Democrats

Donald Trump has called himself a “wartime president” for leading the fight against COVID-19. He has called Americans “warriors” for showing up at their jobs, shopping in stores and generally getting the economy back on track despite knowing that these activities increase the risk of a coronavirus infection.

The metaphor is apt, in that our war on COVID-19 has resulted in substantial casualties — more than 229,000 dead and counting. That’s more double the 90,220 deaths Americans suffered throughout the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam years, there was a clear correlation between the number of combat deaths suffered by a county and the degree to which residents backed the conflict — when deaths went up, support for the president’s war policies fell, researchers have found.

Likewise, voters in areas that suffered more casualties during the Iraq War were less likely to vote for Republican congressional candidates in the 2006 midterm elections, while voters in areas that took more casualties in Afghanistan were more likely to support Trump for president in 2016 instead of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Now political scientists are seeing the pattern again — except this time the war is happening on U.S. soil and the foe is COVID-19.

“Increasing fatalities from the disease leads to losses for Republicans,” a team from George Washington University and UCLA reported Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The researchers used data collected by the New York Times to tally COVID-19 deaths in every state up through May 31. They also looked at responses gathered by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project, a public opinion survey that reaches about 6,400 people each week.

They found that people in the states with high COVID-19 fatalities were 3% less likely to support Trump’s reelection than were people in states where the coronavirus had made little impact. They were also nearly 13% less likely to favor GOP candidates for Senate seats and 5% less likely to back GOP candidates for the House of Representatives.

That was just their starting point. To look more carefully at the relationship between deaths and political preferences, the political scientists compared COVID-19 deaths in the previous 30 days with changes in support for Republican candidates in a state or even county. This allowed them to account for the influence of factors like voters’ race, ethnicity, gender, education and who they voted for in the 2016 presidential election. It also helped them see whether COVID-19 deaths were actually causing voters to turn away from the party controlling America’s response to the pandemic.

The results were clear.

“Overall, areas with higher COVID-19 fatalities are significantly less likely to support President Trump and other Republican candidates,” they reported. This pattern was seen “at every level of geography and for every office.”

The degree of lost support was small, but it may be enough to swing an election in a close race, the researchers wrote.

For instance, if COVID-19 deaths in a county had doubled over the previous 30 days, voters in that county became 0.14% less likely to support Trump’s reelection, 0.28% less likely to support Republican Senate candidates and 0.22% less likely to support Republicans running for seats in the House.

Additionally, if COVID-19 deaths in a state doubled over the previous 30 days, people in that state became 0.37% less likely to say they’d vote for Trump, 0.79% less likely to say they’d vote for a GOP Senate candidate and 0.58% less likely to say they’d vote for a Republican House candidate.

The political scientists noted that in 2016, Trump carried Michigan by a margin of just 0.2%, and he lost New Hampshire by a mere 0.4%. In Florida, Republican Rick Scott unseated Democrat Bill Nelson in a 2018 Senate race with an advantage of less than 0.2%.

Indeed, COVID-19 casualties could be even more influential than the health of the economy, the study authors wrote.

“Just as the public penalizes the president for casualties during wars, the public is penalizing the president and other members of his party for local fatalities during the pandemic,” they concluded. “This could swing the presidential election and the U.S. Senate toward Democrats, with particularly high effects in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Florida.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Robert Garcia and his team faced a monumental task on Nov. 5: Sift through more than 20,000 documents obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein in search for something that would shed more light into President Trump’s relationship with the now-deceased convicted sex offender.

After six tedious days combing through the records, Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and four staff members identified three emails that would go on to ignite a political firestorm.

In the emails, Epstein wrote that Trump had “spent hours” at the late financier’s house with one of his victims and that he “knew about the girls,” suggesting the president knew more about Epstein’s abuse than he had previously acknowledged. The estate released the emails to the committee after receiving a subpoena.

“We thought [the emails] really raised questions about the relationship between the president and Jeffrey Epstein,” Garcia said in an interview last week. “We knew we had to get those out as soon as possible.”

Garcia’s plan to release the emails quickly thrust the second-term Democrat into the national spotlight, elevating his profile as a chief antagonist of Trump on a issue that has dogged the president since his first term. It also increased the pressure on the White House to release its investigative Epstein files.

The assertions in Epstein’s emails about Trump’s involvement or awareness of Epstein’s illicit acts have not been corroborated and the White House has denied the veracity of those accounts.

The White House accused Democrats of “selectively” leaking emails to create a “fake narrative to smear President Trump,” adding that Democrats redacted the name of one of the victims, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April and had previously said she had not witnessed Trump participating in abuse at Epstein’s house.

The email disclosures on Nov. 12 prompted Republicans on the committee to publish the full cache of records just hours later. At the same time, Democrats — joined by a handful of Republicans — were on the verge of forcing a House vote to compel the Justice Department to release its Epstein files. Days later, Trump urged GOP lawmakers to back the bill he had long resisted, and he ultimately signed it into law.

“If we hadn’t released the initial emails, Republicans would likely have released nothing,” Garcia said. “They never release anything until we push them and we bring pressure from the public.”

Garcia said Democrats were prepared to publish the full set themselves — but incrementally over the course of the week, arguing that such a release needed to be done carefully to protect victims’ privacy.

Republicans on the committee have criticized the minority party’s approach, arguing that it focuses on sensationalizing select pieces of information to damage Trump and politicizing the Epstein investigation.

“The most dangerous place in D.C. is between Robert Garcia and a cable news camera,” Republican strategist Matthew Gorman said. “This is simply a ploy for him to draw more attention to himself, and he’s using this issue to do it.”

‘Sometimes you gotta punch back harder’

Garcia’s allies view the 47-year-old’s rise as both foreseeable and reflective of his past.

Born in Peru, Garcia immigrated to the United States as a young child and became a citizen in his early 20s. He later became Long Beach’s first Latino and first openly gay mayor before arriving in Washington — where he is now one of the youngest to ever serve as the ranking member of the main investigative panel in the House.

Five months into the role, Garcia says he remains in disbelief that he is in the position that has been held by people like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), whom he considers one of his “heroes.”

“To be in a place where I’m doing the job that he was in when I got to Congress a couple of years ago is not something that I expected,” Garcia said. “I want to contribute back as best I can, and take on this corruption, take on what is happening with the Jeffrey Epstein case and holding the administration accountable.”

The oversight committee is one of the House’s most high-profile panels and its chair, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, has broad subpoena power. Comer, a staunch Trump ally, has been leading a review of the government’s investigation into Epstein and his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Comer has subpoenaed both the Epstein estate and the Justice Department.

Comer declined to be interviewed for this article, as did other House Republicans. But Comer told Politico last week that he was “done with Garcia” and that the Democrat had “burned his bridges with this.”

“He just needs to do TikTok videos or something. … He’s not a serious investigator. He’s like a TikTok video kind of guy,” Comer said.

Garcia responded to Comer’s comments with a reference to the movie “Mean Girls.”

“Why’s he so obsessed with me?” he said Wednesday in an Instagram post — an example of how Garcia often uses pop culture to communicate to a more general audience.

Garcia says his tactics are motivated by an allergy to bullies.

“I grew up as an immigrant kid. … I know what it is like to be on the other side of the bully,” he said. “If the bully is going to punch or cause harm to you or others that you care about, you have to punch back. Sometimes you gotta punch back harder.”

Democrats credit Garcia for pushing Comer to act. In July, a Republican-led subcommittee passed a Democrat-led motion to subpoena the Justice Department’s Epstein documents — a move that ultimately prompted Comer to issue his subpoenas.

Rep. Robert Garcia speaks at a ceremonial swearing-in event in Long Beach in August to commemorate his new role as ranking member of the House oversight committee.

(Jonathan Alcorn / For The Times)

Rep. Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, said the vote “began knocking over the dominoes” that eventually led to the public seeing a copy of Epstein’s “50th birthday book,” which includes Trump’s name, as well as the three emails linking Trump to Epstein.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), a member of the oversight committee, praised Garcia for securing bipartisan support to secure documents and pushing records out to the public. Khanna, who led the push to force a vote on the House floor to demand the Justice Department release the Epstein files, also co-wrote a letter with Garcia to Epstein’s estate requesting an unredacted copy of the birthday book.

Attorneys for the estate said that they would cooperate, but that they required a subpoena to release materials due to privacy concerns. Khanna said he believes the letter set in motion the push that ultimately led Comer to subpoena the estate.

“I think the way he has worked with Comer to make sure a lot of the investigation has been bipartisan, has been effective,” Khanna said in an interview.

A ‘dynamic’ approach to oversight

Garcia — who is known to use social media and pop culture to amplify his message — has folded those communication tactics into his role on the oversight committee.

The day the emails were released, Garcia promoted them in social media posts and videos and gave multiple interviews. The congressman — a self-described Bravo fan — is scheduled to appear this week on the cable channel’s “What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) told The Times that Garcia’s “dynamic” leadership approach is creating new ways to communicate to a younger generation about the work Congress is doing.

“He seems to thrive on it, and that’s a joy to behold,” the former speaker said. “He is young, but has brought members along and the public along as to what the challenge is.”

Rep. Robert Garcia speaks with Mayor Karen Bass at a congressional field hearing at the Metropolitan Water District on Monday.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Republicans on the committee have accused Garcia and Democrats of intentionally using the Epstein investigation to generate a false narrative against Trump — criticism that Democrats see as Garcia being willing to “fight fire with fire.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, who served on the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Garcia’s push to seek records “outside of traditional channels,” including the Epstein estate, helped drive a “public narrative that broke through.”

“Under such a lawless and corrupt administration, we need talented and creative leaders to do oversight work, expose the malfeasance to the public and break through in a fractured media environment, and Congressman Garcia has proven adept at all three,” Schiff said.

Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee, said Garcia’s strategy could backfire if or when all the information on the Epstein investigation comes out.

“I believe that they’ve sprung Pandora’s box with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories, fake memes and news that the left is fully embracing and that may not actually be real,” he said.

As more records from Epstein’s estate are expected to come to light in the coming weeks, Garcia says he is committed to exposing wrongdoing from anyone, regardless of party. The documents have already shown Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats.

The records have also shown links to major banks, a thread Garcia says he believes could be central in understanding Epstein’s plea deal negotiated by a prosecutor who served in Trump’s Cabinet during his first term.

“I am not interested in protecting anybody,” he said. “I’m interested in justice for the survivors.”

GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — In their last joint appearance before Tuesday’s high-stakes New Hampshire primary, the five major Democratic presidential candidates Sunday coasted through a generally desultory debate enlivened only by attacks on former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas for his support of nuclear power.

Tsongas, who leads in state polls, repeatedly came under attack for his staunch backing of nuclear power–a controversial position in a state where many Democratic activists have long opposed the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Each of Tsongas’ four rivals said they would decrease the nation’s reliance on nuclear energy.

“We’re not all trying to gang up on you, we’re not trying to say you’re wrong all the time,” Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said to Tsongas at one point. “But on this particular issue I think you are. . . . Nuclear power, it seems to me, is fatally flawed.”

The focus on nuclear power–an issue that until recently has played virtually no role in the campaign–underlined the shift in Tsongas’ position from a long-shot who had been gently patronized to a front-runner worthy of pummeling. But other than the criticism of his energy policy–an issue that has not been high on the list of voter concerns here in recent years–Tsongas ran this last gantlet before the vote virtually unscathed.

Early in the debate, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.–who later grilled Tsongas most aggressively on his support for nuclear power–even embraced him as a fellow outsider committed to “the politics of the future” as compared to the three current officeholders in the race.

Brown then mildly distanced himself from Tsongas, saying the former senator “represents a more conservative, business-oriented view of the future.”

In fact, the tone of the debate was strikingly low-key, with all of the candidates focusing more of their fire on President Bush than their rivals. Tsongas took the lead, employing the front-runner strategy used earlier by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. At every opportunity Tsongas stressed his agreements with his rivals and his differences with Bush.

In the debate, sponsored by Cable News Network and the League of Women Voters, the candidates were hampered by a format so disjointed and at times unstructured that twice Clinton felt compelled to suggest questions to moderator Bernard Shaw.

After weeks of focusing on the bread-and-butter concerns of voters in this economically ravaged state, the candidates Sunday found themselves exploring international population control, the destruction of the rain forests, utility pricing reform and whether the nation needs a better class of light bulb.

In this alternately esoteric and disengaged atmosphere, the only energy was generated by the issue of nuclear power.

One by one, each of Tsongas’ rivals insisted they would reduce reliance on nuclear power. Harkin declared that a program “of developing solar . . . for the future” would allow the nation to avoid “going to the nuclear option that Paul Tsongas wants to move to.”

Brown said he would move to phase out all nuclear power plants over the next decade.

Clinton said: “I do not favor anything that will accelerate the building of nuclear power plants. If you have major incentives to the utilities to engage in conservation, if you have a major attempt to convert to natural gas wherever you can. . . . I do not think you are going to see a need for new nuclear power plants.”

Tsongas–after characterizing nuclear power as part of “the third tier” of his preferred energy options for the country–argued in response to the persistent jabs that a reduction in reliance on nuclear power would require greater use of fossil fuels, raising the threat of global warming through the greenhouse effect.

“If you take out all of your nuclear power plants by definition, you are going to have more fossil fuel burning and add to the greenhouse effect,” Tsongas said. “I take the position that the threat long term is global warming.”

Though Tsongas forcefully held his ground, he bristled under the attacks–which were among the most pointed he has endured. “If I could, I would like . . . to characterize my positions myself and not have others do it,” he said.

After the debate, aides to the other candidates maintained that Tsongas had been weakened by the focus on an issue. “I don’t think his position has been laid out before as it was here tonight, so I think it will hurt him,” said Frank Greer, Clinton’s media adviser.

Thaleia Schlesinger, Tsongas’ sister, countered: “People understand his position was based on his fear of global warming.”

When not arguing over whether to split atoms for energy, the candidates managed to make some points about the economy. To a greater degree than usual, Tsongas declared that his approach–which relies heavily on increasing capital incentives for business and rejects a tax cut for the middle class–offered struggle as well as reward.

“There are two roads,” he said in closing remarks. “One is easy, one is comfortable, but it is downhill. The other is the road to economic prosperity. . . . That road is steeper and it’s harder, but it’s more noble and it’s more worthy.”

Harkin reiterated his support for cutting the defense budget in half over 10 years to support infrastructure investments and other programs at home. And he took a harsh line on trade issues, promising to stand up to Japan and prevent former government trade negotiators from lobbying for foreign governments. “I’m saying trade has to be a two-way street, not a one-way bridge,” he said.

As he has in recent days, Clinton sought to differentiate himself from Tsongas by emphasizing his experience as chief executive in Arkansas and his plans to reform government. “I think we have to have a more activist government,” he said, “but it also has to be more community-based, less bureaucratic and provide more citizen choice.”

Like Harkin, Kerrey insisted that America needed to get tougher with Japan on trade. But he called for the establishment of “new trading structures so that we can expand trade into the rest of the world, trying to convert . . . old enemies into new customers.”

Tsongas, who has taken the strongest free-trade position, urged voluntary protectionism, saying that as President he would ask Americans to shun Japanese imports if Japan doesn’t open its markets. “If the Japanese are not willing to be reasonable,” he said, “you have to play hardball.”

For most of this encounter, though, hardball was apparently the last thing on the minds of the five Democrats chasing the White House. With Tuesday’s pivotal vote in sight, they seemed less like contenders stepping into the ring than weary fighters embracing at the end of a bruising match.

Times political writer Robert Shogan contributed to this story.

California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.

Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.

Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.

“The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.

“That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.

The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.

A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.

Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.

The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.

In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.

More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.

While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.

Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.

“If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.

Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.

Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.

Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.

“I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”

The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.

“They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.

Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.

After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

“At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”

President Donald Trump pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys Gobble and Waddle — joking he nearly named them after Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer — while also taking swipes at Joe Biden, stating last year’s turkey pardons were “invalid” because Biden used an autopen to sign them.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — It’s the longest walk in Georgia politics — the 600 steps from the mayor’s office in Atlanta’s towering City Hall to the governor’s office in the gold-domed state Capitol.

No Atlanta mayor has ever made the journey to the state’s top office, but Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms is undeterred.

“I’m going to be the first because I am working to earn people’s votes across the state,” she said after a campaign appearance in Columbus last week. “So just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.”

The former mayor must initially overcome six others in a Democratic primary in May. If she pushes through that thicket, Republicans lie in wait to attack Bottoms on how she managed crime, disorder and the COVID pandemic as mayor before jolting Atlanta politicos by not seeking reelection.

“She is the easiest to run against,” said Republican strategist Brian Robinson, who calls Bottoms “unelectable.”

While Georgia Democrats are elated after two unknowns won landslide victories over Republican incumbents in statewide elections to the Public Service Commission on Nov. 4, they need a nominee who can reach independents and even some Republicans for the party to win its first Georgia governor’s race since 1998.

Democrats hoped Joe Biden winning the state’s electoral votes for president in 2020 marked a lasting breakthrough. But Republican Gov. Brian Kemp handily defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in their 2022 rematch despite Abrams outspending Kemp. And 2024 saw Donald Trump substantially boost Republican turnout in his Georgia victory over Democrat Kamala Harris.

Early advantages

For some Bottoms supporters, the primary is a process of elimination in a field highlighting many of the fissures Democrats face nationally, including suburban-versus-urban, progressive-versus-centrist and fresh faces-versus-old warhorses.

Former state Sen. Jason Esteves is backed by some party insiders but is unknown statewide. Former state labor commissioner and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond has vast experience but is 72 years old and has historically been a weak fundraiser. Former Republican lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan’s party switch has drawn curiosity, but apologies for past GOP positions may not be enough for lifelong Democrats. State Rep. Ruwa Romman promises Zohran Mamdani-style progressivism, but may face an uphill battle among moderate Democrats. And state Rep. Derrick Jackson boasts a military record but finished sixth in the 2022 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.

Bottoms starts with advantages. She’s the best-known of the Democrats running. She’s got executive experience. Being considered by Biden as a possible vice presidential nominee and then joining his administration gave her national fundraising connections. Additionally, Bottoms is the only Black woman in the Democratic field in a state where Black women are the backbone of the party. In 2022, for 10 statewide offices, Georgia Democrats nominated five Black women.

Sheana Browning, who attended the Columbus event, said she liked Bottoms’ promise of pay raises for Browning and fellow state employees. Like 70% of the roughly 125 attendees, Browning is a Black woman. She cited Bottoms’ “previous mayoral status and the fact that she’s a Black woman” as key reasons to vote for her.

But other Democrats bet Bottoms’ early support is soft. A Biden connection could leave many voters cold. And no Black woman has ever been elected governor of any state.

Reminding voters who she is

For Bottoms’ part, she’s seeking to reintroduce herself. She’s reminding voters that her father, a ‘60s soul crooner, went to prison for dealing cocaine and that her mother enrolled in cosmetology school at night to support the family. She’s also burnishing her mayoral record. She rattled off a string of accomplishments in questions with reporters in Columbus — building city reserves to $180 million, avoiding property tax increases, giving raises to police and firefighters, creating or preserving 7,000 affordable housing units.

“That sounds pretty successful to me,” Bottoms said.

Bottoms also touts an affordability message, saying she will exempt teachers from state income taxes and do more to create reasonably priced housing, including “cracking down” on companies that rent tens of thousands of single family homes in Georgia.

