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd, and Gen Z and millennial voters are expected to play a pivotal role.

“We have the opportunity to take the reins,” said Ocasio-Cortez, one of the nation’s most well-known progressive leaders. “And to give direction to where our future will be headed. And I got to tell you, folks, the future is not with David Valadao.”

Recent polls show Democrats may retake control of the House in the Nov. 3 election, and they may have a chance of taking power in the U.S. Senate. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who has swung through California twice within the last month to help Republican candidates, acknowledged the challenges ahead but predicted his party would fare better than many predict.

Roughly two dozen House races across the country are expected to decide the House majority, including three competitive races in California: Those of Republican Valadao, Democratic Rep. Adam Gray in the Central Valley and the open seat of retiring Republican Rep. Darrell Issa in the San Diego area.

Democrats are hoping that the new congressional maps approved by California voters in 2025 will give them an edge. The reconfigured congressional districts approved by Proposition 50 were a response by California’s Democratic leadership to Trump urging Republicans, notably in Texas, to shift their boundaries to help the GOP hold onto control of Congress during his final two years in office.

The San Joaquin Valley district represented by Valadao, which already had a Democratic majority, added about 100,000 Fresno residents, turning it even bluer. Valadao has been a perpetual target of Democrats given their longtime voter registration edge in this area.

Aside from briefly losing the seat for one term nearly a decade ago, Valadao has hung onto the seat. He comes from a dairy farming family and is well-known in the area, winning by nearly seven percentage points in 2024, outperforming Trump.

This cycle, Democrats are hammering him for supporting Trump’s budget cuts that impacted healthcare programs, a critical issue since roughly two-thirds of the population in his district is covered by Medi-Cal, as Medicaid is known in the state, the most of any district in California, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

Valadao is among a handful of GOP members in California’s 52-member congressional delegation, the largest of any state in the nation, and among the Republicans targeted by Democrats in response to Trump’s efforts to keep his party in control of Congress.

“Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme is going to fail,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Buena Park on Thursday. “It’s going to fail in Texas. It’s failing in Florida, and it’s failing in North Carolina. But I’m grateful to the people of California who decided to decisively respond and create the situation where we’ll have a fair national map.”

The party in control of the White House typically loses seats in the midterm election, and Trump and the GOP face additional headwinds because of the affordability crisis that the president promised to address when he ran for reelection in 2024. Californians face some of the highest gas and electricity prices in the country.

“The MAGA extremists are on the run because they have failed. They’ve broken every promise that they’ve made to the American people,” Jeffries said, after stumping for Rep. Derek Tran (D-Orange) at a carpenters’ union hall. “Life has not gotten more affordable. Life is far too expensive. Trump policies … have increased costs on everyday Americans by thousands of dollars per year.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries interacts with members of the audience after he delivered a speech during representative Derek Tran’s “Take Back the House” rally for his reelection campaign in California’s 45th Congressional District, at Carpenters Local Union 714 in Buena Park on Thursday.

(Etienne Laurent/For The Times)

Tran narrowly unseated Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in 2024, winning by just 653 votes. The recently redrawn district, which is located primarily in Orange County, could give him an edge this election.

“Prop. 50 did help me out of the battleground districts in California,” Tran said. “I got the least amount of help, but better, still better.”

On Wednesday, the Republican House speaker acknowledged his party’s hurdles while stumping for congressional candidate Kevin Lincoln in Stockton in the Central Valley.

“We’re gonna be very sober-minded about the challenge, and I want you all to know the odds that we are facing,” Johnson said.

Campaigning for Lincoln, a former Stockton mayor and an underdog in a congressional race against Democratic Rep. Gray of Merced, Johnson acknowledged that the congressional midterm will be a “very close election.” But he argued that public polling is flawed and fought back against the notion that GOP voters are dejected.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), center left, and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) talk to reporters after a campaign event in Bakersfield on Sept. 30.

(Jae C. Hong / AP)

“Republicans are not staying home. They are not depressed,” said Johnson, who also traveled to Bakersfield to campaign for Valadao just a few weeks ago. “They’re coming out in huge numbers, and we’re going to win because of that. You know why? Because everybody knows what’s at stake.”

Lincoln, the grandson of an immigrant and the son of a teenage mother, talked up his experiences in the military and as a pastor. He aligned himself with the “hardworking” people in the Valley, suggesting that D.C. leaders were failing the district.

“When you have a job to do, you show up, you roll up your sleeves and you get that job done, and that same standard should apply to the people that we choose to send to Washington, D.C.,” he said.

Two of California’s most powerful Democrats, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Gov. Gavin Newsom, on Friday appeared at a San Francisco union hall to rally support for Democratic congressional candidates and warn that basic rights will be at risk if Republicans stay in power in Washington. They urged voters to reject Proposition 39, the Republican-led voter identification measure that comes amid Trump’s baseless claims of widespread, illegal voting by undocumented immigrants.

