candidate

Randall Winston has declared victory in his campaign for Seat 6 on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, in what was the closest of three races in last week’s election for the seven-member board.

Second-place finisher Gabriel Buelna has conceded.

According to the count released Monday, Winston had 38.7% of the vote and Buelna had 31.7%, followed by community college professor Roberto David LaCarra in third place and realtor Tonia Arey in fourth.

To win a seat on the seven-member board, candidates need only a plurality of votes, not a majority.

Winston declared victory in an email to supporters over the weekend.

“You voted and told your friends and family why this race mattered,” Winston told supporters on Saturday. “Because of you, the Los Angeles Community College District will have a trustee who believes our colleges are where this city builds opportunity.”

In a brief interview Monday, Buelna said he called Winston to concede and wished him the best in his new role.

Seat 6 turned out to be the most contentious of the races for the Board of Trustees, which oversees the largest community college district in the country with some 200,000 students, most of whom are low-income.

During the campaign, Buelna and Arey accused Winston of misleading the public by describing himself as an architect and an educator, when his full-time job is deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Winston responded by saying his first professional degree is in architecture, he is licensed in the field and he will be teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College this fall.

Helping boost him to victory was a key endorsement from the community college district’s faculty union, which put significant financial resources behind his candidacy.

Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, the union contributed $800,000 to a committee supporting Winston and the two other winning candidates, helping produce slate mailers that hit the doors of voters, according to campaign filings.

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

In the race for Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres held a 40.91% to 33.48% lead over educator Adriana Cabrera, who was in second.

Cabrera did not return emails seeking comment, and Veres said she had not called to concede. As of Monday afternoon, Veres had nearly 97,000 more votes than Cabrera with an estimated 44,000 more ballots to be counted county-wide, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

In Seat 4, Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, has the biggest lead of all.

According to the latest numbers, Harris had 57.3% of the vote in a seven-person race. Healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz was in second place with 14.4%.

WASHINGTON — The midterm elections already upended national politics. Due to the number of state governments that have flipped to Democratic control, they also could change the way the U.S. elects a president.

The sudden blue tint to so many more statehouses opens the door to enough states joining 18 other Democratic-run states in a deal that would effectively neuter the Electoral College. It would remake the battle for the presidency into one for the most votes nationwide, rather than candidates concentrating on a half dozen or so swing states.

The states that have joined what is known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact account for 222 Electoral College votes. Once the number of states involved hits the 270 needed to win the presidency, the arrangement would effectively require a candidate to win the national popular vote to get an Electoral College majority.

It’s not clear that the strategy has support from all the newly elected lawmakers and governors in the key states, and it’s almost certain to draw legal challenges from conservative groups. If it does go forward, it could land before the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

Yet the sweep of the Democratic wins for governor and in state legislatures has the plan’s supporters optimistic. In Tuesday’s elections, Democrats won full control in six states representing 71 Electoral College votes: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Minnesota, with its 10 electoral votes, had joined the compact when it was previously under full Democratic control in 2023.

Some governors express support while others are noncommittal

“We can do away with it,” Wisconsin’s new Democratic Gov. David Crowley said of the Electoral College, now that he has a legislature in his party’s hands for the first time in 16 years. “I am interested in having those conversations with the state Legislature.”

Over the weekend, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a likely 2028 contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he would like his newly Democratic legislature to take steps toward making the Electoral College obsolete.

“I think that the national popular vote makes sense. My views on that have not changed,” Shapiro said on a liberal podcast. “I’ll work with lawmakers to figure out what the right mechanism is for moving forward on that.”

If Pennsylvania and Wisconsin supported the compact, reaching the 270 threshold would require Michigan and either Arizona or Nevada to join. Michigan’s new Democratic governor, Jocelyn Benson did not respond to a request for comment.

Not every Democratic governor is embracing the push yet. In a television interview on Monday, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs declined to say whether she favored her state joining the compact. She said she’s focused on other things, like the cost of living.

Nevada’s previous experience with the issue also is a cautionary tale for supporters.

In 2019, then-Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoed a measure that would have committed Nevada to joining the compact after it was passed by Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature. Sisolak said at the time that the popular vote idea would diminish the influence of smaller-population states like Nevada in national elections.

Democrats passed another measure to join the compact in 2023, but couldn’t figure out a way around the state’s then-Republican governor. The incoming administration of its new Democratic governor, Aaron Ford, did not respond to requests for comment.

Republicans will use their diminished power to push back.

“Our Constitution gives states a voice in choosing the president for a reason,” Tyler August, the Republican leader in the Wisconsin Assembly, said in a statement Tuesday. “This would undermine that balance and disenfranchise Wisconsin voters by letting results in other states override their choice.”

Two presidents 16 years apart lost the popular vote

The idea of shifting to a national popular vote gained traction among Democrats after Republican George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election by inching ahead of Democrat Al Gore in the Electoral College even while losing the popular vote. It became turbocharged after Republicans again won the White House that way in 2016 with Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Under the National Popular Vote plan, the candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide would receive the Electoral College votes from the states that have joined the compact.

There’s nothing inherently partisan about the idea, said Patrick Rosenstiel, a Republican strategist in Minnesota who is a senior consultant to the popular vote movement. Occasionally GOP-majority legislative chambers, including the Oklahoma Senate, have passed proposals to join the compact, but the bills haven’t gone further.

He said his own presidential vote is essentially meaningless because Minnesota has reliably voted Democratic in presidential elections for decades, leaving him with no say in the outcome and steering the vast majority of the candidates’ attention elsewhere.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been relevant in the outcome of a presidential election,” he said. “National popular vote forces campaigns to focus on every persuadable voter in every precinct across the nation.”

Rosenstiel said the national popular vote campaign has been revving up to push the issue when the newly Democratic state legislatures convene at the start of the year. He said the organization has already lined up legislative sponsors.

The compact could create constitutional concerns

Republicans no longer have the power to stop the change in the Democratic-controlled states, but some conservative groups are prepared for a fight. The change “disenfranchises voters in member states if enacted, violates the United States Constitution, and undermines America’s Founders’ intent,” wrote analysts for the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, in September.

There also is no guarantee the proposals will pass. Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor who is skeptical of the idea, said some might have second thoughts now that it’s gone from a symbolic protest vote to a real possibility. He said there will be constitutional concerns, as well, that will likely lead to legal challenges.

The Constitution lets states run elections, and the Supreme Court in a case stemming from electors who sought to find a substitute for Trump in 2016 has ruled that states can require electors to vote for the presidential candidate they’re pledged to.

Muller flagged potential legal hurdles to the popular vote plan. States have the power to run their elections but not set rules that will determine the outcome in other states’ contests. Additionally, each state ballot is different, and some would potentially have third-party candidates who wouldn’t appear elsewhere, leading to the dilution of a vote for a Democrat or Republican in one state compared to another.

That could violate the 14th Amendment’s requirement that everyone have “equal protection of the laws.” The U.S. Supreme Court also might decide that states can’t join a compact to change one of their core constitutional duties, unless they get congressional approval.

“I think the Supreme Court will be interested,” Muller said.

Riccardi and Bauer write for the Associated Press. Bauer reported from Madison, Wis. AP writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Mich., Jessica Hill in Las Vegas and Mikella Schuettler in Phoenix contributed to this report.

The first volunteers gathered in the back house of Nithya Raman’s Silver Lake home with little besides a whiteboard counting down the number of days until the June 2 primary election.

Raman had jumped into the Los Angeles mayor’s race the day before, right at the Feb. 7 filing deadline. Her campaign didn’t have an office, a bank account, a campaign treasurer, or even a proper website.

