gender

Imagine if Sunday’s World Cup final were played under rules that blatantly favored one side over the other. Let’s say Argentina was spotted four goals against Spain.

Spain could, conceivably, overcome that 4-0 deficit. But it would be awfully hard and something of a miracle if the Spanish team prevailed.

Fans the world over would be rightly outraged. Why bother holding the tournament? What’s the point if one team is saddled with near-insurmountable odds?

Increasingly, that’s what elections for the House of Representatives look like.

As recently as the late 1990s, around 4 in 10 congressional districts were considered competitive, meaning Democratic and Republican candidates each had a plausible shot at winning. Today, per the nonpartisan handicappers at the Cook Political Report, only 18 of 435 House districts are considered toss-ups.

Another 20 districts are rated as either leaning Democratic or Republican, meaning candidates from one party or the other enjoy a noteworthy advantage, but aren’t necessarily a lock to win in November.

In sum, that means fewer than a tenth of all House seats are even somewhat competitive.

That’s hardly an accident, as lawmakers have increasingly manipulated the election process to suit themselves, rejiggering congressional districts to sideline voters and boost their political parties.

It’s undemocratic, and it stinks.

Stifling competition, rewarding extremes

“Every voter has a stake in making sure that these elections are fair and that the process is transparent,” said Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents a large, mostly rural swath of western and southern Colorado. “Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy … by preventing voters and communities from having cohesive representation.

“It unfortunately rewards political extremes,” he went on. “It reduces competition and contributes to the polarization and dysfunction that prevents Congress from effectively addressing the issues that our constituents care about.”

Hurd is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of 44 House members dedicated to working through their ideological and political differences to — lordy! — try to get stuff done.

Recently, to mark Independence Day, the caucus announced a framework for legislation aimed at bringing competition back to many congressional races, in part by limiting the redrawing of political maps to once every 10 years, following the census. Among other reforms, the bipartisan group also called for establishing a uniform, national standard requiring that congressional districts be drawn “using clear, objective criteria while rejecting partisan advantage and incumbent protection as legitimate goals.”

The effort is, of course, too late for this election. The hope is Congress will enact the changes in time for the next scheduled round of redistricting, which is due to take place after the 2030 census. The rules would be in place starting in 2032.

The chances of passage are not strong. As Hurd noted: “Any reform that asks politicians to give up political leverage is going to be challenging.” But if ever there was a time for a badly needed systemic fix, it’s now.

A race to the bottom

Gerrymandering has been around for more than 200 years. The term derives from the efforts of Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry to skew state Senate races in the election of 1812. The portmanteau, which appeared in the Boston Gazette, described one politically engineered, misshapen district that resembled a salamander.

The practice reached new heights of creativity (or deviousness, depending on your perspective) in the modern age, when ever-more sophisticated computers allowed for ever-finer slicing and dicing of the electorate.

In 2019, the Supreme Court effectively greenlighted the practice in a 5-4 decision by the conservative majority, decreeing that partisan gerrymandering was beyond the purview of federal courts. In other words, have at it! And lawmakers did.

But this last year, in particular, has broken new, insidious ground.

Pressured by President Trump — who fears losing the GOP’s whisper-thin House majority — lawmakers in Texas tore up their political map mid-decade and redrew the state’s congressional districts in hopes of nabbing five additional seats this November. California responded in kind, with passage of Proposition 50, a measure that shelved the work of a nonpartisan redistricting commission in favor of a map aimed at handing Democrats five additional seats.

More than half a dozen other states — most of them Republican-run — have jumped into the fight, gerrymandering their congressional districts to gain a partisan edge. Lawmakers in several Democratic-run states are now looking at the prospect of retaliatory gerrymandering ahead of the 2028 election.

There’s not much upside to all this self-dealing — if, that is, you care about political competition and allowing the electorate a genuine say. But all that manipulation and maneuvering has, at least, made voters much more aware of the once-obscure practice of congressional line drawing. And that offers reformers a flicker of hope.

One ally, improbable though it may seem, is Paul Mitchell. He’s the Sacramento political guru who drew the gerrymandered map that California voters approved with passage of Proposition 50. (California, he said, was left no choice but to respond after Texas made its move.)

Mitchell said he has long favored a national redistricting standard that would apply to all 50 states and put the much-abused process on an even footing. “I really believe that redistricting should … serve the public, not serve the politicians,” Mitchell said.

Still looking on that bright side, he suggested perhaps the current redistricting war will prove so odious and have “done so much harm” that combatants will reach a point where they “put down [their] arms and embrace a kind of nonpartisan, non-politicized, public-oriented redistricting.”

It seems far-fetched. But miracles do happen.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Californians rallied to save the coast 50 years ago. Trump is spoiling the celebration
The deep dive: On birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court originalists split on history and Trump
The L.A. Times Special: Inside the states’ case to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger: ‘Each side is taking risks’

Until next time,
mzb
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SACRAMENTO — Recent news about literacy, education and general smarts in California and across the country has been somewhat distressing.

Along with claims that Americans are becoming illiterate, here in the Golden State there are worries that even the highest-achieving students aren’t prepared for our universities, and a study shows backsliding in civil rights protections in the vacuum created by federal changes under the Trump administration.

Despite being close to terming out of office, and also otherwise occupied with his ever-emerging presidential run, Gov. Gavin Newsom last week found time to announce a consequential, if controversial, move that has the potential to vastly improve educational outcomes for California kids: switching out an independent, voter-chosen leader for a hired gun.

In legislation signed last week, Newsom basically eviscerated the role of the elected superintendent of public instruction and instead shifted oversight of our K-12 schools to a newly created education commissioner — to be appointed by the governor.

The change, set to happen early next year, has been described as a “power grab” by some, and on its surface could be seen that way. The conservative candidate for state superintendent — Sonja Shaw, who says she is running to stop “political ideologies being shoved down everybody’s throats” — quickly claimed Newsom’s move was all about stopping her.

In reality, power grab or not, it’s the kind of reform we should all support — a long-overdue push to create accountability in a hot-mess system where there are too many people almost-sorta in charge of too many conflicting priorities.

‘A’ for accountability

It’s to Newsom’s credit that he’s setting up his successor to helm a system that at least has a chance at coherence, even if it raises the stakes for the next governor to deliver.

For years — decades, really — streamlining the governing structure of schools “has been proposed by Republicans and Democrats and bipartisan and nonpartisan commissions,” Linda Darling-Hammond told me. She’s a professor emeritus at Stanford University, an advisor to the governor and, by any measure, one of the preeminent education policy experts in the country.

“It’s not at all political. It is really about making the system run well,” she said. “The world is changing, the economy is changing. There’s just a need to be very efficient and effective in making policy and then implementing that policy.”

“Run well” is the key there. California operates the biggest and most diverse school system in the country. We’ve got roughly 10,000 regular schools (depending on how you count), including about 1,200 charter schools, around 1,00 school districts and 58 counties, each with their own slice of local control over those schools, according to the Department of Education.

That’s about 5.7 million students, nearly 300,000 teachers and $150 billion in costs (counting the new funding in the next budget).

To be kind, this system does not always run well. That’s in no small part because oversight and control are fragmented, overlapping and confusing. Currently, the State Board of Education sets policies, but the elected superintendent implements them through the Department of Education. Then control runs downhill to individual school districts, filtering through local school boards and even principals.

The board can’t control how the superintendent does their job, and vice versa. In fact, they don’t always agree, despite (or because of) the shotgun wedding nature of their relationship. At times, it can feel like they are working against each other. Never mind the complexities of local control.

This has been especially true in recent years as Newsom and the Legislature have pushed through big changes, such as the new prekindergarten grade, that have required massive coordination and effort. At the local level, administrators often complain there is little clarity on what is expected of them and, too often, outright conflict.

“The idea of having policy in one place and implementation in the other is really crazy,” Michael Kirst told me. He’s professor emeritus of education at Stanford and the longest-serving president of California’s State Board of Education, serving under both of Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial stints.

Newsom’s proposed system promises “much clearer, cleaner accountability,” Kirst said.

Expertise counts

It also has the benefit of putting an actual education expert in charge of schools. Because the superintendent role is elected, it has too often been coveted by career politicians looking for a landing spot. Its incumbent, Tony Thurmond, had a background in social work before running for various offices, but that kind of experience isn’t always the case. Neither is experience running a major organization with thousands of employees.

While Newsom’s plan leaves many, if not most, of the details to be ironed out later (a frustrating strategy he’s used more than once to keep the ball rolling on policy without having the drag of actual detail), it does promise to put in someone with the kind of high-level educational policy experience that should be required when managing this vast and important endeavor.

Kirst points out that this will be a “powerful position” charged with making sure our schools are indeed run well, and at the end of the day, it gives us one person to blame if they don’t: the governor.

So if schools don’t improve and our kids don’t learn, voters will know exactly who failed.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump ousts members of bipartisan election commission ahead of midterms
The California edge: The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work
The L.A. Times Special: In bed 23 at Adelanto ICE detention center, a terrified teenager missed his mom

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay detailing her sex life as a single mom just landed her a seven-figure book deal.

According to Page Six, the model’s essay in the Cut had publishers champing at the bit in a 12-way bidding war that culminated in the hefty pay day. Editor Helen Rouner at Penguin Press — who also edited Lauren Christensen’s memoir “Firstborn” and Michael W. Clune’s novel “Pan” — landed the deal.

“Emily is an electrifying writer, and she works with a style and force of presence that any publisher would be lucky to support,” Rouner told The Times on Friday. “She’s painting with every color in the palette.”

Rouner continued that the forthcoming memoir is “wise, funny, irreverent, moving — and wholly original.”

Publishers Marketplace announced the forthcoming memoir, describing it as “an examination of modern female identity through the story of the author’s own efforts as a newly single mother in New York City to discover what really constitutes a good life for a woman.”

The essay, which dropped a month ago and quickly broke the internet, drops the veil on EmRata’s sexual adventures (or maybe misadventures) since she and her former husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, split in 2022.

“It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger,” Ratajkowski writes of new motherhood. “And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.”

In the missive, the model interrogates her sexuality — is she a Madonna or a whore? — while untangling bigger questions around gender, power and self-actualization. If Carrie Bradshaw wrote about “Sex and the City,” then Ratajkowski is writing about sex, the city and single motherhood. And naturally, her fleeting paramours have vague monikers: “Vegan Graffiti Artist,” “Spanish Gen-Zer” and “Son of a Billionaire.”

“And then there was the Elder Millennial: obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk,” she writes. “He had approached the subject coyly at first, like it was something he was kind of embarrassed about — the way a kid will test you to see if you’ll talk to them about their dorky obsession of the moment. Do you like Godzilla? What about Star Wars?”

Would-be sleuths with Ratajkowski’s essay and a gossip rag handy will have their work cut out for them.

This will be Ratajkowski’s second book. The first, “My Body,” dropped in 2021 and was a bestselling collection of essays exploring gender, power dynamics, sexuality and the commodification of female beauty in the modeling and entertainment industries.

Ratajkowski’s foray into the spotlight came more than a decade ago when Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” music video made the model an overnight star. She was cast in David Fincher’s adaptation of “Gone Girl,” which hit theaters the following year, and catapulted to top fashion runways — Marc Jacobs, Versace, Victoria’s Secret and Dolce & Gabbana, to name a few. She she’s been romantically linked to Harry Styles, Eric Andre, Shaboozey, Brad Pitt and Pete Davidson, among others.

In 2023, she moonlighted as the host of the “High Low With EmRata” podcast, where she interviewed sex workers, investigated ethical nonmonogamy and pondered the etymology of the word “toxic.” The same year, she told The Times that she was coming into herself post-divorce, “Being able to assert what I want — that feels like it just started: My life as a creator and not as a muse.”

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — Jared Huffman was unstinting and unbowed as he raised an arm heavenward. Not for fear of a thunderbolt hurtling through the blue sky and, punitively, creasing his skull. Rather, he was illustrating a point.

“I believe in a lot of things,” he said over a tuna melt at a small Marin County cafe. “I just don’t believe in magic and a sky god that looks like an old bearded man sitting just beyond the clouds.”

Huffman is the rare American — one of only about 10% or so — who flatly state they do not believe in God, or any higher power for that matter. What makes him rarer still is his place in Congress. Huffman, who represents a sprawling slice of Northern California, reaching from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is one of just four members (out of more than 500) who are openly agnostic or religiously unaffiliated.

He is, by far, the most outspoken.

Huffman, who publicly revealed his nonreligious status in 2017, helped form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which consists of about three dozen members of various religious stripe, each dedicated to the proposition that church and state should be distinct. He’s written a book, due out next month, raising an alarm and summoning Americans to fight the rising tide of Christian nationalism roiling our divided land.

An overwhelming favorite to win an eighth congressional term in November, Huffman, a Democrat, calls himself a humanist and described it this way:

“To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around.

Rep. Jared Huffman, right, greets Marin County Executive Derek Johnson during the opening of a housing community in Point Reyes Station, Calif., on Wednesday.

(Godofredo A. Vasquez / For The Times)

“There are people of faith who sometimes think, well, that must be sad, that must be incomplete,” Huffman went on. “I find it’s just the opposite. It makes this world and our opportunity to be part of it more sacred.”

Growing up in the Mormon faith

Huffman, 62, grew up in a religious household in Independence, Mo. His family practiced an offshoot of the Mormon faith; as a youth, Huffman served in the priesthood.

He began to question the church and its teachings when his father died of lung cancer at age 56. Huffman was 19 and enrolled at UC Santa Barbara on a full-ride volleyball scholarship. (A lean 6-foot-3, Huffman was a three-time NCAA All-American and is a member of the school’s athletic hall of fame.)

