candidates

A wealthy young Silicon Valley venture capitalist hopes to recruit statewide and congressional candidates and launch an affordable-housing ballot measure in 2018 because he says California’s leaders are failing to address flaws in the state’s governance that are killing opportunities for future generations.

Sam Altman, 32, said in May that he was considering a run for governor. But he said in an interview with The Times this week that he has no plans to run for office — at the moment — and will instead roll out an effort Wednesday to enlist candidates around a shared set of policy priorities — including tackling how automation is going to affect the economy and the cost of housing in California — and is willing to put his own money behind the effort.

“I think we have a fundamental breakdown of the American social contract and it’s desperately important that we fix it,” he said. “Even if we had a very well-functioning government, it would be a challenge, and our current government functions so badly it is an extra challenge.”

Altman is the president of Y Combinator, a technology incubator that has provided start-up funding to hundreds of Silicon Valley companies, notably Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe. He first made his mark by co-founding a social media app called Loopt when he was 19 that later sold for $43 million.

He said he hopes to recruit a slate of four candidates to run for office — possibly for governor, lieutenant governor, mayor of a major city in California and Congress — and could provide technology platforms and seed money for their campaigns.

Though Altman said he is not specifically targeting Democratic politicians, he made clear he is not happy with incumbents such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein or the current gubernatorial field, which includes Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“I’m not satisfied with the current choices,” Altman said. “I don’t want to make this about dumping on specific people, [but] I don’t think any of the current candidates are the best we could do.”

He would not be the first wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur to try to shake up California politics based on his tech resume. Among them are former eBay chief Meg Whitman, who spent $144 million of her own money on an unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2010, and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, who ran for Senate in 2010 before running for president in 2016.

In recent years, tech industry executives have played notable roles helping candidates get elected to top office, including Google parent company Alphabet Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt, who backed former President Obama, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who supported President Trump.

Altman declined to say how much he was willing to spend on his effort but said he would prefer to invest heavily on a cause rather than underwriting individual campaigns.

“That’s always felt gross to me,” he said. “I’m happy to spend a lot of money supporting the movement.”

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Over the years, Altman has been registered as a Democrat and as having no party preference, and his political donations swing between liberal and center-left.

Last year, he donated $100,000 to a San Francisco group working to elect moderates to the county Board of Supervisors, and $50,000 to an Airbnb committee that backed an increase in the city sales tax. He has also spent thousands of dollars backing Obama and national and local Democratic groups, as well as congressional, legislative and local candidates.

On a website that launches Wednesday, Altman lays out his concerns and policy goals. He argues that the state’s priorities have become unbalanced, resulting in inequality, stalled growth and declining opportunity. And it will only become worse because of an upcoming economic shift driven by automation, he says.

“We need to figure out a new social contract, and to ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes,” Altman writes on the site.

Altman lays out 10 principles including lowering the cost of housing, creating single-payer healthcare, increasing clean energy use, improving education, reforming taxes and rebuilding infrastructure.

He has few specific policy edicts, and floats proposals that will generate controversy, such as creating a universal basic income for all Americans in an effort to equalize opportunity, public funding for the media and increasing taxes on property that is owned by foreigners, is unoccupied or has been “flipped” by investors seeking a quick return on an investment.

Altman said he recognizes he faces an uphill battle.

“Maybe this will go nowhere,” he said. “There’s always the possibility I put this out and there’s exactly one person who believes in this stuff and it’s me.”

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Updates on California politics

Reporting from Sacramento — Two of California’s leading candidates for governor say they’re going to end the housing shortage, a driver of the state’s affordability crisis.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa both have said they want developers in California to build a half million homes in a year — something that’s never happened, at least in modern history. And they want builders to do it for seven straight years, resulting in 3.5 million new homes from the time the next governor takes office through 2025.

Those numbers are so out of scale with California’s history that they might be impossible to achieve. Practical concerns, including developers lining up enough financing and construction workers to build so many homes so quickly, could stymie the effort. Meeting the goals could also require rolling back decades of popular state policies on growth, taxation and the environment, according to housing academics and economists.

Without specific plans to transform how housing gets approved in California, said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Los Angeles-based consulting firm Beacon Economics, Newsom and Villaraigosa’s promises are empty.

“You’re just saying it,” Thornberg said of the homebuilding goals. “You don’t really mean it.”

Newsom and Villaraigosa said in separate statements to The Times that setting the 3.5-million home goal ensures they’ll be held accountable to whatever needs to be done to attain it.

Here’s why the two candidates’ goals will be so difficult to achieve and how they say they’re going to do it.

How many houses are we actually talking about?

For decades, not enough homes have been built in California to accommodate a growing population, leading to a spike in housing costs. Since 2011, for instance, the Bay Area has added about 627,000 new jobs but only 138,000 homes, according to the Building Industry Assn. of the Bay Area.