It lacked, put simply, “the most basic things,” said Ian Manheimer, Raman’s campaign manager, who joined the team after a 10 p.m. call from Raman the night before the filing deadline. There would be a meeting the next day in Raman’s backyard accessory dwelling unit to get things rolling.

“For anyone who suspected Nithya had designs on this for a long time, you could just come to the ADU and that would dispel those notions,” Manheimer said.

Those unassuming beginnings in Raman’s backyard, with her parents and her husband’s parents taking turns cooking vegetarian Indian lunches for the small staff, evolved into a disciplined campaign that overcame initial struggles to unseat incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, a veteran politician who had racked up endorsements from most of L.A.’s traditional power brokers.

Nithya Raman speaks at a campaign phone bank event at UCLA on May 31.

(Jonathan Alcorn/For The Times)

Raman did it on a hyper-abbreviated timeline by turning out and expanding her base of younger renters, pitching herself successfully to Latino voters, securing late but key endorsements from groups and officials that gave massive support to her campaign’s ground game and by running on a hopeful message about restoring city services against a deeply unpopular mayor.

From the moment she got into the race, there was an evident, yet narrow lane for the progressive, second-term council member to rise to the city’s highest office, but it was far from clear that she would be able to make it through.

For much of the primary, Raman and her campaign were all alone. She had few endorsements, and almost none from elected officials.

Because of her late entry into the race and some past disagreements, she failed to secure the backing of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America for the June 2 primary, even though the left-wing organization endorsed her in both of her council campaigns. Raman got almost no supportive outside spending in the primary, while millions of dollars were spent opposing her.

But Raman had made a name for herself on the City Council as an advocate for tenant rights, and her campaign focused on turning out L.A.’s legions of renters to secure enough of the vote to make the runoff.

She was still a largely unknown entity early on in the race, with 51% of likely voters in a March poll saying they didn’t know enough about Raman to form an opinion of her.

On top of that, Raman was quickly upstaged by Spencer Pratt, the Republican former reality television personality, whose slash-and-burn campaign on social media attacking L.A.’s liberal political establishment dominated news coverage.

While Raman’s camp hadn’t initially worried too much about Pratt, thinking he and entrepreneur Adam Miller would split the more conservative vote in the city, it became clear as the primary went on that Pratt could emerge over Raman as the second candidate in the runoff.

Spencer Pratt, from left, Karen Bass and Nithya Raman take part in a televised debate at the Skirball Cultural Center May 6 during the primary race.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

To dent Pratt’s appeal, the Raman campaign worked to brand him as the MAGA Republican in the nonpartisan race, knowing it would hurt his chances in a deep-blue city like Los Angeles. They chose to try out the line at the only televised mayoral debate.

Raman didn’t miss her chance.

“This is a MAGA Republican’s idea of what Los Angeles looks like,” she said during the NBC4 debate on May 6, referring to Pratt’s sometimes dystopian depiction of L.A. “This is really not the city that I love so much.”

Though Raman’s debate performance was widely panned — and Pratt’s was praised — her team felt she had gotten the point across to Angelenos: With the unpopular Bass almost certain not to win the primary outright, the runoff could either be a contest between two progressive Democrats, or Bass versus a candidate whose views echoed those of President Trump.

That debate was a learning moment for Raman and her campaign.

“She’s up against an extremely seasoned politician and a television star. She’s just a normal person who hasn’t been on stage like that,” Manheimer said.

But defining Pratt as MAGA, the campaign believed, would pull some voters to Raman from lower-performing candidates on the left and in the middle with the hopes of keeping Pratt out of the runoff.

Raman was able to eke out a win against Pratt in the primary, getting 29% of the vote compared to his 26%, with Bass taking first place at 34%.

The sole goal of the primary for Raman’s campaign was, self-evidently, to make it out of the primary.

If her team could move on to the runoff, it would be able to reset — fundraising would restart, it could build a bigger team and it would have a longer runway to increase Raman’s name recognition and build out her base.

While Bass dominated labor and elected official endorsements throughout the race, Raman began to pick up key supporters in the runoff.

In August, the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters endorsed her, sponsoring an independent expenditure group for her called Estamos con Nithya for Mayor 2026.

That was followed by the endorsement from the union Unite Here Local 11, a major player in city politics, which represents hospitality workers at airports and in hotels.

Raman also got major endorsements in the runoff from City Controller Kenneth Mejia and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.

Mejia especially became a pit bull for Raman at events and on social media.

“Kenneth would call every day and say, ‘Let me know what myths I can bust today,’ ” said Tessa Wick, the communications director for Raman’s campaign.

“We didn’t have time to feel particularly lonely in the primary, but once we saw what it felt like to have all these groups and people behind us, each press conference we would do was injecting more force into this movement we were building,” Wick said.

Raman’s bid also got a serious infusion of cash from Aaron Sosnick, a hedge fund manager and bike lane advocate who poured $8 million into two independent expenditure groups to support Raman, making him the single biggest spender in the mayoral campaign.

“He is a cyclist. He just wants to not die riding the streets in L.A.,” said Michael Schneider, who runs Streets for All, a transportation advocacy group that ran one of the independent expenditure groups that Sosnick funded.

Raman also capitalized on a difficult summer for Bass, during which the mayor faced turnover on both her campaign and administration teams, unsheltered homelessness rose citywide (but crucially, went down sharply in Raman’s city council district) and a massive fire burned at a cold-storage food warehouse in Boyle Heights, sending noxious fumes into the heavily Latino, working-class neighborhood.

Nithya Raman, right, reviews notes in Spanish with Lauren Perez-Rangel before an interview at Univision on Oct. 22.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

“Many Latinos saw themselves in the Boyle Heights residents,” said Lauren Perez-Rangel, senior director of Latino outreach for the Raman campaign.

Bass had prevailed in more Latino neighborhoods than any other candidate in the primary. The Raman campaign worked to change that in the runoff, Perez-Rangel said, focusing especially on Latino voters. Raman brushed up on her Spanish and used it frequently at events.

The campaign also teamed up with Latino and Spanish-language content creators to spread Raman’s message of affordability, building more housing and solving the homeless crisis. The result: Raman led Bass among Latino likely voters throughout the runoff campaign, according to polls by UC Berkeley IGS and the L.A. Times.

Despite that growing support, Bass and her allies’ negative portrayal of Raman in attack ads had an effect, as Raman’s unfavorable ratings rose month by month. They framed the council member as too far left, allowing homeless encampments in front of schools and failing to show up for thousands of City Council votes.

“It was a race to define Nithya,” said Jeff Millman, an advisor and spokesperson for Raman’s campaign. “Their strategy was to tear down Nithya. Our job was to make sure that people knew Nithya’s strengths and record of success as a council member.”

As the campaign drew to a climax, Raman improved as a candidate and came off as more confident during the two runoff debates. Her team said she spent many hours improving her debate skills.

“There was no secret weapon, just a person really committed to practicing,” said Wick.

Still, she opened herself up to attacks from Bass’ side during the final debate Oct. 13, after she said the city used to be the “gold standard” of noncooperation with immigration authorities under controversial former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates. Bass hammered Raman over the remark, accusing the council member of romanticizing Gates’ tenure.

Despite that and other missteps during the closing days of the campaign, her team said it was Raman’s insistence on running a largely positive campaign about an optimistic vision of L.A.’s future that pushed her over the finish line.

“She was really dogged that it was a campaign that was hopeful, not nasty and cynical. She wanted the campaign to be a love letter to L.A.,” said Wick.