“I think in hindsight ignorant faith kept me from coming to terms with the fact that he was dying, and it made it way more traumatic than it should have been,” Huffman said of his father’s passing. “I didn’t really own up to the reality of what was happening, because I was this person of faith who thought rotten things would never happen to me and my father.”

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Shaken, Huffman spent years in a period of reflection and deep study — of various religions, spirituality, the Bible, which he can cite chapter and verse — before landing in his place of humanism and nonconformity.

After earning a law degree at Boston College, Huffman moved to the Bay Area and served as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group. His political career began in 1994 with his election to the Marin Municipal Water District. Huffman served for 12 years, until his election to the state Assembly. He won his congressional seat in 2012.

Huffman’s secularism never came up, he said, until his arrival in Washington, where religiosity, God-fearing and worship of a higher power are taken as articles of faith.

“All of a sudden, religion is all around you and everyone wants to know your religion,” Huffman said. “I knew that I was a nonbeliever. I knew that I was a humanist. But that was a very private thing and I had kind of intended to keep it that way.”

Losing his religion

Two things changed.

First, Huffman’s mother died at age 87. She was fervently religious, Huffman said, and “I didn’t really want to break her heart and tell her how deep my nonbelief actually was.” (In his book, Huffman recounts an awkward scene where he takes the congressional oath of office for the first time on a hastily borrowed Bible, to please his proud mom.)

The second factor was the ascent of Trump, riding a wave of ardent evangelical support.

Huffman was put off by the hypocrisy of such a blasphemous president surrounding himself with extremists using the language and symbols of religious faith to enact what he perceived, and perceives, as a distinctly antidemocratic, un-American agenda.

“I was always uncomfortable with the way I saw religion encroaching into government in Washington,” Huffman said. “My previous concerns were heightened by an order of magnitude because of what he did.”

Ignoring the counsel of family, friends and political advisors who, to a person, warned against it, Huffman revealed his religious disbelief in a series of statements and interviews in November 2017. At the time, the only member of Congress to ever publicly come out as an atheist was Rep. Pete Stark, who announced his sentiments in 2007; though the Fremont Democrat was reelected twice, he was eventually defeated by a Democratic rival who turned his lack of faith against him.

That rival was Eric Swalwell; make of it what you will.

Huffman braced for political blowback. There was none, though he’s gotten death threats and plenty of admonishments he’s bound for Hell.

(Meantime, the congressional ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have grown to include Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington and Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona.)

In the first election after his announcement, Huffman was returned to Washington with 77% of the vote. He’s won reelection three times since, with never less than 72% support. “It turns out [constituents] don’t much care what my religion is if I’m doing good work,” Huffman said, “and that’s pretty great in my opinion.”

He underscored the sentiment with a hearty bite of his tuna melt.

The book Huffman has coming out next month — with chapters that include “Breaking Faith,” “Christian Privilege” and “Christian Zionism” — is a work that explains his personal evolution and expresses a dire fear the country is headed, if unchecked, toward a system of authoritarian theocracy.

He describes the Christian nationalism that informed the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and explains the biblical prophecies behind the messianic support among some Trumpian true-believers.

“The book is not so much about humanism,” Huffman said. “It is about the fight to protect our secular democracy, which, I think, is the bedrock of America as we know it.”

The dedication reads, “For everyone who refuses to bow.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: 14 propositions that could remake California taxes, housing, healthcare and elections
The deep dive: Even without birthright citizenship, Supreme Court co-signs much of Trump’s immigration agenda
The L.A. Times Special: The right and left need to control the radicals in their own parties

Until next time,
mzb
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Jennifer Siebel Newsom was frustrated.

She was standing behind her husband, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, at a February press conference to celebrate a new bill that would give Planned Parenthood emergency funds. A throng of women’s advocates, including herself, had spoken about how the law would help women access healthcare. But now reporters were asking a barrage of off-topic questions, from the California High Speed Rail to the 2028 Olympics.

She paced, she swayed, she laughed with displeasure. Finally, she stepped closer to her husband and gently nudged him aside. She found it “incredulous,” she said, that they had assembled all these allies only for the reporters to ask about other issues.

“This happens over and over and over and over again,” she said as Newsom smiled awkwardly. “You wonder why we have such a horrific war on women in this country and that these guys are getting away with it. Because you don’t seem to care. So I just offer that with love.”

All of a sudden, Siebel Newsom herself was the news. One of Sacramento’s top female journalists, Ashley Zavala, shot back on X that reporters were just doing their jobs and the way they were treated “was not normal.” Right-wing media blasted out headlines from “Gavin Newsom’s wife scolds reporters” to “Gavin Newsom’s wife slams reporters for ‘horrific war on women’ in extraordinary rant.”

The scene underscores Siebel Newsom’s predicament as her husband positions himself as Trump’s chief antagonist and prepares for a possible 2028 White House run.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom with California Surgeon General Diana Ramos.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

She came to Sacramento with a mission to speak up for women, calling herself “first partner” to signal she would carry on the theme of her work as a documentary filmmaker and nonprofit leader: dismantling gender norms. But as her husband raises his national profile with a podcast, a memoir and daily trolling of President Trump, she finds herself under mounting scrutiny.

In June, Newsom accused Trump of weaponizing the Department of Justice to launch a politically motivated attack on his spouse after federal agents knocked on the doors of the Newsoms’ friends and former employees, asking about Siebel Newsom’s taxes and nonprofit businesses.

“To get me, he’s coming after my wife,” Newsom said.

A federal source said the investigation began not with Trump, but after federal officials spoke to whistleblowers in Sacramento. Whatever the origin or merits of the probe, Siebel Newsom has long faced questions about her finances — specifically her nonprofits’ partial reliance on donations from companies that lobby the governor, a strategy that does not violate California law but raises concerns about the influence of large corporations in Sacramento.

Her decision to use the title “first partner” and her work “deconstructing” gender are also attracting criticism from the right in the post-#MeToo era as many Americans chafe against what they perceive as radical attempts to undermine traditional values and policing of what they say and do.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom looks on at his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

(Mario Tama / Getty Images)

To Siebel Newsom, the critiques of her work and the federal probe are part of a broader hounding of women who enter the public sphere. When federal agents targeted her associates, she was promoting “Miss Representation: Rise Up,” her new film examining the role technology plays in fueling what she describes as “the rising backlash against women’s progress.”

“We are seeing young women hold themselves back from wanting to pursue careers … not just political leadership, and it’s extremely disturbing,” Siebel Newsom told CNN in June. “It is a backlash, a backslide, and it is happening at an unprecedented scale, where ultimately we are silencing women’s voices.”

She disagreed with those who say scrutiny is the price of admission for being in public life. “Women and girls deserve to be protected,” she said. “Anyone aspiring to a public service career deserves to be safe. It should be fundamental.”

Untangling legitimate political criticism from deeply ingrained gender bias is not easy. Women in the public eye are frequently held to a different standard than men. But some political experts question whether a woman who refuses to stand on the sidelines — raising her voice on radioactive culture war issues and benefiting in part from her marital status to fund her nonprofits — can reasonably expect to be excluded from the rough and tumble of her husband’s political life.

Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and political commentator, said Siebel Newsom had been subjected to heightened public scrutiny for years. “That I think is likely fair,” she said, “in the sense that she has said that she’s very much a partner of the governor, and she has used this platform to advocate for causes that she cares about.”

Still, Levinson said, Siebel Newsom’s availing herself of the public forum did not mean she had violated the law.

“Does the fact that she has created and run nonprofits that receive behested contributions from Gov. Newsom put her and her actions in a different spotlight?” she said. “Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that she’s doing anything nefarious. It just means that their life and their finances and their jobs are a little bit more complicated than other first families.”

Raised in an affluent suburb in Marin County, Siebel Newsom, 52, grew up in privilege. Her father was an investment manager and prominent GOP donor, her mother a co-founder of the Bay Area Discovery Museum.

After studying Latin American studies at Stanford and volunteering in Ecuador and Africa, she returned to Stanford to earn an MBA. Then she moved to L.A. to try to break into Hollywood. She got small parts in “Mad Men” and “Rent,” but has said she “was typecast as a trophy wife and kind of put into this box.”

That sparked her interest in getting behind the camera.

Around the time she married Newsom in 2008 and got pregnant with her first child, she began work on “Miss Representation,” her debut 2011 film that examines how mainstream culture limits female potential and power by focusing on youth, beauty and sexuality.

When Newsom was elected governor, she announced she would eschew the traditional title of “first lady.”

The “first partner” title, she has said, is not just gender inclusive and gender expansive. “It disrupts some of the male-coded language we associate with leadership, versus a ‘lady’ who sits on the sidelines.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Over the last 15 years, Siebel Newsom has worked on a series of documentaries and founded nonprofits focused on gender equity, the Representation Project and California Partners Project.

“She walks the walk,” said Amy Ziering, a documentary filmmaker whose films Siebel Newsom helped produce. She did not take the role lightly, Ziering said, noting she watched cuts and took notes, made introductions and brought people to screenings. The fact that Siebel Newsom kept pressing women’s issues as her husband became governor, Ziering said, reflected her integrity.

“She’s not diminishing her beliefs, her values, her principles or any other kind of long-term goals” Ziering said. “She shows up, ‘This is what I believe,’ and maybe it’s not politically efficacious to believe this right now, or to say ‘I believe it’ … but she does.”

In 2022, Siebel Newsom took on another public role, testifying in Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault trial.

“She did not have to do that, she could have been Jane Doe,” Ziering said. “That’s about showing up for other women and for all sexual assault survivors.”

Cristina Garcia, a former assemblywoman who represented southeast L.A. and worked with Siebel Newsom on women’s legislation, said she thought Siebel Newsom would be a target no matter what.

“But I think she sees the power that she has, and it’s like, why should she just sit in the background?” Garcia said. “Why shouldn’t she use her power to uplift women and children … these things she’s been really passionate about?”

In Sacramento and across liberal California, Siebel Newsom’s ideas on women and gender are relatively mainstream.

But as the 2028 election looms, conservatives have dredged up old clips, highlighting Siebel Newsom’s comments about parenting and deconstructing gender roles to portray her as “radical” and “woke.”

In one video, Siebel Newsom said that when she reads to her children she changes the protagonist’s gender from “he” to “she” to show women matter and can center a story.

In another, she raised concerns about boys being exposed to “alt-right socialization online that we know is very, very dangerous.” She and her husband, she noted, were alarmed to find their son had encountered misogynist influencer Andrew Tate while watching sports online.

Some conservatives have noted, with glee, that Siebel Newsom could be a liability for her husband as he seeks national office.

“Jennifer Siebel Newsom is the very avatar of Democrat Woman,” a New York Post columnist wrote. “Haughty, hectoring and pleased with herself, she is single-handedly wrecking her hen-pecked husband Gavin’s lofty political ambitions.”

But former state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Oxnard) pushed back on the idea that Siebel Newsom was some kind of strident activist or woke scold. After working with Siebel Newsom on equal pay and bringing more women onto corporate boards, she said Siebel Newsom was adept at working with corporations to find common ground and recognize what businesses need to be successful.

The scrutiny of Siebel Newsom comes as her husband tries to stake out a more centrist stance on some issues.

Last year, Newsom inspired the ire of some Democrats by launching a podcast in which he chatted with right-wing figures, such as Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. On its debut episode, Newsom distanced himself from his party’s left flank, calling the dismantling of police departments “lunacy.” Allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports, he said, was “deeply unfair.”

Asked why, Newsom told The Times his party had become out of touch with ordinary Americans. “They think we’re elite,” he said. “We talk down to people. We talk past people. They think we just think we’re smarter than other people, that we’re so judgmental and full of ourselves.”

On this point, it’s not clear whether the Newsoms are in sync.

For all her talk of women as allies, Siebel Newsom portrays conservative women who criticize other women as dupes manipulated by MAGA leaders.

“What’s interesting is that the far right really is using women to go after other women,” she said in June on the “Hysteria” podcast. “So I find it very intentional on their part that they have essentially sent the women out to humiliate, demean, ridicule, mock, silence another women. But that’s just the patriarchy, right? … And that’s what we have to fight.”

Still, she has voiced doubt about whether she would continue to go by “first partner” if her husband were elected president.

Asked in 2023, Siebel Newsom said she didn’t know if Americans were ready for a “first partner.”

“Sadly,” she said, “I don’t know if they are.”

But even as conservatives mock Siebel Newsom’s patrician “girl power” message and activist jargon, she shows few signs of backing down.

As she has taken “Miss Representation: Rise Up” to film festivals in New York and Washington, D.C., she has upped her call for more Big Tech regulation.

An advisor from the first partner’s office said Siebel Newsom had been an advocate for women and girls before she met Newsom. That was unlikely to change, they said, as she faced growing right-wing scrutiny or a federal investigation.

“There’s no strategy change here,” they said.

SACRAMENTO —  Could the Declaration of Independence be signed today by this crop of political leaders, particularly the one who occupies and defaces the White House?

Not just sign, but sincerely mean it.

Especially the guy who bangs a wrecking ball against the historic East Wing to make room for an incongruous ballroom monstrosity, who mars the sacred Oval Office with gold glitter and paves over the lovely Rose Garden.

But never mind these displays of egotism and tackiness that currently blemish landmarks throughout the nation’s capital, including the National Mall, traditional site of the annual July Fourth fireworks.

Back to my central question: Would there be enough patriots today to affix their John Hancocks to a rebellious document that bravely concludes:

“For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Political leaders would very likely sign the more famous preamble that includes this passage, widely regarded as the most important sentence in American history:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words probably would poll well and make salable talking points in local town halls. Even if the notion that all people are created equal would be recognized, as it was 250 years ago, as merely a lofty, hypocritical pie-in-the-sky goal. After all, the eloquent document’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, owned 600 slaves.

