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While Republican Steve Hilton has spent months jackrabbiting around California during his long-shot bid for governor, Democratic front runner Xavier Becerra just recently emerged from quasi hibernation and stepped into political daylight.

Hilton has blasted Becerra as taking the state’s voters for granted, failing to hold public campaign events to explain his detailed plans to address California’s many ills. Despite pledging to participate in multiple debates, Becerra brushed aside several invitations, agreeing to just a solitary one-hour face-off against Hilton on CNN in late September.

That month, Hilton held 14 public events, a dozen more than Becerra, but the Democrat’s spokesperson said he appeared at multiple functions sponsored by other groups. Hilton wasn’t buying it.

“He is a useless nothing, a totally unaccomplished pipsqueak who is so smug, so arrogant, so entitled, that he somehow thinks he’s owed this job just because he was picked as a useful puppet by the Sacramento machine,” Hilton, a former Fox News commentator and British political strategist, said last week in West Sacramento.

On Oct. 10, Becerra, a longtime member of Congress and Biden’s secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, scoffed at his GOP rival.

“Uh, hello?” Becerra said sarcastically to reporters in Sacramento after being asked about his absence from the campaign trail.

“That Steve Hilton doesn’t see me on Fox News is his problem, not mine. I am gonna talk to voters,” Becerra said, rattling off a list of his recent campaign events. “I will talk to them until November the 3rd, and then I’ll be ready to talk to voters and taxpayers and the people of California when I’m the next governor.”

On Thursday, Becerra held a news conference in downtown Los Angeles with Latino leaders and famed Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez urging voters to turn out despite alleged intimidation efforts by the Trump administration.

On Monday, he held get-out-the-vote events in Santa Clarita and Glendale, shortly after he campaigned for former state Sen. Richard Pan, a congressional candidate, in Sacramento, and urged voters to cast their ballots early at an event in Santa Rosa. In September, Becerra promoted Proposition 1, a proposal on the November ballot that would allow the state to sell nearly $11.3 billion in bonds to fund affordable housing.

“We know we can get these men and women who are wearing these orange vests to work and keep them working, so they can afford to buy a house if we pass Proposition 1,” Becerra said, standing alongside union members in front of a chain-link fence encircling a vacant lot in North Long Beach.

Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra held a news conference in Long Beach on Sept. 4 to highlight his housing agenda.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who endorsed Becerra in April and appeared at the housing event, pushed back on the notion that Becerra is taking the election for granted after winning a top spot in the primary, positioning him to be the first Mexican American elected governor of California.

“I’ve seen firsthand the work that has taken place under the radar that may not be explicitly, openly political or openly be seen as campaigning, but it is the kind of thing you want to see,” Richardson said in an interview on Thursday, adding that he saw Becerra meeting with elected officials of both parties, the mayors of the state’s largest cities and labor leaders. “I’ve seen a very active candidate that has been making sure that real time was put into building relationships that will ultimately translate to a successful governorship, because that’s the goal. I mean, ultimately, what we want is a leader who has the relationships to lead our state.”

Becerra’s campaign said that the candidate has frequently met with voters since the primary without press coverage to hear from Californians, and that he would be a frequent public presence in the weeks before the election, when “voters really get engaged, when ballots land in their mailbox,” said spokesman Jonathan Underland.

“People have incredibly busy lives. They are worried about affording their healthcare, putting food on the table, paying for gas to fill their tank,” Underland said. “What is at the forefront of Secretary Becerra’s mind is the very real problems that Californians are facing every day.”

In contrast, Hilton has been publicly barnstorming California since the June primary.

Becerra’s schedule is not surprising given Democratic dominance in California, where the party’s registered voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1. While appearing at parades, pancake breakfasts and in voters’ living rooms can be effective for candidates running in local campaigns, the most effective way for candidates to reach voters in a state as vast as California is through sustained advertising buys, which can cost tens of millions of dollars.

“If you’re the Democrat running in California, the operating theme of your campaign is do no harm and measure the drapes and figure out how you’re going to put an administration together and what is the tone that you’re going to set for that administration,” said Tim Rosales, a veteran GOP consultant who led businessman John Cox’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial campaign and previously worked on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful effort to replace Gov. Gray Davis in the 2003 recall campaign.

Newsom was more active in the 2018 general election campaign against Cox than Becerra has been this year, but Rosales argued that could be because Becerra views it as the final chapter of his political career, which also may have been the case with former Gov. Jerry Brown in his 2014 reelection campaign. Newsom, however, is pondering a 2028 run for the White House.