Newsom and Villaraigosa’s homebuilding goals would address that problem, but they’re without precedent.

Only twice since 1954 — the year the state building industry began tracking permits — have developers built more than 300,000 homes in a year. The highest year on record is 1963, when 322,018 home permits were issued.

To reach 500,000 homes in a year, the state would need to replicate its largest production in modern history plus an additional 178,000 homes, a number the state has surpassed just three times in the past 27 years.

Overall, the state’s rate of homebuilding would have to triple the historical average, quadruple last year’s production and reach nearly seven times the pace of building in the last decade.

Where do these numbers come from?

The goal of 3.5 million homes originated in a 2016 report on California’s housing problems by the McKinsey Global Institute, a private think tank.

The report found that California ranked 49^th in the country in housing production per capita and estimated the state would need 3.5 million new units through 2025 to build homes at a per capita rate equivalent to New Jersey and New York.

California could achieve that goal, the report said, through a dramatic increase in development near transit, increasing building on parcels already zoned for apartments and condominiums and adding some units to single-family parcels.

But there’s a crucial difference between the McKinsey report and the pledges from Newsom and Villaraigosa. The McKinsey report sets a goal for California to build 3.5 million homes from 2015 through 2025, an 11-year period. The gubernatorial candidates want to do it in only seven years, a period that would begin when the new governor takes office in 2019.

How do they plan to get there?

Housing affordability has emerged as one of the most prominent issues in the gubernatorial campaign, and all major candidates have pledged to address the problem. State Treasurer John Chiang, also a Democrat, has set a goal of having developers build 1.6 million homes for low-income Californians by 2030 through a mix of state bond funding, tax credits and other subsidies.

Newsom and Villaraigosa, however, are the only ones to have set the 3.5-million home goal.

Newsom’s proposal relies on spending hundreds of millions of dollars more on low-income homes, approving some development through regional governments rather than solely at the local level and financially rewarding cities and counties that approve housing, especially near transit, and punishing those that don’t.

Villaraigosa emphasizes sequestering property tax dollars to finance low-income housing, making loans to homeowners who want to build a second unit on their lots and making unspecified changes to the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, the 1970 law that requires developers to analyze and lessen a project’s effect on the environment.

Neither of them, though, have specified how many homes they expect each part of their housing plans to produce to add up to 3.5 million homes. Instead, they contend that simply setting a bold goal will require them to allocate funding and reduce the red tape needed to meet it.

“A crisis of this magnitude requires ambitious goal setting matched with focused leadership and bold, innovative policy initiatives,” Newsom said in a statement responding to questions from The Times. “It requires an affordable housing ‘moonshot.’”

“Housing has to be delivered at the local level, and building consensus is the only way to get there,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “It comes down to having the courage and experience to lead on this issue, and I am committed to getting it done.”

What would it actually take?

As governor, Newsom or Villaraigosa would have to reshape how housing gets permitted to make the process faster and more likely to result in approval.

Doing so, experts said, could require taking on three of the most substantial barriers to large-scale housing production, all of which have had long enjoyed broad support

Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that restricts property tax increases, which gives cities incentives to approve commercial and hotel development instead of housing because those projects generate more local tax revenues. It has also helped protect homeowners from rising taxes.

— The California Environmental Quality Act, which creates a lengthy process for assessing the effects of new housing and leaves projects vulnerable to litigation. Environmental groups also credit the law with preserving the state’s natural beauty.

— Local control over development decisions. Cities and counties determine what is built in their communities, and desirable coastal locales often prefer restrictions on growth. Los Angeles, for instance, had in 1960 zoned enough housing to accommodate 10 million people, a figure that’s since been reduced to a little over 4 million. Residents like to shape how their neighborhoods look.

Michael Lens, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, said the candidates would need to make substantial changes to all three policies, potentially even scrapping them, if they wanted to reach the homebuilding targets.

“You could take away one of those pillars and have a wobblier table of housing resistance,” Lens said. “But [removing] all three would be more useful.”

The housing production goal also could conflict with other promises. Newsom and Villaraigosa support California’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, which require concentrating homes near jobs and transit so people drive less. That means the state couldn’t count on large, single-family developments, such as suburban projects built during an early 2000s surge in production, to meet the 3.5-million home target.

Even if it were politically possible to supercharge housing production, there are practical problems that the candidates would have less control over. After a long period of growth, Gov. Jerry Brown has warned that the state economy should expect a slowdown in the coming years, which could also decelerate development.

In addition, it takes time for builders to secure land and financing, no matter how quickly a government approves blueprints and permits. Changes implemented on the first day of a Newsom or Villaraigosa administration might take years before they’d lead to ribbon cuttings for new homes.