Nithya Raman embraces her husband, TV writer Vali Chandrasekaran, left, on election night at the Greek Theatre plaza.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

In her election night speech, still trailing Bass by a few percentage points that she would quickly make up, Raman spoke to that vision.

She called it a vision where the people who made L.A. extraordinary could afford to live in the city and where government is responsive and takes responsibility.

“We believed that Angelenos were hungry for that city,” she said. “And it turns out that we were right.”

WASHINGTON — Republicans aren’t holding back.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described last week’s elections as an “extinction-level event” for the GOP. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas likened it to a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Former Vice President Mike Pence called it a “reckoning.”

For all the apocalyptic talk emerging from a midterm that relegated Republicans to their thinnest ranks on Capitol Hill in decades, there’s little agreement on how the party should move forward.

A return to the bedrock fiscal and national security conservatism that defined Republicans under President Reagan risks alienating the more hard-line conservatives welcomed into the party under President Trump under the “Make America Great Again” banner.

But leaning even further into Trump’s coarse brand of politics could lead to more voter rejection.

“We have soul-searching to do,” Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, which spent $810 million to support Republicans, said in an interview. “We need to first understand and honestly admit why we just endured a wipeout of this magnitude. And then we have to regroup and agree to a path forward.”

Questions about Trump’s future role

As has been the case for the last decade, the central question is the role Trump will play in shaping the party’s future. His insistence on loyalty reached a zenith this year as he intervened in GOP primaries and pressed voters to make the elections a referendum on his second term. He held dozens of rallies in the final weeks of the campaign for candidates, most of whom lost their races.

Since Tuesday’s election, he’s refused to acknowledge any responsibility, placing blame on the candidates. His public events have focused on his pet projects in Washington, which have proved unpopular with voters. On Friday, he elevated Stephen Miller, the advisor behind some of his most contentious policies, to White House chief of staff.

In an interview, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, said that the election results were “shocking” but that Trump could still steer the conversation around issues such as immigration. The governor described the GOP’s current dynamic as a natural process for a party whose leader is deep into his second term.

“It just tells you that the American people, after 10 years, they’re pretty much tired of whoever’s in office,” Stitt said. “I think people want a little more stability. They want people to be nice to people, to say, ‘Hey, we’re all Americans.’”

Others were more blunt.

Longtime conservative commentator Tucker Carlson — for many years a Trump acolyte — said the midterms marked “the end of the Trump era.” John Sununu, a Republican who lost his bid for a Senate seat in New Hampshire, blamed Trump.

“It seems like he or his family is in on every transaction and deal that goes on in Washington,” Sununu told John Kasich, a Republican former governor of Ohio and onetime presidential candidate, on SiriusXM. “Those two things, I think, caused people to say, ‘You know, I just can’t vote for a Republican while he’s still in office.’”

Republican infighting likely to intensify

The GOP infighting is poised to intensify quickly.

When Republicans return to Capitol Hill this week, they’ll have to choose between Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio to lead the new minority in the House. They may weigh whether to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. There could also be tough votes on defense spending and keeping the federal government open after Dec. 11.

Already a leadership fight is brewing at the Republican National Committee, where there are early conversations about limiting Trump’s influence in picking the next chair. KC Crosbie, the co-chair, circulated a letter last week calling the midterms a “serious setback” and announcing plans to run for chair at the committee’s January meeting in Arizona.

Trump announced his support Friday for the party’s current chair, Joe Gruters.

That’s to say nothing of the emerging contest for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. Vice President JD Vance, seen as a leading contender, will probably face a broad range of opponents if he enters the race. Stitt is among the Republicans calling for a “big open primary.”

“I don’t think we should crown anybody,” he said.

There will be pressure to revive the coalition of voters, particularly Latinos, who have lifted the party to success in previous elections but swung to Democrats on Tuesday. Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) said he thought Secretary of State Marco Rubio is best positioned to win back Latinos.

“The two main constituencies that Republicans have to quickly regain are white suburban voters and Hispanic voters,” Curbelo said in an interview. “Vance was out on the campaign trail this year, and it doesn’t appear that he was able to move the needle in terms of Hispanic voters.”

A representative for Vance didn’t comment on that characterization.

Broad election fallout

Still, the fallout for the GOP is broad, according to the AP Voter Poll, an expansive survey of about 80,000 voters in all 50 states.

Younger Republican voters who supported the Republican candidate in their House race were less likely to approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, and more likely to say he worsened the economy with his policies.

About two-thirds of Republican voters under 30 said they approved of how Trump was handling the presidency, compared with about 9 in 10 Republican voters age 65 and older. About one-third of younger GOP voters said Trump had worsened the country’s economic conditions, compared with about 2 in 10 older Republican voters.

The war with Iran also appeared to divide Republican voters, with about 6 in 10 Republican voters under 45 saying the U.S. made the right decision in taking military action against Iran. That rose to about 8 in 10 among Republican voters who were 45 and older.

Young Republican voters were more likely to say U.S. support for Israel was “too strong.” Roughly half of Republican voters under 30 said the country’s backing of Israel was “too strong,” compared with about 1 in 10 voters 65 and older.

Despite rosy outlooks from top Republicans including Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the final weeks of the campaign, Republican strategists had long seen the country’s confidence in the party unraveling.

In late August, the Senate Leadership Fund convened a donor retreat in Laguna Beach, where Latcham told the group that Republicans had lost the confidence of voters on handling the cost of living and the economy, according to two Republican Senate campaign sources who attended the event. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

In defeat, Republicans are trying to take a broader view, knowing that it may take several election cycles before they one day return to power.

Rep. Christopher Smith was reelected to his 24th term last week and will soon be New Jersey’s only Republican in Congress. He took a long view on the party’s current struggles.

“The pendulum swings back and forth,” he told reporters. “These are cycles.”

Sloan and Beaumont write for the Associated Press. AP writers Steve Peoples, Kevin Freking and Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on Friday that he has been discharged from the hospital after suffering a stroke last weekend and will miss “several weeks” of votes in the Senate as he recovers in a rehabilitation facility.

Murphy, 53, said in a statement that doctors are “very encouraged by the progress I’ve made so far” and that the stay at the rehabilitation center will get him back to work on the quickest timeline possible.

Murphy said doctors diagnosed him with a small hemorrhagic stroke, which is a bleed in the brain. He said he called 911 on Oct. 31 out of an abundance of caution after feeling that “something was not right” with his body.

“This has been a scary experience for me and my family, and I appreciate the continued respect for our privacy,” he said.

The press release updating Murphy’s condition included a statement from Dr. Jose Suarez, chief of neurosciences critical care at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Suarez said the senator has shown tremendous progress and “we expect that he will make a full recovery following rehabilitation.”

In the Senate, Murphy serves on the Appropriations Committee and is a leading voice on immigration and gun policy. He is considered a contender for more senior leadership positions in the Senate and among the many Democrats seen as potential 2028 candidates for the White House.

Murphy said he has been staying engaged with his team and colleagues remotely and that his staff ensures the work of his office continues uninterrupted.

“I want to extend my deepest thanks to the excellent doctors and staff at Johns Hopkins who have treated me and cared for my family,” Murphy said.

Murphy had been traveling the country in support of House and Senate candidates as his party raced for majority control, which it secured in Tuesday’s midterm elections. A day before the stroke, he posted that he had been campaigning in his home state for Gov. Ned Lamont. The week before, he posted from Minnesota campaigning with Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the Democratic nominee for the Senate.

