other

The crowd near Los Angeles City Hall had by Sunday evening reached an uneasy detente with a line of grim-faced police officers.

The LAPD officers gripped “less lethal” riot guns, which fire foam rounds that leave red welts and ugly bruises on anyone they hit. Demonstrators massed in downtown Los Angeles for the third straight day. Some were there to protest federal immigration sweeps across the county — others appeared set on wreaking havoc.

Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.

LAPD officers stage on Los Angeles Street.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Jonas March, who was filming the protests as an independent journalist, dropped to the floor and tried to army-crawl away.

“As soon as I stood up, they shot me in the a—,” the 21-year-old said.

Violence and widespread property damage at protests in downtown L.A. have diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations — large-scale immigration sweeps in such predominantly Latino cities as Paramount, Huntington Park and Whittier.

Instead, the unrest has trained attention on a narrow slice of the region — the civic core of Los Angeles — where protests have devolved into clashes with police and made-for-TV scenes of chaos: Waymo taxis on fire. Vandals defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti. Masked men lobbing chunks of concrete at California Highway Patrol officers keeping protesters off the 101 Freeway.

A person lobs a large rock at CHP officers stationed on the 101 Freeway.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The escalating unrest led LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell on Sunday night to break with Mayor Karen Bass, who has condemned President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to the city.

“Do we need them? Well, looking at tonight, this thing has gotten out of control,” McDonnell said at a news conference. The chief said he wanted to know more about how the National Guard could help his officers before he decided whether their presence was necessary.

McDonnell drew a distinction between protesters and masked “anarchists” who he said were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.

CHP officers on the 101 Freeway.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

“When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that’s not the people that we see here in the day who are out there legitimately exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” McDonnell said. “These are people who are all hooded up — they’ve got a hoodie on, they’ve got face masks on.”

“They’re people that do this all the time,” he said. “They get away with whatever they can. Go out there from one civil unrest situation to another, using the same or similar tactics frequently. And they are connected.”

McDonnell said some agitators broke up cinder blocks with hammers to create projectiles to hurl at police, and others lobbed “commercial-grade fireworks” at officers.

“That can kill you,” he said.

The LAPD arrested 50 people over the weekend. Capt. Raul Jovel, who oversaw the department’s response to the protests, said those arrested included a man accused of ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers and another suspect who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail.

California National Guard troops watch as protesters clash with law enforcement in downtown Los Angeles.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

McDonnell said investigators will scour video from police body cameras and footage posted on social media to identify more suspects.

“The number of arrests we made will pale in comparison to the number of arrests that will be made,” McDonnell said.

Representatives of the Los Angeles city attorney and Los Angeles County district attorney’s office could not immediately say whether any cases were being reviewed for prosecution. Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said those who “hurl cinder blocks, light vehicles on fire, destroy property and assault law enforcement officers” will be charged.

On Sunday, the LAPD responded to a chaotic scene that began when protesters squared off with National Guard troops and Department of Homeland Security officers outside the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Around 1 p.m., a phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters, flash-bangs and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.

No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.

Department of Homeland Security police officers had asked protesters to keep vehicle paths clear earlier in the morning, but their commands over a loudspeaker were often drowned out by protesters’ chants. They offered no warning before charging the crowd.

California National Guard troops stand guard at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Some in the crowd lobbed bottles and fireworks at the LAPD. Two people rode motorcycles to the front of the crowd, revving their engines and drawing cheers from bystanders. Police accused them of ramming the skirmish line, and the motorcycles could be seen fallen over on their sides afterward. The drivers were led away by police, their feet dragging across asphalt lined with shattered glass and spent rubber bullets.

On the other side of the 101, vandals set fire to a row of Waymos. Acrid smoke billowed from the autonomous taxis as people smashed their windows with skateboards. Others posed for photographs standing on the roofs of the burning white SUVs.

After California Highway Patrol officers pushed protesters off the 101 Freeway, people wearing masks flung chunks of concrete — and even a few electric scooters — at the officers, who sheltered under an overpass. A piece of concrete struck a CHP car, drawing cheers from the crowd.

Los Angeles Police Department officers shoot tear gas as they advance on demonstrators who formed a makeshift barricade.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Closer to City Hall, the LAPD pushed demonstrators toward Gloria Molina Grand Park, where some in the crowd wrenched pink park benches from their concrete mounts and piled them into a makeshift barricade in the middle of Spring Street.

The crowd, which included a Catholic priest wearing his robes and a woman with a feathered Aztec headdress, milled behind the barricades until LAPD officers on horseback pushed them back, swinging long wooden batons at several people who refused to retreat. Video footage circulating online showed one woman being trampled.