“Depending on the size of the project, the stuff that starts in 2019 might not even come online until somewhere around 2025,” Lens said.

There have to be enough construction workers to build all those homes, too. California contractors already are having trouble finding labor, and that’s before spending ramps up on more than $5 billion annually in road repairs and transit upgrades coming after the Legislature approved a gas tax hike last year, said Peter Tateishi, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of California.

“We don’t see a path to building 500,000 homes in one year on top of all the other infrastructure projects that are on the docket,” Tateishi said.

[email protected]

Twitter: @dillonliam

ALSO

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Updates on California politics

SACRAMENTO — To be elected governor of California, a candidate needs six vital assets.

Maybe not the entire six-pack, but almost. They include:

–A salable message. How’s the candidate going to make life better for the voter? Specifics, not just poll-generated platitudes. And beating up on President Trump isn’t going to be enough for Democrats next year.

Voters will probably be getting migraine headaches from listening to both Trump and his critics.

–Curb appeal. It greatly helps to have matinee-idol looks like Gov. Gavin Newsom. But that gift is rare. Average appearance, verbal skills and a good message will usually suffice.

–Boatloads of money. It costs tens of millions of dollars to market a gubernatorial aspirant’s message in far-flung, heavily populated and diverse California.

–A strong desire to win, also known as “fire in the belly.” Rather than relaxing in a recliner while watching the Rams or 49ers, the willingness to fly off to beg strangers for campaign donations.

–A thick skin. Top-tier candidates are constantly attacked by rivals and often covered by the news media in ways deemed unfair. But overreacting can destroy a candidacy.

–A strong record of public service to show voters you’re committed and won’t need lots of time with training wheels.

There also are other assets that can help. For example: youth.

“We are, in fact, going through a generational change in American politics,” says longtime Democratic strategist Darry Dragow. “That’s inevitable. New generations of voters have not been widely represented in government. The boomers have held political power for a very long time.”

Baby boomers are roughly ages 60 through 79 — born after World War II, between 1946 and 1964.

Another plus is political incumbency — the ability for a candidate to be identified on the ballot label as, for example, attorney general or lieutenant governor. That denotes credibility and a record. You’re not allowed to call yourself a “former” anything.

Democratic strategist Garry South calls the current crop basically “a field of formers” and says that saddles them with an extra burden.

So far, the 2026 race to replace the termed-out Newsom has been a boring trot.

That’s largely because the public’s political focus has been on Trump and the toady Republican Congress. But it’s also because none of the gubernatorial candidates possesses the full six-pack of vital assets.

For months, the contest was frozen in waiting mode: Waiting for former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla to decide whether they wanted to run. Either would have been an early favorite, but not a shoo-in. They’d have faced a fight. And neither apparently felt the job was worth it. No fire.

Democratic donors and activists also were focused on Proposition 50 and waiting for the Nov. 4 redistricting election to be over. Most money and effort were going there.

Now that’s all behind us and the real race is underway.

“It’s a total free-for-all,” Sragow says. “None of these candidates is really on anybody’s radar.”

There’s no actual front-runner.

“You can’t read anything into the polls,” Democratic consultant Gale Kaufman says. “Just because somebody is a few points ahead doesn’t make them a front-runner. We don’t even know who all the candidates are yet.”

A late October poll of registered voters by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed that 44% were undecided. Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter led Democratic candidates with a scant 11%. Former U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra was second at 8%.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, was first overall with 13%. But never mind. No Republican has been elected to statewide office in California since 2006. And one won’t be 20 years later.

Last week, two more Democrats leaped into the race:

–Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, 68, who ran for president in 2020 and got nowhere. He has a good populist, anti-Sacramento message and tons of money to voice it. But he has never held elected office. And Californians have historically rejected mega-rich, self-financing candidates attempting to begin their political career at the highest level.

–Rep. Eric Swalwell, 45, from the San Francisco Bay Area, who also ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020. He has a good message for progressives. But right now it may be too focused on Trump and not enough on Californians’ needs.

Aside from Steyer, none of the other Democratic aspirants are independently wealthy. They’ll need to raise barrels of money — ”24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Sragow says. That takes fire.

Other Democratic candidates:

–Porter, 51. She has curb appeal. But she publicly showed a thin skin with a contentious, rude performance during a TV interview in October. The nasty episode probably wasn’t fatal. But it apparently dropped her in polls, and that hurts fundraising.

–Becerra, 67. He has a respectful record as Health secretary, California attorney general and congressman. But questions were raised recently about Becerra’s judgment when federal prosecutors revealed the then-secretary didn’t notice that a top aide had raided his dormant political account for $225,000. Becerra wasn’t implicated. The aide pleaded guilty.