We’ve made a world of progress since then on equality. But clearly President Trump and much of America today don’t agree that all people are created equal and guaranteed the same right, for example, of due process in court. People such as undocumented immigrants — the tired, the poor and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But that’s a heated and politicized 250-year-old debate that will continue indefinitely.

For me, the most striking and sincere sentence in the Declaration of Independence is the last one, in which 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, unanimously pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

“It was not a throwaway line,” notes UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar. “It was an acknowledgment that they were committing treason. It showed how deeply committed they were.”

The nation’s founders understood that in British King George III’s view, they were traitors. And if their rebellion failed, they’d be targets for execution.

“We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Benjamin Franklin supposedly told delegates.

In fact, nine of the signers died during the Revolutionary War from disease, prison hardships or combat wounds.

An estimated 6,800 U.S. soldiers died in combat and more than 8,500 were wounded. An additional 17,000 Americans perished.

Several signers sacrificed their fortunes, some to help pay for the war.

Gen. George Washington — an immensely rich Virginia planter — refused to accept a salary as commander in chief of the Continental Army. He bought much of the ammunition and fighting gear himself, then was reimbursed after the war.

Sacred honor? That meant what it said back then. The revolutionary leaders proved their character with sacrifice and bravery.

The nation’s first president, Washington, could not tell a lie, according to myth. Of course, he routinely lied during the war to deceive the British. But our 47th president, Donald Trump, is a pathological liar who seems to prevaricate daily.

Would Trump pledge his fortune to the cause of liberty?

That’s hard to imagine of a president who uses the office to promote and prosper from his own brand name. And whose income ballooned to $2.2 billion in 2025, his first year back in the White House after being booted by voters in 2020, a humiliation he still doesn’t have the integrity to acknowledge.

“President Trump is using the office to enrich himself and his family in ways we’ve never seen before,” Chemerinsky asserts.

Pledge his life? Please!

This is a man who once faked bone spurs to avoid the military draft. OK, he wasn’t the only young fellow who dodged combat in the unnecessary Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans.

But Trump has called America’s war dead “suckers” and “losers,” according to former aides. He denies it.

There’s no question he expressed contempt for the late Sen. John McCain, who spent more than five years as a North Vietnamese prisoner. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

The Declaration of Independence was about severing the chains of a British monarchy and creating a government powered by the people with checks and balances.

Trump has attempted — often successfully — to govern as a monarch, ignoring the checks and balances of Congress and the judiciary. He has gotten away with it because bullied Republican congressional leaders have mostly rolled over like lapdogs.

But we may be seeing the early signs of a mild revolt against the king as Trump sinks further in the polls and we draw closer to the November elections.

That’s sort of what the founders had in mind: a government deriving its power “from the consent of the governed.” And when citizens are subjected to “absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

So could the Declaration be signed today? Hard to say. There’s no King George hovering over us. Only a wannabe king.

But, yes, I suspect there’d be a signing. Independence is a dominant gene in America’s DNA.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: What you should know about the $351.7-billion state budget Newsom just signed
Go your own way: Facing setbacks and resistance, Trump presses bid to reshape elections on multiple fronts
The L.A. Times Special: More money and patience could help California’s vote count

Until next week,
George Skelton

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On a recent summer day at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, students ambled through yawns, braces and acne into their creative writing class. The day’s lesson tackled “style,” that elusive, ultra-subjective choice of expression.

“Who was the first author you encountered to do something different on the page?” asked the teacher, Clarke E. Andros.

They named Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein and Lemony Snicket before moving on to a précis of Joy Williams’ flash fiction. “These stories are weird — she’s weird,” Andros warned.

In some ways, high school looks much the same as it did 20, even 100 years ago: sleepy eyes either light up or glaze over when a teacher poses a Socratic question. Nervous laughs and unexpected insights emerge as young people use stories to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

(Fingerprint; Penguin Classics; Pantheon)

The idea of the “Great American Novel” took shape in the aftermath of the Civil War, when a fractured nation looked to literature to define itself. As classrooms evolved, so did the canon that reflected America’s changing identity.

But the syllabus today is at a tipping point. Forces — some visible, some harder to see — are upending literature and education itself. American students are in a decade-long reading recession, while fewer students are reading for pleasure than in previous generations.

Reading scores among high school seniors are at their lowest in decades, according to federal testing data, while schools across the country are grappling with how to respond to waning attention spans and artificial intelligence. The Los Angeles Unified School District has begun a course correction, voting to limit student use of laptops and tablets during class — the first major American school system to do so.

We spoke with five high school English teachers across the city — three from LAUSD, one from a charter and one from a private school — to find out what literature belongs in today’s classroom, and which stories can help us understand America, past and present.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Raquel Olvera, Roosevelt High School, Boyle Heights

What books in the American literary canon are you teaching (old and new)?

In 11th-grade American Literature, as part of the LAUSD-approved Odell curriculum, we read four book options: “Friday Night Lights,” “Beloved,” “The Great Gatsby” and “The Warmth of Other Suns.” For my 10th-grade World Literature course, I like “Antigone” and “Things Fall Apart.” I also teach “In Cold Blood,” using it to explore Americans’ fascination with true crime and what the genre reveals about race, gender, class and the justice system.

(Simon & Schuster; Sky Publishing; Vintage)

What’s one work from the canon adults should revisit today?

“The Great Gatsby.” When I read it in high school, I wasn’t engaging with its undercurrents of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, gender or sexuality in the way I do now. Its themes of power, wealth, consumerism and American identity remain as relevant as ever.

What are English teachers up against in the classroom in 2026?

Besides large class sizes and underfunding, I think public educators are largely battling apathy. Students and young people aren’t engaging with books like they used to. A side effect of that is a lack of empathy and curiosity. At the very least, you can model what it means to be a reader and a writer, and hope that years later, students remember that one nerd English teacher who showed them what humanity can look like.

Schehrezade Lodhy, Da Vinci Schools, El Segundo

What books in the American literary canon are you teaching (old and new)?

Students really enjoy Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” — it’s all about the human condition and cancel culture, forbidden love and lies and deceit, with witches in the forest. In poetry, we explore a range of American voices, from Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes to Amanda Gorman, and sometimes even song lyrics. I also use “The Moth: Storytelling” podcast when students are working on personal essays. The goal is to make literature, poetry and storytelling as accessible as possible. At a charter school, we have quite a bit of autonomy with what we teach.

What’s one work from the canon adults should revisit today?

James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” I read Baldwin a few summers ago, and that was quite an education for me. Unfortunately, some of the content is a bit too mature for high school, but I do talk about Baldwin a bit in my classes when we cover African American authors.

(Reader’s Library Classics; W. W. Norton & Company; Simon & Schuster)

What are English teachers up against in the classroom in 2026?

Artificial intelligence, big time. I really pared back technology in my class, and we’ve pivoted back to paper and pencil. Going into my 18th year of teaching, my biggest goal is re-creating that experience of thinking critically for oneself and studying literature through a critical lens. We’re in this era of going back to the basics. With decreased attention spans, teachers are being forced to become even more creative. It feels like we’re reinventing ourselves every year.

Aiden Brown, John F. Kennedy High School, Granada Hills

What books in the American literary canon are you teaching (old and new)?

From an educationally traditional background, I still believe in canon disruption — mixing the new and old. In American Lit, I’ve taught “Their Eyes Were Watching God” 11 times now. It’s a hard one to get on the first try because the vernacular is so particular, but when we read it physically while also listening to the audiobook, it’s such a great novel to hear. I pair it with bell hooks’ “All About Love.” I teach “Macbeth” from a performance-based lens, making it less intimidating. My favorite book is “Frankenstein,” written by a teenage girl who invented science fiction. My ninth-graders’ favorites were “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Odyssey” (Emily Wilson translation) and “Persepolis,” a graphic novel about a girl discovering punk rock and rebelling against the established order.

What’s one work from the canon adults should revisit today?

All of the lonely young men need to reread “The Great Gatsby,” and anyone freaked out by the state of the world should read “Parable of the Sower.” One quote from the book hangs on a poster board in my classroom: “A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children — the ones we have now and the ones we will have.”

What are English teachers up against in the classroom?

Teenagers are still the funniest people on the planet. As the world around them becomes more atomized, I find that they’re increasingly interested in connection. In the classroom, we are seeing skill loss and a decreased ability to focus on a task. I don’t think that’s just because of AI or the pandemic — it’s also phones, screens and the world kids are growing up in. One thing teachers seem to agree on is a return to pen and paper.

Clarke E. Andros, Crossroads School, Santa Monica

What books in the American literary canon are you teaching (old and new)?

A newer addition I would recommend is “Hunger: A Novella and Stories” by Lan Samantha Chang. Especially in California, we have a lot of great Asian American literature, including works by Amy Tan, but I enjoy the writing level in Lan’s — it’s accessible to students but pushes them, all about intersectional identity and the first-gen experience. A lot of the Latino students I’ve taught in Los Angeles also connect with that book.

(Penguin Classics; Grand Central Publishing; Mariner Books Classics)

What’s one work from the canon adults should revisit today?

“Of Mice and Men.” Revisiting it today opens up deeper conversations about labor, social conciousness and power. Steinbeck creates a microcosm of American society, where disability, gender, race and class are all represented and shaped by an economic hierarchy. The characters are left navigating a world where people often turn on each other rather than challenge the systems around them. It’s novella-length, so you could read it in a Sunday morning.

What are English teachers up against in the classroom in 2026?

We’re up against systems that often prioritize ed-tech and third-party vendors over smaller class sizes and more teachers. When I was at LAUSD, it was clear from our superintendent — who just stepped down over his fraud investigation — was just in bed with tech. It’s hard for me to imagine the folks in power didn’t look at [the failed AI chatbot venture] and see it as a grift.

On the flip side, at hyper-competitive, elite schools like this, students are approaching high school with college in mind rather than with high school in mind. When students understand the value of the process, they’re less likely to look for an easy shortcut like AI.

Adam Tan, Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, Mid-City

What books in the American literary canon are you teaching (old and new)?

With independent reading, memoirs are big, like “Crying in H Mart” and Sylvia Plath’s fictionalized “The Bell Jar.” Younger kids gravitate to “Musashi,” a celebrated epic based on a famous samurai. We have a lot of Korean American students here, so they like “Pachinko,” dealing with racism and the Korean population in post-World War II Japan. I’ll also throw in “The Bluest Eye.”

In ninth grade, we read “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Thief and the Dogs” and “Romeo and Juliet,” with the film adaptations to use media literacy. In American Literature, the major texts are “The Great Gatsby,” “The Things They Carried” and “The Crucible.” We also read nonfiction articles, including pieces on AI and robots, while focusing on rhetorical devices.

(Blackstone Publishing; Knopf; Little, Brown and Company)

What’s one work from the canon adults should revisit today?

“The Catcher in the Rye” benefits from the distance of adulthood. It’s a novel about disillusionment and the search for identity, but when you revisit it, you also see that it’s very much a love story. I often encourage students to look for forms of love beyond romance — love for family, friends and fellow human beings. Even today, students can tell you that the biggest phony in the book is Holden himself. The novel reminds us that while literature may not have answers to the world’s problems, it can help us examine our wounds and find solace in art.

What are English teachers up against in the classroom in 2026?

A lack of accountability in the modern world. In general, we have a school district focused on 100% graduation rates, no F’s. [LAUSD] wanted everything on computer, and now they want less computer time, which is great, but not everyone at top management is on the same page. Teachers are often trying to balance what the district wants with what we know our students need.

What I try to instill instead is an intrinsic desire to grow as a thinker. How do you make sure students are reading without taking the joy out of it? A lot of us are going back to pen and paper. Despite all the concerns about AI, I still think the soul and spirit of young people is as strong as ever. The core is not rotting.

Chances are, right about now, you’re considering how you’d like to spend this upcoming Fourth of July weekend. At the beach, maybe, at a barbecue or whatever place sets fireworks pinwheeling through your holiday-happy mind.

Which makes it a perfectly excellent time to talk about elections and vote counting.

Every two years, in the spring and fall, California holds an election. Every two years the state faces an outraged chorus, voices raised nationwide, decrying the length of time it takes to tally the millions of ballots cast and, in a handful of races, determine the winner.

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Then, just as suddenly, the din fades away, the focus shifts and the election process is forgotten until the next round of howling protest.

Just that word, process, can throttle and snuff the life out of the subject.

So it’s good news that lawmakers in Sacramento have used this inattentive time to address the biennial hullabaloo and perhaps shut some people up.

The budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Monday includes an additional $40 million aimed at speeding up California’s vote count, and even if the sum is less than half the $90 million sought by reform-minded advocates, it’s something.

Most of the money will go toward staffing, technology and equipment upgrades. Another $10 million will pay for voter education and outreach. A further $750,000 will be used to combat election misinformation. (A $3.50 roll of duct tape would be a far more economical way to address the latter were it applied to the inciteful mouth of America’s election-denier-in-chief. More about him in a moment.)

“While the amount budgeted is less than we had recommended, it still represents a sizable investment that prioritizes timely election results,” said Kim Alexander, head of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, which has been at the forefront of election reform efforts in the state.

A surprise Supreme Court decision

As it happens, the budgetary infusion came the same day the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to count mail ballots that are postmarked by election day, even if they arrive days afterward. In California, where most voters mail their ballots, that lag time can be up to a week.

It was a surprise decision from this most Trump-obeisant court, a setback for the petulant president and a ruling that will have very little effect on California’s prolonged vote counting.

That’s because those late-arriving ballots have very little to do with the time it takes to complete the count. My colleague Kevin Rector reported that in 2024 California tallied more than 406,000 late-arriving mail ballots — which represents only about 2.5% of the more than 16 million ballots cast. The long count is a result of the huge number of ballots placed in drop boxes or arriving at processing facilities on or just before election day — and, really, is it such a bad thing for voters to watch for late developments before letting go of their ballot?