The crowd moved south into the Broadway corridor, where the LAPD said businesses reported being looted around 11 p.m. Footage filmed by an ABC-7 helicopter showed people wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts breaking into a shoe store.

McDonnell said the scenes of lawlessness disgusted him and “every good person in this city.”

Before any chaos erupted on Sunday, Julie Solis walked along Alameda Street holding a California flag, warning protesters not to engage in the kind of behavior that followed later in the day.

Solis, 50, said she believed the National Guard was deployed solely to provoke a response that would justify further aggression from federal law enforcement.

“They want arrests. They want to see us fail,” she said. “We need to be peaceful. We need to be eloquent.”

Video game performers and producers have reached a tentative contract agreement, reaching terms that could end a long strike over artificial intelligence.

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the game companies came to a resolution on Monday, more than two years after their previous agreement covering interactive media expired.

The deal is subject to review and approval by the SAG-AFTRA National Board and ratification by the membership in the coming weeks, the union said. Specific terms of the deal were not immediately available.

Terms of a strike suspension agreement are expected to be finalized with employers soon, the union said. Until then, though, SAG-AFTRA members will remain on strike.

SAG-AFTRA members must vote on whether to ratify the new contract, which covers roughly 2,600 performers doing voice-acting, performance- and motion-capture work in the video game industry.

Since fall 2022, video game performers have been fighting for a new contract containing AI protections, wage increases to keep up with inflation, more rest periods and medical attention for hazardous jobs.

Game actors went on strike in late July after contract talks broke down over AI. Throughout the walkout, performers demanded a deal that would require video game producers to obtain informed consent before replicating their voices, likenesses or movements with AI.

During the first few months of the strike, SAG-AFTRA reached numerous side deals with individual game companies that agreed to follow the union’s AI rules in exchange for a strike pardon. By Nov. 18, the labor organization announced that it had made AI pacts with the developers of 130 different video games.

“The sheer volume of companies that have signed SAG-AFTRA agreements demonstrates how reasonable those protections are,” Sarah Elmaleh, chair of the union’s video game negotiating committee, said in a statement in September.

While some companies earned the union’s approval, others felt its wrath.

Halfway through October, SAG-AFTRA added the popular computer game “League of Legends” to its list of struck titles in an effort to punish audio company Formosa Interactive for allegedly violating terms of the walkout. SAG-AFTRA also filed an unfair labor practice charge against Formosa, which provides voice-over services to “League of Legends,” according to the union.

Formosa denied SAG-AFTRA’s allegations.

The biggest sticking point for actors under the umbrella of AI involved on-camera performers, whose job is often to disappear into the characters they are bringing to life. They expressed concerns that the companies’ AI proposal would leave them defenseless against the technology.

The game companies argued that their AI proposal already contained robust protections that would require employers to seek prior consent and pay actors fairly when cloning their performances.

“All performers need AI protections,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, in an interview with The Times months ago.

“Everyone’s at risk, and it’s not OK to carve out a set of performers and leave them out of AI protections.”

This work stoppage marked SAG-AFTRA’s second video game strike in less than a decade and second overall strike in roughly a year.

While the walkout persisted, video game performers weren’t allowed to provide any services — such as acting, singing, stunts, motion capture, background and stand-in work — to struck games. Union actors were also barred from promoting any struck projects via social media, interviews, conventions, festivals, award shows, podcast appearances and other platforms.

AI was also a major sticking point during the film and TV actors’ strike of 2023. That walkout culminated in a contract mandating that producers obtain consent from and compensate performers when using their digital replica.

NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room Is Empty,” has died. He was 85.

White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg.

Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York’s Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash.

A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the 1991 essay “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.”

As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.

“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”

Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”

“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”

His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”

“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told the Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

Staycee Dains was about a month into her job overseeing the Los Angeles city animal shelters when an employee openly defied her.

Dains asked the employee to clean a kennel. Instead, the employee picked up a hose and sprayed a dog in the face, Dains said.

Dains thought the employee should be fired, but she said the city’s personnel department recommended five days of leave.

Mayor Karen Bass hired Dains in June 2023 after promising to make L.A. “a national model for animal welfare” by turning around its troubled shelters, where dogs may live in overcrowded and dirty kennels and volunteers have complained that animals sometimes don’t get food and water.

But in an interview with The Times, Dains said she felt powerless to solve entrenched problems that included severe understaffing and employees who mistreated or neglected animals.

She said she was repeatedly told by the personnel department, which functions like a human resources department at a private company, that she couldn’t fire problem employees. She also clashed with one of the unions that represents shelter employees.

At one point, Dains even reached out to L.A. County prosecutors for help.

Meanwhile, as the overcrowding worsened, more dogs and cats were euthanized in city shelters under her watch than in the preceding years.