–Antonio Villaraigosa, 72, former Los Angeles mayor and state Assembly speaker. No one is more qualified to be governor. And he lets voters know where he stands. But they may be looking for someone younger.

–Betty Yee, 68, former state controller, Board of Equalization member and chief state budget honcho. She knows every inch of state government’s fiscal quagmire and has good ideas about unraveling it. But she’s short on curb appeal.

–State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, 57, the lone incumbent in the field. But he missed an opportunity to shine as state schools chief.

One of these people will probably be our next governor, although others could still enter the race. So, maybe it’s time to start paying attention.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Pondering a run for governor, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta faces questions about legal spending
C.A. vs. Trump: ‘Played with fire, got burned’: GOP control of House at risk after court blocks Texas map
The L.A. Times Special: California’s child farmworkers: Exhausted, underpaid and toiling in toxic fields

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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WAYCROSS, GA. — Driving away from Savannah and into the swampy heart of southeast Georgia, Old South charm fades to decomposing autos forming bunkers in front of nearly every house along U.S. 82. An automobile driver battles for lane rights against semis stacked with pine logs roaring toward the pulp mill. The AM car radio options are country-and-western gospel (“Walkin’ On With Jesus”) or traditional gospel.

The two-lane roadbed across the flat Georgia lowland is a levee separating swamp and pine forest on one side from swamp and pine forest on the other.

A hundred miles from Savannah, beyond the First Free Will Baptist Church and a National Guard armory marquee advertising Ladies and Midget wrestling, U.S. 82 threads a strip of fast-food stands and convenience stores into Waycross, Pop. 20,000, proclaimed locally as “the Largest City in the Largest County in the Largest State east of the Mississippi.”

Waycross, Ware County, Ga., is part of the playing field in the South’s Super Tuesday presidential primary, but Waycross voters have been distant observers. The candidates have campaigned from one New South city to the next, from Charlotte, N.C., to Nashville, Tenn., to Atlanta, but not to Waycross. Waycross voters were not necessarily uninterested in the contest, but in the weeks before the primary, they had more immediate concerns–an election for mayor, racial incidents in the local schools and a campaign to attract jobs.

The South is no longer a political monolith. It is also not as monolithic culturally as outsiders assume. In many aspects, the problems of Waycross may be closer to those of Rock Springs, Wyo., than Atlanta.

Candidates may bypass Waycross, but Waycross is used to being bypassed, first by the interstate highways that siphoned off Florida-bound tourist traffic, and then by the New South economic miracle that brought shiny office towers and research parks to the cities. Even the modern technology that has touched Waycross has been a mixed blessing. Waycross, founded as a railroad town in 1875 where the Savannah, Florida and Western Railroad intersected with the Brunswick and Florida Railroad, has one of the east’s largest rail switching yards. But with deregulation and computerization, employment has declined to about a third of its one-time peak of 3,000.

So Waycross remains an isolated, economically depressed trade center where population and retail sales have remained flat for 20 years. The median household income is half the national level. The population is aging and residents despair that the best young people go off to school and never return.

Waycross’ sin is being rural in an age of urbanization. When Chamber of Commerce Manager Saralyn Stafford talks of southeast Georgia to outsiders, she draws empty looks. “They all know about Atlanta. They think Georgia ends when you get to Macon,” Stafford said.

A woman in charge–particularly one under 30–is something new. Stafford, weary of hearing “we’ve never done that before,” is out to get a stagnant Waycross moving.

In the past, businesses lived off the railroads and little was done to attract new industry. There was no coordinated leadership. No one knocked on doors of the state economic development people in Atlanta and demanded attention.

“We are building relationships now–from ground zero,” Stafford said. “We haven’t always had that. We’ve had a good ol’ boy network.”

Waycross is beginning to get attention, but pulling the community together is not easy. Businesses have moved from downtown to the Hatcher Point shopping center out U.S. 1 on the way to Okefenokee Swamp Park. City center brick buildings are dingy. Shoppers complain about traffic, complicated by the railroad grade crossings in the middle of town, about poor service and the lack of a downtown department store and good restaurants.

Complicating the political fabric is an ethnic gulf between Waycross and surrounding Ware County. Blacks account for about half the city population but only a fraction of the rural. Most counties in the region have one high school but Waycross and Ware County maintain separate schools, with occasional racial tension between them. Stafford has begun a political education campaign among businesses and school consolidation is high on the agenda. But one old-timer chuckled at talk of consolidation and drawled, “Oh, that subject comes up every once in a while.”

All in all, Waycross is not an ugly or unpleasant town, unless a visitor comes with unrealistic expectations about the elegant charm of the antebellum South or the extent of the economic vitality of the New South. The older downtown buildings may be dingy, but are still solid and could be refurbished at modest expense. The center of town is anchored by government offices and a federal courthouse. If additional business leaves, however, the downtown may become moribund and the outskirts even more tacky and cluttered.