Lamont won reelection Tuesday, and Flanagan won her race, becoming the first Native American female U.S. senator.

The final sprint before election day capped Murphy’s whirlwind trip to the Middle East at the start of October for meetings with several leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In early September, Murphy completed his annual “walk across Connecticut,” covering about 70 miles over four days, talking with residents about their concerns along the way.

Three other Senate Democrats had strokes in recent years. Sens. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland had strokes in 2022 and have recovered. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman had a stroke while campaigning for his seat that year and now uses adaptive technology in the Senate, including live captioning on a phone or tablet that transcribes words as people speak to him and helps him process the conversation.

Fetterman said on social media the day after Murphy’s stroke that his family was “rooting for Chris and his family for a full and speedy recovery.”

Freking writes for the Associated Press.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog has said he will name a candidate to form the country’s next government by Sunday, after a majority of lawmakers backed opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Herzog made the announcement on Thursday after holding marathon talks with parties elected to the 120-seat parliament, known as the Knesset.

Some 67 lawmakers endorsed Eisenkot, a former military chief, while 46 backed Netanyahu.

In televised remarks at the end of the talks, Herzog said that although the “results of the consultations may appear clear”, there were “mutual vetoes between the blocs and within the blocs themselves” that make it difficult to say who has the best chance of assembling a governing coalition.

He said he would hold “personal talks with some of the party leaders” over the Israeli weekend, which runs Friday-Saturday, and make a pick on Sunday.

Israel’s October 27 election left neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot with a clear path to a parliamentary majority, handing Herzog the difficult task of choosing a candidate in a deeply divided country.

Netanyahu’s Likud won the most seats of any single party with 27 in the 120-seat Knesset, ⁠but his wider religious-nationalist coalition garnered only 53 in total.

Eisenkot’s alliance of four Jewish-led parties, which spans the political spectrum from centre-left to right, won 48 seats despite polls that had predicted a close race.

Two parties representing Israel’s Palestinian minority won an unprecedented 19 seats.

Eisenkot, like Netanyahu, has ruled out forming a government with the Arab-led parties. Both of those parties nonetheless recommended him, giving him the support of a comfortable majority of lawmakers.

“We want to do things that we did not do in the past in order to remove this criminal government,” Ahmad Tibi, a senior member of the Joint List, which represents an alliance of Arab parties, told The Associated Press news agency.

Eisenkot’s party, Yashar, said his 67 recommendations were the most any candidate had received since 2015, and urged Herzog to give him the mandate “as soon as possible” so he could form a national emergency government.

Separately, Netanyahu suffered a setback on Thursday when United Torah Judaism, one of the two main ultra-Orthodox parties and a longtime ally, declined to recommend any candidate.

The party broke with Netanyahu over his coalition’s failure to pass legislation exempting ultra-Orthodox men from military service, The Times of Israel reported.

Yariv Oppenheimer, a member of the Democrats, a party in Eisenkot’s alliance, told Al Jazeera that he saw “no reason” Herzog would not choose Eisenkot on Sunday.

He said United Torah Judaism had signalled that its support was available for the right price, meaning that a good enough offer from Eisenkot could give him the numbers he needed.

“It’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t have a chance to establish a government at all,” he added.

Once nominated by Herzog, the candidate will have 28 days to try to forge a government, with a possible 14-day extension.

Netanyahu will remain prime minister in a caretaker government until a new coalition is formed, or through another election that must be held if no ⁠candidate succeeds.

Netanyahu, at risk of losing power, has seized on an investigation by election officials into possible vote tampering to cast doubt on the results, accusing Arab-led parties of stealing the vote.

Critics accuse Netanyahu and his partners of trying to undermine the results, which he denies.

Israel’s Central Election Committee said on ‌Wednesday that the election’s integrity had not been compromised. The head of the committee, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, has called on Israel’s elected officials to protect public trust rather than shake it.

“This is a real danger. One of the foundations of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power,” Sohlberg ‌told ‌Herzog at his residence on Wednesday. High voter turnout, including among the Arab minority, was a blessing, he said.

Netanyahu’s allies on the far-right, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have called for the immediate arrest and interrogation of Arab party leaders.

Jose Ugarte was ahead of Estuardo Mazariegos in the race for District 9 on the Los Angeles City Council, while in District 3, Barri Worth Girvan and Tim Gaspar were nearly even, according to early returns Tuesday night.

The current council members in both districts — Bob Blumenfield in District 3 and Curren Price in District 9 — are leaving office because of term limits.

From his campaign headquarters in South L.A., Ugarte did not declare victory but said he felt confident he could hang on to the lead. Supporters watched on a big screen as live results rolled in from the county registrar’s website.

“This means everything to me,” Ugarte said. “I’m looking forward to hitting the ground running. There’s a lot of work to be done in the district.”

District 9 has for decades been represented by a Black council member. Both men vying to replace Price are Latino immigrants, reflecting demographic changes in a district that is nearly 80% Latino and that includes the Convention Center and USC.

Despite the shift in representation, both Ugarte and Mazariegos have said they are committed to ensuring Black residents are heard and represented. The 9th District is the poorest in the city and residents face an array of challenges, including homelessness, safety and street cleanliness, according to the candidates.

Mazariegos, who attended a campaign party at Paseo San Miguel, a Salvadoran restaurant, remained optimistic, saying the early returns “show us that when you show up for the community, they show up for you.”

“We still have a lot of votes to count but already you can see the impact of our campaign, increased youth turnout, and so much optimism at the polls,” he said in a statement.

Jose Ugarte at the South L.A. Wetlands Park on Aug. 12.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Ugarte is a former deputy chief of staff for Price, and Mazariegos is co-director of the L.A. chapter of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. The most recent campaign finance reports show Ugarte raising $1.1 million in contributions and matching funds, and Mazariegos with about $787,000.

Ugarte’s campaign also has received major outside support through independent expenditure committees, which have no contribution limit but aren’t allowed to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. His campaign has received more than $2.3 million in independent expenditure support, with funds coming from Airbnb, Uber, the California Apartment Assn. and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, which represents workers at the Department of Water and Power.

Estuardo Mazariegos at Los Angeles City Hall on March 17.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Mazariegos, who is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter, also has received support through several groups running independent expenditure campaigns on his behalf, including United Teachers Los Angeles and the Progressive Era PAC. Special interest groups have spent more than $250,000 supporting his campaign.

Gaspar and Worth Girvan are competing in a west San Fernando Valley district that includes Woodland Hills, Reseda and Canoga Park.

Tim Gaspar outside the Lucky Strike Bowling Alley in Woodland Hills.

(Arwen Clemans / Los Angeles Times)

At a Woodland Hills watch party, Worth Girvan said she was feeling confident about the early returns, which showed her nearly tied with Gaspar.

“I’m extremely full of gratitude,” she said at the Local Peasant restaurant. “For me, it’s always been about the people of the west Valley and making sure we have a voice.”

In a statement, Gaspar said he was encouraged by the early results and the momentum behind his campaign.

“We saw and heard it everyday on the campaign trail,” he said. “The West Valley showed up to have their voices heard on safety, homelessness, and the cost of living. We look forward to the final votes to be counted.”

Gaspar founded an eponymous insurance company in the Valley in 2008, selling it in 2021. He has said he intends to bring a pro-business perspective to City Hall.

Worth Girvan is a longtime public employee. Prior to running, she was L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s district director for three years, and has said that she would leverage her years of experience in the public sector to advocate for the district in City Hall.

Gaspar has outraised Worth Girvan, raising about $1.3 million of individual contributions and matching funds. Worth Girvan raised about $753,000.