“This is potentially more of a swan song for Xavier Becerra, the icing on the cake for a long and distinguished political career, and for Gavin Newsom, it was a stepping stone,” Rosales said.

Becerra has raised $40.5 million, as of Friday, while Hilton has raised $29 million, according to the fundraising disclosure reports filed with the state. Those figures do not include the exponential advantage that Becerra had in independent expenditure committees’ spending over Hilton in the primary.

Veteran Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, an advisor to Schwarzenegger, said that while Becerra will almost certainly be the state’s next governor, he should be cautious about his approach weeks before the November election.

“What he needs to be careful of is a big Democratic night across the United States that looks muted in California, and if that happens, the analysis will be that it’s his fault,” Stutzman said. “He should want to optimize his political capital as the clear leader of his party now in California. So he has to be a little careful of leaving some political capital on the table by not creating a stronger brand over the next three weeks.”

The last gubernatorial race that was viewed as competitive took place in 2010 between Brown and former eBay chief Meg Whitman, then a Republican who spent $144 million of her personal wealth on her campaign.

That contest drew national attention, but Brown beat Whitman by nearly 13 percentage points. Every gubernatorial election since that race has been sleepy and ignored in national politics, with Democratic candidates coasting to victory. The state has seen contentious gubernatorial primaries, notably in 2018, and this year, when the Democratic field was so crowded that party leaders urged low-polling candidates, including Becerra, to drop out.

He won the top spot in the primary after then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) dropped out amid rape and sexual assault allegations.

Mason Harrison, who worked for Republicans Carly Fiorina in a 2010 Senate bid and Neel Kashkari in a 2014 gubernatorial campaign, and worked with Hilton on business ventures but is not affiliated with his campaign, noted that while Brown was well-known by Californians because of decades in the public eye, Becerra is not. However, given Democrats’ edge in the state’s voter registration, as well as current headwinds against the GOP in California and across the nation, it’s unsurprising that Becerra has been less visible than Hilton. Harrison compared Becerra’s campaign to Biden’s in 2024 before the then-president bowed out of the race.

“The calculus seems to be, the more he gets out on the campaign trail, the greater the potential of him having a misstep in an interview or getting some tough question that he’s going to have to answer, and what’s the advantage of that in a year when you’re running against a party that, by historical standards, stands to lose significantly,” Harrison said. “Why make it more competitive by making yourself more vulnerable?”

Indeed, Becerra previously committed to multiple debates, but has participated in one so far and appears unlikely to agree to another. Still, he has repeatedly disputed the notion that he is taking the race for granted.

“If I were trying to coast, I’d be out on the coast right now instead of here with you all,” he told reporters one sweltering August afternoon in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, an area he represented in Congress.

Xavier Becerra, center, walks with Helen Ota, left, president of the 2026 Nisei Week Foundation, while touring businesses and meeting with business community leaders at Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles on Aug. 18.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

While there, he met with local business and community leaders. And he bought merchandise and delicacies, including a sweet mango mochi wrapped in a thin, fluffy pancake at a 123-year-old Japanese confectionery.

Times staff writer Nicole Nixon contributed to this report from Sacramento.

“We are stunned and heartbroken by this senseless tragedy,” Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Steven Cook said in a statement.

“No words can adequately express the grief our community is experiencing.”

Local law enforcement responded to reports of an active shooter at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, at 12:59 local time, Bend Police Department spokeswoman Sheila Miller told reporters.

The first call indicated that an unknown suspect had shot into a car, she said. Photos released from the scene show a red truck with bullet holes.

Minutes later, the local county dispatch received a flood of 911 calls and law enforcement were sent to the scene.

The suspected shooter was shot dead at around 13:02pm, Miller said.

While police said the shooter was a local 16-year-old boy, they declined to add further details pending the ongoing investigation.

WASHINGTON — California is sometimes described as the ATM of Democratic politics.

That’s certainly been the case in the most divisive Democratic races this year.

Donors from California have given more to far-left candidates and their moderate opponents in congressional races and U.S. Senate contests than donors from any other state — more than $17 million combined, according to a Times analysis of the most recently available campaign finance filings.

More of that money — nearly $11 million — went to more progressive candidates. That giving came from more than 95,000 individual donors, which was more than double the number of California donors who gave to their more moderate opponents. That includes 18,000 donors who gave to both progressive and moderate candidates.