Waycross has pleasant residential areas with tree-lined streets and handsome homes with spacious lawns. A modern three-bedroom house can be had for $50,000. There is a community college, a vocational-technical school and several small industries. The Okefenokee Swamp is an unexploited attraction of great potential. Deer hunting and bass fishing are excellent. While many want to see Waycross boom, others like it as it is.

Of racial troubles, one young black professional said, “It’s no better or worse than any of the other counties around.” And a respondent to a consumer survey said, “I don’t know of any improvements needed. I came here in 1909 and I could write a book about Waycross. It’s the best place in the world to live.”

Waycross probably is not on the threshold of economic boom–or bust. But new energy and leadership and a modest investment of funds could make downtown Waycross an attractive place to work, shop, entertain and enjoy cultural events. Stafford does not have excessive expectations. “We just want our people to stay here,” she said. “We have good lives.”

That, in fact, is the modest goal to which hundreds of bypassed American communities aspire.

Reporting from Washington — President Trump is expected to move quickly to nominate a replacement for retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s soon-to-be-vacant Supreme Court seat, and two leading candidates are veteran Washington, D.C., appellate Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a former Notre Dame law professor and recent Trump appointee to the 7th Circuit in Chicago.

They emerged from a list of more than two dozen potential nominees put together by the conservative Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.

The list was Trump’s idea and it has proven effective, said Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society official who is advising the White House. It told Republican voters that he was serious about appointing only reliable conservatives to the high court, he said.

Unlike in decades past, when presidents and their top lawyers scrambled to find a qualified nominee when a vacancy suddenly arose, the Federalist Society list is the result of careful screening. A team of lawyers read and analyzed everything written or said by the candidates.

Their unofficial motto is “No more Souters,” a reference to now-retired Justice David H. Souter, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Souter was a little-known judge from New Hampshire, but the White House team assured Republicans he was a conservative.

They were wrong. Souter was careful and cautious as a judge and devoted to precedent. But his leanings were moderate to liberal. In 1992, Souter along with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor joined to uphold the right to abortion announced two decades earlier in Roe vs. Wade.

Conservatives are determined never to make the same mistake again.

Kavanaugh, 53, grew up in Washington and is the favorite of many conservative lawyers here. He went to Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court for Kennedy alongside Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court last year as Trump’s first appointment. Kavanaugh was a top deputy to independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the long investigation of President Clinton, and he drafted the Starr Report that led to Clinton’s impeachment. He also joined the legal team that represented George W. Bush in the fight over the recount in the 2000 presidential election.

Kavanaugh worked in the White House counsel’s office for Bush and later served as his staff secretary.

In 2003, Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, but Democrats initially blocked his confirmation. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called him a “very bright legal foot soldier” who has been in the middle of every partisan legal battle. But Kavanaugh finally won confirmation in 2006.

Since then, Kavanaugh has written hundreds of opinions, and he is known for always staking out a conservative position.

“He is much more conservative in his approach to law than Justice Kennedy,” said Justin Walker, a University of Louisville law professor who clerked for Kavanaugh at the appeals court and Kennedy at the Supreme Court. “There is no guesswork with Judge Kavanaugh. He is extremely predictable.”

Walker cited, as an example, Kavanaugh’s support for the right to own a semiautomatic rifle under the 2nd Amendment. In 2008, the Supreme Court struck down a District of Columbia ordinance that prohibited residents from having a handgun at home. The same plaintiff later claimed the right to possess a semiautomatic weapon, but lost by a 2-1 vote in the D.C. Circuit, Walker noted. Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent arguing that the 2nd Amendment included the right to have such a weapon.

The Supreme Court, however, has rejected appeals raising that issue, which has the effect of upholding laws and ordinances that banned such assault weapons.

Last fall, Kavanaugh was involved in a quick-moving dispute over whether a migrant teenager in Texas could be released from immigration custody to obtain an abortion. A federal judge cleared the way, but Kavanaugh wrote a 2-1 decision siding with Trump administration lawyers and blocking the abortion for up to 10 more days. The full appeals court intervened and overturned his ruling. In dissent, he faulted his more liberal colleagues as wrongly creating a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain abortion on demand.”

Like many judges, he has avoided any direct comments in his legal opinions about Roe vs. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling that will loom large over upcoming confirmation hearings.

In contrast to Kavanaugh, Barrett, 46, is a newcomer with a sparse record as a judge. She is a product of the University of Notre Dame and South Bend, Ind. She went law school at Notre Dame and spent a few years in Washington as a law clerk for D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Antonin Scalia. She returned in 2002 to teach law at Notre Dame.