Barri Worth Girvan chats wth LAPD Capt. Rudy Lopez during a neighborhood National Night Out event in Canoga Park’s Lanark Park on Aug. 4.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The race also has received interest from outside groups, with Gaspar’s campaign receiving more than $2.7 million in independent expenditure spending. During the runoff, special interest groups, including IBEW Local 18, the California Apartment Assn. and Uber, were among those that spent a combined $1.3 million supporting his candidacy.

Worth Girvan received about $438,000 in outside contributions during the runoff, with funding mostly from labor unions.

Marissa Roy is on track to become Los Angeles’ next city attorney after jumping out to a significant lead over L.A. County prosecutor John McKinney based on early returns.

Roy, 34, a deputy state attorney general, campaigned on a promise to convert the city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm,” vowing to champion renters and defend Angelenos from an increasingly hostile White House.

Roy, a coalition-builder, had long been the favorite in the race, leading McKinney by double digits in polls leading up to Tuesday. She won the June primary with more than 40% of the vote.

Roy and McKinney’s head-to-head race came after voters and powerful city unions turned on the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto, whose June primary defeat marked the first time a sitting L.A. elected official failed to advance to a general election in nearly a century.

Supporters at Roy’s watch party at the downtown Audio Graph brewery erupted in cheers when the first batch of results dropped, showing Roy doubling up McKinney’s early vote total. The mood was ebullient as the first batch of returns trickled in, buoyed by dramatic wins for Democrats across the country and a better than expected early lead for their candidate.

Roy arrived around 9 p.m. in a plum-colored dress, her arms stacked with bangles that rang as she embraced supporters and took the stage.

“I was planning on hedging and saying, ‘It looks like we’re winning,’ but I think we won!” Roy told the crowd to whoops and cheers.

Roy ran to the left of her opponent and tried to paint him as the preferred choice of Republicans in L.A. County. McKinney is a lifelong Democrat and has been critical of President Trump.

At Hill Street bar, close to the downtown criminal courthouse where McKinney has built his career, supporters swayed to smooth jazz and Top 40 radio hits, nursing cocktails and betraying no reaction to the dismal early returns.

In a brief interview outside the bar, McKinney remained positive and said he always knew he faced an uphill battle. He announced his candidacy long after Roy and Feldstein Soto began their campaigns, yet still surged to a surprise second-place finish in June. He said he was proud he was able to inject discussion of public safety issues and real strategies for solving homelessness into the race.

“I got into this race nine months ago because the people of Los Angeles deserve better,” he said.

Although he said he had “no bitterness” toward Roy and wished her the best of luck, he did express disappointment at the efforts her campaign and some of her supporters took to incorrectly paint him as a conservative.

“I just felt that it was very misleading … it’s not a political position. It’s not a partisan position,” he said.

The candidates were a study in contrasts: Roy is a stylish progressive with savvy social media campaign videos, while McKinney is a stoic law-and-order-type. They also offered voters starkly different plans for leading the city attorney’s office.

A core part of the California Department of Justice legal team that won a historic $17-billion settlement from Meta this summer, Roy ran as a champion of the average Angeleno, promising to hold corporations and landlords accountable for misconduct. A Yale-educated lawyer, she positioned herself as the only candidate who would stand up to Trump administration policies that have harmed Los Angeles.

McKinney, who often noted he has been a lawyer nearly as long as Roy has been alive, leaned on his nearly unblemished record prosecuting some of the region’s most notorious and violent crimes and his compelling personal history. Orphaned at 5, he was raised by an older sister in a household where money was extremely tight and found himself painting houses just to afford college classes. In a 28-year career as an L.A. County prosecutor, McKinney won convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including the murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle.

The veteran prosecutor promised to focus his energy on reducing homelessness and improving public safety through misdemeanors he believed the prior administration under-enforced, including street racing and animal abuse on Skid Row. He also vowed to conduct more aggressive reviews of the way nonprofits that do business with the city spend funds meant to aid unhoused citizens.

Although they aligned in few places, both Roy and McKinney said they would work to bring down the city’s out-of-control legal costs. That figure exploded to nearly $300 million in city payouts last year.

Roy was supported by the L.A. County Democratic Party, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). McKinney was backed by a coalition of law enforcement unions, four former city attorneys and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman.

Today’s the day, and the race is a dead heat: The final poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (cosponsored by The Times) found that 40% of likely L.A. voters said they supported incumbent Karen Bass, while another 40% supported progressive challenger Nithya Raman for L.A. mayor.

That leaves 19% undecided — and it might be those voters that celebrities are trying to reach with their recent endorsements. Jane Fonda, Yvette Nicole Brown, Anthony Anderson, Cedric the Entertainer, Samuel L. Jackson, Kym Whitley, D.L. Hughley, Dustin Lance Black, George Lopez and Stevie Wonder have all voiced public support for Bass. Meanwhile Bob Odenkirk, Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott, Joel Kim Booster, Caleb Hearon, Poppy Liu, P. J. Byrne, Adam Conover, Brennan Lee Mulligan and Jaboukie Young-White have done the same for Raman.

“Battling the nationwide homeless epidemic is the hardest job in American government,” Jackson said. “Karen Bass walked toward it in one day. Her opponent chaired the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and canceled meetings on it. It’s easy to run a pilot in one district and call it a model. Try doing it in 15 districts with Washington cutting your funding while the whole country watches. That’s the job, and Karen Bass has done it.”

In the other camp, Kaling said: “There’s one issue that I can speak to from experience: Keeping Hollywood jobs in Los Angeles. Yes, it’s actors and directors, but I’m also talking about the crew, electricians, grips, hair and makeup artists, drivers, set builders, editors — and then there’s the restaurants, the dry cleaners and the small businesses that depend on productions being here. And Nithya’s plan is to fight for that work to stay in town. She wants stronger, dependable state tax incentives, and a film office that actively works to keep production in town.”

There have also been a few gray areas: Bass posted a video of drag queen Trixie Mattel‘s voting PSA to her account, but Mattel didn’t explicitly endorse her as a candidate. “I watch, like, 18 hours of news a day, so it was kind of crazy sitting next to Karen; she’s like my third roommate in my house,” Mattel said. “So shout out to Karen.”

Luxury real estate broker Jason Oppenheim, best known for his role on the reality series “Selling Sunset,” had a discussion with Raman, cross-posted to both of their accounts, and also interviewed her on Graham Stephan’s podcast, “The Iced Coffee Hour.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly held an off-the-record meeting with Raman and figures from Hollywood and other industries at his L.A. office.

Bass’ supporters rolled out a series of coordinated, collaborative videos from her social media accounts somewhat regularly over the past two weeks, several with matching formatting (including Fonda, Anderson, Cedric, Hughley and Lopez). Some of the videos also featured Bass.

In the most-liked celebrity endorsement included here, posted Monday, Lopez said: “Karen Bass is like that tía that shows up with a huge pot of pozole before anybody’s even hungry. She’s gonna keep fighting for us, but también we have to fight for her.”

Raman’s campaign, on the other hand, had a more organic approach, incorporating celebrities into specific events, like National Coming Out Day with Booster (and the drag queen Pickle), “Dungeons & Dragons for the City” fundraiser with gamemaster Brennan Lee Mulligan and an Election Eve Party with Young-White (and comedians Kiran Deol, Jared Goldstein and Brittani Nichols).

