Democrats

To hear Republicans tell it, California is a failed state and Donald Trump won the presidency in a landslide that gives him a mandate to do as he pleases. No surprise there.

But more and more, Democrats are echoing those talking points. Ever since Kamala Harris lost the election, the Democratic Party has been on a nationwide self-flagellation tour. One after another, its leaders have stuck their heads deep into their navels, hoping to find out why so many Americans — especially young people, Black voters and Latinos — shunned the former vice president.

Even in California, a reliably blue state, the soul-searching has been extreme, as seen at last weekend’s state Democratic Party convention, where a parade of speakers — including Harris’ 2024 running mate, Tim Walz — wailed and moaned and did the woe-is-us-thing.

Is it long-overdue introspection, or just annoying self-pity? Our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak hash it out.

Chabria: Mark, you were at the convention in Anaheim. Thoughts?

Barabak: I’ll start by noting this is the first convention I’ve attended — and I’ve been to dozens — rated “R” for adult language. Apparently, Democrats think by dropping a lot of f-bombs they can demonstrate to voters their authenticity and passion. But it seemed kind of stagy and, after a while, grew tiresome.

I’ve covered Nancy Pelosi for more than three decades and never once heard her utter a curse word, in public or private. I don’t recall Martin Luther King Jr., saying, “I have a [expletive deleted] dream.” Both were pretty darned effective leaders.

Democrats have a lot of work to do. But cursing a blue streak isn’t going to win them back the White House or control of Congress.

Chabria: As someone known to routinely curse in polite society, I’m not one to judge an expletive. But that cussing and fussing brings up a larger point: Democrats are desperate to prove how serious and passionate they are about fixing themselves. Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the Democratic brand “toxic.” Walz told his fellow Dems: “We’re in this mess because some of it’s our own doing.”

It seems like across the country, the one thing Democrats can agree on is that they are lame. Or at least, they see themselves as lame. I’m not sure the average person finds Democratic ideals such as equality or due process quite so off-putting, especially as Trump and his MAGA brigade move forward on the many campaign promises — deportations, rollbacks of civil rights, stripping the names of civil rights icons off ships — that at least some voters believed were more talk than substance.

I always tell my kids to be their own hero, and I’m starting to think the Democrats need to hear that. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Move on. Do you think all this self-reproach is useful, Mark? Does Harris’ loss really mean the party is bereft of value or values?

Barabak: I think self-reflection is good for the party, to a point. Democrats suffered a soul-crushing loss in November — at the presidential level and in the Senate, where the GOP seized control — and they did so in part because many of their traditional voters stayed home. It would be political malpractice not to figure out why.

That said, there is a tendency to go overboard and over-interpret the long-term significance of any one election.

This is not the end of the Democratic Party. It’s not even the first time one of the two major parties has been cast into the political wilderness.

Democrats went through similar soul-searching after presidential losses in 1984 and 1988. In 1991, a book was published explaining how Democrats were again destined to lose the White House and suggesting they would do so for the foreseeable future. In November 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president. Four years later, he romped to reelection.

In 2013, after two straight losing presidential campaigns, Republicans commissioned a political autopsy that, among other recommendations, urged the party to increase its outreach to gay and Latino voters. In 2016, Donald Trump — not exactly a model of inclusion — was elected.

Here, by the way, is how The Times wrote up that postmortem: “A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.”

Sound familar?

So, sure, look inward. But spare us the existential freakout.

Chabria: I would also argue that this moment is about more than the next election. I do think there are questions about if democracy will make it that long, and if so, if the next round at the polls will be a free and fair one.

I know the price of everything continues to rise, and conventional wisdom is that it’s all about the economy. But Democrats seem stuck in election politics as usual. These however, are unusual times that call for something more. There are a lot of folks who don’t like to see their neighbors, family or friends rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks; a lot of people who don’t want to see Medicaid cut for millions, with Medicare likely to be on the chopping block next; a lot of people who are afraid our courts won’t hold the line until the midterms.

They want to know Democrats are fighting to protect these things, not fighting each other. I agree with you that any loss should be followed by introspection. But also, there’s a hunger for leadership in opposition to this administration, and the Democrats are losing an opportunity to be those leaders with their endless self-immolation.

Did Harris really lose that bad? Did Trump really receive a mandate to end America as we know it?

Barabak: No, and no.

I mean, a loss is a loss. Trump swept all seven battleground states and the election result was beyond dispute unlike, say, 2000.

But Trump’s margin over Harris in the popular vote was just 1.5% — which is far from landslide territory — and he didn’t even win a majority of support, falling just shy of 50%.

As for a supposed mandate, the most pithy and perceptive post-election analysis I read came from the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin, who noted Trump’s victory marked the third presidential campaign in a row in which the incumbent party lost — something not seen since the 19th century.

Challengers “win elections because their opponents were unpopular,” Levin wrote, “and then — imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda — they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.”

It’s a long way to 2026, and an even longer way to 2028.

But Levin is sure looking smart.

Chabria: I know Kamala-bashing is popular right now, but I’d argue that Harris wasn’t resoundingly unpopular — just unpopular enough, with some.

Harris had 107 days to campaign. Many candidates spend years running for the White House, and much longer if you count the coy “maybe” period. She was unknown to most Americans, faced double discrimination from race and gender, and (to be fair) has never been considered wildly charismatic. So to nearly split the popular vote with all that baggage is notable.

But maybe Elon Musk said it best. As part of his messy breakup with Trump, the billionaire tweeted, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

Sometimes there’s truth in anger. Musk’s money influenced this election, and probably tipped it to Trump in at least one battleground state. Any postmortem needs to examine not just the message, but also the medium. Is it what Democrats are saying that isn’t resonating, or is it that right-wing oligarchs are dominating communication?

Barabak:

Chabria: Mark?

Barabak: Sorry.

I was so caught up in the spectacle of the world’s richest man going all neener-neener with the world’s most powerful man I lost track of where we were.

With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, I think Democrats need first off to figure out a message to carry them through the 2026 midterms. They were quite successful in 2018 pushing back on GOP efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, if you prefer. It’s not hard to see them resurrecting that playbook if Republicans take a meat-ax to Medicare and millions of Americans lose their healthcare coverage.

Then, come 2028, they’ll pick a presidential nominee and have their messenger, who can then focus on the medium — TV, radio, podcasts, TikTok, Bluesky or whatever else is in political fashion at the moment.

Now, excuse me while I return my sights to the sandbox.

It’s over: US president no desire to make up with Musk, who dredged up allegations of links to sex offender Epstein.

United States President Donald Trump has warned billionaire former ally Elon Musk against funding Democratic candidates in the country’s 2026 midterm elections as the pair’s volcanic break-up continued to play out on the world stage.

“He’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that,” Trump told US network NBC News in an interview published Saturday, without spelling out what the repercussions might be for the tech mogul, whose businesses benefit from lucrative US federal contracts.

Trump aides, various Republicans, and key wealthy donors to the GOP  have urged the two to temper the bitter feud and make peace, fearing irreparable political and economic fallout.

But, asked whether he thought his relationship with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was over, Trump said, “I would assume so, yeah”.

The interview featured Trump’s most extensive comments yet on the spectacular bust-up that saw Musk criticising his signature tax and spending bill as an “abomination”, tensions escalating after he went on to highlight one-time links between the president and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

By Saturday morning, Musk had deleted his “big bomb” allegation that Trump featured in unreleased government files on former associates of Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while facing sex trafficking charges.

“That is the real reason they have not been made public,” he said in Thursday’s post on X.

The Trump administration has acknowledged it is reviewing tens of thousands of documents, videos, and investigative material that his “MAGA” movement says will unmask public figures complicit in Epstein’s crimes.

Trump was named in a trove of deposition and statements linked to Epstein that were unsealed by a New York judge in early 2024. The president has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but he had a long and well-publicised friendship with Epstein.

Trump has denied spending time on Little Saint James, the private redoubt in the US Virgin Islands where prosecutors alleged Epstein trafficked underage girls for sex.

Just last week, Trump had given Musk a glowing send-off as he left his cost-cutting role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Vice President JD Vance said Musk was making a “huge mistake” going after Trump, though he also tried to downplay his attacks as the frustrations of an “emotional guy”.

“I hope that eventually Elon comes back into the fold. Maybe that’s not possible now because he’s gone so nuclear,” he said in the interview with comedian Theo Von, released Friday.

Trump also told NBC that it was the Department of Justice, rather than he, that had decided to return Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the US, where he faces charges of transporting undocumented migrants inside the country.

Trump added that he had not spoken to El Salvador President Nayib Bukele about Abrego Garcia’s return.

It’s not easy being a Democrat in these Trumpian times, as each day brings fresh tales of conquest and pillage.

Still, despite all that, 4,000 stiff-upper-lipped partisans showed up in Anaheim over the weekend, seeking solace, inspiration and a winning way forward.

As mouse-eared pilgrims plied the sidewalks outside, the party faithful — meeting several long blocks from Disneyland — engaged in their own bit of escapism and magical thinking.

“Joy is an act of resistance,” state party Chairman Rusty Hicks gamely suggested at a beer-and-wine reception, which opened the party’s annual three-day convention with as much conviviality as the downtrodden could muster.

That’s certainly one way to cope.

But the weekend gathering wasn’t all hand-wringing and liquid refreshment.

There were workshops on top of workshops, caucus meetings on top of caucus meetings, and speaker after speaker, wielding various iterations of the words “fight” and “resist” and dropping enough f-bombs to blow decorum and restraint clear to kingdom come.

President Trump — the devil himself, to those roiling inside the hall — was derided as a “punk,” “the orange oligarch,” a small-fisted bully, the “thing that sits in the White House” and assorted unprintable epithets.

“My fellow Golden State Democrats, we are the party of FDR and JFK, of Pat Brown and the incomparable Nancy Pelosi,” said a not-so-mild-mannered Sen. Adam Schiff. “We do not capitulate. We do not concede. California does not cower. Not now, not ever. We say to bullies, you can go f— yourself.”

The road from political exile, many Democrats seemed to feel, is richly paved with four-letter words.

Two of the party’s 2028 presidential prospects were on hand. (Another of those — Gov. Gavin Newsom — has fallen out of favor with many of his fellow California Democrats and found it best to stay away.)