(Does the name Eric Swalwell ring any bells?)

Lawmakers in California made a purposeful decision that voting should be convenient and not a chore, as a way to to encourage the greatest turnout possible. That’s a good thing if you believe in our system of representative democracy. The voice of the people, and all that.

There wasn’t much hue or cry — especially about mail balloting, which has exploded in popularity and introduces all sorts of time-consuming steps, such as signature verification — until Trump cried fraud and made other specious claims. That’s what happens when you have a sore, whiny loser astride the bully pulpit; Trump is perfectly willing to torch people of good faith and burn working systems to the ground if it salves his eggshell ego.

An election, not a soccer match

Many political commentators are complicit in Trump’s arson.

Awaiting California’s election results, they act like pouty birthday children forced to leave their presents unopened until all the kids have had their cake. They speak of voters losing faith in the election process without explaining the commendable reason for the delay — seeking maximum voter participation — or acknowledging how their impatience contributes to the sense that something wrong is afoot.

At bottom, the push for instant results, and instant gratification, is much more about sating the curiosity of pundits and political junkies than some widespread agita among voters glued to the ballot-counting as if it were a World Cup match.

Is there a soul out there who feels there’s insufficient time between June 8, when the Associated Press called the Los Angeles mayoral race, and June 9, when the call came in the gubernatorial contest, for candidates to present their cases and voters — who haven’t already decided — to make up their minds?

Hang out with family and friends. Enjoy some barbecue. Watch fireworks paint the night sky. There’s plenty of time for speechifying, TV ads and campaign mailers to blitz the state between now and the election on Nov. 3.

Frankly, most Californians welcome the break.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: What you should know about the $351.7 billion state budget Newsom just signed
The deep dive: Costs of Iran war will linger despite conflict’s end, experts say
The L.A. Times Special: This California bill is so bad it has me agreeing with a Trump Republican

Until next time,
mzb
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SACRAMENTO — President Trump was handed a golden opportunity to upstage Gov. Gavin Newsom in Newsom’s own state on an issue of critical importance to Americans everywhere. But Trump naturally blew it.

The governor and the Democratic-led state Legislature shined.

Trump was victimized by his own self-centered obstinance and inhumanity. And Republican congressional leaders were left looking embarrassed and wimpy.

The issue was housing affordability — the lack of it that is stifling the American dream of homeownership everywhere, not just in California.

In Sacramento, the Legislature lopsidedly passed an $11.25-billion bond proposal aimed primarily at providing government subsidies for building affordable housing. Newsom immediately signed the measure last week, just beating the deadline for getting it on the Nov. 3 election ballot.

“In California, we don’t turn away from the needs of our people,” Newsom boasted in a prepared statement, taking a veiled shot at Trump, his favorite political target.

This came just after both houses of Congress, with members working collaboratively in a rare bipartisan manner, overwhelmingly passed a landmark bill aimed at boosting housing supply. The measure removed regulatory barriers, upgraded federal programs and incentivized new home building.

A Trump “promise kept,” the White House proclaimed.

Whoops! The president then suddenly flip-flopped. He canceled a planned bill-signing ceremony, torpedoing the legislation, an opportunity to gain sorely-needed points for the GOP heading into the fall elections and a chance to outboast Newsom, arguably his most annoying political antagonist.

Trump said he wouldn’t sign the housing bill unless Congress approved his unrelated voter ID legislation, which has practically no chance of passage. The least of his concerns seemed to be struggling homebuyers and renters.

As of this writing, it wasn’t clear what Trump would ultimately do. Nothing ever is certain with him. Shocked and confused GOP congressional leaders even held back sending the president the bill, then ducked out on holiday recess.

At the California state Capitol, by contrast, the governor and legislative leaders were united, working off the same page and successfully negotiating a final agreement on housing help.

As icing on the cake for voters, $1.25 billion was added for the popular CalVet loan program for military veterans. Their home loans are repaid through mortgages, costing the state nothing.

But the remaining $10 billion would need to be paid off by taxpayers over 30 years — at an estimated $580 million annually, bringing the total bond cost to about $17.4 billion, including interest.

Putting this in perspective, the Legislature just passed a $352-billion state budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. Of that, $7.5 billion will go for retiring debt on $73 billion in bonds. And the state has voter authorization to sell $38 billion more in bonds.

During legislative floor debates, some Republicans objected to the additional borrowing.

“We’ve got record revenue, why do we need to borrow money?” asked Assemblyman David Tangipa (R-Fresno).

That was answered during the Senate debate by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon (D-West Sacramento), one of the measure’s principal jockeys.

Building affordable housing “simply is impossible, it can’t be done without this bond” to finance government subsidies, Cabaldon told colleagues.

Developers are subsidized so they can build at a cost that will result in affordable consumer prices, mainly rents in this case.

Some Republicans also objected to inserting the CalVet money for voter appeal. Assemblyman Carl DeMaio called it “window dressing.”

CalVet funds normally are acquired through very small, separate bond measures.

But in the end, only a few Republicans voted against the big bond, which was officially authored by the Assembly Speaker and the Senate leader to display political muscle.

To their credit, the Legislature and governor in recent years have been whittling away at regulatory obstacles to home building. But many cities still balk at rezoning residential neighborhoods to make room for new multifamily dwellings.

The bond proposal is mainly designed to generate affordable rentals for poor people. More money was added at the end for affordable student and farmworker housing.

There’ll be a separate bond proposal on the November ballot that goes in a different direction but doesn’t conflict. It would help middle class homebuyers. And that measure wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent.

“Housing supply is not just about poor people. It’s not just about homelessness,” says the middle class initiative’s originator, former legislative leader Bob Hertzberg, a Los Angeles County Democrat.

His proposal would authorize $25 billion in revenue bonds. Like the CalVet program, those bonds would be repaid by homebuyers through mortgages — not costing the state anything.

Under the plan, a homebuyer could borrow most of the money needed for a down payment on a newly constructed single-family home or condo. Typically, a 20% down payment is required. Under Hertzberg’s proposal, 17% could be borrowed. Regular lending institutions would arrange the second mortgage.

To be eligible, a homebuyer’s income could not exceed 200% of the area’s median income. In L.A. County, that would be around $213,000 for a family of four, Hertzberg figures. The home would need to be the owner’s primary residence.

The November ballot will be bursting with state propositions — 14 in all, mostly very complex, running the gamut. Besides housing, there’ll be proposals for a billionaires tax, voter ID requirement, local tax limitations and fast-tracking of public works.

Voters could just throw up their hands and reject everything.

“At some point, voters are just gonna say, ‘I don’t know about all this stuff. There’s a lot of stuff,’” says Dan Dunmoyer, who heads the California Building Industry Assn.

California’s housing affordability crunch won’t be solved by just two bond packages. But they’d help.

We and all of America could also use some help from our seemingly unconcerned president, who enjoys free public housing.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Newsom, California Legislature reach $351.7-billion budget deal
Money (That’s what I want): Controversial billionaire tax proposal will appear on November ballot
The L.A. Times Special: Here’s a clue about these mystery books: ‘Papa’ may be California’s next governor

Until next week,
George Skelton

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For years, Kitty Felde was a familiar voice on public radio in Southern California. Reporting from Capitol Hill, it was her job, she felt, to explain government to the grown-ups living thousands of miles away.

It could be frustrating, given how little many listeners seemed to know or understand about even the basics of Washington and how the place works. (Or, at least, how it’s supposed to work.)

“They don’t remember this stuff from fifth grade,” Felde said.

Worse, a lot of people didn’t seem to care.

So Felde wondered: What if her insights and expertise were aimed at a younger audience?

With her career in radio winding down, Felde set off in a new direction, writing a novel for young adults that combined sleuthing with civics; a blend of “Nancy Drew” and “The West Wing,” as Felde’s website described the result.

Set in Washington, the book’s main character was Fina Mendoza, a 10-year-old girl modeled after someone whom Felde, a Southern California native, mentored years ago while living and reporting in Los Angeles.

“She was fierce, smart, quiet, driven, even persuading her non-English-speaking mother to help her transfer to a better high school where she graduated with honors,” Felde told an interviewer when the book was published in 2019. In creating Fina Mendoza, “I imagined what [Felde’s mentee] must have been like when she was younger.”

For Mendoza’s father, or “Papa,” Felde envisioned someone she had gotten to know over the years covering California’s congressional delegation. Someone genial and soft-spoken who, lately, has been in the news quite a bit.

Xavier Becerra.

“He’s a widower,” Felde said of the fictional Arturo Mendoza, a Democratic congressman representing Los Angeles, as Becerra did for nearly a quarter of a century. “Xavier, obviously, is not. But I met his daughters, I met his wife. And so that image … I could see him being the father.”

She did not, Felde confessed, see Becerra as a California governor-in-waiting.

When she conceived Arturo Mendoza, Felde said, “nobody knew who [Becerra] was” — which is only a slight exaggeration. Even now, many Californians are just becoming familiar with the Democrat, who is heavily favored to beat Republican Steve Hilton in November, given the state’s strong Democratic tilt.

A five-part series

That first novel about Fina and her exploits on Capitol Hill has expanded into a multi-volume series, published in English and Spanish, featuring the young detective and her roman à clef Papa. The fourth installment comes out next month. Felde is currently working on the fifth and, she expects, final volume.

Collectively, the works do not purport to offer “The Xavier Becerra Story.” Rather, each centers on a mystery — a bird that poops on the president during his State of the Union speech; a culprit placing snakes in the gym bags of lawmakers; a series of break-ins, fires and vandalism in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Fina is home for the summer. The protagonist unravels each knot and, along the way, delivers readers a goodly dose of Government 101.

Felde has written four books in the Fina Mendoza Mystery Series and is working on the fifth and, she believes, final volume.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Unlike Becerra, Papa continues serving in the House. His real-life model left Congress in January 2017 after Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him California attorney general, replacing Kamala Harris upon her departure for the U.S. Senate. Becerra was elected to the job the following year, served in the Biden administration as Health and Human Services secretary and finished atop the field in California’s crowded June 2 gubernatorial primary.

Speaking via Zoom from her home office in Baldwin Hills, Felde ventured a few thoughts on how Becerra would do as governor. (Which, of course, is also a mystery; at this point one can only guess.)

“We’re a big state with a lot of problems,” Felde said with a small shake of her head. “I think he’ll have a good time fighting the current administration. And I think, because he does have contacts both in Sacramento and in Washington … that can help because that’s where money’s coming from.”

The great divide

Returning to Fina Mendoza, Felde said part of her intent in writing the series was closing the yawning physical and psychic gaps that exists between California and Washington.

“We think we are the center of the universe because we are isolated in a lot of ways from the rest of the country,” Felde said of her fellow Californians. In Washington, “they think the same thing, but they’re the ones with the money and the power…. There is a dependency there.”

For that reason alone, she suggested, people should pay closer attention to what’s happening back East, notwithstanding the distance and the sometimes confounding, oftentimes arcane ways and means of the nation’s capital.

“It’s our government,” she said. “If you want to change the world, it’s not just City Hall. It’s not just whoever is making the HOA rules. It’s on Capitol Hill. It’s the White House. It’s the Supreme Court.”

Apart from the Fina Mendoza novels, Felde has written several other books and plays related to government and history, set in and around Washington. She also hosts several podcasts, including a book club for kids.

What does Becerra think of his artistic rendering?

Felde’s husband caught up with the gubernatorial hopeful a few months ago outside a candidates forum in Santa Monica. He presented Becerra with a copy of the first book in the series, “Welcome to Washington Fina Mendoza.” Becerra’s eyes brightened at the mention of Felde and he sent his warm regards.

Otherwise, she has yet to hear back.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: Politician behind ‘top two’ primary has second thoughts
The deep dive: ‘I got crushed’: AI giants are funding ad wars in races across the country
The L.A. Times Special: Federal probe of Newsom creates lots of smoke. Is there any fire?

Until next time,
-mzb
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SACRAMENTO — The man who brought California the top-two open primary now thinks it needs a drastic overhaul. In fact, he says the “top-two” part should be trashed.

Former state Sen. Abel Maldonado advocates returning to a “top-one” system where the winning vote-getter in each recognized political party — major or minor — qualifies for the November general election.

But he’d keep the “open” part that allows citizens to vote for any candidate on the state ballot, regardless of party.

Maldonado says he crafted the current system 16 years ago believing it would produce “pragmatic and commonsense” officeholders. But that has failed, he acknowledges.

The ex-politician, a Republican centrist who runs a Santa Maria farm operation, is one of several people from both major parties who contend the top-two system should be significantly altered or eliminated.

The movement gained momentum during the recent California primary. And I’ve got some other suggestions for reform that sprang from that election experience:

• We shouldn’t allow 61 people to “run” for governor. That many people, the vast majority of them on a laughable lark, clog the ballot and create a nuisance for voters. Just so they can tell a grandkid or a guy on the next barstool, “I once was a candidate for California governor.” Each got roughly 0% of the vote.

A solution: Quadruple both the current $4,900 candidate filing fee and the alternative collection of 6,000 voter signatures. That might dissuade frivolous “candidacies.”

• Hate language should be banned from the state’s Official Voter Information Guide. One so-called gubernatorial contender got a blatantly antisemitic “candidate statement” inserted into the information guide that was mailed to all voter households.

“It was disgusting. Horrible,” said Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee and a member of the Legislative Jewish Caucus. She’s pushing legislation to prohibit such language in the guide.

You’d think that the secretary of state’s office would have burned the crud without needing a new law, but somebody dropped the ball.