There was a geographic divide in giving by Californians. The largest share of cash to progressive candidates came from donors in the Bay Area, while the largest share of financial backing to moderate candidates came from donors in the Los Angeles area.

The Times looked at competitive races outside California in which one of the candidates had been endorsed by either the Justice Democrats or the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, as well as key Senate races in Michigan, Minnesota, Florida and Maine that featured a stark ideological divide between top Democratic contenders.

Although these races represent a small fraction of the electoral contests across the country, they were the races in which the future ideological direction of the Democratic Party was most fiercely contested.

Progressive candidates fared better in the majority of these contests.

California donors helped fund the Senate primary victories of progressives Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota — second only to in-state donors in providing cash to each of those candidates.

Progressive House candidates such as Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York were able to defeat more moderate incumbents with heavy support from California donors.

Their efforts weren’t always successful, however.

Former Rep. Cori Bush raked in more cash from California donors than in-state supporters in her bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, the seat she had held previously. But Bell easily cruised to victory in this year’s primary.

And then there was Graham Platner.

California donors gave nearly $2.5 million to his Senate campaign in Maine before he withdrew after he was accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. He has denied the accusation.

The Times analysis looked at direct contributions to campaigns, which are capped at $7,000 per election cycle. It did not include contributions to party committees or independent committees that could also be spending in these races. The analysis included both bigger contributions required to be disclosed by campaigns as well as small-dollar contributions through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue.

Flipping the script

Progressive donors said they were motivated to give to candidates who would shake up the Democratic Party’s status quo.

“The Democratic Party has to understand that they can’t keep doing the same thing,” said Rehan Alvi, a real estate investor in El Dorado Hills.

He gave the maximum allowable to support the campaigns of El-Sayed and Bush, and also supported Junaid Ahmed’s failed primary bid in the Illinois 8th Congressional District, as well as Platner’s campaign.

Harry Saddler, a retired designer who lives in San Francisco, said that the state of the party is “enraging.”

“That leads me to think about people who can actually flip the script,” he said.

Joshua Saltman, shown in his Los Angeles home, is one of many Democratic donors from California who have given in divisive Democratic races across the country.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Saddler has written checks to a number of more progressive candidates, including Flanagan, Chevalier, Ahmed and Nida Allam, who lost her primary bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, though he has also supported some moderate candidates in other races he sees as crucial to Democrats chances at retaking control of one or both chambers of Congress.

That pragmatic approach is part of the reason Joshua Saltman said he has supported a number of moderate candidates.

“The reality of the map is that if Democrats are going to retake the House, it’s not just winning super blue districts,” said Saltman, a former entertainment industry lawyer who now runs a Broadway music festival.

Saltman said that he considers himself to be a more moderate Democrat and is also inclined to give to moderate candidates who he believes “get a little less love” from other donors, particularly in California.

He has written checks to Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in Michigan; Rep. Angie Craig, who lost to Flanagan in Minnesota; Bell in Missouri and Gov. Janet Mills in Maine, who was Platner’s main competition in the Democratic primary before dropping out of the race.

Alan Burye, a retired accountant who lives just outside San Diego, said he prefers more moderate candidates because he thinks they are more productive politicians.

“The ones who are out on the edges, like Bernie Sanders, really don’t get much done,” Burye said.

He cut checks to Craig in Minnesota and Stevens in Michigan.

Israel’s impact

American support for Israel — in the wake of wars in Gaza and Iran — has been a major point of division among more progressive and moderate candidates and is a key fault line among many donors.

Progressive candidates have been increasingly critical of the actions and influence of the Israeli government as the public, broadly, has adopted a more negative view of the Israeli government.

Politicians who have drawn support in the past from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, have been a particular target of progressive challengers.

“The problem with the Democratic Party is that they’re all just beholden to AIPAC and to corporate interests,” said Alvi, the real estate investor in El Dorado Hills. “I want a candidate who has the courage to speak.”

In Michigan, El-Sayed described AIPAC’s support of Stevens, his moderate opponent, as “legalized bribery.”

El-Sayed has made no secret of his criticism of American foreign aid for Israel and said that he “doesn’t believe in ethno-states” in response to a question in the summer about whether he supports the right of Israel to exist.

El-Sayed’s comments and similar sentiments expressed by other more progressive candidates are part of the reason some donors have given to moderate candidates.

“I feel that people who fundamentally aren’t big fans of Israel aren’t necessarily people I want to give money to,” said Saltman, who gave to Stevens.