Hearon shouted her out while hosting Chappell Roan’s Super Graphic Spectacular fundraiser for the singer’s Midwest Princess Project supporting trans youth and LGBTQ+ communities, and Byrne posted an Instagram story with his son after casting his ballot for Raman.

Raman’s most-liked celebrity endorsement included here was not cross-posted to her account, but rather came from Mulligan’s own get-out-the-vote video. “I am supporting Nithya Raman for mayor in Los Angeles, Marissa Roy for city attorney,” he said with an “I Voted” sticker on his forehead. “And I would say this as well: There’s great candidates all over the country.”

Other celebrities simply encouraged fans to fulfill their civic duty and vote without backing any candidates, while others focused on the California gubernatorial election and key Senate races.

WASHINGTON — Control of Congress hangs in the balance as Americans head to the polls Tuesday to vote in a historic set of midterm elections that will determine how power is divided for the rest of President Trump’s time in office.

A robust turnout appeared possible, after months of polls suggesting voters’ frustration with cost-of-living issues may drive them to the polls. More than 59 million Americans had already cast ballots in early voting, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.

The campaign has largely been marked by Democrats’ unexpected traction in red states, resulting in Senate races that have been far more competitive than anticipated. Whether that translates into losses for Republicans could become a nail-biter Tuesday night.

Polling shows Democrats poised to make significant gains in the U.S. House and well-positioned for swing Senate races, but analysts say the Senate majority could go either way. Several gubernatorial seats are also open, and some contests have become unexpectedly close, including in Georgia, Kansas, Texas and Florida.

Eyes will be on a handful of bellwether House races as the polls begin closing, with a Kentucky district expected to be the first to offer clues as to how good a night it may be for Democrats.

For weeks, the midterms have appeared poised to deliver a referendum on Trump’s second term and the state of the economy. Americans’ approval of the president has sunk to historic lows as they have cited concerns about affordability, corruption and immigration as driving factors for their votes.

On Monday and over the weekend, candidates made their final pushes to persuade voters.

Democrats, hoping to clench voter support for a “blue wave,” hammered home their arguments about affordability, corruption and the perceived toll of Trump’s governance, aiming to sway non-Democratic voters.

“This election is a battle between the powers that be and the powers that ought to be,” Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico of Texas said at a Sunday night rally. “We are standing with the powers that ought to be — the teachers and the nurses, the farmers and the ranchers, the grandmother who is facing eviction.”

Republicans, anticipating losses in the House, focused on delivering dire warnings to voters about Democratic candidates, whom they have portrayed throughout the campaign as extreme, dangerous and in some cases a threat to the American way of life.

“This race is about defending our state and our country, but it’s also about safeguarding our way of life,” Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate, said Sunday. “Texas has never been this close to slipping away. We’ve never been this close to losing everything that we hold dear — our jobs, our livelihoods, our way of life.”

As voters cast ballots Tuesday, the Justice Department’s election monitors fanned out at polling sites across the country. Thousands of volunteers nationwide were also mobilized to be poll monitors, a backlash to the idea of potential federal election interference.

Trump sent out a flurry of last-minute social media endorsements for Republican congressional candidates and called in to the “Fox and Friends” show to make a final case. Democratic candidates dropped last-minute ads urging voters to head to the polls.

This article will be updated.

Nov. 1, 2026 11:10 AM PT

JUNEAU, Alaska — A federal judge on Sunday dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses.

Sullivan, an ally of President Trump, faces Democratic former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in one of the country’s most closely watched races, with Senate control at stake. Tuesday’s ranked-choice election also includes two candidates who have done little campaigning, one of whom shares the incumbent’s name.

The lawsuit, filed less than two weeks before the election and with early voting underway, called for an investigation into whether votes for retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan were intended for the senator. The state said the case lacked merit and argued there would be no way to determine that without violating voter privacy.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason wrote in the order that the relief the United States seeks is “infeasible” because many voters have already cast their ballots. She said the cast ballots have been mixed together to the point where they cannot be matched to specific voters.

“More fundamentally, the United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified ‘investigation’ of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy,” she wrote.

Attorneys for the Republican-led state government, Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee argued that the case lacked any legal basis and amounted to interference. The senator and his allies, including Trump, for months have portrayed Dan J. Sullivan as a sham candidate intent on confusing voters and helping Peltola.

In the week before election day, the New York Times reported that Peltola’s campaign was involved in efforts to recruit the challenger Sullivan. Dan J. Sullivan in June, shortly after entering the race, said he’d had no contact with the campaign about running. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Peltola’s campaign responded by saying the campaign “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign” — a statement similar to one it released after Dan J. Sullivan launched his bid.

“I am not interested in tricking voters,” she said during a recent campaign event.

State courts, including the Alaska Supreme Court, rejected Republican-backed efforts to block the retired teacher from the August open primary ballot on which he appeared as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party affiliation. The senator was listed as Dan S. Sullivan, Republican and incumbent.

Both Sullivans appear the same way on the general election ballot. Peltola placed first in the primary, followed by the senator. Dan J. Sullivan received about 2.5% of the primary vote, but that was enough to finish within the top four and qualify for the Nov. 3 ranked-choice election.

Attorneys for the Alaska Department of Law, led by Republican acting Atty. Gen. Cori Mills, represented state elections officials in the case and asked Gleason, who was appointed by President Obama, to toss the lawsuit. They filed a scathing response to the federal government’s complaint, calling it “meritless.”

Alaska also said the state had taken “significant steps” to distinguish the two Sullivans on the ballot. Voters who still might be confused could ask for help or look up candidate biographies and other information in state-distributed election pamphlets.

Gleason wrote that the administration’s attempt to block certification ran counter to the Constitution, which gives states the authority to run elections. She also cited the Supreme Court’s Purcell principle, which holds that federal courts should generally not change election rules too close to an election.

Alaska’s ranked voting system also offers a solution to possible confusion, the state wrote, allowing voters to rank the Sullivans as first and second choices, if they choose.

“That way, if the voter’s first-ranked Sullivan is eliminated, his vote would transfer to the other Sullivan,” attorneys Rachel Witty, Margaret Paton Walsh and Laura Fox wrote. “The voter’s vote would not ‘be transferred to Peltola’ as the complaint asserts, unless the voter chose to rank Peltola as his next choice instead of the other Sullivan.”

Trump for years has railed against Alaska’s use of ranked-choice voting in general elections. Republican state leaders have said that while they don’t like ranked voting, they want voters to “rank every Republican” candidate on this year’s ballot, especially with a high-stakes governor’s race featuring one Democrat and three Republicans.

On Thursday, the Justice Department escalated a criminal investigation over the same-named candidates on the Alaska ballot, issuing a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press. The FBI also has begun contacting people who donated to Dan J. Sullivan, some of whom told the AP that the agents were asking if they had been misled about which candidate they were supporting.

Riccardi and Bohrer write for the Associated Press. AP photographer Lindsey Wasson in Anchorage contributed to this report.

The race for L.A. city attorney delivered a shock this spring when incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto was ousted, an upset the likes of which hadn’t happened in nearly a century. The pair of candidates who remain have since laid out their widely differing visions of the job.

Here’s what you need to know.

The candidates

• John McKinney is an L.A. County deputy district attorney with nearly 30 years of legal experience. He vows to clean up what he calls a blighted downtown and work closely with his boss and backer, Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman, to reduce crime in the city.
• Marissa Roy is a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice. She plans to use the office to fight for tenant and wage workers. Her vision of the city attorney is to be the “people’s lawyer” for L.A.

In their own words

Here are the Q&As with each of the candidates.