Barrett was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in November, and now commutes a few days a week from South Bend to downtown Chicago.

She has, however, written and spoken frequently about the importance of her Catholic faith and in her belief that life begins at conception. In a 2003 scholarly article, she suggested Roe vs. Wade was an “erroneous decision.”

During her Senate hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she had read Barrett’s writings, adding that the “dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.”

That comment triggered a sharp backlash from Barrett’s defenders and others, who said the nominee was being criticized for her faith.

But if Barrett is the nominee, Democrats and liberal activists are certain to focus on her views about abortion and the role they might play if the court is asked to overturn Roe.

The latest from Washington »

More stories from David G. Savage »

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Twitter: DavidGSavage

It was going to make California count, make it a contender after decades spent watching all those other pipsqueak states decide who among the legions of presidential candidates got to move into the Oval Office.

When California legislators–and Gov. Pete Wilson–agreed two years ago to move the state’s 1996 presidential primary forward from June to March, you could almost hear the silent chortles: Take that, New Hampshire! Back to the farm, Iowa!

And now that the state’s early presidential primary is a mere six months away, the nation’s most delegate-rich state can witness the result:

Nothing.

Sure, the candidates still plumb the state for money, just as they did in the old days. But apart from President Clinton’s trips, there are precious few actual campaign visits and little attention given to the issues peculiar to California. Even Wilson spent more than twice as much time out of state last month than he did tending to matters in Sacramento.

Some candidates still believe that California could ultimately play a big role in selecting the Republican nominee, even given the current dearth of activity. The state, after all, controls about 16%–or 163 of the 991–delegates needed to win the Republican nomination.

Scenarios abound, with California either putting a runaway victor over the top or deciding between two strong candidates. Then again, it could also add to a muddle of results that would force the nomination to be decided weeks later.

“California is going to play a significant role,” said Mark Helmke, communications director for Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, who announced his candidacy in April. “It’s just that none of us could speculate on what that role is.”

Others in the perennially optimistic corps of campaign activists insist that California won’t matter because the front-runner (their candidate, of course) will have it all sewn up beforehand.

“The problem is that California is too late. This thing is going to end in the industrial Midwest,” said Mike Murphy, a senior aide in the campaign of former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander. Murphy was referring to a ring of primaries to be held the week before California’s.

This underwhelming outcome was utterly predictable, according to campaign seers. And there are both logical and logistic reasons.

California moved its primary up, but only to March 26, six weeks after the campaign-opening Iowa caucuses. Not eager to be left in the dust, a host of other states began to clamor.

New York, with the third-largest delegate pool, moved from early April to early March. Pennsylvania and Ohio moved from late spring to March 19, where they will join Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin in the massive Rust Belt regional primary.

The New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine similarly coalesced into a Yankee primary on March 5–three weeks before California’s primary.

All the movement left California in 32nd place in the 1996 campaign chronology, only slightly better positioned than if it had left the primary in June.

“We were dead last, along with New Jersey and a few other states,” said state Sen. Jim Costa (D-Fresno), who lobbied for an early primary for 14 long years. “We’re better off than we were then. We’re just not significantly better off.”

Because the early primary is a one-year experiment, legislators will have to take up its fate after next year. Costa said that he may propose moving it up even further for the 2000 election.

The state senator initially wanted to set this year’s primary for March 5, which would have made California the first big state on the election calendar. But he compromised with others in the Legislature, who argued that the state is so big that it would swallow up all but the richest candidates. Give the poorer candidates a chance to make their mark in earlier, smaller states, the argument went, and then their momentum could offset their lack of funds in California.

The upshot is this: Candidates are still cozying up to Iowa, whose caucuses are scheduled for Feb. 12, and New Hampshire, whose first-in-the-nation primary will be held eight days later.

They are patting backs and kissing babies in South Carolina, whose primary will be held March 2, on the grounds that it will serve either as a fire wall to block a surging campaign or will redouble the momentum of an earlier winner.

They are courting voters elsewhere in the South, where the Super Tuesday primary will be held March 12 and where voters will decide the fates of at least two of their own, Texas’ Phil Gramm and Tennessee’s Alexander.

All of this makes compelling strategic sense.

“The first focus has to be the first caucus and primaries,” said Charles Robbins, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter. “They come first and if you don’t perform, you’re out of the game.”

Put another way, it would be political malpractice for a candidate to hang out in California when his time is better spent in the earlier states. Compounding matters is California’s status as a winner-take-all primary. That means a candidate who put all his marbles into the state and pulled, say, 48% of the vote would walk away without a delegate. Many other states dispense their delegates proportionally.

“No candidate is going to make a serious commitment to resources in a March primary simply because there’s no guarantee you’re going to get that far,” said an adviser to one of the campaigns. “It’s a huge gamble to put up that money and risk walking away with nothing.”