• This has nothing to do with the primary, but the office of lieutenant governor should be abolished. It’s a non-job. The only real purpose is to wait for the governor to vacate the office by resignation or death. The last time that happened was 73 years ago when Gov. Earl Warren left to become a Supreme Court chief justice.

If another governor did ever depart — many fantasize about being elected president — the job could be assumed by, perhaps, the attorney general.

• Two other elective state offices should also be scratched: superintendent of public instruction and insurance commissioner. Those posts should be appointed by the governor, who is the logical person to be held accountable for education and insurance policies.
• And the state board of equalization. Junk that too. Hardly anyone knows what it does. Not much, after the scandal-plagued board was stripped of most of its tax duties a decade ago. They were shifted to two entities that report directly to the governor, rendering the board essentially superfluous.

But don’t expect any elective office ever to be eliminated by politicians. They desperately protect them as potential landing spots.

Back to the top-two open primary.

Maldonado jockeyed California’s oft-called jungle primary system onto the 2010 ballot as part of a late-night budget and tax deal. The senator agreed to vote for a gridlocked state budget and a hefty tax hike in exchange for legislative approval of the ballot measure.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed hard for the proposition and voters passed it.

Voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for any candidate. And the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the general election.

The idea was that candidates would be forced to appeal to centrist voters — not just party idealogues — and more moderates would be elected.

“Can you seriously say that the top-two system has led to more moderation? No, that’s asinine,” asserts Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego, who strongly supports returning to party nominations.

A few additional moderates have been elected to the Legislature, and some districts have become more competitive. But that’s mainly because of independent, nonpartisan redistricting, according to Eric McGhee, an elections expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.

Actually, the electorate has become so polarized in recent years — particularly during the Trump era — that very few centrist voters seem to be left.

The move toward abolishing or severely reshaping the primary system is nonpartisan.

Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, favors dumping the top-two.

For one thing, she says, there was too much focus this spring on whether any Democratic gubernatorial candidate would qualify for the November ballot. Fear spread that so many Democrats were running that they’d splinter the party vote and two Republicans would finish first and second.

She wanted to hear less talk about the horse race and more debate over substantive issues.

“People were obsessing about a Democratic shutout,” Gonzalez said. “And people were waiting until the last minute to fill out their ballot because they wanted to vote for the candidate who was ahead to make sure someone made the top two. We didn’t have a policy discussion.”

A top-two problem from the beginning has been that one party, usually the GOP, always gets locked out of some legislative or congressional elections.

In November, there’ll be eight congressional races with only Democrats running and one contest with just Republican candidates. And no general election write-ins are allowed.

That’s unfair to voters. They deserve a clear ideological choice.

Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio is pushing a proposed ballot initiative to wipe out the top-two. “It hasn’t delivered what it promised,” he argues.

Agreed. We gave it a try and it didn’t work out. Time to try something new–like Maldonado’s hybrid idea.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Behested payments aren’t illegal, but they are a problem. Especially for Newsom
Money for nothing: Billionaire tax proposal faces hurdles as it moves closer to November ballot
The L.A. Times Special: People are betting on elections in prediction markets. Congress is watching

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Joseph Soto is an activist and co-founder of the Transgresores collective. This 34-year-old, who holds a degree in performing arts, has emerged as a leading figure in the defense of the rights of the sexual and gender diversity community in Venezuela, with a particular focus on raising awareness about trans men.

How was the transition process to a trans man in Venezuela amid a full-blown crisis?

It was undeniably very complex. The years 2016–2017 saw a worsening of the socioeconomic crisis in Venezuela as a result of the US blockade and sanctions, which had a drastic impact on day-to-day life, public services, and the population’s living standards. Everything pointed to the fact that, in order to transition, I would have to leave the country, but I decided not to. There had to be some way to be a trans man in Venezuela.

It was difficult, not only because of the material and socioeconomic conditions, but above all because of the lack of information and the void of references surrounding the issue of trans masculinity. Historically, trans women have shouldered the burden of visibility within the struggles for sexual diversity. When we talk, for example, about the 1969 Stonewall riots, trans women played a leading role. Trans men, on the other hand, have not taken on that protagonism.  It caused me a great deal of anxiety to not know what to do, where to start, or where to go. I figured it out by researching, studying, seeing how things were done in other countries, reading medical protocols, analyzing different perspectives, and acquiring theoretical tools to develop my own process. But also by making connections and building networks here. That’s what saved me.

In the end, it was challenging but not impossible. And that’s exactly how I began to make connections with activists and advocates in the field of sexual and gender diversity, who in turn put me in touch with trans peers who were here in Venezuela. That allowed me to navigate the initial challenges of my gender identity transition, which involved building a collective of trans men called Transgresores.

In general terms, how would you describe the access to healthcare and medical treatment for trans people in Venezuela?

I believe there is a great need for discussion, training, and awareness-raising among healthcare workers regarding the care of our population. In addition to the inherent weaknesses of the public healthcare system, resulting from the US blockade and internal mismanagement, which create endless hurdles for receiving care at a hospital or affording treatment at a clinic, there is also the anxiety stemming from the possibility that a medical professional might be prejudiced or lack knowledge about trans issues. 

The trans community doesn’t just go to healthcare centers for issues related to their gender transition, such as hormone replacement therapy or surgery. We may also experience general illness or suffer an accident, and prejudice stemming from ignorance can affect the quality of care we receive. It’s happened to me. Once I went to the hospital in Lidice (Caracas) for a swollen lymph node in my armpit, but when I mentioned that I was trans, the doctor refused to treat me, telling me to go to my primary care physician or an endocrinologist. He couldn’t even prescribe some ibuprofen. Prejudice won out. 

Worse still is the treatment of transgender women. Discrimination persists, and the medical field is no exception. But we exist, and we have the right to healthcare. It seems like something very basic, but it’s work that still needs to be done. In the current context, with the Coexistence Program and the call made by the acting president herself for the recognition of sexual diversity, there is an opportunity for the Ombudsman’s Office, which has been facilitating this debate, to collaborate with the governing bodies in the healthcare sector to develop a training and awareness-raising process. 

In other Latin American countries such as Cuba, or certain provinces in Argentina and Uruguay, there are established protocols and transition processes. This is provided through the public healthcare system, including access to hormones and surgical procedures if that is what the person desires. However, in Venezuela, there is no public health policy established and regulated by the state geared toward the care of transgender people. Before that can happen, there must be a rigorous debate since, in addition to transgender people, gay men and lesbians also suffer this type of discrimination.

Two issues stand out on the gender and sexual diversity agenda: marriage equality and legal name and gender changes for transgender people. Can you explain why these two issues are so central? And what other demands does the movement have?

In what concerns marriage equality, the Venezuelan sexual and gender diversity movement submitted a bill to the National Assembly in 2014. In other words, work has already been done on this issue, including going through the various legal steps required by the Venezuelan legal framework to present a bill of this magnitude to the legislature. But in the end, that debate did not proceed. It was shelved despite having met all the requirements. That is why we still demand a debate, to overcome the fear of recognizing other forms of family and to integrate ourselves as subjects of equal rights within our legal framework. That would allow, for example, our partners to have inheritance rights. 

Regarding the issue of legal name and gender changes for transgender people, there are two key points. The first is that for trans people, when the name registered on legal documents does not match how we see ourselves, it can often expose us to situations of violence and discrimination in administrative procedures or when dealing with law enforcement. There have been instances of discrimination, violence, and abuse by the police when they identify a person as trans. 

The second reason is that there is no need to create a new right. What is needed is to enforce and implement an existing one. The Organic Law on the Civil Registry establishes that every citizen of this country has the right to change their name at least once if it is humiliating or does not correspond to their gender. That is why the Venezuelan sexual and gender diversity movement has been so vocal in demanding this provision. As for other demands, there is the issue of the right to a life free from violence and discrimination, because discrimination based on gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation is still very much alive in Venezuela. Certain municipalities have proposed decrees on this matter, but I believe that is insufficient. We need a legal framework that establishes penalties and, above all, addresses all the various forms of discrimination faced by our community.

In other interviews and articles, you have talked about the harm suffered from studying in religious schools, despite the law establishing that education should be secular. As we witness a major offensive from evangelical groups in national politics, what is your perspective?

Indeed, the rise of conservative religious thought is a threat to sexual and gender diversity. But at the end of the day, this is nothing new. We are the cultural product of [Spanish] conquest and colonization, and from that point on, the Catholic religion was imposed. 

Now, [Protestant] fundamentalist groups are definitely on the rise both nationally and regionally. But I believe the threat does not lie in religious thought itself, because this country is not inhabited solely by Christians. It is a melting pot of religions, beliefs, and faiths. I believe that our commitment must be precisely to celebrate, through sexual and gender diversity, that religious pluralism, so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of any group. My call is for sexual diversity to provide the country with a roadmap, a vision of a truly diverse, respectful society that aims for recognition and is free from violence and discrimination. We must engage in a meaningful debate about the kind of society we want to build. This involves addressing educational, cultural, and media issues.

Most of the country is focused on socioeconomic issues, and this is pushing other important questions to the backburner. What does the sexual and gender diversity movement propose in these circumstances?

I believe that the diversity movement owes a debt to the country because it has often limited itself to merely making demands and pointing out the shortcomings of the Venezuelan state and the Venezuelan people, but it has also failed to develop a strategic, programmatic vision to offer the country a vision of governance and an institutional framework.

My view is that we need to open up a broader debate and reestablish spaces for discussion within collectives, organizations, and platforms. Migration has also disrupted spaces for activism, because many sexual, gender, and diversity activists left the country. But it’s time to regroup and rise to the challenge of the times. What do we propose for the country in the present context? How do we see it? That is the debate we are called upon to have. I cannot definitively say what the sexual and gender diversity movement proposes because it is a debate that has yet to take place. But our approach cannot be limited to marriage equality and sexual identity.

You have also expressed concerns about a sector of the LGBTIQ+ community subordinating its agenda to the dynamics of foreign funding. Can you elaborate on this?

On this topic, I am referring to the fact that many of the sexual and gender diversity initiatives or forms of activism have been limited by NGOs since the international humanitarian system entered the country, as a result of sanctions, the crisis, and so on. In this kind of activism, political action has fallen short because it has been restricted solely to activities outlined within a given project sponsored by a specific funder, and it has lost its own organic character. It cannot be that the only spaces for us to meet and discuss are fully determined by the timelines, categories, and demands of a specific NGO project.

We must have our own agenda, with our own perspective and objectives. One that, above all, is guided by sexual and gender diversity activism and struggle. We have the responsibility and the challenge of overcoming this logic to reclaim an organic structure linked to concrete spaces of work and transformation, to a community, to a specific educational institution, to our territories, with our own agendas, categories, and timelines, not those predefined by an external organization. 

The idea is not to demonize external funding, but our actions cannot be completely determined by it. Furthermore, these project activities fall short of the transformation we owe to our society. This is a personal perspective, and I’m sure I’ll get a lot of hate for it, but painting a bike lane with a rainbow flag in wealthy parts of eastern Caracas doesn’t bring about real change, even if resources, information, media coverage, and human effort are devoted to it. In terms of social and structural transformation, it achieves nothing; it leaves no lasting impact. We need a deeper, more strategic vision that harnesses the transformative potential we possess as a collective, as organized actors in society. That is why we must rebuild the movement.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood silent and stone-faced behind Donald Trump on Wednesday as the president joked of passing the buck if his deal with Iran, under increasingly withering criticism and scrutiny, ultimately falls apart.

The blame, Trump said, would likely fall on his vice president, JD Vance, who led the negotiations toward a memorandum of understanding with Iran and will sign the agreement this week in Switzerland — a ceremony that will generate indelible images for a politician openly considering a run for the White House.

The controversial diplomatic breakthrough poses a quandary for Vance, whose aides see Rubio as his most viable challenger for the Republican presidential nomination should the secretary choose to run.

“If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the Iran deal, with Rubio by his side.

“If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” he joked. “You better be careful, JD!”

Silent secretary

Rubio, who also serves as the president’s national security advisor, has remained effectively mum since news of a preliminary peace deal was announced by the administration on Sunday.

His absence has drawn notice across foreign policy circles — not only because Rubio has served as chief architect of the administration’s global strategy thus far, but also because he has become one of the president’s most effective communicators, both at home and abroad.

By contrast, Vance, on a scheduled press tour promoting his new book, has emerged as the face of an agreement that appears to be fracturing a Republican Party already divided over America’s role in the world.

The administration’s internal divide over Iran extends beyond the war to broader U.S. support for its historic allies, including Israel in the Middle East, Canada and Mexico in this hemisphere, and Ukraine and Europe against a revanchist Russia.

“Rubio has always been a hawk on Iran, and Vance has always been an appeaser,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, describing the vice president as positioning himself “as Trump without the flaws.”

“Rubio has a harder job because he’s more of a traditional Republican,” she said, adding that a competitive presidential run by the secretary might require him to pitch “a return to normalcy.”

No guarantee of success

Behind closed doors, Rubio advocated against the deal in its current form, citing intelligence reports that found it highly unlikely Tehran would give up its nuclear ambitions, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Rubio’s internal skepticism was first reported by Axios.

The deal kicks down the road highly technical discussions over the mechanics of unwinding Iran’s nuclear program — with no guarantee of success — while granting Tehran immediate relief, lifting a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports that will allow Iranian imports and exports to resume.

In exchange, Iran has only agreed in principle not to pursue nuclear weapons — a vow it has made multiple times before — and to do its “best” to return commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz back to prewar levels. It commits in the deal to refrain from implementing a toll system in the strait, according to U.S. officials, for a mere 60-day period.

“This agreement is a road map for Iran to become a rising, stronger power in the [Persian] Gulf — stronger than it is even today,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.