A highly caffeinated New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, of 25-hour filibuster fame, summoned past glories and urged Democrats to find their way back to the party’s grounding principles, then fight from there.

“We are here because of people who stood up when they were told to sit down. We’re here because of people who spoke up when they were told to be silent. We’re here because of people who marched in front of fire hoses and dogs,” Booker hollered in his best preacherly cadence. “We are here because of people who faced outrageous obstacles and still banded together and said we shall overcome.”

Tim Walz, the party’s 2024 vice presidential nominee and the weekend’s keynote speaker, was on hand after jetting from a morning appearance in South Carolina. He delivered the most thorough and substantive remarks.

He began with a brief acknowledgment and thanks to his 2024 running mate, Kamala Harris. (She, too, stayed away from the convention while pondering her political future. The former vice president’s sole presence was a three-minute video most noteworthy for its drab production and Harris’ passion-free delivery.)

By contrast, Walz gleefully tore into Trump, saying his only animating impulses were corruption and greed. He noted the callous hard-heartedness the president and his allies displayed during California’s horrific January firestorm.

“They played a game, a blame game, and they put out misinformation about an incredibly tragic situation,” Minnesota’s governor said. “They didn’t have the backs of the firefighters. They didn’t hustle to get you the help you needed. They hung you out to dry.”

Keeping with the weekend’s expletive-laden spirit, Walz blasted Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bull—” legislation and mocked congressional Republicans as the “merry band of dips—” who lend him their undying support.

But much of his 30-minute speech was devoted to flaying his own party — “like a deer … in goddamned headlights” — saying Democrats can blame only themselves for being so feckless and off-putting they made the odious Trump seem preferable by comparison.

“There is an appetite out there across this country to govern with courage and competency, to call crap where it is, to not be afraid, to make a mistake about things, but to show people who you truly are and that they don’t have to wonder who the Democratic Party is,” Walz said to a roaring ovation.

“Are you going to go to a cocktail party with somebody who’s super rich and then pass a law that benefits them?” he demanded. “[Or] are you going to work your ass off and make sure our kids get a good education?”

And yet for all the cursing and swagger and bluster, there was an unmistakable air of anxiety pervading the glassy convention center. This is a party in need of repair and many, from the convention floor to the hospitality suites, acknowledged as much.

Alex Dersh, a 27-year-old first-time delegate from San Jose, said his young peers — “shocked by Trump’s election” — were especially eager for change. They just can’t agree, he said, on what that should be.

Indeed, there were seemingly as many prescriptions on offer in Anaheim as there were delegates. (More than 3,500 by official count.)

Anita Scuri, 75, a retired Sacramento attorney attending her third or fourth convention, suggested the party needs to get back to basics by speaking plainly — she said nothing about profanity — and focusing on people’s pocketbooks.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” she said, recycling the message of Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign. “It’s focusing on the lives people are living.”

Gary Borsos said Democrats need to stop dumbing-down their message and also quit harping on the president.

“There’s a lot of ‘Trump is bad,’ ” said the 74-year-old retired software engineer, who rode eight hours by train from Arroyo Grande to attend his first convention.

“What we’re doing is coming up with a lot of Band-Aid solutions to problems of the day,” Borsos said. “We’re not thinking long-term enough.”

Neither, however, expressed great confidence in their party going forward.

“I’m hopeful,” Scuri said. “Not optimistic.”

In the aftermath of Democrats’ widespread electoral failures last year, party activists in California who gathered for their annual convention this weekend struggled with balancing how to stick to their values while also reconnecting with voters who were traditionally part of their base — notably working-class Americans.

California’s progressive policies and its Democratic leaders were routinely battered by Republicans during the 2024 election, with then-vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris taking the brunt of it. Harris ultimately lost the election to Trump, partly because of shrinking support among traditional Democratic constituencies, including minorities and working-class voters.

“We got to be honest in what happened, because losing elections has consequences,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, during a rousing speech Saturday afternoon. “We’re in this mess because some of it’s our own doing. … None of us can afford to shy away from having hard conversations about what it’s going to take to win elections.”

Walz, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, said Democrats don’t need to retreat from their ideals, such as protecting the most vulnerable in society, including transgender children. But they need to show voters that they are capable of bold policy that will improve voters’ lives rather than delivering incremental progress, he said.

“The Democratic Party, the party of the working class, lost a big chunk of the working class,” he said. “That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts: do something, do something, stand up and make a difference.”

California is home to the most Democrats in the nation as well as a large number of the party’s most deep-pocketed donors, making the state a popular spot for presidential hopefuls from across the country.

In addition to Walz, another potential 2028 White House candidate who addressed the 4,000 delegates and guests at the Anaheim Convention Center was New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Booker argued that Democrats must remember the courage of their ancestors who fought for civil and voting rights and created the social safety net for the most vulnerable Americans as they try to fight Trumpism.

“Real change does not come from Washington. It comes from communities. It comes from the streets,” he said in a Saturday morning speech. “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

Harris, who is weighing a 2026 gubernatorial run and is also viewed as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, addressed the convention by video. Gov. Gavin Newsom, also viewed as a possible White House contender, did not appear at the convention.

Delegate Jane Baulch-Enloe, a middle school teacher from Pleasant Hill in the Bay Area, said she wasn’t sure that California’s particular brand of liberalism will sell on the national stage.

“I don’t know if a California Democrat can win a presidential election,” she said as she and her daughter sorted through swag and campaign fliers in the convention cafe. “California is thought of as the crazy people. … I don’t mean that in a bad way — though I know some people do — but we do things differently here.”

She said she learned from President Obama’s memoir, “Audacity of Hope,” that most, if not all, Americans “want the same things,” but talk about them differently and have different approaches for getting there. California Democrats, Baulch-Enloe said, “need to get people on our side and help them understand that we aren’t just wacko liberals, and teach people that it’s okay to want things” like healthcare for all and high union wages.

But the 2028 presidential race was not the focus of this year’s California Democratic Party convention. Delegates were more concerned about last year’s presidential and congressional losses — though California was a rare bright spot for the party, flipping three districts held by the GOP — and preparing for next year’s midterm elections. Delegates hope Democrats will take control of Congress to stop Trump from enacting his agenda.

Aref Aziz, a leader of the party’s Asian American Pacific Islander caucus, said the party needed to sharpen its messaging on economic issues if they want to have a chance of victory in coming elections.

“When it comes to the affordability issue, when it comes to economics, those are the things that across the broad spectrum of our coalition, all those things matter to everybody,” Aziz said. “And what really is, what really is important is for us to focus on that economic message and how we’re going to improve the quality of life for everyone in these midterm elections and future presidential elections.”

He noted he was in France on his honeymoon recently, and was strolling through a grocery store and buying half a dozen eggs for 1.50 euros (the equivalent of $1.70) when the news broke that California’s economy had grown to the fourth largest in the world.

“When you look at a lot of our economies, California and New York, by all accounts, GDP, the numbers that you look at, they’re doing great,” he said. “But when it comes to the cost that consumers are paying in these places, they’re so high and so far above other countries that we end up diminishing whatever value there is in our GDP, because everything’s so expensive.”

Some Democrats questioned the impact of the weaponization of California’s liberal policies, including defending transgender rights, on voters in battleground states in 2024.

But delegates and party leaders largely argued that the state needs to continue to be on the vanguard of such matters.

“People like to point a finger somewhere, and I think California is an easy target, but I disagree,” said delegate Melissa Taylor, president of our local Foothill Community Democrats. “Because I think that California is standing up for values that the Democratic Party believes in, like we believe in labor, we believe in healthcare, we believe in women’s rights, we believe in rights for LGBTQ people.”

Jodi Hicks, the president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said issues such as reproductive healthcare access also have an economic impact.

“We have to walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said, adding that the party’s 2024 losses were likely prompted by multiple factors, including Harris’ being the Democratic nominee for a little over three months after then-President Biden decided not to seek reelection.

“We’re going to be analyzing 2024 for a very long time,” Hicks said. “It was such unique circumstances.”

Times staff writer Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The widening and increasingly bitter divide between Republicans and Democrats defines American politics, but in recent weeks, it’s the divisions inside each of the two parties that have dominated headlines.

Democratic progressives have fumed at moderate lawmakers who have insisted on cutting the size of President Biden’s social spending plans.

Republicans have denounced 13 of their House colleagues who sided with Democrats earlier this month to pass Biden’s $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill. After conservative Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted their phone numbers on social media, some of the 13 reported getting death threats.

What issues create the deep fissures within the two parties, and which Americans make up the conflicting factions?

For some 30 years, many of the best answers to those questions have come from a project of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center — a long-running effort to analyze the political groupings into which Americans cluster, which Pew refers to as a political typology.

Pew released its latest typology on Tuesday, the eighth in the series. The results are key to understanding why American politics works the way it does.

Parties driven by their extremes

For this latest effort, Pew surveyed 10,221 American adults, asking each of them a series of questions about their political attitudes, values and views of American society. Researchers took the results and put them through what’s called a cluster analysis to define groups that make up U.S. society.

The new typology divides Americans into nine such groups — four on the left, which make up the Democratic coalition, four on the right, making up the Republican coalition, and one in between whose members are largely defined by a lack of interest in politics and public affairs.

Nearly all the Democrats agree on wanting a larger government that provides more services; nearly all the Republicans want the opposite.

And nearly all Democrats believe that race and gender discrimination remain serious problems in American society that require further efforts to resolve. On the Republican side, the belief that little — if anything — remains to be done to achieve equality has become a defining principle.

On other issues, however, the parties have deep internal splits. In each, the most energized group — the people who most regularly turn out to vote, post on social media and contribute to campaigns — stands at the edges.

On the right, that would be an extremely conservative, religiously oriented, nationalistic group which Pew calls the Faith and Flag conservatives. At the other end of the scale stands a socialist-friendly, largely secular group it calls the Progressive Left.

On several major issues, those two groups have views that are “far from the rest of their coalitions,” yet they’re “the most politically engaged groups, and they’re driving the conversation,” said Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research.

The Faith and Flag conservatives, who make up about 10% of American adults and almost 25% of Republicans, have shaped the party’s policies on some social issues such as abortion, but have even more strongly affected its overall approach to politics. A majority (53%) of the group, for example, says that “compromise in politics is really just selling out.”

That has strongly shaped the GOP’s approach to legislation and helps explain the bitter, angry response to the Republicans who voted for Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure compromise.