“I think can really put a dent into this affordability issue that we’re having,” Bottoms said.

A long shadow from 2020

But her mayoral record also poses problems, centering on the challenging summer of 2020. The high point of Bottoms’ political career may have come on May 30, 2020, when she spoke emotionally against violence and disorder in Black Lives Matter protests, upbraiding people who vandalized buildings, looted stores and burned a police car.

“We are better than this! We are better than this as a city, we are better than this as a country!” Bottoms said in a speech that raised her profile as a possible vice presidential pick for Biden. “Go home! Go home!”

But the low point followed weeks later on July 4, when an 8-year-old girl riding in an SUV was shot and killed by armed men occupying makeshift barricades near a Wendy’s burned by demonstrators after police fatally shot a Black man in the parking lot. A “blue flu” of officers called in sick after prosecutors criminally charged two officers in that shooting of Rayshard Brooks. Bottoms said she gave a City Council member more time to negotiate with protesters to leave without police intervention.

“She took the side of the mob over the Atlanta police over and over again,” is how Robinson puts it.

The reelection that never happened

In May 2021, Bottoms became the first Atlanta mayor since World War II not to seek a second term. She later served for a year as Biden’s senior adviser for public engagement, then joined his reelection campaign.

Esteves has been sharpening attacks, telling WXIA-TV that Bottoms is “a former mayor who abandoned the city at a time of crisis, and decided not to run for reelection” and saying Bottoms is one of several candidates who have “baggage that Republicans will be able to focus on.”

Bottoms denies she’s a quitter, saying her political position remained strong and that she would have won reelection. “I ran through the tape,” Bottoms said in May. “We ended the term delivering.”

In May, Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman and Atlanta City Council members Eshé Collins, Amir Farokhi and Jason Dozier endorsed Esteves. Shipman, elected citywide as City Council president in 2021, said voters told him that year that they were unhappy with crime, garbage collection, and efforts to split the city by letting its Buckhead neighborhood secede.

“I think that that frustration is something that people are going to have to revisit,” Shipman said of the 2026 governor’s primary, saying Democrats need “a fresh start” and “some new energy.”

But Bottoms says her experience and record should carry the day.

“Who I am is a battle-tested leader and what I’ve been saying to people across the state is, I know what it’s like to go into battle,” she said. “I know what it’s like to go up against Donald Trump. I know what it’s like not to back down against Donald Trump.”

Amy writes for the Associated Press.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a remarkable rise, a San Francisco real estate broker left a checkered past in Hawaii and established herself as an important Democratic fund-raiser with access to some of the country’s most powerful politicians.

Just 18 months after she finished federal probation for income tax evasion, Chong Lo joined a small group of contributors at the White House for a coffee with the president and vice president in 1995.

A month later, President Clinton praised her during a fund-raising luncheon at a Nob Hill hotel. At that moment, the U.S. attorney’s office was preparing to prosecute her for mortgage fraud and the state was on the verge of revoking her broker’s license.

To cap her political ascent, she was elected a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, although she was not a registered Democrat and had never voted.

Before she was arrested last July on 14 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy, Lo boasted to friends that she had met with Clinton 30 times and visited the White House on seven occasions. Sources said the walls of her office and home were lined with photos of her with the president, vice president and first lady, as well as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), California’s U.S. senators, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

Now Lo is a political pariah, and her fund-raising activities have become part of a widening national probe of improper campaign practices and illegal contributions. The FBI is investigating whether any of the campaign money she and others raised through a Bay Area nonprofit group called the Lotus Fund may have come from foreign sources.

With her trial on the mortgage fraud charges scheduled this fall, Lo and her attorney, Tony Serra, refused to discuss her case with reporters. She has pleaded not guilty, and Serra has complained publicly that she had been jailed without bail for two months for unspecified political reasons.

Her story has become a paradigm of modern American politics–of how aggressive fund-raising is rewarded with access to power and encouraged by campaign operatives who appear more interested in collecting contributions than questioning the source. To the Democrats, the emerging political involvement of the Asian community offered a new source of money and votes.

Lo portrayed herself as a community leader and a fund-raiser on a grand scale. Documents show that she and the Lotus Fund pledged to raise more than $500,000 for the Democratic National Committee, but it was unclear how much was collected. She personally contributed $24,000 to various candidates and the DNC, but much of that is being returned because it has been tainted by the fund-raising scandal.

If party officials had dug into Lo’s past, they might have discovered that she once was known as Ester Chung Shung Lo Chu and left Hawaii under a cloud. Records also show that she used at least two Social Security numbers.

The party “did not have a policy of checking everyone out,” said a Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There was an attempt to bring in the Asian community, to get that segment of the population active. So they were more inclined not to check.”

Said one of Lo’s political allies: “Nobody knew who she was, but they took her money.”

‘A Tremendous Charmer’

Chong Shung Lo is a locomotive of a woman with a penchant for fine jewelry and clothes. Small of stature, she talks fast, walks fast and eats fast, according to those who know her. Working 16- to 18-hour days, this divorced mother of two kept up a frenetic pace as real estate broker and property manager, traveling the city in her champagne-colored Mercedes. At one point, her home was in elegant St. Francis Wood.

Friends describe her as a charming, if impulsive, woman who speaks her mind. “In life,” she has said, “you have to take risks. I am willing to take risks.”

She was born in the Sichuan province of China, most likely in 1942, although documents show various birth dates. Raised in Shanghai, she has told friends she came from a distinguished family that once included Confucian scholars, an ambassador to Germany and a Qing Dynasty official.

As a youngster, she lived in Hong Kong, Australia and Canada before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, sources said. In 1970, as Ester Chu, she was licensed as a nurse in Hawaii but moved into real estate. Her Ester Chu Realty Inc. had offices in Honolulu and Hong Kong, documents show.

“She was a tremendous charmer,” said Robert Taylor, a Honolulu businessman who worked in her office part time and parted company with her over a property dispute. “A great salesperson. It’s just that she misled some people.”

Her troubles centered on her role as managing partner in two condominium projects in Honolulu and on the Big Island of Hawaii. By 1984, the local real estate market had turned sour and both partnerships were in bankruptcy.

That year the Hawaiian Real Estate Commission filed a complaint against her and Ester Chu Realty for allegedly making misrepresentations to clients, exaggerating sales figures on faltering projects, failing to return renters’ security deposits and putting clients’ money in her personal account.

During the three years it took the commission to revoke her license, Chu explored business opportunities in China. In 1985, she told acquaintances, she developed a hotel in a joint venture with the Chinese government.

The Internal Revenue Service began investigating her. In 1988, the government charged her with reporting a $39,750 income loss in 1981 when she had actually made more than $290,000.

After moving to Las Vegas, she pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion, was sentenced to five years’ probation, fined $5,000 and barred from working in real estate without her probation officer’s permission. It is unclear whether such permission was granted.

Lawsuits and an FBI Probe

As Chong Lo, she established herself as a real estate broker in California. But she fell into trouble again.

A tenant of a San Francisco apartment Lo managed charged in a lawsuit that she demanded he vacate the premises. When he refused, the lawsuit said, a man later threatened to kill him and threw a padlock, breaking two of the tenant’s teeth. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount, according to the plaintiff’s attorney. Lo’s attorney confirmed the settlement but declined to comment further.

In another suit, charging Lo and others with misrepresentation and breach of contract, a couple from Pacifica, Calif., said they lost their home because of a complicated loan deal that required them to deed the house to an associate of Lo. In a response, Lo said she had little to do with the transaction. The lawsuit, filed in 1990, remains unresolved.

By 1991, the FBI was investigating allegations that Lo, as chief financial officer for Able-Tao Financial Inc., was involved in an elaborate mortgage fraud scheme. The scheme allegedly included falsifying pay stubs and W-2 forms of borrowers who would not otherwise qualify for loans. To verify nonexistent jobs or salaries, banks were allegedly given the number of a phone in the same building as the Able-Tao offices, according to records and interviews.

That October, FBI agents, armed with a search warrant, raided Lo’s office, removing boxes of loan files and other papers.

While the investigation went on, Chong Lo plunged into the world of politics.

‘She Knew Everybody in Town’

Lo has told acquaintances that she was nonpartisan but admired Clinton because he successfully overcame his humble beginnings. She saw the president for the first time at his January 1993 inauguration, she told them.

Meanwhile, Lo joined the Lotus Fund, which was formed the previous year to unite Asian American and Pacific Islander communities behind candidates and issues.

It included such prominent people as Ginger Lew, who was named deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration under Clinton, and Michael J. Yamaguchi, who was appointed U.S. attorney in San Francisco by Clinton. It was Yamaguchi who would sign the bank fraud indictment of Lo last June but later would recuse himself.

While Lo worked her way up to the chairmanship of the Lotus Fund, she made political contributions, including $1,750 to state Treasurer Kathleen Brown’s bid to unseat Gov. Wilson in 1994. Lo contributed $400 to Wilson as well. But records show that most of her donations went to Democrats–$500 to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, $1,350 to Sen. Barbara Boxer and $9,500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“She definitely was able to get her foot in the door. She knew everybody in town,” said Bill Ong Hing, visiting law professor at UC Davis, who has known Lo for five years and whose sister, Grace, is a Lotus Fund founder.

Hing, who attended a fund-raiser featuring Vice President Al Gore last year at Lo’s invitation, said she relished her connections. “She fell into the category of Asians who liked to say that they had contact with important people, and the way for her to have greater contact was to give more money,” he said. “I felt badly for her that people dropped her.”

One DNC document said Lo made a commitment to raise $150,000 for the party in 1995 alone.

On the invitation to a September 1995 luncheon at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco honoring Clinton and Gore, she is listed as a member of “The National Finance Board of Directors”–an honorific title indicating that she had pledged to raise at least $50,000 for the event, according to a Democratic source.