State of the race

Roy is leading in the race to become the next Los Angeles city attorney. She was ahead by 10 percentage points in the most recent poll conducted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times.

Still, some local voters don’t know the candidates by name.

Issues

Criminal justice

• McKinney is focusing his campaign on tamping down quality-of-life crimes in the city such as organized retail theft, drug dealing and street racing. McKinney would prioritize public safety and vows to go after demonstrators who block freeways or engage in conduct similar to the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments on UCLA’s campus.
• Roy wants to funnel nonviolent offenders to diversion programs such as mental health treatment or vocational training.

Hefty legal payouts

• McKinney said he’d lean on his long experience as a trial attorney to quickly decide which incoming lawsuits against the city should be fought and which should be settled in order to reduce the city’s legal costs.
• Roy wants to bring civil litigation back in-house to rein in the millions spent on outside counsel. She also argues for beefing up the claims process so legitimate suits are settled effectively and frivolous ones are fought.

How each candidate would handle Trump

• McKinney would work to balance respecting federal authority as required by law against protecting the constitutional rights of city residents and defending local resources if threatened by federal overreach.
• Roy has made fighting the Trump administration a centerpiece in her campaign.

Homelessness

• McKinney wants to use the court system as a “last resort” to leverage people into accepting services or shelter.
• Roy says renter protections will be vital to stemming the city’s homeless crisis.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is escalating a criminal investigation over an Alaska Senate candidate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, issuing a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press on Thursday.

Subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony or documents, along with records preservation demands, were issued after the New York Times reported that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan Jr. as part an alleged effort to confuse voters in the highly competitive race.

More subpoenas were expected to be sent Thursday, according to a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe. Neither the recipients of the subpoenas nor the number of them were immediately clear.

The Justice Department for months has been looking into allegations that Dan J. Sullivan Jr. entered the race to siphon votes from the incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.

The potential targets of the Justice Department’s investigation are unclear, but President Trump earlier this week called for the criminal prosecution of Peltola and her campaign.

The new subpoenas were confirmed by a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe.

Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche in a Fox News interview on Wednesday said he wouldn’t discuss any criminal investigations but accused Democrats of “cheating.”

“They are trying to take votes away from the incumbent, not by running an election, not by running on issues, but by putting up a person with the same name,” Blanche said.

The race is among a handful of Senate contests this year expected to determine control of the chamber. Trump had previously directed his Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the Senate race should Peltola defeat Sen. Sullivan.

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

Separately, Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered an investigation into Peltola, saying the newspaper’s reporting “reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates — including one with the same name as an incumbent U.S. Senator — to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes.”

“Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” Dunleavy added, noting that the reporting “substantially supports” earlier findings by the state’s elections board into the matter.

Trump on Thursday cast doubt on whether Peltola would be seated in the Senate even if she won the election. “Well, you’re going to have to see what happens,” the president told reporters on his way to a rally in South Carolina. “It’s hard to believe that she could even be allowed to run.”

Later, as he rallied for GOP Sen. Darline Graham, Trump said he felt Peltola “actually should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.”

Peltola’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a message Thursday seeking comment on Dunleavy’s order. But during a campaign stop in Soldotna, Peltola, a former congresswoman, suggested the Times’ report was a “distraction” from issues such as Sen. Sullivan’s support of the war in Iran.

“This is just another distraction. It’s another diversion,” she said in a video posted online. “This is all stuff to sell newspapers. This is all stuff to get subscriptions.”

And the situation in Alaska isn’t that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on ballots to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.

In Ohio’s Senate race, Republicans have been tied to an effort to boost a socialist on the ballot who would pull votes from the Democratic candidate challenging Sen. Jon Husted.

On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance didn’t go as far as Trump did in calling for Peltola to be prosecuted but said he supported a probe into possible election fraud.

“I mean, she is a person who, for months now, has pretended that she has had nothing to do with the fact that they have put a fraudulent person, a person explicitly designed to confuse Alaska voters, on the ballot,” Vance told reporters ahead of a campaign trip to Texas. “She is trying to steal a Senate seat from the voters of Alaska, and it’s disgraceful.”

Earlier this year, a top state elections official ruled Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher in the small fishing community of Petersburg, ineligible for the primary ballot, concluding that his declaration of candidacy was filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

The case went to the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled he was qualified to run. Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent” on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” will not have a party affiliation.

The New York Times reported that interviews, text messages and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit showed Peltola’s team aimed to coax candidates into the race, with the aim of splitting support for the GOP senator.

Asked about the reporting on Wednesday, Trump told journalists, “I think they should be prosecuted.” He earlier had posted on social media that “Peltola should suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done.”

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Black women see the attacks as loaded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans say Atlanta ‘burned’ in Bottoms’ tenure

Other conservatives have gone further than Jackson.

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

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

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

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

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

Bottoms counters with a more complicated reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 28, 2026 11:15 AM PT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rep. Jimmy Gomez’s reelection bid, once helped by his high-profile fight against President Trump’s immigration policies, is in peril as he tries to recover from allegations of sexual misconduct.

The accusations, which Gomez denies, have left the 51-year-old Eagle Rock Democrat vulnerable to an upstart challenger from Highland Park who earned a reputation for antagonism while serving on the area’s neighborhood council.

Angela Gonzales-Torres, 31, is seizing on Gomez’s issues in the race to represent California’s 34th Congressional District, a Latino-majority territory spanning Koreatown, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Glassell Park and adjacent neighborhoods.

Gonzales-Torres, who has worked part-time jobs as an academic counselor for formerly incarcerated students and at an affordable housing development, is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and counts support from other national progressive organizations.

Over the last week, she campaigned at UC Berkeley alongside fellow progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), appeared on left-wing streamer Hasan Piker’s show and rallied in Los Angeles with Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor and activist David Hogg.

Gonzales-Torres has linked the accusation against Gomez to the politician’s onetime ally former Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Bay Area Democrat who saw his campaign for governor derailed when several women came forward with allegations of impropriety. Swalwell has also denied wrongdoing.

“We’re going to take on this apparent culture in Congress in which men appear to abuse their positions of power and abuse women and younger staffers,” she said on Piker’s show.

In August, attorneys representing a woman released a statement accusing Gomez of sexual assault. Days earlier, the House Ethics Committee had announced an inquiry into Gomez, elected in 2017, over alleged “inappropriate sexual contact with a House staffer.”

Gomez denied wrongdoing while acknowledging mistakes outside his marriage — a sharp contrast with his image as the lawmaker who founded the Congressional Dads Caucus to champion family-friendly policies and famously carried his infant son in a baby carrier during the protracted votes for House speaker in 2023.

Gomez has avoided the public eye since the accusations surfaced, declining media interviews and campaign appearances, giving further momentum to his opponent.

“They’re trying to fly so far under the radar to not bring attention to the [allegations] or to me,” Gonzales-Torres said during a get-out-the-vote event in Eagle Rock.

Gonzales-Torres’ history in Highland Park

Gonzales-Torres, who graduated from UCLA, has described a childhood in Highland Park, where she was raised by her mother after her father was deported to Mexico following a domestic violence charge.

Reflecting the anxieties of thirtysomethings like herself, she’s talked about going without health insurance, working multiple low-wage jobs and questioning whether she can afford children.

In 2023, she was elected to the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, on which she served two years advising City Hall on issues and policy matters. She opposed new liquor licenses and took stances against gentrification, a hot-button issue in Highland Park, where some longtime business owners and residents feel squeezed by rising rents.

Her year as president on the area council proved contentious, prompting several former colleagues to issue a statement Saturday criticizing her congressional bid.