The group is overwhelmingly white (85%), relatively old (two-thirds are 50 or older) mostly Christian (4 in 10 are white, evangelical Protestants) and heavily rural.

Their mirror image, the Progressive Left, is a significantly smaller group, only about 6% of Americans and 12% of Democrats. Despite their smaller size, however, they have had a strong impact, moving their party to the left, especially on expanding government and combating climate change.

That group is in several ways the opposite of the Faith and Flag conservatives: urban, secular and significantly more college-educated than the rest of the country.

Like the Faith and Flag group, however, the Progressives are mostly white (68%) — the only Democratic faction with a white majority.

The groups have one other trait in common — each has a deep, visceral dislike of the other party.

While those two set the parameters of a lot of American political debate, it’s the other groups in each party’s coalition that explain why the Democratic and Republican approaches to government have diverged so widely.

On the Democratic side, the two biggest blocs, which make up just over half of Democratic voters, fit comfortably into the party establishment.

The Establishment Liberals (think Vice President Kamala Harris or Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg) are a racially diverse, highly educated (one-quarter have post-graduate degrees), fairly affluent group that is optimistic in its outlook, liberal in its politics and strong believers that “compromise is how things get done” in politics.

The Democratic Mainstays (think House Democratic Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina or President Biden) are more likely to define themselves as political moderates and are significantly more likely than other Democrats to say that religion plays a major role in their lives. Roughly 40% of Black Democrats fit into this group.

The Mainstays are more likely than other Democrats to favor increasing funds for police in their neighborhoods and somewhat less likely to favor increased immigration, but are extremely loyal to the Democratic Party.

Together, those two groups give Democrats a strong orientation toward cutting deals, making incremental progress and getting the work of government done.

Virtually the opposite is true of Republicans, whose two largest groups, the Faith and Flag conservatives and what Pew calls the Populist Right, dislike compromise and harbor deep suspicions of American institutions. Together, those groups, which make up nearly half the GOP’s voters, have produced a party that revels in opposition but has often found itself stymied when trying to govern.

The Populists group, the one most closely identified with former President Trump‘s style of politics, has a negative view of huge swaths of American society — big corporations, but also the entertainment industry, tech companies, labor unions, colleges and universities, and K-12 schools.

Nearly 9 in 10 of them believe the U.S. economic system unfairly favors the powerful, and a majority support raising taxes on big companies and the wealthy. Both of those views put them at odds with the rest of the GOP, helping explain why the party struggles to come up with economic proposals beyond opposition to Democratic plans.

The Populist Right also overwhelmingly says that immigrants coming to the U.S. make the country worse off. That puts them in conflict with the party’s smaller but still influential business-oriented establishment.

About half the Populist group say that white people declining as a share of the U.S. population is a bad thing, more than in any other group.

The Republican establishment faction (think Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky or Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah) is what Pew calls the Committed Conservatives, pro-business, generally favorable to immigration and more moderate on racial issues.

A lot of Republican elected officials fall into that group, but unlike the very large establishment blocs on the Democratic side, relatively fewer voters do — 7% of Americans and 15% of the GOP. That creates a pervasive tension between GOP elected officials and many of their constituents.

Unlike the two larger conservative blocs, in which majorities want to see Trump run again, most Republicans in this group would prefer him to take a back seat.

Each of the coalitions also has a group that is alienated from its party.

A significant number in the Ambivalent Right, a younger, socially liberal, largely anti-Trump group within the GOP, voted for Biden in 2020.

On the Democratic side, the mostly young people in the Outsider Left are very liberal, but frustrated with the Democrats and not always motivated to vote. When Democratic political figures talk about the need to boost voter turnout, those are the potential voters many of them picture.

By the way, there’s a long connection between the Los Angeles Times and the political typology project. The first version of the political typology dates back to 1987 and was developed by the long-ago Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, a research organization founded by the company that owned The Times.

To allow readers to see how they compared to the political types in that era, The Times published the typology quiz as a full-page in print, inviting people to fill it out, mail it in and get a letter back telling them what group they belonged to. Today, you can do it all online.

The vice president abroad

On a trip this week to France, Harris is introducing herself to the world in personal terms, Noah Bierman wrote. The trip, he said, has given Harris a chance “to reveal herself on the world stage — highlighting her status as the first woman and the first woman of color to serve in such high office — after 10 months of focusing on responding to the COVD-19 pandemic and other crises,” which have taken a political toll.

Part of Harris’ goal in the trip is to further mend relations with France, which were strained when the administration struck a deal with Australia to help build nuclear submarines, which wiped out a major French contract to build boats for the Australian navy. In her speeches, however, Harris has also tried to make the case that the U.S. has moved past the Trump era and once again can be relied upon as an ally, Bierman wrote. That’s met with some skepticism from Europeans, who wonder what will happen in the next election.

Meantime, Mark Barabak looked at how Harris has adopted a much lower public profile of late. As past occupants of the office, including George H.W. Bush and Al Gore have found, the number-two job is an “inherently diminishing one,” he wrote.

The continued racial impact of freeway projects

The U.S. has largely stopped building new freeways, but projects to widen or extend existing roads continue to displace thousands of Americans, with a particularly harsh impact on communities of color, Liam Dillon and Ben Poston reported.

Their investigation, based on thousands of documents and Transportation Department data, shows that more than 200,000 people have lost their homes nationwide to federal road projects over the last three decades. In many cases, predominantly Black or Latino communities that were torn apart by freeway construction a generation or more ago have been dislocated once more by new projects.

The new data show that the U.S. has not entirely moved beyond the racist history of freeway development.

The latest from Washington

Inflation has seriously damaged several presidencies in the last half century; now, rising prices threaten Biden, Chris Megerian and Erin Logan wrote.

At the international climate conference in Glasgow, the U.S., Britain and 17 other countries agreed to reduce emissions from the shipping industry, which is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases, Anna Phillips reported. Large container ships use fuel that is dirtier by far than the diesel that powers cars. Ships can also be a major source of air pollution in port cities, including Los Angeles.

Phillips also wrote this look at what the international climate conference has achieved, including pledges to phase out gasoline-powered cars and stop building new coal-fired power plants — and what it hasn’t done.

As Democrats continue to haggle over the details of their big social spending proposal, Jennifer Haberkorn took a look at one of the plan’s largest elements — a major increase in money for early childhood education. The bill would devote about $390 billion over the next 10 years to providing preschool access to all 3- and 4-year-olds. That would mark the largest expansion of free education since high school was added about 100 years ago.

The latest from California

The state’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission has come up with a draft map of new congressional and legislative districts, and it’s already causing heartburn for a number of incumbent lawmakers, Seema Mehta and John Myers reported.

The new maps may strengthen Latino political clout in California overall, but the most heavily Latino district in the state would be eliminated. The 40th District, represented by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, covers parts of East and South L.A. and would be parceled out among neighboring districts, Mehta reported. Roybal-Allard, 80, has raised very little money amid speculation that she has plans to retire next year. The state is losing one congressional district after last year’s census, and the loss was widely expected to come in the Los Angeles area, which has grown more slowly than other parts of the state.

The redrawn boundaries may force some incumbents to run against each other or run in districts that have suddenly become less politically secure. The Central Valley districts of GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of Tulare and Democratic Rep. Josh Harder of Turlock would both be significantly altered, according to redistricting analysts in both parties. Reps. Mike Garcia of Santa Clarita, Michelle Steel of Seal Beach and Darrell Issa of Bonsall would all find their districts becoming less secure.

But there’s a good chance the maps will change again after a two-week public comment period, which began with the commission’s approval of the maps on Wednesday night.

The Biden administration will extend a major homelessness initiative that has allowed Los Angeles and other cities to rent hotel rooms as temporary housing for thousands of people. As Ben Oreskes reported, the administration will extend the program through March. It was slated to expire at the end of the year.

In another development related to homelessness, a group looking to oust Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin says it has submitted more than 39,000 signatures on recall petitions. If the signatures hold up to scrutiny, that would qualify the measure for the ballot. Bonin’s opponents have accused him of failing to take seriously the impact of crime that they say is connected to homeless encampments.

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Thousands of California Democrats will gather this weekend to be courted by gubernatorial and potential presidential candidates, rage against the Trump administration and organize for the 2026 election.

However, the state’s two most prominent Democrats — former Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newson — will not be attending the multiday gathering of roughly 4,000 party delegates, activists, donors, labor leaders and other powerful voices in the largest Democratic state in the nation, according to a source familiar with the event’s planning.

Their absences are notable given speculation about their political futures. Newsom and Harris are both viewed as potential 2028 presidential candidates. Harris also may jump into California’s 2026 race for governor, and is expected to make a decision by the end of the summer.

Both were invited to the state party convention in Anaheim, according to the source. Harris is expected to send a video greeting attendees. Harris representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Newsom is scheduled to participate in a Democratic Governors’ Assn.’ gathering in Portland to coordinate efforts to fight Trump’s tariffs, a spokesperson said. But the gathering doesn’t begin until Sunday, the final day of the state party convention. A letter from the governor to delegates is included in the convention program.

Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist, said there was little benefit to either one attending the gathering.

“There’s no question that well-known, well-defined political figures like the governor and former vice president could be met with mixed reactions,” he said. “If I was advising them, I’m honestly not sure I could come up with a justification for their going. What’s the upside?”

Prominent California Democrats have routinely faced backlash from liberal delegates at the party’s annual conventions. Anti-fracking advocates interrupted a speech by former Gov. Jerry Brown over his support for the controversial oil extraction practice and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein was booed during her 1990 speech supporting the death penalty. Her then-gubernatorial campaign turned the latter into a television advertisement aimed at that era’s more moderate electorate.

Newsom, once a darling at such conventions, could possibly face similar fallout among party loyalists because of recent statements about opposing transgender athletes being allowed to compete in women’s sports as well as bantering with conservative heroes such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk on his podcast.

If she attended, Harris could be criticized for complicity in hiding former President Biden’s alleged cognitive decline while in office, an allegation lodged in a recent book that argues that deception led to Trump’s 2024 victory.

However, Harris has the luxury of time as she decides what to do next in her political career. Harris’ delay in making a decision about the gubernatorial contest, however, has drawn scorn from some Democrats who have announced their candidacies.