Clinton publicly thanked Lo, along with Feinstein’s husband, financier Richard Blum; winemaker Ernest Gallo, developer Walter Shorenstein, and Esprit clothing founder Susie Tompkins.

Lo had clearance for at least six White House visits, Washington sources confirm. These included the coffee with Clinton and Gore, as well as several dinners and receptions.

Back home, her legal problems mounted and she emerged as a ubiquitous presence in Bay Area Democratic circles.

The state Department of Real Estate revoked her broker’s license in 1995 for failing to keep adequate records and placing client funds in a non-trust account. A month later, she was granted a restricted license, but officials recently began reviewing it to find whether she failed to disclose her prior felony conviction.

When DNC staff and volunteers needed places to stay, she put them up in her home and an apartment above her business office, which also doubled as Lotus Fund headquarters. Sources said she also supplied visiting Democrats with fresh towels and sheets and use of a friend’s car.

At a party caucus in February 1996, Lo organized supporters to help elect her as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 12th Congressional District. However, records show that she was registered outside the district as a member of the American Independent Party, making her ineligible to be a Democratic delegate.

Former Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame), who chaired the session, remembered meeting Lo. “I recall the woman specifically because she made a point of showing me a picture of herself taken with President Clinton to establish her credentials.”

There was no attempt to check the party affiliations of those who attended or ran as delegates. “You just take everyone at their word,” Speier said.

Fund Vowed to Raise $400,000 for DNC

Lo soon began organizing an event that propelled her into the public spotlight months before the Washington fund-raising scandal erupted. The nonprofit Lotus Fund, which could legally make political contributions under its state charter, promised to raise at least $400,000 for the DNC.

The group promised that those contributing $12,500 or more to its event would fly to Washington a few days later to meet and be photographed with Clinton.

A May 30, 1996, letter from the DNC’s Northern California finance director, Michael Marubio, appears to confirm that the White House visit was in the works.

However, the Lotus Fund learned that Clinton would appear July 23 at an official DNC fund-raiser in San Francisco. So the group decided to hold its own event that evening at the same hotel, making it convenient for the president to stop by.

There is disagreement among DNC officials about whether the White House committed itself to a Clinton appearance at the Lotus Fund event.

But any possibility of a presidential visit apparently was dashed two weeks before the event when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a Lotus Fund vice president was facing illegal weapons possession charges.

A few days after the news report, DNC fund-raiser Mark Thomann told Lo and other Lotus Fund leaders that the president would not be appearing at their event. To placate them, he provided 100 free tickets to the party event and said a small group of them could be photographed with Clinton.

The Lotus Fund planned to carry on with its own fund-raiser until Lo was arrested on suspicion of mortgage fraud July 19 and kept in jail until September as a flight risk.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco office of the FBI examined whether the Lotus Fund had committed mail fraud by falsely promising contributors an appearance by the president, FBI spokesman George Grotz said.

However, investigators found that the group’s leaders had good reason to believe Clinton would attend. One important piece of evidence, sources said, was a secretly recorded tape of Thomann apologizing to the group. The mail fraud probe then was dropped.

An FBI task force has continued to look into the origins of political campaign contributions raised by Lo and the Lotus Fund, sources said, to determine whether they were properly reported and whether any came from foreign interests.

Days after Lo’s arrest, the San Francisco Examiner reported that Chong Lo appeared to be Ester Chu, a former Hawaii resident with a tax evasion conviction.

By matching fingerprints and photos, federal authorities now have established that Chu and Lo are the same person, sources said.

Lo has told acquaintances that she never tried to hide her identity: that Chu was her married name, dropped after her divorce, and that among Chinese friends she has always been known as Chong (or Chung) Lo.

Some say she was guarded about her past. Richard Mar, a mortgage loan representative who knew Ester Chu in Hawaii, said he ran into her again in San Francisco several years later. “She told me not to mention Ester, ‘because my name is Chong Lo and I don’t want people to know. . . .’ ”

Lo, who was freed on $100,000 bond, has told acquaintances that she feels bitterness toward the DNC but remains an admirer of Clinton.

She could not attend the national convention in August because she was in jail. But Lo requested court permission to leave the state to attend the Clinton inauguration in January.

A copy of her invitation and a detailed itinerary were submitted–and permission was granted. Lo told acquaintances she got a good seat for the swearing-in and attended an inaugural ball.

Times staff writer Dan Morain and researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Delegate Was No Democrat

Chong Lo, a San Francisco real estate broker with a history of legal problems, was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention at a party caucus last year. However, records show that she was not a registered Democrat, as party rules require, and had never voted. This document certifies her election as a Bill Clinton delegate, but she could not attend the convention because she was in jail.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday said he believed Democratic lawmakers who publicly urged active service members to “refuse illegal orders” amounted to seditious behavior, which he said should be punishable by death.

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” Trump said in a social media post.

Trump went on to amplify more than a dozen social media posts from other people, who in reaction to Trump’s post called for the Democrats to be arrested, charged and in one instance hanged. Trump then continued: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

The president’s remarks were in reaction to a joint video released by six Democrat lawmakers in which they urged military and intelligence personnel to “refuse illegal orders.”

The Democratic lawmakers who released the video — Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Michigan Sen. Alyssa Slotkin, Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio, New Hampshire Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan and Colorado Rep. Jason Crow — served in the military or as intelligence officers.

They did not specify which orders they were referring to. But they said the Trump administration was “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professional against American citizens” and that threats to the Constitution were coming “from right here at home.”

The video, which was posted on Tuesday, quickly drew criticism from Republicans, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who characterized it as “Stage 4 [Trump Derangement Syndrome].” But Trump, who first reacted to the video on Thursday, saw the video as more than partisan speech.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” Trump said in another post.

When asked Thursday if the president wanted to execute members of Congress, as suggested in one of his social media posts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “no.”

But, Leavitt said, the president does want to see them be “held accountable.”

“That is a very, very dangerous message and it is perhaps punishable by law,” Leavitt said. “I’ll leave that to the Department of justice and the Department of War to decide.”

What the law says

Under a federal law known as “seditious conspiracy,” it is a crime for two or more individuals to “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States” or to “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States” by force.

A seditious conspiracy charge is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Federal courts and legal scholars have long emphasized that seditious conspiracy charges apply only to coordinated efforts to use force against the government, rather than political dissent.

The last time federal prosecutors pursued seditious conspiracy charges was in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges for plotting to prevent by force the transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden.

Among the convicted individuals was former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, whose 22-year sentence was the stiffest of any of the Jan. 6 rioters. Trump pardoned him earlier this year.

Hours after the president’s posts, the six Democratic lawmakers issued a joint statement, calling on Americans to “unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence.”

“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” the lawmakers said in a statement posted to X. “Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders.”

Democratic leaders in Washington and across the country denounced Trump’s post.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement with other Democratic leaders that Trump’s comments were “disgusting and dangerous death threats against members of Congress.” They added that they had been in contact with U.S. Capitol Police to ensure the safety of the Democrat lawmakers and their families.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom reacted to the posts by saying Trump “is sick in the head” for calling for the death of Democratic lawmakers.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday night signed into law legislation demanding that the Justice Department release all documents related to its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

With little fanfare, the president announced the action in a lengthy social media post that attacked Democrats who have been linked to the late financier, a line of attack that he has often deployed while ignoring his and other Republicans’ ties to the scandal.

“Perhaps the truth about these Democrats and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, will soon be revealed, but I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Now the focus turns to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, whom the legislation compels to make available “all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials” in the Department of Justice’s possession no later than 30 days after the legislation becoming law.

The action on the bill marks a dramatic shift for Trump, who worked for months to thwart release of the Epstein files — until Sunday, when he reversed course under pressure from his party and called on Republican lawmakers to back the measure. Within days, the Senate and House overwhelmingly voted for the bill and sent it to Trump’s desk.

Although Trump has now signed the bill into law, his resistance to releasing the files has led to skepticism among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who question whether the Justice Department may try to conceal information.

“The real test will be, will the Department of Justice release the files or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said at a news conference Tuesday before the House and Senate passed the bill. Greene was among a small group of GOP defectors who joined Democrats in forcing the legislation to the floor over Trump’s objections.

The legislation prohibits the attorney general from withholding, delaying or redacting the publication of “any record, document, communication, or investigative material on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

Carve-outs in the bill could allow Trump and Bondi to withhold documents that include identifying information of victims or depictions of child sexual abuse materials.

The law also would allow them to conceal information that would “jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.”

Trump directed the Justice Department last week to investigate Epstein’s links with major banks and several prominent Democrats, including former President Clinton.

Bondi abided, and appointed a top federal prosecutor to pursue the investigation with “urgency and integrity.” In July, the Justice Department determined after an extensive review that there was not enough evidence that “could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties” in the Epstein case.

At a news conference Wednesday, Bondi said the department had opened another case into Epstein after “new information” emerged.

Bondi did not say how the new investigation could affect the release of the files.

Asked if the Epstein documents would be released within 30 days, as the law states, Bondi said her department would “follow the law.”

“We will continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims,” Bondi said.

An Indiana lawmaker who has yet to make a decision on whether to back President Trump’s push to have Republicans redraw the state’s congressional boundaries was the victim of a swatting call that brought sheriff’s deputies to his home.

The call, in which someone reported a fake emergency at the Terre Haute home of state Sen. Greg Goode on Sunday, came hours after Trump criticized Indiana lawmakers for not moving forward with the plan and singled out Goode and Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray. Trump has been trying to persuade Republican-led states across the country to aggressively redraw their congressional maps to help the GOP hold the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections.

Deputies were sent to Goode’s home after receiving an email “advising harm had been done to persons inside a home,” according to a statement from the Vigo County Sheriff’s Office.