“That is going to be an issue for the balance of power with Israel, which before the Iran war was the rising power. Now it’s lost that paradigm,” Pape said. “And this is going to be an issue with the future disposition of American forces in the region, because the [memorandum of understanding] states quite clearly that Iran is expecting those forces to withdraw.”

Positioning by the vice president

Despite mounting skepticism, Vance has embraced his role in ending a war that a powerful faction of Trump’s base aggressively opposed from the start.

“I think there are some people who just want the bombing to continue, regardless of whether it accomplishes anything for Americans,” Vance told CBS News on Wednesday.

“I do think there are people,” he added, “who sometimes confuse the ends with the means.”

Because the preliminary Iran deal leaves key details unresolved, further negotiations virtually ensure the agreement remains in flux through the election season — potentially thrusting the talks into the center of the presidential primary campaign.

“Given the distance between the parties on the core nuclear issues, as well as the Trump administration’s poor track record with coercive diplomacy, I fully expect the 60-day window for talks to be extended, as the [memorandum of understanding] text permits, taking this issue to the heart of the midterms and beyond,” said Reid Pauly, a professor of nuclear security and policy at Brown University.

“There will be a lot of incentive in the administration,” Pauly added, “to distance oneself from this fiasco.”

As a guest on Megyn Kelly’s podcast this week, Vance acknowledged the political realities of Trump’s base splintering over the Iran war, noting that a coalition of isolationists — as well as those advocating what he called a more “aggressive” foreign policy — had together swept Trump back into office.

The war may be breaking that coalition apart, he said.

“We have a constituency right now that is saying, we’re going to send boots on the ground — they want Donald Trump to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Iran,” Vance told the former Fox News host.

“Those are Republicans,” Kelly said.

“We need people to be pushing back from inside the tent,” Vance replied.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: He graduated high school with honors. ICE detained him the next day
The deep dive: What we know about two SoCal men arrested in alleged plot to attack White House UFC fight
The L.A. Times Special: L.A. defies the skeptics for a World Cup marked by unity, mutual respect, fearlessness

More to come,
Michael Wilner
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Diversity in last year’s streaming films followed the same downward trend as theatrical releases, a new study found, with the percentage of people of color directing, writing and leading films diminishing.

In past years, streaming was considered a more accessible outlet for early-career female or BIPOC filmmakers, which was reflected in data about gender and racial representation. According to Part 2 of UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report, which was released Wednesday and analyzed all of the original English-language films distributed on major streaming platforms in 2025, that trend reversed across every category studied.

The share of streaming films directed by women declined to just over 23%, the lowest it’s been since 2022, when the annual study began analyzing streaming and theatrical films separately. Among those female directors, an overwhelming majority (81%) were allotted budgets below $20 million, while more than a quarter of the films directed by white men exceeded $50 million.

Only about 31% of streaming films last year had BIPOC directors, down 10% since 2024, when the proportion more closely reflected U.S. demographics.

“This is an industry in flux — and in reverse, especially when it comes to diversification,” Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost and the report’s co-founder, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with theatrical films, we’re now seeing the impact of this current political climate in very meaningful and concrete ways,” he continued. “As budgets tighten, opportunities for filmmakers of underrepresented backgrounds are always the first to be squeezed out.”

Despite losing ground behind the scenes and in front of the camera, women and people of color continued to drive streaming viewership in 2025, the report found.

The year’s biggest streaming hit, “KPop Demon Hunters,” was also the most-watched original Netflix film of all time, and according to Neilsen ratings, it was most streamed by women in Latinx households, followed by women in Asian and Black households. The report acknowledged the film as a “bright spot” in a disappointing year for diversity.

Michael Tran, a sociologist who co-authored the report, noted that the film’s impact and earnings potential could have been even greater with a theatrical release.

“It was a missed opportunity for theaters,” Tran said. “We’ve tracked how diverse films tend to succeed at the box office, here and abroad. For ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ we could have been talking about record-breaking box office receipts in addition to topping the ratings.”

When “KPop Demon Hunters” did briefly screen in theaters — for two days last August, with over 1,750 locations domestically and more than 1,150 sold-out screenings — it was the No. 1 movie that weekend, earning about $18 million in ticket sales (though Netflix does not report exact box office figures).

Data from the report also indicated that streaming films with at least somewhat diverse casts tended to outperform in terms of audience and social media engagement.

However, overall cast diversity in streaming films declined in 2025. For the first time since 2022, films with a majority-BIPOC cast did not represent the plurality of streaming titles. Most notably, the percentage of lead actors of color dropped from a high of 51% in 2024 to 36% in 2025.

Report authors called it an “industry-wide chilling effect” reminiscent of a similar decline in diversity among theatrical films in 2024. That said, streaming films continued to star BIPOC leads more often than their theatrical counterparts, the study found.

The overall number of streaming films also declined. While the annual UCLA report typically examines the top 100 original, English-language movies across streaming platforms, this time, there were only 89 for researchers to analyze.

In addition to studying race and gender demographics in the film industry, the report also examined on-camera representations of disability. According to the study, while adults with a disability make up at least 26% of the U.S. population, actors with a known disability represented 6.5% of total streaming movie actors, which is in line with the previous year.

According to the study’s authors, streamers hoping to compete in a fast-paced, globalized market should increase their diversity efforts in light of these results.

“Kids under 18 are already majority BIPOC. There’s no going back if a studio wants to be profitable and relevant to Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” said report co-founder and co-author Ana-Christina Ramón. “Severing all brand loyalty now will only make it more difficult to regain long-term subscribers in the future.”

SACRAMENTO — If Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature truly believe that slow vote counting is a horrible problem — which it’s not — right now is the time to fix it.

They’re crafting a new state budget. And they could choose to spend the money needed to help counties hire more temporary election workers, buy more sophisticated vote-counting machines and add space for all of it.

That’s the only way to significantly speed up vote counting and mute the MAGA drivel about California being a national “laughingstock.”

How much money?

“We’ve suggested $55.5 million,” says Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, which pushes to improve the election process.

“That’s not a lot in the big scheme of the state budget.”

She’s right. It’s essentially pocket change in a proposed budget still being negotiated that tentatively totals $356 billion.

But don’t bet on much of it being allotted for swifter vote counting.

Regardless of all the potshots at California from cable news panelists about our “embarrassing” elections, faster vote tallying doesn’t seem to be a high priority for the Legislature.

Democrats are justifiably much more concerned about protecting poor people’s healthcare, in-home services for seniors and the unraveling safety net as the Trump administration and GOP Congress slash federal funding.

Federal cutbacks aside, the state for years has been spending more money than it takes in despite tax revenue exceeding expectations. Sacramento has a severe deficit spending problem that is projected to last for a while.

So, allocating more money to speed up vote counting by a few days isn’t very high on the governor’s and legislative leaders’ to-do lists.

“The reality is elections currently are underfunded,” says Assembly Elections Committee Chairwoman Gail Pellerin, a Democrat who was Santa Cruz County’s chief elections official for 27 years.

She also says, referring to demands for faster counting: “The media outlets want to call the races and be the first. And that’s what this is all about.”

I don’t disagree. By our nature, we journalists are anxious to report fresh news, including the outcomes of elections. And we become impatient when vote counts roll in seemingly at a snail’s pace.

But come on, it’s not a horrendous burden on the public to wait a few days for an accurate vote count.

It does, however, provide an excuse for President Trump and MAGA Republicans to regurgitate unfounded accusations that elections won by Democrats are “stolen” from the GOP.

“Look what’s happening in California … it’s a rigged election,” Trump bellowed in a June 7 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. “They’re cheating on the election.”

When Welker challenged him for evidence, Trump heatedly replied: “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked. … You’re either crooked, or you’re stupid.”

To put this in context, the Trump diatribe came immediately after he called police officers attacked by Jan. 6 Capitol invaders “a bunch of dirty cops” and “crooked cops.” The Trump-inspired rioters were trying to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s “rigged” election.

It’s constantly puzzling why millions of Americans take this unhinged man’s blatherings so seriously. But they do.

And when the president lies about ballot fraud, it erodes public confidence in the integrity of our election system and undermines democracy. Americans become even more cynical and polarized.

So, the governor, Legislature and counties would do everyone a favor by investing in a faster vote count.

“It’s a problem,” Alexander asserts. “The slow vote count has become the norm in California, but it’s not normal for a democracy. It opens the door for false fraud claims.”

Much of the slow count results from tallying mail ballots, which amount to at least 80% of votes cast. They take longer to process, largely because each voter’s signature on the ballot’s envelope needs to be checked against one on file.

So, California could speed up counting by mailing out fewer ballots. Now, every registered voter gets one. We could go back to requiring voters to request an “absentee” ballot.

But forget that. We’re right to make it easy for people to participate in democracy — as long as safeguards are maintained to prevent fraud.

Some counties have taken advantage of a new law that allows a voter to drop off a filled-in mail ballot inside a voting center. There, it’s handled like an old-fashioned ballot that’s filled out at a booth. This significantly reduces processing time. But many counties say they need more state money to implement the program. I have no idea why.

Counting also is slow, of course, because lots of voters wait until election day — or near it — to cast their mail ballot. That clogs the system.

If the ballot is postmarked by election day, it’s allowed seven days to reach vote processors. Trump and fraud conspirators want to trash all ballots arriving after election day. That would speed up counting. But it’s un-American.

California election officials also try to pressure voters into mailing their ballots early. Rubbish.

Election day should mean something. It’s a day citizens are allowed to vote — whether they hand their ballot to a clerk at a voting center or drop it in the mail. They’ve got a right to take their sweet time in concluding what the wisest voting decisions are.

After all, the government allows us to drop our tax return in the mail on April 15 each year — and is very happy to receive our check a few days later. They process that check plenty fast.

“There’s nothing wrong with a slow count,” says Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law. “But it‘s a major problem because, unfortunately, it’s a manufactured crisis that can undermine public confidence. And it has gotten worse.”

So, Sacramento needs to undermine the demagogic manufacturers by stepping up vote counting while keeping elections virtually fraud-free.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump prosecutor in L.A. pushing unusual public search for voter fraud during ongoing count
California love: From the scene of South L.A.’s erupting sidewalks, 5 questions for Bass and Raman
The L.A. Times Special: Who loved Bass, Raman and Pratt the most? A district-by-district breakdown

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Thank you, Steve Hilton, for calling out President Trump for the liar he is.

Hilton on Tuesday addressed the president’s unfounded but vociferous claims that Democrats have massively cheated in our recent election.

“We’ve got teams standing by, we’ve got lawyers standing by, very focused on that,” Hilton told reporters, including my colleague Seema Mehta, outside the L.A. elections headquarters. “We don’t want to let anyone down, we don’t want to let anything slip away, and we’ve seen nothing.”

We’ve. Seen. Nothing.

How refreshing to have a MAGA insider repudiate the lies.

If only more RITOs (Republicans in Trump Only) would follow suit. But, alas, the conspiracies rage on, aided and abetted by L.A.’s own First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who recently told right-wing commentator Glenn Beck (among others) that he expected his office to charge people in voter fraud cases in coming months.

“But we need a wide-scale audit of the California voter roll,” Essayli told Beck.

Voter rolls are a huge refrain in conspiracy theories and the subject of numerous (mostly unsucessful) lawsuits by Trump‘s Department of Justice. Trump is demanding that the federal government “audit” the voter rolls to ensure ballots go only to legal voters, which is one of those scary and ill-conceived ideas that sounds reasonable on the surface.

Trump’s lawyers, some of whom made careers out of civil lawsuits around voter conspiracy allegations before being appointed to office, claim untold thousands of ballots are sent out erroneously, then somehow, via Democrats, land in the hands of undocumented immigrants and others who use them to vote illegally.

It is nonsense, but also now government-backed nonsense.

“It certainly is a new level of danger that the people who spent unlimited amounts of time and money trying to prove that the 2020 election was stolen are now leading and staffing the Department of Justice,” Eileen O’Connor told me. She’s a senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, a nonpartisan effort to protect democracy.

“There have just been people who have spent every waking moment of their lives, practically for decades now, searching for all of this voter fraud that they claim is happening and not finding it,” O’Connor said. “And they’re still failing to find it.”

So what’s the deal with voter rolls? Are they really the dark heart of a Democratic scam to rig elections? Or is the scam that Trump and MAGA are attempting to use the boring and bureaucratic nature of voting rolls to do the very thing they claim to be fighting — undermine of free and fair elections?

What the heck is a voter roll?

Voter rolls are the lists of eligible voters kept by each state.

States run elections, because, well, the Constitution. But that structure is also a good idea because states keep closer track of who is a legal resident and where they are than the federal government.

Those like O’Connor who care about democracy and fair elections point out federal meddling with an “audit” of these lists is vastly overstepping federal power — and likely will knock of numerous voters who have a right to cast a ballot.

Part of that is because voter rolls are “loose,” according to Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demographics at Penn State who specializes in voting rights. Most states have laws that strive to be inclusive and are slow to remove people from the lists, precisely because we want as many people to vote as we can get.

Some people in California are added when they get a driver’s license. Some people move and ask the postal service to update their voter registration. Some people register once, move dozens of times and never think to tell their secretary of state.

Some people die. Some people get married and change their name. Some people don’t vote for 10 years, then do. You get the idea. Life happens, and updating voter registration is rarely our first thought.

And yes, there are cases of folks illegally getting onto voter rolls, such as one Essayli recently pointed to in which a signature gatherer was paying folks on Skid Row to register to vote. The key there being register, not actually vote.

One-off cases like this should be and are prosecuted, but the inclusive nature of the rolls is by design, not a flaw.

“They’re imperfect,” Fowler said.

Why not audit?

Fowler added, though, if someone wants to make a big stink about fraud without any actual evidence, that inaccuracy is the perfect sleight of hand. To the average person, it sounds bad that we can’t keep a clean list of eligible voters.