Another hindrance to actively campaigning in California is the fact that the state is so far from Washington, where no less than six of the nine Republican candidates are based.

One recent Thursday, for example, Specter jetted from Washington to Boston, held two campaign events and was back in the Capitol for Senate business by lunchtime.

“You can’t do that to California,” said his aide Robbins. “Just because of the geography, all the way on the other side of the country, it’s a real project.”

While the Republican candidates have not spent much time in California, their campaigns are starting to lay the foundations of an effort here.

Wilson’s campaign is rebuilding his longstanding organization, despite prominent defections to other camps and surveys that show the governor losing the state to front-runner Bob Dole of Kansas.

Besides having the only full-fledged campaign office in the state, Wilson’s operation has staffers specifically working to buoy his standing here, said spokesman Dan Schnur.

“For all their talk, none of the other campaigns are putting any time or energy into California at all,” he said. “They file in and out for fund-raisers, but beyond that there’s no indication of any serious organizational effort on the part of any of them.”

Wilson does have a leg up, but his opponents argue that his campaign may have folded by late March or, even if he stays in the race, they may be able to build enthusiasm here from the momentum of earlier victories.

Gramm has made the biggest splash, garnering the support of Republican legislative leaders Curt Pringle and Rob Hurtt, both of Orange County, and a host of activists. U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach, who is heading Gramm’s California campaign, said the effort so far is a “very well-organized, low dollar” effort.

It will remain entirely a volunteer effort through the end of the year, he said.

“When you’re running statewide in California, it’s important to have money when it counts, not lavishly throw it around months in advance,” Cox said.

Dole has been here infrequently, but has tried to make a big splash when he has come. He salted one Los Angeles fund-raising trip with a high-profile assault on the entertainment industry.

Overall, the Dole campaign said, it has raised $1.5 million in its visits to California.

“Some analysts are suggesting that it will all be over before California,” said Dole spokesman Nelson Warfield. “Our attitude is that we are contesting every state very vigorously. We’re proceeding on the assumption that it is up for grabs.”

Former television commentator Patrick J. Buchanan has made three multi-day fund-raising trips to California since March–the same time frame in which he has visited Iowa 11 times and New Hampshire eight times. His aides say they are putting together networks of volunteers who will fan out in support of Buchanan.

Lugar and Alexander have raised money in California, and Lugar aides said they had particular luck with a direct mail drive that touted his proposal to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace income taxes with a national sales tax. Like the latter two, Specter has had a low profile here.

At some point, the Republican nominee will begin fighting the general election war here–one that President Clinton is already waging. Mindful that he needs to win the state in order to be reelected, Clinton has visited California 19 times in less than three years, more than any other state.

On Tuesday, voters in the largest city of the United States, New York, will choose a new mayor in a race that has stirred debate across the country and drawn global interest.

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old state assembly democratic socialist who surprised many with his June win in the Democratic Party’s primary, is facing former Governor Andrew Cuomo, now running as an independent after losing the Democratic nomination. Republican Curtis Sliwa is among the other candidates in the race.

Here is what we know:

What’s happening on Tuesday?

Voters on both coasts of the US will cast ballots in a series of elections: gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia, the New York City mayoral race, and a vote in California on a redistricting measure.

But of these electoral battles, it is the New York mayoral vote that has grabbed the most attention .

Who are the candidates in NYC?

The three leading candidates are Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa.

Zohran Mamdani

The Democratic nominee is running on a platform focused on affordability, calling for rent freezes, universal childcare, cheaper public transport, and a raise in the hourly minimum wage to $30. An immigrant, Muslim, and democratic socialist, his popularity has surged during the campaign, with nearly 370,000 early ballots already cast, and appealing strongly to young voters.

Mamdani, whose parents have Indian roots, was born in Uganda. If elected, he will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first to be born in Africa, and the first of South Asian descent.

Andrew Cuomo

Cuomo served as New York state’s governor from 2011 to 2021 and resigned after a state inquiry confirmed sexual harassment allegations by 13 women. He lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani (56 percent to 44 percent), but stayed in the race as an independent.

Curtis Sliwa

At 71, Sliwa has resisted pressure to withdraw from the race amid concerns he could split the anti-Mamdani vote. Known for his trademark red beret, he rose to prominence as the leader of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer crime-fighting group that became famous for its patrols of the New York subway system.

Who is leading in the polls?

The latest RealClearPolitics average shows Democratic nominee Mamdani leading the mayoral race with 46.1 percent , giving him a 14.3-point edge over Cuomo (31.8 percent ) and a 29.8-point lead over Sliwa (16.3 percent ).