“All persons were secure, safe, and unharmed. Investigation showed that this was a prank or false email (also known as ‘swatting’),” the statement said. The incident is under investigation.

Goode, a Republican, wrote on social media that the responding deputies were “under the impression of a domestic violence emergency.” He thanked the deputies for acting professionally.

“While this entire incident is unfortunate and reflective of the volatile nature of our current political environment, I give thanks to God that my family and I are ok,” Goode wrote.

Trump singled out Goode and Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray while demanding that Republicans move forward with a redistricting plan for Indiana. Republicans already hold a 7-2 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

“Because of these two politically correct type ‘gentlemen,’ and a few others, they could be depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, a VERY BIG DEAL!” Trump wrote on his social media platform.

Bray, the Republican leader of Indiana’s Senate, announced Friday that his chamber will no longer meet to vote on redistricting, citing a lack of support from his members even after pressure from the White House. Vice President JD Vance has visited multiple times to make the case.

Goode, a Republican member of the Senate, has not publicly stated his position on redistricting and says he will not make a decision without seeing a map and legislation introduced for lawmakers’ review.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The goal of swatting is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address by making bogus claims of violence happening inside.

Democrats need to gain just three seats to win control of the House next year, leading to Trump’s strong-arming of GOP-controlled states. Legislatures or commissions in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have adopted new maps to boost Republicans’ odds, while California and Virginia are poised to counter Trump’s push and redraw their own maps to benefit Democrats.

Weber writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — A federal court has blocked Texas from moving forward with a new congressional map hastily drawn in recent months to net Republicans up to five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections.

The ruling on Tuesday is a major political blow to the Trump administration, which set off a redistricting arms race throughout the country earlier this year by encouraging Texas lawmakers to redraw its congressional district boundaries mid-decade — an extraordinary move bucking traditional practice.

The three-judge federal court panel in El Paso said in a 2-1 decision that “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” ordering the state to revert to the maps it had drawn in 2021.

Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who at Trump’s behest directed GOP state lawmakers to proceed with the plan, vowed on Tuesday that the state would appeal the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court.

Californians responded to Texas’ attempted move by voting on Nov. 4 to approve a new, temporary congressional map for the state, giving Democrats the opportunity to pick up five new seats.

Initially, the proposal pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, known as Prop. 50, had trigger language that would have conditioned new California maps going into effect based on whether Texas approved its new congressional districts.

But that language was stripped out last minute, raising the possibility that Democrats enter the 2026 midterm election with a distinct advantage. The language was removed because Texas had already passed its redistricting plan, making the trigger no longer needed, said Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, who drew the maps for Prop. 50.

“Our legislature eliminated the trigger because Texas had already triggered it,” Mitchell said Tuesday.

Newsom celebrated the ruling in a statement to The Times, which he also posted on the social media site X.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” Newsom said. “This ruling is a win for Texas, and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”

Legal scholars had warned that Texas’ bid would invite accusations and legal challenges of racial gerrymandering that California’s maps would not.

The new Texas redistricting plan appears to have been instigated by a letter from Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who threatened Texas with legal action over three “coalition districts” that she argued were unconstitutional.

Coalition districts feature multiple minority communities, none of which comprises the majority. The newly configured districts passed by Texas redrew all three, potentially “cracking” racially diverse communities while preserving white-majority districts, legal scholars said.

While the Supreme Court’s rulings on redistricting have been sporadic, the justices have generally ruled that purely political redistricting is legal, but that racial gerrymandering is not — a more difficult line to draw in southern states where racial and political lines overlap.

In 2023, addressing a redistricting fight in Alabama over Black voter representation, the high court ruled in Allen vs. Milligan that discriminating against minority voters in gerrymandering is unconstitutional, ordering the Southern state to create a second minority-majority district.

The Justice Department is also suing California to attempt to block the use of its new maps in next year’s elections.

Times staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The House is poised to vote overwhelmingly on Tuesday to demand the Justice Department release all documents tied to its investigation of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

President Trump, who initially worked to thwart the vote before reversing course on Sunday night, has said he will sign the measure if it reaches his desk. For that to happen, the bill will also need to pass the Senate, which could consider the measure as soon as Tuesday night.

Republicans for months pushed back on the release of the Epstein files, joining Trump in claiming the Epstein issue was being brought up by Democrats as a way to distract from Republicans’ legislative successes.

But that all seismically shifted Sunday when Trump had a drastic reversal and urged Republicans to vote to release the documents, saying there was “nothing to hide.”

“It’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The reversal came days after 20,000 documents from Epstein’s private estate were released by lawmakers in the House Oversight Committee. The files referenced Trump more than 1,000 times.

In private emails, Epstein wrote that Trump had “spent hours” at his house and “knew about the girls,” a revelation that reignited the push in Congress for further disclosures.

Trump has continued to deny wrongdoing in the Epstein saga despite opposing the release of files from the federal probe into the conduct of his former friend, a convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker. He died by suicide while in federal custody in 2019.

Many members of Trump’s MAGA base have demanded the files be released, convinced they contain revelations about powerful people involved in Epstein’s abuse of what is believed to be more than 200 women and girls. Tension among his base spiked when Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in July that an “Epstein client list” did not exist, after saying in February that the list was sitting on her desk awaiting review. She later said she was referring to the Epstein files more generally.

Trump’s call to release the files now highlights how he is trying to prevent an embarrassing defeat as a growing number of Republicans in the House have joined Democrats to vote for the legislation in recent days.

The Epstein files have been a hugely divisive congressional fight in recent months, with Democrats pushing the release, but Republican congressional leaders largely refusing to take the votes. The issue even led to a rift within the MAGA movement, and Trump to cut ties with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who had long been an ardent support of the president.

“Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart,” Greene said at a news conference Tuesday in reference to the resistance to release the files.

Democrats have accused Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) of delaying the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, because she promised to cast the final vote needed to move a so-called discharge petition, which would force a vote on the floor. Johnson has denied those claims.

If the House and Senate do vote to release the files, all eyes will turn to the Department of Justice, and what exactly it will choose to publicly release.

“The fight, the real fight, will happen after that,” Greene said. “The real test will be: Will the Department of Justice release the files? Or will it all remain tied up in an investigation?”

Several Epstein survivors joined lawmakers at the news conference to talk about how important the vote was for them.

Haley Robson, one of the survivors, questioned Trump’s resistance to the vote even now as he supports it.

“While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files, and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is,” Robson said.

If signed into law by Trump, the bill would prohibit the attorney general, Bondi, from withholding, delaying or redacting “any record, document, communication, or investigative material on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

But caveats in the bill could provide Trump and Bondi with loopholes to keep records related to the president concealed.

In the spring, FBI Director Kash Patel directed a Freedom of Information Act team to comb through the entire trove of files from the investigation, and ordered it to redact references to Trump, citing his status as a private citizen with privacy protections when the probe first launched in 2006, Bloomberg reported at the time.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, said the Trump administration will be forced to release the files with an act of Congress.

“They will be breaking the law if they do not release these files,” he said.

Stenciled on sidewalks, projected on buildings and tweeted in hashtags, a one-word message will greet California Democrats as they arrive in Sacramento for their party convention this weekend: Persist.

It’s not a guerrilla marketing campaign for a politician or a product. It’s the brainchild of a crew of top Democratic strategists — all women — who were seeking a cathartic way to channel their grief over the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

What started as an internal support group has become a multi-pronged effort to promote female empowerment, capped off by a 5-foot-8, 400-pound bronze figure of a defiant young girl perched on the roof of the Democratic Party headquarters in downtown Sacramento — the West Coast’s own version of the Wall Street “Fearless” statue.

Here’s how the effort evolved:

Democratic strategists commissioned their own version of the Wall Street “Fearless” statue. (Melanie Mason / Los Angeles Times)

(Melanie Mason / Los Angeles Times)

The inspiration

The word “persist” took on new political meaning in February, when GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cut Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren off from speaking, offering as an explanation, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted.”

But it was a month later, when a statue of an assured girl facing down the iconic Charging Bull statue appeared on Wall Street, when Angie Tate decided to act.

The “Fearless Girl” statue stands facing the Charging Bull statue as tourists take pictures in New York on April 12. (Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images)

(JEWEL SAMAD / AFP/Getty Images)

Tate, chief fundraiser for the California Democratic party, saw a picture of the “Fearless” statue before her morning walk to the office. By the time she arrived, she had the makings of a plan — and was quickly drafting friends to join.

“There was a morning when there were a lot of texts from Angie,” recalled Robin Swanson, a veteran Democratic communications consultant.

Tate’s idea was to make their own version of “Fearless” for the West Coast. Within weeks, they had found a model for the statue — the 5-year-old daughter of Democratic strategist Dana Williamson — and two anonymous donors to cover the $16,000 tab.

The message

The organizers of the campaign have their own definitions of what it means to persist.

“It’s a symbol that we can all choose our own path if we continue to stand, even when it’s really hard,” Tate said.

For Swanson, the word carries a political connotation after last year’s presidential election.

“For me, I am inspired by Hillary Clinton — inspired that every day she gets out bed and has something to say,” Swanson said.

Children of the “Persist” campaigners pose at the California Democratic Party headquarters. (Jeff Walters)

But she and her colleagues hastened to make clear that their message was not limited to partisan politics.

“I was picturing a little girl in a classroom afraid to raise her hand,” said Williamson, who is an advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown. “We want this next generation to see powerful images of strong women and girls so that they believe very early on that [they] not only can they speak up, but that they should.”

The clues

A completed stencil in Sacramento. (Melanie Mason / Los Angeles Times)

Robin Swanson stencils “persist.” (Melanie Mason / Los Angeles Times)

In the run-up to this weekend’s party convention, the Persist campaign planners steadily dropped hints about their effort. They launched a website and encouraged women to share their own stories about persistence on social media. They recruited heavy-hitter friends in California politics — including former First Lady Maria Shriver, Brown’s top aide Nancy McFadden, influential labor and Democratic Party figures, even Colusa, the governor’s dog — to reference the campaign on their Twitter feeds.