But here’s what the conspiracy folks leave out: Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted or even that a ballot will be sent. It’s just the starting point of everyone who might be invited to the party.

There are numerous safeguards, such as signature verification, that cast ballots go through before the vote is considered legitimate. When there is doubt, the vote is “cured,” which is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying local election officials may go as far as tracking down the actual voter and making sure they are legit. Yes, if there is a question, actual people contact an actual voter. If they can’t get in contact, the vote is usually set aside.

The MAGA demand to audit voter rolls ignores all this reality and is instead based on the false idea that voter rolls translate directly into counted votes.

The game MAGA is running with voter roll audits is that it was never about election integrity. It’s about suppressing the vote of Black people, brown people, young people and others who tend to vote Democratic and also tend to have more unsettled lives that would lead them to have inaccurate information, such as conflicting addresses, on the voter rolls.

Federal audits would, instead of protecting elections, allow a conspiracy theory to be weaponized into a way to keep legal voters from casting their ballot. Call it the new Jim Crow — a disingenuous way to suppress certain votes all gussied up as safety.

But the effort creates a win-win for Trump. If his Department of Justice is successful in getting state voter rolls — which it has been in more than a dozen states that have voluntarily turned them over — they can demand as many names as they want be removed.

The federal government has not said what criteria it will use to “clean” these rolls, who will be in charge, how the information will be used or kept, or how people will even know they’ve been knocked off until they try to vote. There is even concern the information gathered from audits will be used for other purposes, such as immigration enforcement or surveillance activities.

And for the many states such as California who are fighting the demand in courts — the DOJ lost its California case and has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — MAGA is simply screaming that the mere fact of protecting these lists from federal interference is proof that we’re covering up this vast conspiracy.

“It is part of laying the groundwork to just be able to say either we have all these voter rolls and we’ve analyzed them and they’re full of errors, or to be able to say, ‘Oh, you didn’t hand over the voter rolls. What are you hiding?’ O’Connor said.

None of that is actually good for elections, or democracy. That’s the real scam with voter roll audits.

They are a Trumped-up attempt to make us doubt a system that is working just as designed, imperfectly and inclusively, protecting democracy while encouraging legal voters to participate.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Trump Previews Fall Strategy With Baseless Claims of California Vote Fraud
The deep dive: Spencer Pratt could have been a real contender. His greatest enemy was himself
The L.A. Times Special: Why the L.A. mayoral runoff is about to be a ‘knife fight’

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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SACRAMENTO — Winning elections — or achieving any success — often is about being in the right spot at the right moment. Getting lucky and capitalizing. Xavier Becerra is a textbook example.

Becerra’s moribund campaign for California governor was flatlining in early April when he got a shocking break. Five women publicly accused the Democratic front-runner, Rep. Eric Swalwell, of sexual misconduct, including rape. He denied the allegations but quickly quit the race and Congress.

And Becerra surged, leaping from his political deathbed to Democratic front-runner in the contest to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, ultimately earning one of two gubernatorial slots on the November ballot.

That’s assuming the agonizingly slow vote count in last week’s primary election holds up, and it’s virtually inconceivable that it won’t.

But Becerra didn’t suddenly just get lucky with Swalwell’s demise. He has capitalized on life-altering sudden good fortune much of his life.

There was a fortuitous incident in high school that substantially upgraded Becerra’s higher education and undoubtedly his career.

Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants whose construction worker father didn’t go past the sixth grade, was pulling down good grades at McClatchy High in Sacramento when he was invited to a summer program at UC Davis for promising students of color.

One day he saw a classmate toss some wadded paper into a waste basket.

“What’s that?” Becerra asked.

“I was going to apply to this college, but now I’m not,” the kid replied. He had screwed up on a final exam.

“Give it to me,” Becerra said.

It was an application form for Stanford University. Becerra filled it out and “got it in the mail at the last moment,” he recalled to me years later.

He was accepted. His working-class family was able to send him to the pricey, private university thanks to scholarships, federal aid and after-school work.

“I didn’t know where Stanford was until I rode there with my mom,” Becerra told me.

Becerra got a B.A. in economics at Stanford, then earned a law degree there. That ultimately landed him a job as a deputy state attorney general.

He eventually was elected to Congress, filling a vacant central Los Angeles seat when longtime Rep. Edward Roybal retired. He served 12 terms, rising to the No. 4 Democratic leadership position as party caucus chairman.

A big career break came just before the 2016 election. Becerra was back in Sacramento campaigning for two congressional candidates and was invited to a nonpolitical reception. Also attending by chance was Gov. Jerry Brown’s top aide, Nancy McFadden.

McFadden was impressed. They wound up having a long private talk in a corner. Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris was about to win a U.S. Senate seat and Brown would be appointing her replacement as AG.

“What about Xavier?” McFadden thought to herself, she later told me.

McFadden suggested Becerra to Brown, who didn’t really know the guy. But Becerra’s resume stood out and Brown phoned him. There was an instant liking.

“It wasn’t a hard decision,” McFadden recalled. “It just made sense.”

So, Becerra became California’s so-called top cop, a post he really hadn’t been seeking.

But it was the perfect job for Becerra because goofy Donald Trump became president at the same time. Becerra — often with other Democratic state attorneys general — filed 123 lawsuits against the Trump administration and won the vast majority.

The suits ran the gamut of issues, and one was particularly highlighted: Trump’s efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Fast-forward to Joe Biden’s ouster of Trump in 2020 and the newly elected president’s search for Cabinet members.

Biden needed a health secretary and was drawn to Becerra partly because he had helped jockey Obamacare through the U.S. House as a congressional leader and had staunchly defended it in court as California attorney general.

Without being appointed AG, Becerra might be running for House reelection in November instead of now seemingly having an easy shot at becoming California’s first elected Latino governor.

Becerra got a huge break in the gubernatorial race when two potential heavyweight contenders concluded the job wasn’t worth running for. Either person would have been heavily favored to win.

Former Vice President Harris decided to retain the option of seeking the presidency for a third time in 2028.

Sen. Alex Padilla opted to keep his comfy job, which opens lots of doors to national cable news sets and doesn’t require running vast, nerdy state bureaucracies.

But “if it hadn’t been for Swalwell’s demise, Becerra never would have made the top two” list of vote-getters in the primary, veteran Democratic strategist Garry South says.

Why did Swalwell’s collapse benefit the mild-mannered, low-key Becerra much more than any other Democrat?

“People are looking for something stable,” he told me several weeks ago. “Everybody likes pizzazz and glitter. Then all of a sudden their hero falls from grace. And they look for who they can trust.”

That trust is built on an impressive resume and likability.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, who has never held public office, spent tens of millions of dollars attacking rival Becerra in TV ads. But it apparently didn’t work because he lacked credibility. Steyer came across to many voters, I suspect, as a wild-eyed meanie.

He would have been better off spending his negative ad money on positive spots promoting himself and becoming more likable.

Likability is a candidate’s No. 1 asset. We learn that as grammar schoolers in class president elections. It beats a billion dollars every time — at least in California.

Now Becerra is on the verge of another break — facing Republican former Fox news commentator Steve Hilton in a lopsided fall contest. Californians haven’t elected a Republican to statewide office in 20 years.

Becerra merely needs to remind voters that Hilton is endorsed by Trump — a nice break gifted by the president.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Becerra advances to November, moves closer to becoming California’s first elected Latino governor
This just in: 2026 live primary election results
The L.A. Times Special: How a simple mix-up fueled false conspiracies about L.A. vote count

Until next week,
George Skelton

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TWILIGHT star Taylor Lautner has revealed the gender of his unborn baby in a sweet video with his wife Taylor.

The couple, who are expecting their first child together, took to Instagram to share the exciting news with their fans.

In the video, the pair are seen covering their eyes while finding out the gender on a laptop in front of them.

They scream in excitement as the word ‘Girl’ flashes on screen in pink.

She begins crying as he puts his arms around her to console her.

He looks at her and says: “We did it,” as they both wipe away tears from their faces.

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They captioned it: “Our little secret is now yours,” with pink and blue heart emojis.

Their fans flocked to the comments section to share their well-wishes for the soon-to-be-parents.

One person gushed: “I will forever be watching this on repeat. It’s a girl! I guessed right! I’m so excited for you guys!”

Another social media user commented: “I love how intimate this moment was for you both.”

Somebody else enthused: “Congratulations to a beautiful couple that will be the best parents in the world.”

Yet another wrote: “It’s so nice and wholesome to see a man so excited to have a girl!

“Congratulations guys, this beautiful angel is lucky to have such wonderful humans as her parents.”

While a fifth added: “My kids are obsessed with Shark Boy and Lava Girl and watch it about five times a week and now shark boy is having a baby?! Congratulations!”

The couple revealed they were expecting their first child in March.

The actor, 34, shared a sweet snap of him planting a kiss on his wife’s blossoming baby bump.

The glowing couple also posted a baby scan in an adorable family photo.

Taylor cheekily captioned the post: “What’s better than two Taylor Lautners?” – a nod to the fact his wife shares his first name and surname.

The image was the first in a series shot by snapper Chanelle Sekas-Whitacre showing the couple dressed in white in a countryside setting.

The husband and wife revealed last year on their podcast The Squeeze that they had been exploring their fertility as they planned to start a family.

Taylor’s wife bravely opened up about her fertility concerns, recalling a chat with her doctor about whether she’d have enough eggs.

“My doctor was a little concerned for me because I’ve been on birth control for 10 years and never taken a break.

“And she was like, you could, like, not have any eggs right now,” she said, adding: “We’re in the clear. I got a lot of eggs.”

The two tied the knot in a lavish November 2022 wedding.

A federal judge sided with California and other Democratic states on Friday in a preliminary injunction that blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to condition food benefits on compliance with the president’s policies on gender and immigration.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in March against the Trump administration in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, arguing that the “unlawful” and “unconstitutional” funding requirements are vague and designed to force policies on states.

Billions in federal funding are ultimately at stake, including money for school lunch programs that provide meals to 30 million children nationwide and food stamps that support about 40 million Americans living in low-income households.

“As the Trump Administration tries to use essential programs and billions in funding as leverage to advance their hateful, discriminatory agenda, California continues to fight to uphold the law and ensure that our communities can continue to access the funding they need to thrive,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta in a statement.

The policy shift from the United States Department of Agriculture marks another effort by the president to force left-leaning states to submit to his positions on hot-button political and cultural issues to receive government funding. California’s current budget relies on $174.5 billion in federal dollars, or roughly one-third of the overall state budget funds.

Last year, the Trump administration canceled a sexual education grant to California after the state declined to remove gender identity from sexual education curriculum. The administration is also restricting federal funds in an attempt to force states to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

The funding conditions from the USDA relate to gender ideology, women and girls’ sports and immigration, according to the lawsuit.

States argue that the conditions do not explain what activities are prohibited for entities that receive grants. The USDA did not cite any law allowing the organization to impose anti-discrimination policies that go beyond federal law, the suit states.

The states that joined the lawsuit contend that they are left with the “unlawful” choice of adhering to the conditions or risk losing up to $74 billion in collective federal assistance from the USDA.

U.S. District Judge Myong Joun approved a preliminary injunction Friday and is expected to issue a memorandum later explaining the decision, according to the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — As Californians cast their ballots in the state’s closely watched gubernatorial primary Tuesday, a very different race was playing out in Iowa — one that holds clues about the mood of Republican voters heading into November.

President Trump’s endorsed candidate in Iowa’s high-stakes governor’s race, Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, lost his bid for the party’s nomination, a rare defeat for a Trump-backed candidate.

The outcome exposed fractures among Republican voters, though their choice of Zach Lahn, who ran on an “Iowa First” and Make America Healthy Again platform, didn’t amount to a rebuke of Trump’s politics, said Jimmy Centers, a Republican strategist in Iowa.

The primary race was “emblematic of the seismic plates that make up the Republican Party in Iowa,” Centers said — the successful MAGA-style message, from Lahn; a more traditional conservative platform, from Feenstra; and a conservative Christian approach, from candidate Adam Steen.

“It’s a bit of a look-ahead in terms of how the Republican Party is going to be shaped in what will be a post-Trump era,” Centers said. “Those plates are moving, and last night in Iowa, we had an earthquake.”

Results from Iowa, California and other late-stage primaries portend contentious fall campaigns, with control of the House and Senate hanging in the balance.

“You’re seeing Republican primary voters rebel against politicians, whether it’s Dusty Johnson in South Dakota or Chip Roy in Texas,” said Matt Gorman, a longtime Republican strategist and chief communications officer at Targeted Victory. “There’s clearly a backlash against sitting politicians, and Republican primary voters are looking for outsiders.”

That pro-outsider outlook has been promoted by Trump himself in some races, as he has used his endorsement to boost primary challengers to victory over Republican incumbents — notably in Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky. In Tuesday’s primaries, however — held in six states — none of the races involved Republican veterans whom Trump wanted to see ousted.

Outside of such races, Trump — who last week said, “I don’t care about the midterms” — has taken a more laissez-faire approach. In Iowa, he did not endorse Feenstra until Friday, a last-minute boost that didn’t help the congressman over the finish line.

Lahn, in a victory speech Tuesday night, acknowledged the upset he had pulled off.

“Nobody thought this could be done,” Lahn said. “We were outspent, opposed by the establishment, told to wait our turn.”

Lahn will face Iowa state auditor Rob Sand, who ran uncontested for the Democratic nomination. The seat is being vacated by Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who is not seeking reelection.

Iowa Republicans will now ramp up efforts to retain both the governor’s office and the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Joni Ernst, as Democrats target both offices for flipping.