Every prominent Democrat who has announced a gubernatorial run is expected to attend the convention.

Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond have official speaking roles because they currently serve in elected office, as does former state Controller Betty Yee because she is the party’s vice chair.

Former state Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, businessman Stephen J. Cloobeck, former Rep. Katie Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will also be wooing attendees.

Potential 2028 presidential candidates Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and N.J. Sen. Cory Booker are also scheduled to speak to California Democratic Party delegates at the Anaheim Convention Center.

In addition to addressing delegates at caucus meetings, such as labor, environmental, Latino and women voters, candidates will meet with donors and court activists throughout the weekend. Social gatherings include a Friday night fireworks show, an ice cream social and a party titled “Punk the System” hosted by state Democrats as well as the powerful nurses’ and teachers’ lobbies.

“Dance. Drink. Rage for Democracy,” reads the invite to the gathering.

Candidates are also hosting events — Yee is offering “healthy breakfast bites” and coffee on Saturday morning. Cloobeck, a billionaire who made his fortune in real estate and hospitality, is planning a reception that night with the theme “Fight for California, Celebrate CA Dems!”

The longtime donor and fundraiser for Democrats and philanthropic causes has never previously run for elected office. In his first introduction to state party activists, Cloobeck said he plans to focus on lessons from the 2024 election and urging Democrats not to be tone deaf to the electorate’s needs.

“The party should work for everyone,” Cloobeck said. “It can’t cater to only special interests or well-connected individuals.”

State party chairman Rusty Hicks, who is widely expected to win reelection at the convention, said California Democrats have reflected and reckoned with last year’s election results, “some good and some bad and some ugly.”

While the party bucked national trends by performing strongly in congressional races, it also unexpectedly lost legislative seats and saw a decline in voter turnout among Latinos, Asian Americans and young people, Hicks said.

“We can’t just compete in targeted seats,” he said. “We have to compete everywhere in a different way. What happened in ‘24 — the good and the bad — informs what our work is in ‘26.”

Times staff writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers this week condemned the Trump administration’s termination of humanitarian protections that have left a 4-year-old girl who is receiving critical medical treatment in Los Angeles vulnerable to deportation and death.

On Tuesday, The Times published the story of S.G.V., who has short bowel syndrome — a rare condition that prevents her body from completely absorbing nutrients. She and her parents received temporary permission to enter the U.S. legally through Tijuana in 2023.

In a letter Thursday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, 38 congressional Democrats, including California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, urged her to reconsider the termination of the family’s legal status.

“We believe this family’s situation clearly meets the need for humanitarian aid and urge you and this Administration to reconsider its decision,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is our duty to protect the sick, vulnerable, and defenseless.”

Last month, S.G.V.’s family, who now live in Bakersfield, received notice from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that their status had been terminated and that they had to leave the country immediately. Earlier this month, they applied again for humanitarian protections.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the family is not actively in the deportation process and that their application is still being considered.

The girl’s physician, Dr. John Arsenault of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, wrote in a letter requested by her family that any interruption in her daily nutrition system “could be fatal within a matter of days.”

The story about S.G.V. drew swift public outcry. An online fundraiser for the girl’s care had amassed nearly $26,000 as of Thursday morning.

The letter to Noem was led by Reps. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood) and Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles). Rivas said state legislators and constituents messaged her about the family, asking what she could do to help.

While the family lives outside of Rivas’ district, which encompasses the north-central San Fernando Valley, she said it is her role as a California Democrat and a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to speak up for immigrant constituents in districts where Republican representatives may not do so.

“That’s why we’re organizing as members of Congress,” Rivas said. “Without action from Secretary Noem and this administration, this little girl will die within days.”

In a post on X, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) called the situation “heartbreaking.” Seeking to deport the girl despite her medical condition is “cruel and inexcusable,” Chu added.

In another X post, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) wrote: “Trump wants to deport a four-year-old who could die from a life-threatening medical condition if her treatment is interrupted. How does this cruelty make us a stronger nation?”

The family and their attorneys held a news conference Wednesday at the Koreatown office of the pro bono firm, Public Counsel. The lawyers explained that the equipment administered by the hospital to S.G.V. for home use is not available outside the U.S.

“If they deport us and they take away my daughter’s access to specialized medical care, she will die,” said Deysi Vargas.

Attorneys for the family noted that S.G.V. is not the only child affected in recent months by the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In an attempt to speed up arrests and deportations, they said, children are needlessly being swept up in the process.

Gina Amato Lough, directing attorney at Public Counsel, said the girl’s case “is a symbol of the recklessness of this administration’s deportation policies.”

“We’re seeing a pattern of cruelty and a violation of our most treasured rights and values,” said Amato Lough. “These are people coming to us for protection, and instead we’re sending them to die. That’s not justice, and it doesn’t make us any safer.”

WASHINGTON — When President Trump directed his attorney general last month to investigate online fundraising, he cited concerns that foreigners and fraudsters were using elaborate “schemes“ and “dummy accounts” to funnel illegal contributions to politicians and causes.

Instead of calling for an expansive probe, however, the president identified just one potential target: ActBlue, the Democrats’ online fundraising juggernaut, which has acknowledged receiving over 200 potentially illicit contributions last year from foreign internet addresses.

Trump’s announcement contained a glaring omission — his political committees also received scores of potentially problematic contributions.

An Associated Press review of donations to Trump over the past five years found 1,600 contributions from donors who live abroad, have close ties to foreign interests or failed to disclose basic information, often making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify them and verify the legality of their donations Among those was $5,000 linked to a derelict building, and $5,000 from a Chinese businessman who listed a La Quinta Inn as his address. Another sizable donation — $1 million — was made by the wife of an African oil and mining magnate.

It’s against the law for U.S. candidates and political committees to accept contributions from foreign nationals. Laws also place strict limits on donation amounts and prohibit the laundering of contributions to get around legal caps. For the most part, such donations have been policed by campaigns and the Federal Election Commission, with only the most egregious examples being targeted by federal law enforcement.

But after reclaiming the White House, Trump embarked on a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies, launching broadsides against universities, law firms and his own former officials. If the Justice Department were to investigate ActBlue, it could imperil a key fundraising tool for Trump’s political rivals before the 2026 midterm elections, when Republicans’ threadbare House majority — and the president’s ability to pass an agenda through Congress — will be on the line.

“This is him taking direct aim at the center of Democratic and progressive fundraising to hamstring his political opponents,” said Ezra Reese, an attorney who leads the political law division at the Elias Law Group, a leading Democratic firm that does not represent ActBlue. “I don’t think there’s any question that they picked their target first. He’s not even pretending.”

Trump’s committees collected scores of donations from people living overseas

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s fundraising, including what sort of fraud prevention measures his committees have in place. Instead, a senior administration official pointed to the findings of a recent House Republican investigation of ActBlue that the White House alleges “uncovered specific evidence of potentially unlawful conduct.”

“The memorandum directs the attorney general to investigate this matter broadly, and she will follow the evidence and take appropriate action as warranted,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the matter.

Neither the Justice Department nor Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita responded to requests for comment.

U.S. citizens living abroad are free to donate to politicians back home. But it can be difficult even for campaigns to discern who is allowed to give and whether a person may be serving as a “straw” donor for someone else seeking to influence U.S. elections.

The AP identified only two Trump donors out of more than 200 living abroad whose U.S. citizenship was listed as “verified” in the president’s campaign finance reports. He received over 1,000 contributions from 150 donors who omitted key identifying details such as their city, state, address or country. Trump also received at least 90 contributions from people who did not give a full name, are listed as “anonymous” or whose donations include the notation “name not provided.”

Many of these Trump donors contributed through WinRed, the Republicans’ online fundraising platform that is the GOP’s answer to ActBlue. Only about three dozen of these contributions were rejected, most of which came from an unknown source and were paid in cryptocurrency, campaign finance disclosures show.

WinRed officials did not respond to a request for comment.

“Foreign money in our elections is a legitimate concern,” said Dan Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who is now director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “What’s not legitimate is to single out one political opponent and pretend the problem is limited to them.”

Donating from a La Quinta Inn

Jiajun “Jack” Zhang, for example, is a jet-setting Chinese businessman whose Qingdao Scaffolding Co. boasts of being one of the “biggest manufacturers and suppliers in China” of scaffolding. In October, he used WinRed to donate $5,000 to Trump, campaign finance disclosures show.

Zhang lives in China’s Shandong province, according to his LinkedIn account, and is described in French business filings as a Chinese national. But his contribution to Trump lists a La Quinta Inn in Hawaiian Gardens, California, as his address, records show. The donation was made around the time that Zhang posted a photo on social media of his family visiting Disneyland, which is near the hotel.

Zhang did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Other potentially troublesome donations include four from unnamed donors listing an address of “999 Anonymous Dr.”

There is also a series of contributions made through WinRed that listed the donor’s address as a vacant building in Washington that was formerly a funeral home. The donor, identified only as “Alex, A” on Trump’s campaign finance report, gave nearly $5,000, spread across more than 40 separate transactions last year. Those types of donations tend to draw scrutiny from campaigns and regulators.

Regulators and watchdogs have also long been concerned about donations from individuals with ties to foreign interests. Trump has received many such contributions, including one in December from Nnenna Peters, the wife of Benedict Peters, a Nigerian billionaire who is the founder and CEO of oil and mining businesses.

Nnenna Peters, who goes by Ella, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. A naturalized citizen, Nnenna Peters — who lives in Potomac, Maryland, a tony suburb of the capital — is allowed to make campaign donations.

Federal law, however, bars U.S. citizens from making contributions on behalf of a noncitizen spouse if the money is not a shared asset. For example, experts said, a husband could be prohibited from making a campaign donation using funds from a checking account solely in his wife’s name.

In practice, such a prohibition is hard to enforce because it is difficult to assess whether spouses are acting on their own accord or on behalf of significant others. Government watchdogs say donations like these raise the risk of an attempt to influence U.S. policy on behalf of a foreign interest.

That was precisely the kind of problem Trump cited in his executive order that singled out ActBlue.

Benedict Peters, as it turns out, has a lot to offer that could be of interest to Trump, who has made the extraction of natural resources a focus on his second administration. In particular, the Trump administration has sought to secure access to critical minerals that help power modern technology. Peters’ Aiteo Group markets itself as one of the largest energy conglomerates in Nigeria, while his company, Bravura Holdings, purports to hold the rights to vast critical mineral deposits across Africa.