Pelosi, who will retire early next year after a historic 40-year run in Congress and two stints as House speaker, criticized Trump’s “vicious, malicious” attempts to undermine elections through gerrymandering, fraud claims and attempts to mandate voter ID.

“They are putting up obstacles to participation to vote. As women, if you have your husband’s name in marriage, you’re going to have to go find your birth certificate in order to vote,” Pelosi warned of voter ID requirements. After “63 years in marriage, you think I could find my birth certificate?” Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, warned that Republicans “are ruthless” in their attempts to roll back civil rights. The outgoing governor said the 2026 midterm fight began when he and state lawmakers put Proposition 50 on last year’s November ballot.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a rally, accompanied by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, right, members of the state’s Democratic Party, organized labor and other advocates in San Francisco on Friday.

(Heather Diehl / AP)

“Everything we have done to get us to this point is unbelievable,” he told union members in the Mission District. “You’re unbelievable, but it won’t mean anything unless we run through the tape.”

The Democrats were supporting state Sen. Mike McGuire, who is trying to flip one of Northern California’s redrawn congressional districts. He faces Rep. James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), who won a June special election to finish the term of the late Rep. Doug LaMalfa. “Prop. 50’s final chapter is almost here,” said McGuire, who has represented the rural North Coast in the Senate since 2014. “It is time to close the book on Donald Trump. It’s time to take America back.”

Seema Mehta reported from Buena Park, Nicole Nixon from San Francisco and Dakota Smith from Bakersfield.

JACKSON, Miss. — Portions of a Mississippi ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools can go into effect after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s ruling that blocked sections of the law from being enforced.

The parts of the law in question prevent public schools from requiring diversity training and maintaining DEI-related programs, courses and offices. It also bans public schools from discussing a list of “divisive concepts” related to race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and national origin. Public schools that violate the law could lose state funding.

The ban passed in April 2025 and is being challenged by a group of educators, students, parents and activists who say the law violates their 1st and 14th Amendment rights.

The plaintiffs have several weeks to file a petition for rehearing with the 5th Circuit. The law would take effect seven days after the petition deadline passes or if a petition is denied, according to McKenna Raney, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.

The 5th Circuit also ordered that the case be reassigned to a different district court judge after U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate issued a “botch job” temporary restraining order that contained artificial intelligence hallucinations, according to the Thursday ruling. The TRO predates Wingate’s August 2025 preliminary injunction, which the 5th Circuit overturned.

Additionally, the ruling provides clarity on the scope of the law, which opponents have criticized as overly vague.

The law does not apply to scholarly activities, student activities and groups or creative engagements, according to the 5th Circuit. The court also said concerns raised by the plaintiffs that the law would ban discussions of civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th Amendment, Juneteenth and “Of Mice and Men” are incorrect.

“It is heartening to know that at the very least these specific iterations of classroom discussions that have been happening for years in Mississippi are exempted and they can continue unimpeded,” said Raney, an LGBTQ Justice Project staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. However, Raney said the types of discussions allowed under the law are still “murky.”

Bates writes for the Associated Press.

MISSION VIEJO — Twenty years after the GOP last won a state-level election in California, few Republican voters believe this will be the year.

But they can hope.

“I’m praying, praying, praying that people will come out of the woodwork and show up and just vote for Steve,” said Annette Owens, a 65-year-old Orange County resident and longtime special education teacher.

Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host originally from the United Kingdom, faces Xavier Becerra, a longtime Democratic politician who is heavily favored to win the Nov. 3 election to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The 2026 elections are looking particularly grim for California Republicans, whose statewide influence over the past two decades has atrophied to super-minority levels. Redistricting from Proposition 50 removed some key GOP seats in Congress. And nationally, the party is struggling with high prices, fallout from the war in Iran and polls showing President Trump’s popularity at all-time lows.

While she is “doubtful” Hilton or any other Republicans running statewide will beat their Democratic opponents, Owens says “if anyone’s going to do it,” it’s Hilton.

The candidate had just spent nearly 40 minutes addressing several dozen Orange County moms in Mission Viejo, a hilly and affluent enclave speckled with golf courses and Spanish colonial architecture.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton visits patrons at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood, which hosted a watch party for the CNN debate between him and Xavier Becerra.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Sipping mimosas in a glass-walled event space overlooking the city’s verdant public course, women — and a couple of tagalong husbands — listened as Hilton and local Republicans argued for a change after 16 years of Democrats controlling California government.

“We can make this a place where people follow their dreams and build their lives, and that’s the ultimate test: That people are moving back to California after my first four years in government,” Hilton said.

Rachel Darvish drove from her home in Pacific Palisades to support the gubernatorial candidate. In the aftermath of the January 2025 fires, Darvish was captured on viral video angrily confronting Newsom as he toured the wreckage. She joined the Republican Party after the fires.

“I considered myself an independent up until the day I realized we had no choice,” Darvish, wearing a Hilton campaign T-shirt, said. “I think this is really the first election that the R or the D really does matter, and there is an obvious difference.”