US President Donald Trump and businessman Elon Musk backed Cuomo late on Monday. Whether that high-profile, last-minute support will shift voter sentiment remains uncertain.

What time do polls open and close in New York?

Polling stations across the city will open on November 4 at 6am local time (11:00 GMT) and voting will continue till 9pm (02:00 GMT on November 5).

Early voting took place from October 25 to November 2.

When will we know results?

In New York, mayoral races are usually called quickly.

This time, however, with two candidates vying for the support of the city’s mostly Democratic voters, it may take longer to determine the outcome.

The 2021 mayoral race ended quickly – Democrat Eric Adams was declared the winner soon after the polls closed.

What are the main issues and what’s at stake?

Being the US’s most diverse city, known around the world for its business and culture, makes picking a new mayor an especially important occasion.

New York’s election campaigns have mirrored the bigger national debates in the US, over identity, religion, political beliefs, and the country’s future.

Some of the key issues include:

Cost of living: The city is facing one of its tightest housing markets in decades. In 2023 the city had a vacancy rate of 1.41 percent , which means that only 14 out of every 1,000 housing units were unoccupied; 9.2 percent of all rental housing was described by city authorities as “overcrowded”. The number of new housing permits issued fell in 2024 compared with 2023.

This has made housing cost and availability a dominant issue. After a slate of California cities, New York is the costliest urban hub in the US to live in.

“Most of us are working multiple jobs, can’t make rent or rents are going up,” Tom Grabher, a city voter, told Al Jazeera.

Law and order: Serious crimes in the city, including murder, have gone down from their 17-year high in 2023. However, lower-level offences, such as shoplifting, remain higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, adding to public worries about safety and disorder.

Migration: The city has long been a magnet for people from around the world, from its historic role as a gateway for immigrants to the recent influx of asylum seekers that critics say has placed new strains on the city’s resources.

Israel and Gaza: The ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict and the city’s large Jewish and Muslim populations have made foreign policy a key issue in this race.

What has Trump said about the race?

A former New Yorker, Trump has loomed over the mayoral race for months, threatening to arrest Mamdani, deport him, and take control of the city if he wins.

On Monday, Trump urged the city’s voters on his Truth Social platform to back Cuomo, saying they had “no choice” but to vote for the former governor.

When the federal government shut down in October, Trump put on hold roughly $18bn in federal funds, although $187m from New York’s security funding has since been restored. Trump has threatened to withhold more federal aid for the city if Mamdani wins.

What other elections are taking place?

Virginia governor

All eyes are on Virginia, a state next to Washington, DC, that has been directly affected by Trump’s spending cuts and the recent government shutdown.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger is facing off against Republican Lieutenant-Governor Winsome Earle-Sears.

New Jersey governor

In New Jersey, the governor’s race has centred on concerns about affordability. Although Democrats hold a voter advantage, Republicans are optimistic that Trump’s rising popularity in the state could lead to a surprise win. Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill is up against Republican Jack Ciattarelli , a former state assemblyman.

California

In California, a proposed ballot measure would redraw congressional districts in a way that could benefit Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections. Governor Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers say they introduced the plan in response to Trump’s earlier push for Texas to reshape its districts to give Republicans an advantage in five seats currently held by Democrats. If approved, the measure would effectively eliminate five Republican-held districts in California.

New York City’s mayoral candidates are making a final push Monday to get voters to the polls, as the race to lead America’s biggest city nears its finale.

Ahead of Election Day on Tuesday, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa have all spent the race’s final stretch campaigning at a frenetic pace across the city’s five boroughs as they make their case to succeed outgoing Mayor Eric Adams.

In recent days, Mamdani went dancing with seniors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Cuomo dined in the Eastern European enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Sliwa went to a mosque in the Bronx.

Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, jolted the political world when he defeated Cuomo in the primary with an energetic campaign focused on making the city a more affordable place to live.

As the race approaches the finish line, he’s continued to post viral social media videos and run a relentless ground game, while warning his progressive fan base not to become complacent and to send as many supporters to the polls as possible.

Cuomo is trying to make his return to political office after resigning as governor four years ago following a barrage of sexual harassment accusations that he denies. Now running as an independent, the 67-year-old has in recent days shifted to wooing Republican voters to bolster his centrist base, pitching himself as the only candidate who can stop Mamdani.

Sliwa, the creator of the Guardian Angels crime patrol group and a longtime fixture on New York’s airwaves, seeks to spoil both Democrats’ chances. He’s been heavily canvassing the streets and subways in his signature red beret to spread his message of public safety.

Early voting in the city ended Sunday, and election officials say more than 735,000 ballots were cast.

In last year’s general election, there were 1,089,328 early, in-person votes cast. But in the 2021 mayoral general election, only 169,879 in-person early voting ballots were cast.

Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press.