His wife’s donation stands out in light of her past giving: She donated exclusively to Democrats, records show, including a $66,800 contribution to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

“This clearly could have come from her husband,” said Craig Holman, a registered lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington-based government watchdog group. “This is something the FEC should take a very, very close look at.”

Benedict and Ella Peters did not respond to requests for comment.

Indifference towards campaign finance rules

The questionable donations fit a pattern for Trump, who has in the past exhibited indifference toward campaign finance rules and used his presidential powers to assist those facing legal trouble in such matters.

In January, Trump’s Justice Department dropped its case against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican accused of accepting a $30,000 contribution from a Nigerian billionaire. During his first term, Trump pardoned conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza and Republican donor Michael Liberty, who were both convicted of using straw donors to evade contribution limits. He also pardoned former California Rep. Duncan Hunter, who was convicted in 2020 of stealing $250,000 from his campaign fund.

Trump’s political efforts have also drawn contributions from straw donors and foreigners who have been subjected to legal scrutiny.

Among them is Barry Zekelman, a Canadian steel industry billionaire, who was fined $975,000 in 2022 by the Federal Election Commission for funneling $1.75 million to America First Action, Trump’s official super PAC, in 2018. The contribution helped Zekelman secure a dinner with Trump at which steel tariffs were discussed.

Two Soviet-born U.S. citizens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were convicted in a straw donor scheme that funneled $325,000 to the same super PAC in the runup to Trump’s losing 2020 reelection campaign.

Jesse Benton, a Republican political operative, was convicted in 2022 of serving as a straw donor for a Russian businessman who contributed $25,000 to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Democrats say Trump’s focus on ActBlue is a lot to stomach in light of Trump’s acceptance of questionable donations and his seeming lack of interest in enforcing campaign finance laws more generally. They noted that Trump in February fired a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission. The firing, followed by the resignation of a Republican commissioner, has denied the agency the quorum necessary to enforce campaign finance laws and regulations.

“It’s telling that while Trump and his allies attack grassroots-funded platforms like ours, their own campaigns have welcomed money from questionable sources,” ActBlue spokesperson Megan Hughes said.

Republicans counter that there is well-founded reason to investigate the Democratic platform, which eased some fraud detection protocols in 2024 before the presidential election.

Democrats are concerned about ActBlue’s future

There is, however, a political upside to investigating ActBlue. The platform has proved more successful than WinRed, the Republican platform designed to imitate it, which took in less than half of the $3.8 billion that ActBlue raised during the 2024 election cycle.

ActBlue representatives declined to say whether they have been contacted by the Justice Department.

ActBlue is expected to battle any investigation. It took a different approach when a Republican-led congressional committee launched an investigation in 2023. That committee’s findings turned out to be the basis for some of the allegations cited by Trump in his executive order.

Democrats, meanwhile, are preparing for the worst.

“There is a pervasive fear that ActBlue could cease to exist,” said Matt Hodges, a veteran Democratic operative who served as the director of engineering for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. “That’s the worst fear people have — that this will escalate or drain legal resources that hinder their ability to operate.”

He predicted that the Democrats could lose more than $10 million in the short term if ActBlue were forced to shut down. That has led some Democrats to begin thinking about alternatives, but they acknowledged it might be too late to create something as successful as ActBlue with the midterms around the corner.

Slodysko and Peoples write for the Associated Press. Peoples reported from New York.

PAINTSVILLE, Ky. — Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote in November.

Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.

Democrats’ path back to power may start in places like Paintsville, one small meeting at a time, because it may be difficult for the party to regain control of Congress or the White House without faring better among rural and small-town voters across the country.

The party recently lost U.S. senators from states with significant rural populations: Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Also, Democratic-led states are losing population to Sun Belt states led by Republicans, with some projections suggesting changes after the 2030 census could cost Democrats 12 electoral college votes.

“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”

It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts to win more elections. It’s more a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024, and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.

Nationally, Trump won 60% of small-town and rural voters when he lost reelection in 2020 — and 63% in his 2024 victory, according to AP VoteCast data. That’s a far cry from a generation ago, when Democrat Bill Clinton won pluralities in Johnson County on his way to capturing Kentucky’s electoral votes in the 1992 and 1996 White House races.

“We have to be intentional about how we build something sustainable,” Elridge said. “It’s not like we haven’t won here before.”

Combating the ‘caricature’ of Democrats

For two hours in downtown Paintsville, Elridge listened as Stumbo and others took umbrage at conservatives’ policy agenda, expressed frustration over President Trump’s standing in eastern Kentucky and said they were determined to sell their neighbors an alternative. Many brought their personal experiences to bear.

The event was part town hall, part catharsis, part pep talk. In some ways, the complaints in Paintsville mirrored how Democrats nationally are angry, often for very different reasons.

Sandra Music, a retired teacher who called herself “a new Democrat,” converted because of Trump. She bemoaned conservatives’ success in advancing private school tuition voucher programs and said they were threatening a public education system “meant to ensure we educate everybody.”

Music criticized Republicans for making a “caricature” of Democrats. “They want to pull out keywords: ‘abortion,’ ‘transgender,’ ‘boys in girls’ sports’” and distract from the rest of the Republican agenda, she said.

Stumbo, the former justice, lamented what she called the rightward lurch of the state and federal courts. “We are going to suffer irreparable damage,” she said, “if we don’t stop these conservative idiots.”

Michael Halfhill, who works in healthcare information technology, was incredulous that the billionaire president has taken hold of voters in Appalachia, historically one of the country’s poorest regions.

“It’s not left versus right. It’s rich versus poor,” he said, shaking his head at working-class white voters — Johnson County is 97.5% white — “voting against themselves.”

Ned Pillersdorf, who is married to Stumbo, went after Republicans for their proposed federal tax and spending plans, especially potential cuts to Medicaid. He said Paintsville still has a rural hospital, which is among the largest employers in the region, in no small part because Kentucky is among the GOP-leaning states where a Democratic governor expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Elridge, the first Black chair of a major party in Kentucky, mentioned Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and related civil rights laws and regulations.

“This is where Trump and MAGA excel — if somebody who looks like me is your enemy, then you don’t care if the guy in the White House is peeing on your leg and telling you it’s rain,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make American Great Again” movement.

Republican response

By definition, a “listening tour” is not meant to produce concrete action. Elridge and Nicholas Hazelett, the Johnson County Democratic chair who is a college student and a Paintsville City Council member, acknowledged that the small crowd was Democrat-friendly. Despite a few recent converts, no one was there waiting to be convinced.

Across the street, antiques shop owner Michelle Hackworth said she did not even know Democrats were holding a meeting. Calling herself a “hard-core Republican,” she smiled when asked if she would consider attending.

“They wouldn’t convince me of anything,” she said.

Bill Mike Runyon, a self-described conservative Republican who is Paintsville’s mayor and loves Trump, went immediately to social and cultural commentary when asked in an interview to explain Johnson County politics.

Democrats, he said, “have to get away from the far-left radical — look at the transgender message.” Further, Runyon said, “everything got kind of racial. It’s not like that here in Paintsville and in Johnson County, but I can see it as a country. … It’s making people more racist against one another.”

Asked specifically who he was talking about, he alluded to progressive U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina from New York City, and Jasmine Crockett, a Black woman from Texas.

“It’s the ones you always see on TV,” the mayor said.

Governor’s bipartisan appeal

Beshear seems to be the one Democrat who commands wide respect in and around Paintsville.

Democrats hailed the 47-year-old governor for supporting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights while still attracting support beyond the Democratic strongholds of Louisville, Lexington and Frankfort. Beshear did not win Johnson County but got 37% of the vote in his 2023 reelection. He carried several nearby counties.

Many Republicans, including the mayor, complimented Beshear for his handling of floods and other disasters in the region.

“He’s been here,” Runyon said. “I absolutely can get to him if I need him.”

In 2024, Beshear landed on the list of potential vice presidential running mates for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. He also remains Senate Democrats’ top pick for a 2026 campaign for the seat coming open with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s retirement.

Beshear, whose father once lost to McConnell after having won two governor’s races, has said he will not run for Senate. But he has stepped up his cable TV interviews and launched his own podcast, fueling speculation that his next campaign will be for the 2028 presidential nomination.

“Andy is not like those national Democrats,” Runyon said. Harking back to the 1990s, he added, “Bill Clinton wasn’t like these Democrats today.”

Hackworth, the shop owner, noted that she voted against the younger Beshear twice. But over the course of an extended interview, she, too, commended the governor’s disaster management. She also questioned some moves by Trump, including the idea of getting Washington completely out of the disaster aid business.

She blamed Trump’s predecessor, former President Biden, for a “tough time at my store,” but acknowledged that federal aid had helped many businesses and households stay afloat through the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.

Hackworth said she was not familiar with details of Medicaid expansion, but she identified the nearby hospital as among the area’s largest employers. The others, she said, are the public school system and Walmart, which a day earlier had announced it was increasing prices because of Trump’s tariffs.

While supporting Trump’s “America first” agenda, Hackworth said widespread tariffs would upset many consumers. “You can walk through my store and see where the new stuff is made,” she said. “I try to buy American, but so much of it is China, China, China.”

Asked again whether any of that should give Democrats an opening in places like Paintsville, she said, “Well, there’s always an opening if you show up.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the Murphy Brown uproar, Vice President Dan Quayle has delivered another double-barreled commotion. First, in the past 10 days, he has made two more fire-breathing speeches on family values, one to a convention of Southern Baptists and the other to a National Right to Life gathering. Second, he has demonstrated he does not know how to spell potato .

My West Coast sources say politically aware people in the entertainment industry have made up their minds about the vice president’s “values” theme: It will not play in Peoria. Quayle’s distasteful traditionalist fervor, in this view, simply does not reflect the ethics or concerns of most Americans. Besides, how can you take a man seriously who doesn’t know the names of his vegetables?

But Quayle’s critics are kidding themselves, trying to suppress the message by deriding the messenger. They may think the vice president’s misspelling marks him as an irredeemable jerk, but many of his fellow citizens are not so sensitive, and some will even sympathize with him. (Pop quiz: Is it potatos or potatoes ?)