Jens Jonasson, a member of the neighborhood council’s board of directors, characterized her tenure as chaotic, arguing that her unwillingness to compromise derailed board initiatives, including a proposed resolution supporting the Gaza Strip.

“She is not ready for the office she is asking voters to entrust to her,” Jonasson and three other board members said in the joint statement.

Darren Gold, who succeeded Gonzales-Torres as board president, alleged that she falsely accused him of shaking her. Gold was briefly removed from the board during an inquiry but reinstated after a city investigation.

In a 2024 podcast interview with Hear in L.A., Gonzales-Torres referred to Gold as a “very Zionist gentrifier man, a white man” and a “threat to my community.”

Gold told The Times he had never publicly staked out a position on Israel or Gaza.

“If she assigned me that label because I’m Jewish, that is antisemitic,” Gold said. “My concern is less about what she called me than whether she can turn her rhetoric into results and treat people respectfully when they disagree with her.”

Another board member, Caroline Aguirre, filed a police report in 2024 accusing Gonzales-Torres of aggressively pointing a finger at her during a meeting. The report did not result in an arrest or charges.

Gonzales-Torres declined to comment on the incidents involving Aguirre and Gold.

In 2025, Gonzales-Torres mounted a bid for one of 13 at-large neighborhood council seats, finishing last in a field of 23.

Her supporters pointed to her dedication to Highland Park and the work she’d done to help previously incarcerated youths.

Jesse Rosas, a Figueroa corridor business leader, echoed her concerns about neighborhood displacement and wants a representative more involved in the area.

“She’s a young lady who can bring change to the community for the better,” Rosas said. “I’ve seen her trying to do the best that she can.”

State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Pasadena-area Democrat who met Gonzales-Torres through her work as an academic counselor, said she’s impressed with her interest in challenging federal immigration laws.

“She’s had a firsthand account into some of the way that the immigration raids are directly impacting our students,” Pérez said.

Gomez runs on anti-Trump record

Despite the abuse allegations, Gomez has the power of incumbency and name recognition in a vast and diverse district.

A spokesperson pointed to his lawsuit challenging the Trump administration over access to immigrant detention centers as well as his advocacy for tenant protections and affordable housing.

If reelected, Gomez said in a statement, he aims to reverse federal healthcare cuts, lower living costs for working families and push for an end to the Iran war.

“Anyone can promise to stand up to Donald Trump, but I’ve proven I can take him on and win, whether it’s in Congress, on the picket lines, or in the courts,” Gomez said.

Both candidates back progressive priorities such as a Green New Deal and Medicare for all. Gomez advocates redirecting funding away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Gonzales-Torres calls for abolishing ICE.

Gonzales-Torres is also criticizing Gomez for receiving financial support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. An AIPAC-affiliated political action committee spent more than $1.7 million supporting his 2024 campaign, and the group helped direct donations this cycle.

For some voters in the district, neither candidate is ideal.

Ray Rios, president of the Hillside Homeowners Assn. in El Sereno, wants to see more from Gomez when it comes to federal funding for the district. He also voiced skepticism over the DSA’s anti-policing platform and questioned whether Gonzales-Torres can build the institutional relationships needed to deliver federal resources.

“Her lack of experience is a consideration, a big consideration,” said Rios, who intends to vote for Gomez.

While Gomez beat back progressive challengers in recent election cycles, the local DSA chapter has built momentum across the district, winning City Council seats, noted Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

“Even without the allegations, this would be a competitive race,” Guerra said. “Then you add that, and that really hurts him.”

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman’s campaign team has filed a complaint with the city Ethics Commission against an outside group backing Mayor Karen Bass, claiming its social media campaign promotes an interactive AI phone line with a voice falsely identified as that of Nithya Raman.

The ads, paid for by Thrive LA, are styled as real estate advertisements for a fictitious “Nithya Raman Realty.” Some show an image of Raman holding a tent, with the slogan “Keeping Tents on Our Streets.”

The ads are intended to promote the idea that Raman isn’t tough on homeless encampments, which Raman says misrepresents her position. People who call the number get a Raman sound-alike saying “We’re bringing tent communities to your block. Would you prefer them outside your children’s school, the library, or right outside your home?”

Raman’s campaign claims that Thrive LA broke campaign rules by failing to report the AI phone system on required campaign spending forms, and imitating Raman’s voice without stating who paid for it. Not disclosing that it’s an ad could lead voters to believe the AI voice is actually Raman, according to the complaint.

Ana Teresa Dahan, the executive director of Thrive LA, called the complaint “false and absurd” and added that the organization’s ad spending has been properly disclosed. She said the satire ads are protected political speech and abide by campaign finance rules. The advocacy group will continue running ads until Election Day, she said.

“Nithya Raman wants to run the second-largest city in America, and she can’t handle a parody phone number. Imagine how she’d handle a budget crisis, or a wildfire,” Dahan said. “The only real complaint here is the one Angelenos have about her record.”

Thrive LA defines itself as a centrist political advocacy group backed by business and community leaders. The group also received backlash over anti-Raman ads its ran during her 2024 reelection campaign for councilmember.

How to address the city’s homelessness crisis has been a central issue in the Nov. 3 election between incumbent Bass and challenger Raman, a City Councilmember. Raman has voted against imposing no-camping zones proposed by other City Councilmembers in their districts, but has said she would not oppose such zones if elected mayor.

Raman says she is committed to ending homelessness, but the city has gone about it the wrong way and that no-camping zones just push the problem from one neighborhood to another.

Bass made homelessness a central focus of her first term as mayor and launched Inside Safe to move people into hotels, motels and other interim housing. Unsheltered homelessness decreased for the first two years, but the latest homeless count showed the numbers are growing once again.

The anti-Raman ads, posted on Instagram, show videos of a recreational vehicle driving around L.A. On the vehicle are posters featuring Raman. One shows her pointing toward a large arrow labeled “Designated Poop Zone” next to the words “Coming to a Neighborhood Near You!” One poster includes a phone number that leads to the AI phone line.

The AI-generated voice carries a live conversation with the caller, and doesn’t clarify it’s not a real person unless prompted. When asked by The Times if the phone is being answered by Raman, the AI bot said, “I’m a fictional AI. I’m as imaginary as my campaign promises.”

The advertisement violates state law that prohibits the distribution of digitally fabricated audio of a candidate within 30 days of an election, according to the complaint.

“It’s both sad and illegal for Karen Bass’ conservative allies to be cloning Nithya’s voice, manufacturing her words, and hiding who is paying for it, all to deceive voters,” Liz Garcia, spokesperson for Raman’s campaign, said in a press release. “These are desperate tactics from corporate interests determined to keep their grip on City Hall.

The city’s Ethics Commission didn’t immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Independent expenditure committee that support political candidates have increasingly come under question. These groups can raised unlimited amounts of campaign donations but cannot coordinate its activities with the candidate.

Any audio communication for an independent expenditure group must clearly state that it’s a political ad at the beginning or end of the audio, according to the city’s campaign rules. When inquired by The Times on Monday morning, the AI bot did state the ad was paid for by Thrive LA, uses artificial intelligence and isn’t coordinated with a city candidate or committee.

In audio recordings included in the complaint, the AI bot said that it couldn’t disclose who paid for the line when asked by callers.

Some small business owners in Raman’s district have said they’ve battled homeless encampments and public safety issues without support from Raman’s office.

Even so, homelessness in Raman’s district dropped by 49% this year, and the candidate says that if elected she aims to deliver those same results citywide.

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.

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.

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.

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.”