The big reveal

Finally, on Friday morning, the “persist” statue was installed on top of the Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento — which had its roof reinforced to accommodate the new addition.

The references to the campaign will crop up throughout the convention, including on fliers slipped in delegate goody bags and in planned mentions in speeches by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Kamala Harris.. But organizers are hoping the campaign endures beyond the weekend; they’ll continue to collect stories on their website and have discussed potential for other art installations across the state.

For now, their statue now peers out from the corner of the building to passersby.

“Little girls need something to look up to,” Swanson said. “They can literally look up at the statue of ‘persist’ and say ‘I can persist.’ Frankly, we all need a little reassurance ourselves.”

UPDATES:

1:30 p.m. This article was updated to include planned references to “persist” in convention speeches by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Kamala Harris.

This article was originally published at 1:20 p.m.

Reporting from Washington — After carefully avoiding any involvement in the Democratic presidential primary, Gov. Jerry Brown dropped his neutrality – and looked past his bitter history with the Clintons – to endorse Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.

In an open letter to Democrats and independents, Brown urged voters who do not want to see a Donald Trump presidency to stop the infighting and rally behind Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.

“This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other,” he wrote. “The general election has already begun.”

Brown said Clinton has made a persuasive case that she is capable of pushing forward a progressive agenda, and her lead over rival Bernie Sanders is so large at this point that the insurgent Vermonter no longer stands any realistic chance of winning the party’s nomination. Clinton is poised to wrap up the nomination on June 7, when California and five other states will be voting.

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Still, Brown’s endorsement at this stage is yet more evidence of the closely fought primary ahead in California. A recent poll showed Sanders and Clinton in a dead heat in the state, and Clinton cut short a planned campaign swing through New Jersey so she could get back to California by Thursday and hit the stump for several days.

Brown’s backing is also an indication of Democratic Party leaders’ eagerness to coalesce around their front-runner and kick their general-election campaign into full gear. He wrote that he will be voting for Clinton because “this is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the candidacy of Donald Trump.”

A loss for Clinton in the most populous state in the nation and the last major primary going into the Democratic National Convention in July in Philadelphia would deeply bruise her campaign.

Those close to the governor believe Brown simply thought it was the right time, given his own sense of the campaign’s rhythm.

For weeks, Brown had been conspicuously coy about his presidential leanings. In mid-April, the governor said he was “not in any hurry” but reminded reporters that he will serve as a superdelegate to the party’s convention.

Even so, it may have been Bill Clinton who helped seal the deal. The former president spent an hour and a half with the governor in Sacramento last week, delaying an evening speech on the campus of Cal State Sacramento.

Helping win an endorsement for his wife from Brown would mark yet another intriguing chapter in one of politics’ most tempestuous relationships.

It was Brown, after all, who refused to close ranks after losing to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential primary, famously referring to his rival as “the prince of sleaze.”

Brown played a role that year not unlike the one Sanders is playing now, running as the outsider against the establishment, demanding the Democratic Party move in a more leftward direction and refusing to yield to the front-runner at a time party leaders were eager for unity.

At the party’s 1992 national convention in New York, Brown supporters roamed Madison Square Garden with tape over their mouths, protesting what they said was the muzzling of their candidate by party leaders. They interrupted a speech by Hillary Clinton with shouts of “Let Jerry speak!”

“I’ve never known Jerry not to speak when he wants to speak,” Clinton said at the time. “He’s always speaking, near as I can tell.”

The uneasiness still had not subsided by the time Brown had launched his campaign for governor, in 2010. His GOP rival at the time, Meg Whitman, quoted Bill Clinton to make her case that Brown had raised taxes during his first stint as governor.

Brown responded by pointing out that Bill Clinton lied about his philandering in the White House, mocking Clinton’s notorious line, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

“Clinton’s a nice guy, but who ever said he always told the truth?” Brown told a crowd at the opening of a Democratic Party office in East Los Angeles in 2010. “You remember, right? There’s that whole story there about did he or didn’t he. OK, I did — I did not have taxes with this state.”

Brown later apologized. And Bill Clinton ultimately endorsed his gubernatorial bid that year.

The governor worked hard to stay on the sidelines after Hillary Clinton launched her White House bid last year.

But his endorsement, one week before election day, may not have the impact that it could have a few weeks earlier. More than 1.5 million ballots have already been cast through the mail in California, according to an analysis by Political Data Inc., a well-known campaign data firm. A number of other prominent Democrats, from statewide elected officials to most every state legislator, have already spoken up in favor of Clinton.

Sanders’ team argued that the endorsement was akin to party leadership panic.

“That may be why he’s weighing in now on behalf of the Democratic establishment,” said Jane Sanders, the candidate’s wife, in a CNN interview on Tuesday.

Veteran campaign watchers in California all but declared that the endorsement would signal the beginning of the end of a raucous race.

”He’s really become an elder statesman in the Democratic Party,” David Townsend, a longtime party strategist, said of Brown. “I think he realizes that it’s his state and that we need to pull together.”

Regardless of whether animosity between the two big personalities remains, Trump’s agenda could be more disruptive to California than any other state, as Brown alluded to in his open letter.

The presumptive GOP nominee is looking to roll back many of the California policies that Brown’s legacy has been built on, particularly those involving rights for migrant workers and combating climate change.

Trump “has called climate change a ‘hoax,’” Brown warned in his letter. “He has promised to deport millions of immigrants and ominously suggested that other countries may need the nuclear bomb.

“I want to be sure it is Hillary Clinton who takes the oath of office, not Donald Trump,” Brown wrote.

Halper reported from Washington and Myers from Sacramento.

Twitter: @evanhalper

@johnmyers

ALSO:

Bernie Sanders moves toward a fight over Israel, forcing Hillary Clinton to navigate a splintered party

Libertarians hope voter frustration with Trump and Clinton will create a ‘perfect storm’

Analysis: Bernie Sanders looks for success in an ‘unbelievable’ place: California’s Central Valley

UPDATES:

3:28 p.m.: The story was updated with background on Gov. Jerry Brown.

The story was originally published at 8:41 a.m.

The 2028 presidential election is more than 1,000 days away, but you’d hardly know it from all the speculation and anticipation that’s swirling from Sacramento to the Washington Beltway.

Standing at the center of attention is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, fresh off his big victory on Proposition 50, the backatcha ballot measure that gerrymandered the state’s congressional map to boost Democrats and offset a power grab by Texas Republicans.

Newsom is bidding for the White House, and has been doing so for the better part of a year, though he won’t say so out loud. Is Newsom the Democratic front-runner or a mere flash in the pan?

Times columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak disagree on Newsom’s presidential prospects, and more. Here the two hash out some of their differences.

Barabak: So is the presidential race over, Anita? Should I just spend the next few years backpacking and snowboarding in the Sierra and return in January 2029 to watch Newsom iterate, meet the moment and, with intentionality, be sworn in as our nation’s 48th president?

Chabria: You should definitely spend as much time in the Sierra as possible, but I have no idea if Newsom will be elected president in 2028 or not. That’s about a million light-years away in political terms. But I think he has a shot, and is the front-runner for the nomination right now. He’s set himself up as the quick-to-punch foil to President Trump, and increasingly as the leader of the Democratic Party. Last week, he visited Brazil for a climate summit that Trump ghosted, making Newsom the American presence.

And in a recent (albeit small) poll, in a hypothetical race against JD Vance, the current Republican favorite, Newsom lead by three points. Though, unexpectedly, respondents still picked Kamala Harris as their choice for the nomination.

To me, that shows he’s popular across the country. But you’ve warned that Californians have a tough time pulling voters in other states. Do you think his Golden State roots will kill off his contender status?

Barabak: I make no predictions. I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough to know. And, after 2016 and the election of Trump, the words “can’t,” “not,” “won’t,” “never ever” are permanently stricken from my political vocabulary.

That said, I wouldn’t stake more than a penny — which may eventually be worth something, as they’re phased out of our currency — on Newsom’s chances.

Look, I yield to no one in my love of California. (And I’ve got the Golden State tats to prove it.) But I’m mindful of how the rest of the country views the state and those politicians who bear a California return address. You can be sure whoever runs against Newsom — and I’m talking about his fellow Democrats, not just Republicans — will have a great deal to say about the state’s much-higher-than-elsewhere housing, grocery and gas prices and our shameful rates of poverty and homelessness.

Not a great look for Newsom, especially when affordability is all the political rage these days.

And while I understand the governor’s appeal — Fight! Fight! Fight! — I liken it to the fleeting fancy that, for a time, made attorney, convicted swindler and rhetorical battering ram Michael Avenatti seriously discussed as a Democratic presidential contender. At a certain point — and we’re still years away — people will assess the candidates with their head, not viscera.

As for the polling, ask Edmund Muskie, Gary Hart or Hillary Clinton how much those soundings matter at this exceedingly early stage of a presidential race. Well, you can’t ask Muskie, because the former Maine senator is dead. But all three were early front-runners who failed to win the Democratic nomination.

Chabria: I don’t argue the historical case against the Golden State, but I will argue that these are different days. People don’t vote with their heads. Fight me on that.

They vote on charisma, tribalism, and maybe some hope and fear. They vote on issues as social media explains them. They vote on memes.

There no reality in which our next president is rationally evaluated on their record — our current president has a criminal one and that didn’t make a difference.

But I do think, as we’ve talked about ad nauseam, that democracy is in peril. Trump has threatened to run for a third term and recently lamented that his Cabinet doesn’t show him the same kind of fear that Chinese President Xi Jinping gets from his top advisers. And Vance, should he get the chance to run, has made it clear he’s a Christian nationalist who would like to deport nearly every immigrant he can catch, legal or not.