The same critics are surely right in seeing considerable daylight between most Americans’ general moral posture and the pungency of some of Quayle’s stronger words. Nonetheless, the “values” card might not only help the Bush-Quayle reelection effort, it may even play a moderating role in the campaign.

In his speeches, Quayle again criticized the “cultural elite” that “flees from the consequences of its self-indulgence.” But he also expanded on the idea of this elite as an alien force in American life. The country is made up, he said, of “the cultural elite, and the rest of us.” The elite “mock us in the newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges,” but “we Americans” must “stand up for our values, stand up for America.” The American people are “playing David to the Goliath of the dominant cultural elite,” he exhorted, “but remember the final outcome” of that battle: “The Philistines fled.”

This is unattractive stuff. It says only the people on Quayle’s side of the argument can lay legitimate claim to the label “American.” One of our worst national characteristics in politics is the tendency to read our opponents out of the rolls of American citizenship–and parts of the Quayle speeches serve as fair examples of this nasty habit.

But the recent Quayle sorties, despite the rough language, are not the beginning of a crusade–which would fail–to Puritanize American life. Instead, speeches like his accomplish two other things.

First, such talk shores up the Bush Administration’s base among social conservatives. They are not a majority in America, but they constitute a Peoria in which the vice president’s ideas will play to standing-room-only crowds. Solidifying a core constituency is a prudent thing to do for an electorally weak Administration facing a three-way presidential race. In olden times, national politicians could do this type of cheerleading in obscurity, with their most inflammatory words heard only by the special groups they were addressing. But now, because of modern communications, we are constantly eavesdropping on each other’s private political conversations.

Second, Quayle’s theme promises benefits for the Administration’s campaign even among many who do not share his moral fervor but do share a general unease with TV, movies and a popular culture that seems out of control. Often these are the same people now lured, to the Administration’s discomfort, by the siren song of Ross Perot.

Perot, it is becoming clear, is a strange man. He has displayed an authoritarian temperament in his business and public life and in the preemptory ways he proposes to deal with problems ranging from entitlements to the cost of U.S. troops abroad. He is cavalier about constitutionally rooted civil liberties and about institutions with which the Constitution says a President must share power. The different versions he gives of his own life are starting to make Ronald Reagan’s lapses in this area look trivial and benign.

In short, Perot is dangerous. Moreover, his attitudes do not reflect the considered views of the electorate: Americans of all kinds remain massively attached to the basic features of the American system. Yet Perot maintains his political strength because he has succeeded in presenting himself as the ultimate outsider to a citizenry that has been brought to mistrust all insiders.

We know today’s citizens are increasingly alienated from their government and public officials. Many Americans have come to see today’s politics and government as one vast sinkhole of incompetence and corruption. Even with the large problems our nation faces, this despair is out of proportion.

There is more than one reason for this mistrust, which has been building for a quarter-century. But the “cultural elite” cannot deny having had a hand in shaping it. If popular culture has shaken tradition regarding sexual morality, parts of the elite have also mounted a challenge in the arena of conventional politics.

To take the largest example, the national press, since Watergate, has given news consumers an unending stream of political scandal. Yet national politics is, by most measures, far cleaner than it was 25 years ago. But there is no way that newspaper readers and TV viewers absorbing this reportage can escape thinking that today’s politicians are incorrigibly dirty.

The view we get from movies that deal with politics is even darker, ranging from simple corruption to grand conspiracies to steal the presidency from the American people. “The “faculty lounges” that Quayle cited are, like the sitcoms, a mixed bag, but some major university campuses have been seedbeds for critiques of the profound structural racism, sexism and imperialism said to infest our conventional social and political institutions.

Those who have purveyed this radical political disaffection may have hoped it would lead to a more just America. Instead, what they begot was Perot, and they should recognize him as their child.

By pounding away at the theme of the cultural elite vs. America’s traditional values, Quayle is asserting that the Administration should be seen not as a bunch of political insiders but as the champion of all those cultural outsiders who feel denigrated and ignored by the media and popular culture. In other words, he argued that voters should exempt him and President George Bush from the “insider” curse of 1992.

More important, in appealing to traditional values, Quayle took the quickest and most powerful route to generally delegitimizing what have been called the “chattering classes” and casting grave doubt on whatever comes out of their collective mouths. Once people are reminded of how little they trust the “cultural elite,” they can be persuaded to exercise this mistrust in other areas. If members of the elite are insensitive to issues of family values, there is no reason to think them trustworthy on general politics. If they say American politics stinks, they should not be believed any more than they should be trusted on the issue of sex.

But if American politics does not stink in the way Hollywood says it does, then Perot should not get credit for being the outsider who champions the people against the Establishment. To the contrary: Perot can be portrayed as a creature of the cultural elite and its cynical view of American political life. His contempt for other politicians and his insistence on his unique ability to save us are perhaps messages not from the majority of Americans, but from an elitist fringe. Quayle has actually started in on this idea, chiding Perot for not showing sufficient respect for the Constitution.

If this strategy works, the “family values” issue will have tapped into some of the same anti-Establishment voter anger to which Perot appeals and will shake Perot loose from his position as the embodiment of average people’s sentiments. Even for those who do not like some of Quayle’s recent speeches, this is probably a good trade.

If Kamala Harris runs for California governor, the job is essentially hers for the taking.

So goes the common wisdom.

After all, she’s a household name, which is no small consideration in a state as vast and politically inattentive as California. She has a coast-to-coast fundraising base and a record of winning statewide contests going back to 2010, when she was first elected attorney general.

Who better, supporters say, to engage President Trump than the former prosecutor who whipped him in their one debate and only just lost the popular vote after being thrust overnight into a drastically truncated campaign?

Antonio Villaraigosa isn’t buying that for a second.

Unlike others in the crowded race for governor, who are likely to drop out if Harris jumps in, L.A.’s former mayor said he’s not budging.

In fact, Villaraigosa insists he wants Harris to run — just so he can beat her and, he says, send an anti-elitist message to those Democrats who have their noses in the air rather than eyes fixed on hard-pressed voters and their myriad frustrations.

“I think she’s been OK that we’ve been a party of just people that drive a Tesla and not a Toyota pickup, or ride a bus like my mother did,” Villaraigosa said. “I think she has no idea what it means to buy a carton of eggs and spend $12 at Ralph’s.”

Harris is “the face of that party,” he went on, warming to the heat of his smoldering rhetoric. “The party that thinks that people that don’t have a college education are stupid. The party that believes that … people voted for Trump just because he’s a great used-car salesman and not because what he was selling resonated with people that work every day. The people who shower after work. Not before.”

As Harris uses the summer to decide her future — retiring from politics or running again for president being other options — no Democrat has been as brash and bold as Villaraigosa when it comes to assailing the putative front-runner and erstwhile leader of the national party.

Earlier this week, he accused Harris and Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra of helping cover up President Biden’s decline in office, seizing on the scandal fueled by a new book, “Original Sin,” that offered details of Biden’s eroding mental and physical state.

“She could say she didn’t know,” Villaraigosa said, elaborating on that initial volley during a lengthy conversation. “They can’t prove that she did. But last time I looked, she had lunch with him pretty regularly … She had to have seen what the world [saw] over time and particularly in that debate. The notion that she didn’t? Come on. Who’s going to buy that?”

That sort of talk is more typical of, say, Fox News than a candidate bidding for the support of fellow Democrats. Villaraigosa, a former labor leader who’s gotten crossways with teacher unions among other party mainstays, professed not to care. If anything, he said, he’s been encouraged by the response.

“For every one of those people” — upset by Villaraigosa’s remarks — “there are three of them, maybe not as high up among Democrats, who are saying the same damn thing. That’s why this got so much traction … Since Vietnam, people don’t believe in government anymore. They don’t believe in their leaders. And every time we lie or misrepresent … [or] hide the truth from them, their support and their belief in our institutions” diminishes.

Harris would have plenty of time to push back on Villaraigosa’s depiction, should she choose to run. In the meantime, what’s notable is his eagerness to take on the former vice president, positioning himself as the most vocal and assertive of her potential gubernatorial rivals.

Others have taken a few pokes.

“No one should be waiting to lead,” former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter told The Times’ Seema Mehta after entering the contest in March.

Becerra echoed that sentiment when he announced his candidacy in April. “Watching what’s unfolding before our eyes made it clear this is not a time to sit on the sidelines,” Becerra said.

But that’s comparatively weak tea.

“If she wants to come in the race, she should come in now,” Villaraigosa taunted. “Let’s debate. What are the challenges facing our state? Where are the opportunities? Where do we meld them together? How do we make this a better state for our kids?”

During the 40-minute phone conversation, starting in his car and finishing after Villaraigosa arrived home in Los Angeles, he toggled between criticisms of Harris and statements of good will toward a one-time political ally.

The two have known each other, he said, since the mid-1990s, when Villaraigosa was a freshman assemblyman in Sacramento and Harris was dating then-Speaker Willie Brown. He supported her run for attorney general — “I did three press conferences” as L.A. mayor — and was quick to back her as soon as Biden stepped aside last summer and Harris became the Democratic nominee.

“I supported her,” he said. “I got behind her. Her husband” — former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff — “has thanked me a number of times when he’s seen me in person.”

The disagreement now, Villaraigosa said, is over the direction of a party he sees unmoored from its history as a champion of the middle and working classes and too beholden to interest groups that make up its patchwork coalition. Harris, he suggested, is the personification of that disconnect from Democratic tradition.

“At the end of the day, what I’m arguing for is, let’s get to the place where we’re focused on getting things done and focused on common sense,” Villaraigosa said, citing, among issues, his support for Proposition 36, the anti-crime measure that voters overwhelming approved last November. The vice president, he noted, refused to take a position.

But don’t, he said before hanging up, take his attacks on Harris the wrong way.

“This isn’t personal,” Villaraigosa insisted.

It’s just politics.

RICHMOND, Va. — U.S. Rep. Gerald “Gerry” Connolly, an outspoken Democrat who sought key reforms in the federal government while bringing transformational development to his populous Virginia district, died Wednesday. He was 75.

Connolly, who most recently held a prominent position as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, served in Congress for more than 16 years.

He died at home in the company of family members, his family said in a statement. Connolly announced in 2024 that he had esophageal cancer and said a few months later that he planned to retire from Congress. His death leaves House Republicans with a 220-212 majority.