“We need to tell the unfiltered, unvarnished truth about what is happening in the shelters,” Dains said.

In August, after a little more than a year as Animal Services general manager, Dains went on paid leave. A few days later, a top Bass advisor told Dains that her last day would be Nov. 30 and that she was free to resign before then.

Zach Seidl, a Bass spokesperson, pushed back on Dains’ accusations.

“Many of these characterizations are misleading and some are just plain inaccurate,” he said in an email.

Dains, in a series of interviews, said the city does not provide enough funding to meet the basic needs of the animals in its six shelters.

During Bass’ first year in office, amid critical reporting by The Times and others about conditions in the shelters, the mayor offered an 18% budget increase — far less than the 56% the Animal Services department had requested. The following fiscal year, her budget proposal slightly lowered the department’s funding.

Last week, in passing a budget that closed a nearly $1-billion shortfall, the City Council spared Animal Services from major cuts.

Dains, who previously held top shelter jobs in San José and Long Beach, said her employees were desensitized to the suffering of the animals after witnessing it day after day. The understaffing was so bad that three people were responsible for 500 dogs: cleaning kennels, setting up adoptions and working with the medical team, she said.

“I couldn’t sleep knowing that animals were just in those hellholes suffering,” said Dains, who now works at a shelter system in Sacramento. “It was awful.”

Dains, who made about $273,000 a year in L.A., said she witnessed some of her employees “terrorizing” dogs by banging on their kennels, or spraying them with water to move them back. She told the employees to stop the behavior, but some said they had been trained to treat the dogs that way, she said.

To ensure that animals were fed and their enclosures cleaned, Dains suggested starting a schedule that tracked when each task was done. But a union representative worried that the information could be used to punish employees, Dains said.

Ultimately, Dains said, she dropped the proposal because of the opposition from the union, Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 300. A representative from the union declined to comment.

Dain said that personal entanglements and gossip among employees sometimes made it hard to hold them accountable.

Some supervisors had had sexual relationships with their subordinates, which led them to overlook the employees’ poor work performance, according to Dains. Others used the “dirt” they had on co-workers to protest when confronted about their own behavior, she said.

Dains said she suspected that some employees were sleeping during night shifts instead of cleaning cages or doing paperwork. She showed The Times a photo of dog beds arranged on the floor of a staff room like a “nest.”

She said she also witnessed employees watching videos on their phones, rather than working. Others ignored people who walked into the shelter looking to adopt a pet, she said. Some employees told her that colleagues failed to give food or water to cats and dogs.

At the same time, Dains said, other employees went “above and beyond constantly” to make up for those who didn’t pull their weight.

“There’s a significant portion of staff that just aren’t doing their jobs,” she said. “I saw this constantly.”

Dains put some of the blame on supervisors, who were “not requiring them to perform.”

When she tried to discipline supervisors, she faced pushback, she said.

After she put a supervisor on leave who was accused of bullying people, Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 300 filed a grievance against her, Dains said.

A spokesperson for the personnel department declined to comment.

At the same time, Dains acknowledged that she should have been tougher on some of the assistant general managers who reported directly to her. But she said she wanted to maintain working relationships with them.

It is a “tricky thing to do to start writing up executive-level managers that you are trying to work with,” she said.

A shelter employee, who requested anonymity because he didn’t have permission to talk to the media, agreed with Dains’ assessment.

“There’s no accountability, there’s no repercussions,” he said. “And the staff who do work have to work twice as hard.”

A report last year by Best Friends Animal Society, which highlighted the poor conditions in the shelters and suggested possible solutions, criticized Dains as the “biggest barrier” to improvement.

The shelters lacked written protocols, and the euthanasia policy “changed five times in the last year” without communication about the changes, the report said.

According to a Times analysis, the number of dogs euthanized at city shelters from January through September last year increased 72% compared with the same period the previous year. The number of dogs entering the shelters increased each year since 2022, but the number put to death far outpaced the population gain.

In the crowded conditions, animals started behaving poorly and suffered “mental and emotional breakdown,” according to the Best Friends report. That made them less likely to be adopted and more likely to be euthanized.

Dains, in her interview with The Times, defended her euthanasia decisions, arguing that it wasn’t safe for the animals, staff, volunteers or the public to “warehouse” dogs in kennels for months or years.

She said that there was no euthanasia policy when she arrived and that the department was creating one during her tenure.

Bass was Dains’ boss, but Dains’ main contact was Jacqueline Hamilton, deputy mayor of neighborhood services. Dains said she spoke often with Hamilton and told her about the personnel problems and other issues. But Hamilton didn’t offer any meaningful help and didn’t want her to publicize the poor conditions at the shelters, Dains said.