Being a Californian may not be the drawback it’s historically been, especially if Trump’s authoritarianism continues and this state remains the symbol of resistance.

But our governor does have an immediate scandal to contend with. His former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was just arrested on federal corruption charges. Do you think that hurts him?

Barabak: It shouldn’t.

There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on Newsom’s part. His opponents will try the guilt-by-association thing. Some already have. But unless something damning surfaces, there’s no reason the governor should be punished for the alleged wrongdoing of Williamson or others charged in the case.

But let’s go back to 2028 and the presidential race. I think one of our fundamental disagreements is that I believe people do very much evaluate a candidate’s ideas and records. Not in granular fashion, or the way some chin-stroking political scientist might. But voters do want to know how and whether a candidate can materially improve their lives.

There are, of course, a great many who’d reflexively support Donald Trump, or Donald Duck for that matter, if he’s the Republican nominee. Same goes for Democrats who’d vote for Gavin Newsom or Gavin Floyd, if either were the party’s nominee. (While Newsom played baseball in college, Floyd pitched 13 seasons in the major leagues, so he’s got that advantage over the governor.)

But I’m talking about those voters who are up for grabs — the ones who decide competitive races — who make a very rational decision based on their lives and livelihoods and which candidate they believe will benefit them most.

Granted, the dynamic is a bit different in a primary contest. But even then, we’ve seen time and again the whole dated/married phenomenon. As in 2004, when a lot of Democrats “dated” Howard Dean early in the primary season but “married” John Kerry. I see electability — as in the perception of which Democrat can win the general election — being right up there alongside affordability when it comes time for primary voters to make their 2028 pick.

Chabria: No doubt affordability will be a huge issue, especially if consumer confidence continues to plummet. And we are sure to hear criticisms of California, many of which are fair, as you point out. Housing costs too much, homelessness remains intractable.

But these are also problems across the United States, and require deeper fixes than even this economically powerful state can handle alone. More than past record, future vision is going to matter. What’s the plan?

It can’t be vague tax credits or even student loan forgiveness. We need a concrete vision for an economy that brings not just more of the basics like homes, but the kind of long-term economic stability — higher wages, good schools, living-wage jobs — that makes the middle class stronger and attainable.

The Democrat who can lay out that vision while simultaneously continuing to battle the authoritarian creep currently eating our democracy will, in my humble opinion, be the one voters choose, regardless of origin story. After all, it was that message of change with hope that gave us President Obama, another candidate many considered a long shot at first.

Mark, are there any 2028 prospects you’re keeping a particularly close eye on?

Barabak: I’m taking things one election at a time, starting with the 2026 midterms, which include an open-seat race for governor here in California. The results in November 2026 will go a long way toward shaping the dynamic in November 2028. That said, there’s no shortage of Democrats eyeing the race — too many to list here. Will the number surpass the 29 major Democrats who ran in 2020? We’ll see.

I do agree with you that, to stand any chance of winning in 2028, whomever Democrats nominate will have to offer some serious and substantive ideas on how to make people’s lives materially better. Imperiled democracy and scary authoritarianism aside, it’s still the economy, stupid.

Which brings us full circle, back to our gallivanting governor. He may be winning fans and building his national fundraising base with his snippy memes and zippy Trump put-downs. But even if he gets past the built-in anti-California bias among so many voters outside our blessed state, he’s not going to snark his way to the White House.

I’d wager more than a penny on that.

WASHINGTON — Now that the government shutdown is over, House and Senate Republicans say they will negotiate with Democrats on whether to extend COVID-era tax credits that help tens of millions of Americans afford their healthcare premiums. But finding bipartisan agreement could be difficult, if not impossible, before the subsidies expire at the end of the year.

The shutdown ended this week after a small group of Democrats made a deal with Republicans senators who promised a vote by mid-December on extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies. But there is no guaranteed outcome, and many Republicans have made clear they want the credits to expire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the subsidies a “boondoggle” immediately after the House voted Wednesday to end the shutdown, and President Trump said the Obama-era healthcare overhaul was “disaster” as he signed the reopening bill into law.

It is far from the outcome that Democrats had hoped for as they kept the government closed for 43 days, demanding that Republicans negotiate with them on an extension before premiums sharply increase. But they say they will try again as the expiration date approaches.

“It remains to be seen if they are serious,” said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. But he said Democrats “are just getting started.”

Republicans have been meeting privately to discuss the issue. Some want to extend the subsidies, with changes, to avoid the widespread increases in premiums. Others, like Johnson and Trump, want to start a new conversation about overhauling “Obamacare” entirely — a redo after a similar effort in 2017 failed.

Democrats push for extension

Healthcare has long been one of the most difficult issues on Capitol Hill, marked by deep ideological and political divides. Partisan disagreement over the 2010 law has persisted for more than a decade, and relationships are already strained from weeks of partisan tensions over the shutdown.

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said that while Republicans have promised negotiations and a Senate vote, Democrats are wary. She noted that Johnson has not committed to anything in the House.

“Do I trust any of them? Hell no,” DeLauro said.

If the two sides cannot agree, as many as 24 million people who get their healthcare from the exchanges created by the law could see their premiums go up Jan. 1. New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, one of the Democrats who struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to reopen the government, said she thinks an agreement on the tax credits is possible.

During the talks that led to the shutdown’s end, Shaheen said she and other moderate Democrats sat across from Thune and “looked him eye to eye” as he committed to a serious effort.

“We’re going to have a chance to vote on a bill that we will write by mid-December, in a way that gives us a chance to build — hopefully build — bipartisan support to get that through,” Shaheen said.

While Democrats would like to see a permanent extension of the tax credits, most realize that is unlikely. Just before the shutdown ended, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York proposed a one-year extension and a bipartisan committee to address Republican demands for changes to the Affordable Care Act. But Thune said that was a “nonstarter” as the government remained shut down.

In the House, Democrats have proposed a three-year extension.

What Republicans want

While Republicans have long sought to scrap Obamacare, they have had challenges over the years in figuring out what would replace it. That problem plagued the 2017 effort, when then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cast the deciding vote to kill a bill on the Senate floor that was short on detail.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have proposed overhauling the law to create accounts that would direct the money to individuals instead of insurance companies. Those are ideas that Trump echoed as he signed the funding bill Wednesday evening.

“I want the money to go directly to you, the people,” Trump said.

It is unclear exactly how that would work, and scrapping the law in its current form would take months, if not years, to negotiate, even if Republicans could find the votes to do it.

Slow start to negotiations

Some moderate Republicans in the House have said they want to work with Democrats to extend the subsidies before the deadline, which is only weeks away. In a letter to Thune and Schumer on Wednesday, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, the Republican co-chair of the Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, encouraged negotiations.

“Our sense of urgency cannot be greater,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “Our willingness to cooperate has no limits.”

So far, though, Senate Republicans have been meeting on their own to figure out their own differences.

“Right now, it’s just getting consensus among ourselves,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Monday after GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee met to discuss possible ways forward.

Tillis is supportive of extending the tax credits, but said lawmakers also need to find a way to reduce costs. If the two sides cannot eventually agree, Tillis said, Republicans may have to try to figure out a way to do it on their own, potentially using budget maneuvers that enabled them to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” this summer without any Democratic votes.

“We should have that in our back pocket too,” Tillis said.

Another shutdown?

Some House Democrats have raised the possibility that there could be another shutdown if they are unable to win concessions on healthcare. The bill signed by Trump will fully fund some parts of the government, but others run out of money again at the end of January if Congress does not act.

“I think it depends on the vulnerable House Republicans who are not going to be able to go back to their constituents without telling them that they’ve done something on healthcare,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).

“We’ll just have to see” if there could be another shutdown, said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside).

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said he is “not going to vote to endorse their cruelty” if Republicans do not extend the subsidies.

DeLauro said that Republicans have wanted to repeal the ACA since it was first enacted. “That’s where they’re trying to go,” she said.

“When it comes to Jan. 30 we’ll see what progress has been made,” she said.

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block new congressional district boundaries approved by California voters last week, joining a court battle that could help determine which party wins control of the U.S. House in 2026.

The complaint filed in California federal court targets the new congressional map pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to a similar Republican-led effort in Texas backed by President Trump. It sets the stage for a high-stakes legal and political fight between the Republican administration and the Democratic governor, who is seen as a likely 2028 presidential contender.

“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in an emailed statement. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”

California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that changes the state’s congressional boundaries to give Democrats a shot at winning five seats currentlyheld by Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.

The Justice Department is joining a case challenging the new map that was brought by the California Republican Party last week. The Trump administration accuses California of racial gerrymandering in violation of the Constitution by using race as a factor to favor Latino voters with the new map. It asks a judge to prohibit California from using the new map in any future elections.

“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50 — the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the lawsuit says.

Proposition 50 was Newsom’s response to Trump’s maneuvers in Texas, where Republicans rejiggered districts in hopes of picking up five seats of their own ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when House control will be on the line.

Democrats need to gain just a handful of seats next year to take control of the chamber, a win that would imperil Trump’s agenda for the remainder of his term and open the way for congressional investigations into his administration. Republicans currently hold 219 seats, to Democrats’ 214.

The showdown between the nation’s two most populous states has spread nationally, with Missouri, Ohio and a spray of other states either adopting new district lines to gain partisan advantage or considering doing so.

The national implications of California’s ballot measure were clear in both the money it attracted and the high-profile figures who became involved. Tens of millions of dollars flowed into the race, including a $5-million donation to opponents from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super political action committee tied to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Former action movie star and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposed the measure, while former President Obama, a Democrat, appeared in ads supporting it, calling it a “smart” approach to counter Republican moves aimed at safeguarding House control.

The contest provided Newsom with a national platform when he has confirmed he will consider a White House run in 2028.