The spirited and at times bullheaded Fairfax Democrat became known for his voluble nature and willingness to engage in spirited debates. In one hearing, he accused Republicans of engaging in a witch hunt against the IRS, asking a witness if they ever read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

“I am heartbroken over the loss of my dear friend,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. “To me, he exemplified the very best of public service.” He said Connolly “met every challenge with tenacity and purpose, including his final battle with cancer, which he faced with courage, grace, and quiet dignity.”

A fixture of Virginia politics for three decades, Connolly was first elected to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 1995. On the county board, he steered the transition of northern Virginia’s Tysons Corner from a traffic-heavy mall area to a downtown business hub.

In 2003, Connolly was elected board chairman, and he continued pushing for transportation investment that had been debated among officials for decades. Connolly sought billions in state and federal dollars to develop the regional rail system’s Silver Line connecting the national capital region to Tysons Corner.

Connolly’s dream was realized with the Silver Line’s opening in 2014, and eight years later, the rail line was extended an extra 11 miles to reach Dulles International Airport.

As the extension opened in 2022, Connolly said: “Doing big things is difficult — the world is filled with naysayers.”

Connolly’s local government experience launched his congressional career. He was elected in 2008 after flipping an open Republican-held seat by nearly 42,000 votes. In his victory speech, Connolly said he would use his position to ensure the federal bureaucracy is “a responsive, accountable instrument for the people we serve.”

“If we insist the government must work for all of our citizens again, we cannot fail,” Connolly said.

Connolly got his first taste of Congress while working as a staffer for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 1980s. Decades later, Connolly became a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

He also served as a member of the House Oversight Committee and led Democrats on subcommittees on government innovation and information technology.

Connolly cosponsored the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act, which requires federal agencies to allow a portion of their employees to telework at least one day a week. In 2014, he cosponsored another bill that reformed federal IT management and has since saved the government billions of dollars, according to the Government Accountability Office.

He also closely followed the financial burden of the slowing U.S. Postal Service, becoming a prominent voice accusing President Trump and former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy of seeking to winnow the postal service to suppress mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election.

Connolly reached a new milestone late last year as he was chosen ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. He defeated Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the position. The victory came shortly after Connolly announced that he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

As ranking member, Connolly called on inspectors general to investigate the Department of Government Efficiency. He and other Democrats also introduced a pair of resolutions demanding the Trump administration turn over documents and information about billionaire advisor Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest and the firings of federal workers.

He said in late April that after “grueling treatments,” he learned that the cancer had returned and that he decided to step down from his post on the committee and would not seek reelection.

“With no rancor and a full heart, I move into this final chapter full of pride in what we’ve accomplished together over 30 years,” he said.

Diaz writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans are getting closer to passing President Trump’s tax breaks, spending cuts and beefed-up border security as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) attempts to pass the package over unified Democratic opposition by Memorial Day.

House committees have labored for months on the legislation, which exceeds 1,000 pages and is titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a nod to Trump himself.

GOP divisions have narrowed but continue as fiscal conservatives worry the bill doesn’t do enough to curb Medicaid spending, while Republicans from competitive swing districts have expressed concerns about the prospect of their constituents losing access to health coverage and food assistance.

Democrats say they will fight what House party leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) calls “this extreme and toxic bill.”

Here’s a look at what’s in and out of the legislative package so far.

Tax cuts for individuals and businesses

Republicans are looking to make permanent the individual income and estate tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, in 2017, plus enact promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail to not tax tips, overtime and interest on some auto loans.

To partially offset the lost revenue, Republicans propose repealing or phasing out more quickly the clean energy tax credits passed during Joe Biden’s presidency, helping to bring down the overall cost of the tax portion to about $3.8 trillion.

The bill includes a temporary boost in the standard deduction — a $1,000 increase for individuals, bringing it to $16,000 for individual filers, and a $2,000 boost for joint filers, bringing it to $32,000. The deduction reduces the amount of income that is actually subject to income tax.

There is also a temporary $500 increase in the child tax credit, bringing it to $2,500 for 2025 through 2028. It then returns to $2,000 and will increase to account for inflation.

The estate tax exemption rises to $15 million and is adjusted for inflation going forward.

Several of the provisions Trump promised in the campaign would be temporary, lasting roughly through his term in office. The tax breaks for tips, overtime and car loan interest expire at the end of 2028. That’s also the case for a $4,000 increase in the standard deduction for seniors.

Among the various business tax provisions, small businesses, including partnerships and S corporations, will be able to subtract 23% of their qualified business income from their taxes. The deduction has been 20%.

Businesses will temporarily be allowed to fully expense domestic research and development costs in the year they occur and the cost of machinery, equipment and other qualifying assets. This encourages businesses to invest in ways that enhances their productivity.

Parents and older Americans face work requirements for food assistance

House Republicans would reduce spending on food aid, what is known as the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, by about $267 billion over 10 years.

States would shoulder 5% of benefit costs, beginning in fiscal 2028, and 75% of the administrative costs. Currently, states pay none of the benefit and half of the administration costs.

Republicans also are expanding the work requirements to receive food aid. Under current law, able-bodied adults without dependents must fulfill work requirements until they are 54, and that would change under the bill to age 64.

Also, some parents are currently exempt from work requirements until their children are 18; that would change so only those caring for a dependent child under the age of 7 are exempt.

At the same time, the legislation would invest $60 billion in new money for agriculture programs, sending aid to farmers.

New work requirements for Medicaid

A focal point of the package is nearly $700 billion in reduced spending in the Medicaid program, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

To be eligible for Medicaid, there would be new “community engagement requirements” of at least 80 hours per month of work, education or service for able-bodied adults without dependents. The new requirement would not kick in until Jan. 1, 2029, after Trump leaves office. People would also have to verify their eligibility for the program twice a year, rather than just once.

Republicans are looking to generate savings with new work requirements. But Democrats warn that millions of Americans will lose coverage.

An estimate from the Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with healthcare by at least 7.6 million from the Medicaid changes, and possibly more with other changes to the Affordable Care Act.

Applicants could not qualify for Medicaid if they have a home that is valued at more than $1 million.

No taxes on gun silencers, no money for Planned Parenthood and more

Republicans are also using the package to reward allies and disadvantage political foes.

The package would eliminate a $200 tax on gun silencers that has existed since Congress passed the National Firearms Act in 1934. The elimination of the tax is supported by theNational Rifle Assn.

The group Giffords, which works to reduce gun violence, said silencers make it more difficult to recognize the sound of gunfire and locate the source of gunshots, impairing the ability of law enforcement to respond to active shooters.

Republicans are also looking to prohibit Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion care and other services. Democrats say defunding the organization would make it harder for millions of patients to get cancer screenings, pap tests and birth control.

‘MAGA’ kids $1,000 savings accounts

“MAGA” is shorthand for Trump’s signature line, “Make America Great Again.” But in this case, it means “Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement.”

For parents or guardians who open new “MAGA” accounts for their children, the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between Jan. 1, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2028.

Families could add $5,000 a year, with the account holders unable to take distributions before age 18. Then, they could access up to 50% of the money to pay for higher education, training and first-time home purchases. At age 30, account holders have access to the full balance of the account for any purpose.

Funding for Trump’s mass deportation operation

The legislation would provide $46.5 billion to revive construction of Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and more money for the deportation agenda.

There’s $4 billion to hire an additional 3,000 new Border Patrol agents as well as 5,000 new customs officers, and $2.1 billion for signing and retention bonuses. There’s also funds for 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and investigators.

It includes major changes to immigration policy, imposing a $1,000 fee on migrants seeking asylum — something the nation has never done, putting it on par with a few others, including Australia and Iran.

Overall, the plan is to remove 1 million immigrants annually and house 100,000 people in detention centers.

More money for the Pentagon and Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’

There’s also nearly $150 billion in new money for the Defense Department and national security.

It would provide $25 billion for Trump’s “Golden Dome for America,” a long-envisioned missile defense shield, $21 billion to restock the nation’s ammunition arsenal, $34 billion to expand the naval fleet with more shipbuilding and some $5 billion for border security.

It also includes $9 billion for servicemember quality-of-life-related issues, including housing, healthcare and special pay.

Tax on university endowments and overhaul of student loans

A wholesale revamping of the student loan program is key to the legislation, providing $330 billion in budget cuts and savings.

The proposal would replace all existing student loan repayment plans with just two: a standard option with monthly payments spread out over 10 to 25 years and a “repayment assistance” plan that is generally less generous than those it would replace.

Among other changes, the bill would repeal Biden-era regulations that made it easier for borrowers to get loans canceled if their colleges defrauded them or closed suddenly.

There would be a tax increase, up to 21%, on some university endowments.

More drilling, mining on public lands

To generate revenue, one section would allow increased leasing of public lands for drilling, mining and logging while clearing the path for more development by speeding up government approvals.

Royalty rates paid by companies to extract oil, gas and coal would be cut, reversing Biden’s attempts to curb fossil fuels to help address climate change.

In a last-minute add, Republicans also included a provision authorizing sales of hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah, prompting outrage from Democrats and environmentalists.

Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writers Collin Binkley and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Matthew Brown in Billings, Mont., contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Republicans advanced their massive tax cut and border security package out of a key House committee during a rare Sunday night vote as conservatives who blocked the measure two days earlier reversed course after gaining commitments on the package’s spending cuts.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) met with Republican lawmakers shortly before the meeting, telling reporters that the changes agreed to were “just some minor modifications. Not a huge thing.”

Democrats on the panel pressed for more details about the changes that Republicans had agreed to in the private negotiations. But Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said he could not do so.

“Deliberations continue at this very moment,” Arrington said. “They will continue on into the week, and I suspect right up until the time we put this big, beautiful bill on the floor of the House.”

The first time Republicans tried advancing the bill out of the Budget Committee, hard-right Republicans joined with Democrats in voting against sending the measure to the full House. Five Republicans voted no, one on procedural grounds, the other four voicing concerns about the bill’s effect on federal budget deficits.

On Sunday evening, the four voicing concerns about the deficit voted present, and the measure passed by a vote of 17 to 16.

Johnson is looking to put the bill on the House floor before the end of the week.

“This is the vehicle through which we will deliver on the mandate that the American people gave us in the last election,” he said on “Fox News Sunday” in advance of the vote.