The race to replace Ernst is now on between Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has been in Congress since 2021 and has Trump’s support, and Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek, a former Paralympian who was backed by a leadership PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Economic issues, particularly in the agricultural sector, where farmers have been squeezed by Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran, could dominate the races. Centers said both parties are acutely aware of the economic factors — and aware that Democrats’ chances in Iowa could be slightly better than “a hope and a prayer,” though the state’s voter-registration edge remains solidly red.

“I don’t think many Republicans in Iowa are bashful about acknowledging the environment we’ll face in November,” Centers said. “It’s going to be a hard-fought race.”

Other Tuesday takeaways

Elsewhere on Tuesday, voters chose candidates in races for U.S. Senate, House and governor’s seats, setting up some lively November match-ups.

In New Jersey, the state’s 7th Congressional District will be a closely watched contest — largely because of the recent absence of Republican Rep. Tom Kean, who has not been publicly seen for months as he deals with an undisclosed medical issue.

His absence has provided an opening to Democrats, who have ramped up attention on the seat as they attempt to flip as many House seats as possible. Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, won the Democratic nomination Tuesday.

Kean, who has support from Trump, ran unopposed. In a statement Tuesday evening, he laid out plans to reveal his medical condition when he returns to in-person work, which he said would be “within a matter of weeks.”

The race could become key to Democrats’ attempt to win control of the House in November.

“We’re ready for this fight. Bring it on,” Bennett wrote Wednesday on X.

In Montana, the race for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, being vacated by Republican Sen. Steve Daines, was also set to get interesting.

Trump-backed Republican Kurt Alme, a former U.S. attorney, and Democrat Alani Bankhead, an Air Force veteran, won primaries Tuesday — but former University of Montana president Seth Bodnar has launched an independent bid for the seat. Bodnar said Tuesday that he had delivered enough petition signatures to the secretary of state to get on the November ballot.

And in New Mexico, former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland secured the Democratic nomination for governor, advancing in her bid to make history as the first Native American governor in the United States. She will face Republican Gregg Hull, a former local mayor, in November.

What’s next

Next week brings Maine’s Senate primaries, following a Democratic race that has taken several twists and turns. Democrats have held hopes of unseating Sen. Susan Collins, the veteran Republican lawmaker, as part of their long-shot attempt to flip the Senate along with the House.

But leading Democratic candidate Graham Platner has been dogged by controversies. The primary vote will be held just more than a week after a New York Times report that he had sent sexual messages to several women outside his marriage. This week, Gov. Janet Mills, who had opposed Platner but suspended her campaign at the end of April, said, “I am still on the ballot.”

Also to watch: Next week’s outcomes in South Carolina’s crowded gubernatorial field; the June 16 Georgia Senate runoff to determine which Republican will face Democratic Sen. Jon Osoff; and the June 16 Democratic primary for Senate in Oklahoma.

Times staff writer Michael Wilner,in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: The U.S. is investigating two more Mexican governors for connections to cartels
The deep dive:Can we speed up California’s vote count already?
The L.A. Times Special:More middle-class Californians cancel health coverage after losing federal aid

More to come,
Justine McDaniel and Michael Wilner
—
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SACRAMENTO — Regardless of the final vote count, Xavier Becerra’s pre-primary sprint to the front in the race for governor was remarkable and historic.

Here’s a low-key 68-year-old candidate who excited no one. And that apparently was a major strength. He was easygoing, non-threatening and a safe bet.

He also had an impressive resume — former U.S. health secretary, California attorney general, longtime congressman and state assemblyman. This seemed to attract voters.

People perpetually badmouth politicians. That’s in the American DNA. And in California, there’s always loud anti-Sacramento jabber. But voters tend to prefer politicians with Sacramento experience when electing governors — unless a celebrity entertainer is available.

Politics is cyclical, however. In the past six decades, Californians have gone from electing fascinating Govs. Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown to selecting uninspiring George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis — then returning to headliners like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown again and Gavin Newsom.

Now we’re ready for boring Becerra?

The last pre-primary poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found Democrat Becerra leading the pack. But he was closely trailed by Republican former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton and Democrat billionaire Tom Steyer, a hedge fund founder turned climate activist.

The large field of candidates wound up with those three leading — Becerra drawing 25% support, Hilton at 21% and Steyer with 19%.

A later Emerson College poll also found Becerra in front but Steyer and Hilton in a statistical dead heat: Becerra 28%, Steyer 22%, Hilton 21%.

The top two vote getters will qualify for the November general election.

In contrast to earlier hot speculation about two Republicans — Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — finishing in the top two and locking out any Democrat from the November ballot, the final IGS and Emerson polls showed that an opposite scenario was possible. Two Democrats could conceivably advance to the November voting.

As campaigning neared an end, Becerra apparently tried to help Hilton attract more MAGA support to prevent Steyer from edging out the Republican. Becerra would be a shoo-in over any GOP opponent in November, but could face a tough fight facing Steyer with his bottomless checkbook.

The games-playing involved Becerra running a statewide digital ad subtly reminding Republican voters that Hilton was President Trump’s “favorite” candidate for governor. The spot asserted that Becerra is “Trump’s worst nightmare.”

Steyer would be Becerra’s worst nightmare in a general election brawl.

Another major poll completed a few days earlier by the Public Policy Institute of California found the same basic rankings as the IGS survey, but with Steyer a bit further back.

Becerra was leading with 23%, followed by Hilton at 20% and Steyer at 15%.

Every independent poll found Becerra surging from irrelevancy in March to leader of the pack by late May.

It’s “one of the most unusual gubernatorial election campaigns in modern California history,” IGS poll director Mark DiCamillo says.

Particularly unusual was the April frontrunner, then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), abruptly withdrawing after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, which he denies.

Most of Swalwell’s voter support soon went to Becerra, which helped him attract campaign donors and endorsements by interest groups.

Becerra, who had been moseying along the race track, suddenly got a second wind. And voters sensed a breath of fresh air.

“Voters are exhausted by Trump. He makes it hard to sleep at night. ‘Cool and calm’ win,” says Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller. “People want a candidate like a no-drama Becerra.

“The fact he has a charisma deficit may in fact be his political asset.”

But Becerra also has other assets, notes UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser — ”legislative and executive experience…. He was safe and predictable.

“And he’s second only to Gavin Newsom in opposing Donald Trump.”

Yes, a calm temperament appeals to voters fatigued by political fire and brimstone. But California Democrats also want someone who will fight back against Trump’s policies.

Becerra repeatedly points out that as state attorney general, he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times and won the vast majority of cases.

“Becerra has caught the attention of Democratic voters who overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump,” says PPIC Poll Director Mark Baldassare.

How overwhelmingly? Ninety-five percent disapproval by Democrats in the latest PPIC survey, 70% among all likely voters.

Becerra “stood out from the rest of the candidates because of his background as attorney general,” Baldassare adds.

“And look at the other candidates. You can’t name one who has had experience in Sacramento.”

Longshot former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was once state Assembly speaker, but that was nearly three decades ago.

Among the last nine California governors, only Schwarzenegger and Reagan have been elected without serving prior Sacramento stints.

Becerra also has another asset: He’d be the first elected Latino governor in California history. He finished the primary campaign with a comfortable lead among Latino voters, as well as Asian American.

As Becerra’s political stock rose, Democratic rivals — especially Steyer — tried to portray him as incompetent, touched by scandal and a Chevron tool. But the mud didn’t seem to stick.

A natural Becerra strength is likability.

DiCamillo recalls what his mentor, the late legendary pollster Mervin Field, used to say about how voters choose between candidates for governor or president.

“It’s a highly personal choice,” DiCamillo says, quoting Field. “People put more mental energy into choosing a top-of-the-ticket candidate than any other.

“It’s like trying on a new suit. If it doesn’t fit well, you don’t buy it. You’ve got to be comfortable in the feel.”

Many California voters apparently feel that way about Becerra — nothing flashy, just plain but comfortable.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Becerra leads governor’s race, with Hilton and Steyer in tight contest for second spot, poll finds
Money honey: Record-setting outside money pouring into California governor’s race
The L.A. Times Special: Voter guide to the 2026 California primary election

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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When Congress passed the big, ugly bill known as HR 1 last year, most Americans understood it meant cuts to Medicaid, the safety net program millions rely on for medical insurance.

But few Californians realized just how much it will affect the Golden State when its provisions really kick in, starting after the midterms (the Republicans aren’t that dumb) and continuing on in cascading cuts for the next few years.

Millions of Californians — not just low-income folks — are going to feel the effects, whether through a loss of insurance, fewer providers able to keep their doors open, or rising premiums and costs.

“This problem trickles up,” state Senate leader Monique Limón (D-Goleta) told me. “This is not just going to impact the people that have a public healthcare plan. When you see a hospital close, when you see medical providers no longer being able to practice, it is absolutely going to impact everybody, the middle class included.”

Added to the loss of federal funds, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s most recent budget plan (which the Legislature has to debate in coming weeks) includes cuts at the state level. This is in part to contend with the loss of federal money, but also because healthcare costs keep rising and even in this wealthy state, we can’t afford the bills — at least not without some changes.

What those changes are — and who should bear the brunt of them — is a complicated and largely ignored debate happening right now. While our candidates for governor have been grilled on whether they support single-payer healthcare or not, (Becerra is a sort-of, Steyer is a yes) the real question isn’t how is the next governor going to expand access to care — but how are we going to keep the whole system from collapsing right now.

“This is not hypothetical, this is what’s coming down the line,” Limón said.

The problem

About 15 million adults and children, or about 1 in 3 of our state’s residents, rely on Medi-Cal, which is what California calls its Medicaid program.

Through a creative bit of state financing called the Managed Care Organization, or MCO, tax, the federal government has been paying for a big chunk of the costs of that insurance, about $7 billion a year. President Trump’s HR 1 makes that money go bye-bye by greatly reducing the MCO, leaving the state to figure out how to backfill that cash. And that’s just one of the ways the big, ugly bill hurts California. Yes, it’s complicated.

The number of Californians losing health insurance coverage could roughly double in the next four years. Above, a patient undergoes treatment for tongue cancer at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on March 6, 2026.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

Newsom’s budget plan relies in a not-small way on restructuring the MCO tax to fit HR 1’s new rules. But here’s the problem with that — any fix will require approval from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly shown the welfare of Californians is not a high priority. In fact, the Trump administration in March rejected California’s request to update another fee related to hospitals that also generates billions for Medi-Cal.

So maybe Newsom will be able to negotiate a plan that saves the MCO and California healthcare. But wouldn’t it be much better for the GOP, with a presidential election looming, to watch California (and her presidential-contender governor) tumble off a healthcare cliff? Few states rely on an MCO tax the way ours does, which means our pain is going to be far more visible and profound if we lose this funding.

That means if Newsom’s budget is approved by the state Legislature with the MCO fix, the state is taking a gamble. If the feds don’t approve some new version of the MCO tax, “it would have major implications,” Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto told me. She’s a senior policy fellow with the nonpartisan California Budget and Policy Center.

Sort-of solutions

What’s the fourth-largest economy in the world to do? Limón would like to see the state stop subsidizing corporations who pay so meagerly that their employees qualify for Medi-Cal.

“We don’t have the luxury of being able to provide these tax subsidies,” Limón said.

Turns out, 42% of Medi-Cal enrollees are full-time workers, according to a new report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Although most big corporations offer some sort of health insurance, it’s often tied to working a certain number of hours (which they then make sure not to schedule) or it has prohibitive costs or other barriers.

In 2022, the Labor Center found, 34% of low-wage workers received their health insurance through employers, compared with 69% of higher wage workers — meaning California is picking up insurance costs because low-wage employers are finding ways out of them.

“Over the decades, Medi-Cal has really undergone a significant transformation. It’s shifted from a program that primarily served the disabled and indigent and elderly folks to one that largely supports folks that work in low-wage industries,” Tia Orr, the executive director of SEIU California, told me. “Medi-Cal has now become a program where folks that work every single day have to rely on it. The idea that someone can work every day and qualify for food stamps and Medi-Cal, it should be eye-opening to folks.”

Right now, she points out, California taxpayers are paying about $7,800 a year for each person on Medi-Cal.

“The corporations that they work for don’t have to pay one dollar of that, right?”

Limón and her Senate colleagues would like to change that. They have proposed the “Fair Share” plan that would impose a tax on the state’s largest and wealthiest corporations whose employees rely on public assistance. It’s more of an idea than a fleshed-out policy at this point, but as ideas go, it ain’t a bad one. It’s been done in Massachusetts, and New Jersey’s governor has suggested it.

In California, it deserves more attention than it’s currently being given.

To be fair, Newsom’s plan also would also limit state corporate tax credits to $5 million, as my colleague Taryn Luna points out, or 50% of a firm’s tax liability, whichever is greater. That change could bring in $850 million next year to state coffers and grow to $1.8 billion by the end of the decade. That’s still not nearly enough to cover healthcare costs.

To add to the drama, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts all this will get worse — that the number of Californians losing health insurance coverage could roughly double in the next four years. The Newsom administration projects federal Medi-Cal changes could push off 44,000 people in 2026-27, growing to 1.3 million people by 2029-30.

That means more people getting sick and dying because they can’t afford a doctor. It means more doctors, clinics and hospitals losing income vital to keeping their doors open, and more emergency rooms being overloaded because it’s the only option.

“The worst is yet to come,” Rachel Linn Gish, interim deputy director at Health Access California, a consumer healthcare advocacy coalition, told me. “If you wait to take action until it gets bad, it’s already going to be way too late.”

She’s right, and however you look at it, a fix should include corporations paying their fair share.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Justice Department sues UCLA for the third time, alleges antisemitism against students
The deep dive: The $400 Million Showdown Between a Billionaire and a California Mayor
The L.A. Times Special: Garden Grove crisis exposes Southern California’s hidden industrial risks

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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