Richer and Blood write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Chicago.

We are being ruled by the “Epstein class,” and voters deserve to know the details of that particular scandal, and to be able to expect better of their leaders in the larger sense.

That’s the message we’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months now that Democrats have successfully moved forward their effort to release the full investigation into former President Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

“When you take a step back, you have a country where an elite governing class has gotten away with impunity, and shafted the working class in this country, shafted factory towns, shafted rural communities,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) told me Wednesday.

He represents parts of Silicon Valley and is one of the authors of the House push to release the full government investigation into Epstein. But in the Epstein case, he also sees an opportunity to reach voters with a larger promise of change.

“What Epstein is about is saying, ‘we reject the Epstein class governing America today,’” Khanna said.

How appropriately strange for these days would it be if Epstein, who faced sex trafficking charges at the time of his death, provided the uniting message Democrats have been searching for?

“Epstein and economics” sounds like a stretch on the surface, but it is increasingly clear that Americans of all political stripes are tired of the rich getting richer, and bolder. The Epstein files are the bipartisan embodiment of that discontent.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), left, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) have led Democrats’ push for release of the Epstein files.

(Sue Ogrocki and J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Our collective frustration with what can appear only as a cover-up to benefit the wealthy and powerful is an unexpected bit of glue that binds regular Americans, because the corruption and hubris of our oligarchy is increasingly undeniable and galling.

Whether it’s our president’s obviously wrong contention that grocery prices are down; our vice president being willing to take on the pope about true Catholic doctrine; or our FBI chief flying his girlfriend around on the taxpayer dime, the arrogance is stunning.

But where each of those examples becomes buried and dismissed in partisan politics, sex trafficking girls turns out to be frowned upon by people from all walks of life.

“It’s universal,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and another Californian. “This is clearly a White House and a president that is the most corrupt person we’ve ever had in office serving as a chief executive, and this is just another piece of that corruption.”

Khanna, along with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, built the unlikely but unstoppable effort that brought together once-loyal Trumpers including Reps. Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene with Democrats.

Those staunch right-wingers are tied in to their voters, and probably understood just how unpopular sex trafficking is with a base that grew into maturity on QAnon-inspired fear mongering about kidnapped children.

“It’s the only thing since Trump walked down the escalator that’s been a truly bipartisan effort to expose corruption and where there’s been a break in his coalition,” Khanna said.

And by “exposing rich and powerful people who abuse the system and calling them out clearly, we start to rebuild trust with the American people,” Khanna argues, the trust required to make folks believe Democrats aren’t so terrible.

Long before he was a linchpin in the Epstein saga, Khanna built a name as a force on the progressive left for a positive and inclusive economic platform that resembles the New Deal, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to rebuild democracy in another era of hardship and discontent.

It’s all about real payoffs for average Americans — trade schools and affordable child care and jobs that actually pay the bills. That’s the message that he hopes will be the top line as Democrats push forward.

On Wednesday, the buildup of resentment that might make that possible came into full focus in Washington, as Congress opened up to anything but business as usual. Democrats, led by Garcia, released emails raising questions about Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Trump “spent hours at my house” and “knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote, even as Trump’s press secretary argued this was all a “fake narrative to smear” her boss.

Republicans countered the emails with a massive information dump probably meant to obscure and confuse. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, out of excuses, finally swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who promptly provided the final signature on the discharge petition to call a House vote on releasing the entire Epstein files.

That happened just hours after Boebert, one of the key Republican backers of that effort, was called to the White House in a last-minute, heavy-handed bid to pressure her into dropping her name from the demand. She did not.

Enough to make your head spin, honestly. About 10 more dastardly, intriguing and unexpected things happened, but you get the gist: President Trump really, really does not want us to read the Epstein files. House Democrats are ready to fight the long fight.

Garcia said House Democrats aren’t caving, because the cover-up keeps growing.

“There’s a lot of folks now that are obsessed with hiding the truth from the public, and the American public needs to know,” he said. “The Oversight Committee is committed to fighting our way to the truth.”

But it will be a long fight, and one with only a slim chance of winning the release of the files. Any effort would have to clear the Republican-held Senate (and after the shutdown collapse, who knows if Senate Democrats have the stomach for resistance), then be signed by Trump.

Judging from his near-desperate social media posting about the whole thing being a “hoax,” it’s hard to imagine him putting his scrawl on that law.

But unlike the shutdown, the longer this goes, the more Democrats have to gain. People aren’t going to suddenly start liking pedophiles. And the more Trump pushes to hide whatever the truth is, the more Democrats have the high ground, to message on corruption, oligarchs and even a vision for a better way.

“Epstein and economics” — linking the concrete with the esoteric, the problem with the solution.

The bipartisan message Democrats didn’t know they needed, from the strangest of sources.

Jack Miller, an associate professor of political science at Portland State University, discusses how the narratives from both major political parties are likely to shift following the end of the US government shutdown.

Democrats’ caterwauling this week after a few of their senators caved to end the government shutdown couldn’t completely drown out another noise: the sound of President Trump pinballing dumb “policy” ideas as he flails to respond to voters’ unhappiness that his promised Golden Age is proving golden only for him, his family and his donors.

On social media (of course) and in interviews, the president has been blurting out proposals that are news even to the advisors who should be vetting them first. Rebates of $2,000 for most Americans and pay-downs of federal debt, all from supposed tariff windfalls. (Don’t count on either payoff; more below.) New 50-year mortgages to make home-buying more affordable (not). Docked pay for air traffic controllers who didn’t show up to work during the shutdown, without pay, and $10,000 bonuses for those who did. (He doesn’t have that power; the government isn’t his family business.) Most mind-boggling of all, Trump has resurrected his and Republicans’ long-buried promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

It’s been five years since he promised a healthcare plan “in two weeks.” It’s been a year since he said he had “concepts of a plan” during the 2024 campaign. What he now calls “Trumpcare” (natch) apparently amounts to paying people to buy insurance. Details to come, he says, again.

With all this seat-of-the-pants policymaking, Trump only underscores the policy ignorance that’s been a defining trait since he first ran for office. No other president in memory put out such knee-jerk junk that’s easily discounted and mocked.

In his first term, Trump didn’t learn how to navigate the legislative process, and thus steer well-debated ideas into law. He didn’t want to. Even more in his second term, Trump avoids that deliberative democratic process, preferring rule by fiat and executive order (even if the results don’t outlast your presidency, or they fizzle in court). For Trump, ideas don’t percolate, infused with expertise and data. They pop into his head.

But diktats are not always possible, as the shutdown dramatized when Republicans couldn’t agree with Democrats on the must-pass legislation to keep the government funded.

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress (and arguably the Supreme Court: see recent decisions siding with the Trump administration to block SNAP benefits), the Democrats were never going to actually win the shutdown showdown — not if winning meant forcing Republicans to agree to extend health insurance tax credits for millions of Americans. Expanding healthcare coverage has never been Republicans’ priority. Tax cuts are, mainly for the wealthy and corporations, and Republicans pocketed that win months ago with Trump’s big, ugly bill, paid for mainly by cuts to Medicaid.

Yet Democrats won something: They shoved the issue of spiraling healthcare costs back onto politics’ center stage, where it joins the broader question of affordability in an economy that doesn’t work for the working class. Drawing attention to the cruel priorities of Trump 2.0 is a big reason that I and many others supported Democrats forcing a shutdown, despite the unlikelihood of a policy “W.” (I did not support the Senate Democrats’ caving just yet, not so soon after Democrats won bigger-than-expected victories in last week’s off-year elections on the strength of their fight for affordability, including health insurance.)

The fight isn’t over. The Senate will debate and vote next month on extending tax credits for Obamacare that otherwise expire at year’s end, making coverage unaffordable for millions of people. Even if the Democrats win that vote — unlikely — the subsidies would be DOA in the House, a MAGA stronghold. What’s not dead, however, is the issue of rising insurance premiums for all Americans. It’s teed up for the midterm election campaigns.

Such pocketbook issues have thrown Trump on the defensive. The result is his string of politically tone-deaf remarks and unvetted, out-of-right-field initiatives.

On Monday night, having invited Fox News host Laura Ingraham into the White House for an interview and a tour of his gilt-and-marble renovations, he pooh-poohed her question about Americans’ anxiety about the costs of living with this unpolitic rejoinder: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats.” When Ingraham, to her credit, reminded Trump that he’d slammed President Biden for “saying things were great, and things weren’t great,” Trump stood his shaky ground, sniping: “Polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” (False.)

On Saturday, Trump had posted that Republicans should take money “from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate” Obamacare. He told Ingraham, “Call it Trumpcare … anything but Obamacare.” Healthcare industry experts pounced: Such direct payments could allow younger, healthy people to get cheaper, no-frills coverage, but would leave the insurance pools with disproportionately more ailing people and, in turn, higher costs.

As for Trump’s promised $2,000 rebates and reductions in the $37 trillion federal debt, he posted early Sunday and again on Monday that “trillions of dollars” from tariffs would make both things possible soon. On Tuesday night, he sent a fundraising email: “Would you take a TARIFF rebate check signed by yours truly?”

Maybe if he’d talked to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who professed ignorance about the idea on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Trump would have learned that tariffs in the past year raised not trillions but $195 billion, significantly less than $2,000 rebates would cost. Not only would there be nothing to put toward the debt, but rebates would add $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. That would put Trump just $2 trillion short of the amount of debt he added in his first term.

When Ingraham asked where he’d get the money to pay bonuses to air traffic controllers, Trump was quick with a nonanswer: “I don’t know. I’ll get it from someplace.” And when she told him the 50-year mortgage idea “has enraged your MAGA friends,” given the potential windfall of interest payment for banks, Trump was equally dismissive: “It’s not even a big deal.”

Not a big deal: That’s policymaking, Trump-style.

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