The Republicans who criticized the measure noted that the bill’s new spending and tax cuts are front-loaded in the bill, while the measures to offset the cost are back-loaded. For example, they are looking to speed up the new work requirements that Republicans want to enact for Medicaid recipients. Those requirements would not kick in until 2029 under the current bill.

“We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the committee. “Something needs to change, or you’re not going to get my support.”

Johnson said the start date for the work requirements was designed to give states time to “retool their systems” and to “make sure that all the new laws and all the new safeguards that we’re placing can actually be enforced.”

Roy was joined in voting no by Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania switched his vote to no in a procedural step so it could be reconsidered later.

The vote against advancing the bill had come after President Trump urged Republicans in a social media post to unite behind it.

At its core, the sprawling package permanently extends the existing income tax cuts that were approved during Trump’s first term, in 2017, and adds temporary new ones that the president campaigned on in 2024, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay and auto loan interest payments. The measure also proposes big spending increases for border security and defense.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, estimates that the House bill is shaping up to add roughly $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to the measure, which Republicans have labeled “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called it “one big, beautiful betrayal” in Friday’s hearing.

“This spending bill is terrible, and I think the American people know that,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union’’ on Sunday. “There is nothing wrong with us bringing the government in balance. But there is a problem when that balance comes on the back of working men and women. And that’s what is happening here.”

Johnson is not just having to address the concerns of those in his conference who raised concerns about the deficit. He’s also facing pressure from centrists who will be warily eyeing the proposed changes to Medicaid, food assistance programs and the rolling back of clean energy tax credits. Republican lawmakers from New York and elsewhere are also demanding a much large state and local tax deduction.

As it stands, the bill proposes tripling what’s currently a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, increasing it to $30,000 for joint filers with incomes up to $400,000 a year.

Rep. Nick LaLota, one of the New York GOP lawmakers leading the effort to lift the cap, said they have proposed a deduction of $62,000 for single filers and $124,000 for joint filers.

If the bill passes the House this week, it would move to the Senate, where Republicans are seeking additional changes that could make final passage in the House more difficult.

Johnson said: “The package that we send over there will be one that was very carefully negotiated and delicately balanced, and we hope that they don’t make many modifications to it because that will ensure its passage quickly.”

Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.

PHOENIX — Former President Biden’s time in office is behind him, but his age and mental acuity have become an issue for the next leaders in his party.

Audio was published Friday from portions of interviews Biden gave to federal prosecutors in 2023, the latest in a stream of reports putting questions about Biden’s health back in the spotlight. Months after former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, a new book alleges that White House aides covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline.

Several potential Democratic contenders for the 2028 nomination have been asked in recent days whether they believe Biden was declining in office or whether he should have sought reelection before a disastrous debate performance led to his withdrawal.

Many Democrats would prefer to focus on President Trump’s second term and his sagging poll numbers. Trump has done his best to prevent that — mentioning Biden’s name an average of six times per day during his first 100 days in office, according to an NBC News analysis — and Republicans have followed his lead, betting that voters frustrated by Trump’s policy moves will still prefer him over memories of another unpopular presidency.

In the race for Virginia governor, one of this year’s highest-profile contests, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears is running a pair of digital ads tying Democratic former Rep. Abigail Spanberger to Biden, with images of the two hugging and the former president calling her a friend.

“The stench of Joe Biden still lingers on the Democratic Party,” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett said. “We have to do the hard work of fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told Politico this week that “there’s no doubt” that Biden, now 82, experienced cognitive decline as president.

Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden’s Transportation secretary, wasn’t as blunt but stopped short of defending Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection. He responded “maybe” when asked Tuesday whether the Democratic Party would have been better off if Biden hadn’t declared a bid for a second term.

“Right now, with the advantage of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that’s the case,” Buttigieg told reporters during a stop in Iowa.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he didn’t see signs of mental or physical decline in his meetings with Biden.

“I saw him a few times,” he told CNN this week. “I certainly went to the White House whenever there was an opportunity for me to make the case for something for people in my state. And I never had the experience of anything other than a guy who brought to the table a lot of good ideas about how to solve problems.”

The book “Original Sin,” by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, revives a core controversy of Biden’s presidency: his decision to run for a second term despite voters, including Democrats, telling pollsters that he should not. Biden would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won in November.

A spokesperson for Biden did not respond to a request for comment.

“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job,” the spokesperson has told many media outlets in response to the book.

Late Friday, Axios published portions from audio recordings of Biden’s six hours of interviews with prosecutors investigating his handling of classified documents after his term as vice president ended in 2017, for which he was not charged.

The Biden administration had already released transcripts of the interviews, but the recordings shed light on special counsel Robert Hur’s characterization of Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and appeared to validate his claim that the then-president struggled to recall key dates, including the year his son Beau died of cancer — 2015.

Biden and his aides fiercely objected to Hur’s report, which they characterized as a partisan hit. Biden at that time — early 2024 — was still planning to run for a second term and fending off accusations that he was too old for another four years in the job.

The recordings released by Axios include Biden’s discussion of his son’s death. His responses to some of the prosecutors’ questions are punctuated by long pauses, and his lawyers at times stepped in to help him recall dates and timelines.

Before he dropped his reelection bid last summer, Biden faced widespread doubts within his own party, even as Democratic leaders dismissed a series of verbal flubs and Republican allegations about his declining acuity.

In January 2022, a year into Biden’s first term, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that only 48% of Democrats wanted him to seek reelection. That fell to 37% of Democrats in an AP-NORC poll in February 2023. Three-quarters of Americans — and 69% of Democrats — said in August 2023 that they believed Biden was too old to serve as president for another four-year term.

And shortly after his debate flop, nearly two-thirds of Democrats said Biden should withdraw from the race.

Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden appeared on ABC’s “The View” on May 8 in a preemptive defense of his health and decision-making before the first excerpts of “Original Sin” were published.

The former president said he’s responsible for Trump’s victory but attributed Harris’ loss, at least in part, to sexism and racism. He maintained that he would have won had he remained the Democratic nominee. Both Bidens rejected concerns about his cognitive decline.

Patricia McEnerney, a 74-year-old Democrat in Goodyear, Ariz., said Biden should not have tried to run again.

“I think it’s sad the way it ended,” she said.

She compared him to Douglas MacArthur, the World War II and Korean War general famously dismissed by President Truman.

“I think he needs to stop giving interviews. I think that would help,” McEnerney said. “Like MacArthur said, generals just fade away.”

Janet Stumps, a 66-year-old Democrat also from Goodyear, a Phoenix suburb, had a different view.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt the Democrats,” Stumps said. “I feel badly that he feels he has to defend himself. I don’t think he has to. Everybody ages. And the fact that he did what he did at his age, I think he should be commended for it.”

Hackett, the Democratic strategist, predicted Biden won’t be a major factor in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential primaries. But he said Democrats who want voters to trust them would be well-served “by telling the truth about the mistakes that our party made in the run-up to 2024.”

“Those mistakes were largely driven by Joe Biden, and I think any Democrat not willing to say that is not really prepared to face the voters, who want the truth and they want authenticity,” Hackett said.

Rick Wilson, a former GOP strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, said Republicans want to talk about Biden to avoid defending Trump. But he said the strategy is folly.

Besides “political nerds,” he said, “no one else cares.”

Cooper writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Thomas Beaumont in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — In the largest gathering of 2026 gubernatorial candidates to date, seven Democrats vying to lead California courted labor leaders on Monday, vowing to support pro-union agreements on housing and infrastructure projects, regulation of artificial intelligence, and government funding for university research.

Throughout most of the hourlong event, the hundreds of union members inside the Sacramento hotel ballroom embraced the pro-labor pledges and speeches that dominated the candidates’ remarks, though some boos rose from the crowd when former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa strayed from the other Democrats on stage.

Villaraigosa was the only candidate to raise objections when asked if he would support providing state unemployment benefits to striking workers, saying it would depend on the nature and length of the labor action. Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 vetoed a bill that would have provided that coverage, saying it would make the state’s unemployment trust fund “vulnerable to insolvency.”

The Monday night event was part of a legislative conference held by the California Federation of Labor Unions and the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, two of the most influential labor organizations in the state capital.

Villaraigosa was joined on stage by former state Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and former state Controller Betty Yee. All are running to replace Newsom, who is serving his second and final term as governor.

Throughout most of the event, the candidates were peppered with yes-or-no questions, answering with the wave of a red flag for “no” or green flag for “yes.”

The event was not without its frosty moments, including when the candidates were asked whether, as governor, they would be “pragmatic and stop targeting California’s oil and gas industry in ways that jeopardize union jobs and force us to rely on dirtier imported energy.”

Some of the candidates raised their green flags timidly. California’s Democratic leaders, including Newsom and top state lawmakers, have been major proponents of transitioning to renewable energy and imposing more restrictions on the state’s oil and gas industry.

“We all want a clean environment going forward,” Yee said, “but it cannot be on the backs of workers.”

Villaraigosa, in remarks after the event, said he challenged the idea of jumping into electrification too quickly, which would affect union jobs and increase the cost of utilities and energy across the state.

“Closing down refineries, telling people to get rid of their gas stove and gas water heater is just poppycock,” he said.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, praised the Democratic candidates for showing strong support for unionized workers. She’s hopeful that each would be more receptive to some pivotal union concerns than Newsom, such as the regulation of artificial intelligence, a major threat to union jobs, she said.

“When we’re talking about things like regulating AI — we can’t even get a conversation out of Gavin Newsom about any regulation — I think that was, that was a key thing. They all threw up their green flag,” Gonzalez said.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who is weighing a run for governor, declined an invitation to address the conference.

The State Building and Construction Trades Council represents hundreds of thousands of workers in the state, including bricklayers, ironworkers and painters, among many others.

The Labor Federation is a formidable power in California politics and policy, expected to help coordinate the spending of as much as $40 million by unions in next year’s election. The federation is an umbrella group for about 1,300 unions that represent around 2.3 million workers in the public and private sectors.

The organization has backed all of the gubernatorial candidates in various prior races, although it opposed Villaraigosa in the 2005 mayor’s race and supported Newsom over Villaraigosa in the 2018 gubernatorial race.

The latter decision was driven by the arc Villaraigosa has taken from his roots as a union leader to a critic of Los Angeles’ teachers union and supporter of charter schools and reform of teacher-tenure rules.

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.