Hilton and other Republicans acknowledge the math. Democrats outnumber GOP voters nearly 2-to-1 in California, and no-party-preference voters largely side with Democrats in statewide contests.

Hilton, who is endorsed by Trump, often declares to supporters that the race against Becerra, a President Biden-era U.S. Health and Human Services secretary and former state attorney general, “is going to be really difficult to win, but not impossible.”

As he calculates his chances of victory, the former Fox News host considers three sets of facts. The “establishment polls,” as he calls them, conducted by widely trusted pollsters, including the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Public Policy Institute of California, have shown him more than 20 percentage points behind. His internal polls also have him losing, albeit by smaller margins.

Then there are the people who come to his events.

California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks at a rally Thursday in Bakersfield.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

“Every single day I get all these people saying, ‘I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I’m voting for you because we got to have some balance, we got to have a change,’” he said in an interview on the golf course patio following his event. “A lot of them say, ‘But I’m not telling anyone.’”

Midterm elections are historically more difficult for the incumbent president’s party. While never popular in California, Trump’s approval rating recently fell to a record low of 27% in a Berkeley IGS poll.

Fierce headwinds for GOP in California

Political operatives expect anti-Trump sentiment to intensify the headwinds Republicans face in California. More than half of likely Democratic voters, and 37% overall, said a top motivator in this election is pushing back against the administration‘s policies.

“I’m not really anticipating Republicans winning for anything statewide,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative writer and former executive director of the California GOP. “If somebody’s anticipating that, then they don’t know how to do math.”

He doesn’t expect Republican turnout to drop, but “Democrat turnout could be enhanced over what it normally is. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference.”

Some Republicans are frustrated by the Democratic-only choices in the high-profile race for Los Angeles mayor, as well as the down-ballot contest for state insurance commissioner.

Darvish, who supported conservative Spencer Pratt for L.A. mayor in the primary, described the runoff between incumbent Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman as a choice between “Satan and Lucifer.”

“I’m going to have to vote for Karen Bass,” she said. “It’s really hard for me to say that,” but she does not want Raman or any candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America to win.

Some Republicans say they won’t vote for insurance commissioner, the only statewide race between two Democrats: Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor, and state Sen. Ben Allen.

Fleischman described the DSA-endorsed Kim as “nuts” and Allen, who represents Manhattan Beach, El Segundo, Beverly Hills and other cities, as “an extreme liberal” who “has enthusiastically supported virtually every Gavin Newsom policy I dislike.”

While Trump and Republicans will likely suffer midterm losses, many Democrats are “massively unpopular as well,” said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. “All politicians are underwater right now. Voters are in a pretty bad mood.”

Hilton concedes it would be easier to run a midterm race with a sitting Democratic president, but believes the Trump endorsement is not as toxic to his campaign as it might seem.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton enjoys a light moment with a woman who was happy to get gas for $3 a gallon at a gas station in Los Angeles on Oct. 8.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“It doesn’t come up in really any of the meetings,” he said. “People really are asking about gas prices.”

Republican candidates and party officials are making the case that California’s longstanding homelessness and cost-of-living woes have little to do with the president.

“I can’t think of anything less relevant” than Trump, said Roxanne Hoge, chair of the Los Angeles Republican Party. “We are drowning in high taxes and high costs. Anyone trying to make this election about who the president is — and who will only be president for two more years — has a screw loose and also doesn’t have much of anything to offer.”

Hilton doesn’t engage in voter fraud allegations

Federal authorities this week charged 28 people in California with illegally registering and casting ballots as part of a broader fight to exert more control over elections, which are run by states.

Having just won an election primary in June, Hilton walks a line when discussing claims of electoral fraud. He takes issue with rules like ballot harvesting and a seven-day, post-election deadline for mail ballots to arrive, but he does not believe there is systemic fraud or cheating.

“We mustn’t let ourselves believe that every time we lose an election, it’s because they cheated,” he said when a supporter made the accusation during a Modesto town hall in August. “We lose the elections [because] we don’t win enough votes, right?”

Viewers attend a watch party at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood during the debate between gubernatorial candidates Democrat Xavier Becerra, left, and Republican Steve Hilton earlier this month.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

That’s why he is trying to reach independent voters and Democrats who “can’t stand President Trump” but “are desperate for something to change in California,” he explained as applause rippled through the heavily Republican crowd.

Hilton is counting on voters like Summer Behan, a former Democrat, to not only vote for him but persuade other disenchanted voters.

“My car got broken into 14 times in a year and a half,” Behan told Hilton during the Modesto event. “Our homeowners insurance went from $180 to $860, so we had to sell our house.”

She drives more than two hours to her nonprofit job in San Francisco.

“It’s sort of an exhausting way to live,” Behan said after the town hall. Families from her children’s schools have moved to other states, but she wants to stay. “California is beautiful, and it’s just got so much to offer people, so I want to try and stick it out and see what it looks like with different leadership.”