“I am not getting any movement or traction,” Dains told The Times, describing her work experience.

Seidl, the Bass spokesperson, said Dains “was given support to succeed, including assistance in communicating the status of the department to the public and decision makers.”

Dains said that shortly after she became general manager, she asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Kimberly Abourezk, who worked on animal cruelty cases, to send a letter to the mayor about poor conditions at the shelters.

Venusse D. Dunn, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said Abourezk didn’t send the letter because she visited city animal shelters and didn’t find evidence of any crimes.

The office “is not in a position to tell another agency how to operate their facility,” Dunn said.

Annette Ramirez, a longtime Animal Services staffer, is now interim general manager. The “severe overcrowding crisis,” as the department described it in news release this month, continues.

Welcome to the Riley Tiernan Revenge Tour.

Oh, sure, the Angel City forward is far too nice to call it that, but that’s what her first NWSL season has become.

“Everybody loves an underdog story,” she said. “It kind of added fuel to my fire. When people doubt you, it makes you want to prove it that much more.”

Tiernan was definitely being doubted about six months ago when she finished her college career at Rutgers as the school’s all-time leader in assists, yet didn’t get a call from 12 of the 14 NWSL teams. In the first winter without a league draft, every player was a free agent, available to the highest bidder. Only no one bid on Tiernan.

So she accepted an invitation to training camp with Angel City and now she’s showing the others what they missed, with her five goals leading all NWSL rookies and ranking second in the league overall heading into Saturday night’s home match with Racing Louisville.

“A fair shot,” said the 22-year-old. “All I wanted, literally, was just a chance to prove myself. Without the draft it was kind of like you get what you get and you’ve got to hope for the best.

“Once I got this invitation it was ‘let’s go big or go home.’ I got to show out. And pretty much did.”

Four of her five goals have given her team a lead; two were game-winners. Without her, Angel City (4-3-2) would not be in playoff position a third of the way into the season.

If Tiernan gets credit for passing her preseason test with the team, then technical director Mark Wilson and the rest of Angel City’s staff deserve praise for doing their homework. They identified Tiernan as a player worth watching last summer and nothing they saw — even the lack of interest from other clubs — swayed their thinking.

“We decided Riley was a top, top target once we’d kind of curated all of her stuff,” Wilson said. “You have to trust your process.”

So in November, Wilson had a Zoom call with Tiernan and found that he liked the person even better than he liked the player.

“That was the final piece of the puzzle,” he said. “We believed she had a big ceiling after watching her and we wanted to at least invite Riley in to spend some time with us.

“We really liked her character after the interview.”

Angel City forward Riley Tiernan heads the ball downfield during a game against the Washington Spirit on May 2.

(Roger Wimmer/ ISI Photos via Getty Images)

Tiernan said the only other offer she received came from Gotham FC, which trains 35 miles from Rutgers. But after spending her entire life in South Jersey, she felt Southern California offered a different sort of challenge.

“It just felt like it was time for me to spread my wings and step out of my comfort zone,” she said. “I had nothing to lose. After the first couple of training sessions, I started feeling comfortable and I started feeling like it was a place that I should be, an environment where I belonged.”

She’s certainly fit in, starting all nine Angel City matches and ranking second among outfield players in minutes played. Plus her five goals are just two shy of the franchise single-season record with 17 games left.

“She’s a big presence, but she turns on a sixpence,” Wilson said. “She has the ability to send players into the stands with a little check and her balance and mobility for a big presence is deceiving.

“She exhibited all of those qualities and more in all the work we did.”

She’s continued to prove she belongs despite playing as an attacker on a team that has seven forwards with World Cup experience.

“Isn’t it funny how that worked out?” Wilson said with a wry grin. “While we had quality attacking players, we want you looking over your shoulder. When you’re looking over your shoulder, you’re not comfortable. When you’re not comfortable, you’re pushing yourself. That level of competition for places drives standards and performance.

“Riley exhibited that from Day 1 and it hasn’t stopped. I don’t see her ever taking her foot off the gas.”

At least not until she’s finished proving herself to all those who doubted her. If she was once unwanted she’s now in high demand, having earned her first callup to the U-23 national team earlier this week. She’ll leave after Saturday’s game for Europe and two games against Germany, which constitute another new challenge.

“I think it’s good to have a sense of humbleness and be intimidated by such a high level in a new environment,” she said. “But I also think it’s important to turn that intimidation into motivation.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Tiernan has used others’ opinion of her to fuel her fire.

“I love this game because it does reward talent that works hard,” Wilson said. “Riley’s a talent, she is working hard, and eventually that value will be recognized.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combating the ‘caricature’ of Democrats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republican response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governor’s bipartisan appeal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.