Saltman, who was born in Michigan, said that he would still vote for El-Sayed if he lived in the state.

Other donors said they were inspired to give to moderate candidates because of concern that anti-Israel rhetoric could veer into attacks on Jews more broadly.

Los Angeles investor Steve Emerson said his motivation in writing checks to moderate Democrats such as Stevens is “to fight antisemitism.”

El-Sayed, for his part, said in the summer that his criticism of Israel is about foreign policy, not Jewish people.

“Judaism and the Jewish people are a light onto the world,” he said.

Sept. 23, 2026 1:23 PM PT

SALT LAKE CITY — A U.S. Postal Service letter carrier in Utah threw out more than 300 mail ballots that were being sent to voters for the state’s June primary, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter said during a news conference that Damon Matai Seei was arrested Tuesday and appeared in federal court in Salt Lake City to be arraigned.

The 34-year-old from Payson, Utah, pleaded not guilty to a felony charge of destruction or delay of mail. If convicted, he could face up to five years in federal prison. A message seeking comment was sent to his attorney.

Seei was delivering mail in Eagle Mountain, a conservative suburb of Provo, when he threw the ballots and other mail into a dumpster in a church parking lot not long after his shift started, McCotter said.

Melissa Holyoak, the U.S. attorney for Utah, said Seei indicated to authorities that he had no political agenda and did not intend to discard the ballots. He told investigators in an interview that he acted out of “laziness,” throwing away mail to “lighten his workload,” according to court documents.

In a written statement quoted in court filings, Seei said he felt overwhelmed that day by the quantity of mail, and he decided to toss out advertisements so he could focus on other deliveries.

He told law enforcement he had set aside the ballots at the beginning of his shift, prosecutors said, arguing it was implausible that Seei didn’t know they were in the discard pile.

Most voters in Utah cast ballots by mail or deposit them in drop boxes. Nationwide, nearly a third of voters use mail-in ballots.

All active registered voters in Utah are automatically sent ballots by mail, though that system is set to end in 2029 under a new state law requiring voters to opt in.

Several Eagle Mountain residents complained to Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson that they never received their ballots, leading him to investigate. He determined that the rate of voter participation in the community was unusually low and learned through outreach that the number of voters who did not receive ballots was in the hundreds, according to court documents.

Seei is no longer employed by the Postal Service. The investigation remains ongoing, officials said.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s attempts to impose new Postal Service rules that would have restricted mail voting for the midterm elections.

Catalini and Schoenbaum write for the Associated Press.

Sept. 22, 2026 10:20 AM PT

DETROIT — Michigan U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed said Tuesday that he wants Kamala Harris’ midterm campaign stop in Detroit to unify Democrats in the key swing state where their party’s factions were on full display in a hotly contested primary earlier this year — and in Harris’ 2024 presidential defeat.

“We’re building an electoral coalition here,” El-Sayed said, speaking about the economy hours ahead of a planned appearance with the former vice president.

An unapologetic progressive, El-Sayed downplayed his differences with Harris over the Biden administration’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel. El-Sayed has called Israel’s military actions in Gaza a genocide against Palestinians. Israel rejects that position, but it aligns El-Sayed with many voters in Michigan’s large Arab American community and with progressives who withheld their votes from Harris in 2024, when the state tipped narrowly to Republican Donald Trump.

That election “ended where it did because we could not find the places of agreement to be able to bring people together or move in the direction that we need to move,” El-Sayed said, emphasizing that he and Harris both want to help voters who are struggling economically.

Harris, the first Black vice president, remains popular among Black voters who anchor the Democratic base in Detroit and who leaned in favor of El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, in the August primary. El-Sayed said Harris, who will attend a roundtable on Black maternal health with him and separately join an event hosted by the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, is a critical advocate in helping him close ranks as he tries to defeat Republican Mike Rogers.

“Her presence here speaking to communities that were really empowered by her voice throughout her political career, I think will help us to continue to bring our coalition together,” El-Sayed said.

El-Sayed vs. Rogers is a critical contest for Senate control

The Democrat’s matchup against Rogers, a former congressman, will help determine control of the Senate for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. If Democrats hold the seat, which was opened by Sen. Gary Peters’ announced retirement, they’d still need to win at least four more currently held by Republicans to flip the chamber. A Rogers victory would narrow Democrats’ path to a majority.

Rogers’ campaign framed Harris’ visit as a sign of weakness for both Democrats.

“Abdul is so desperate that he’s parachuting Kamala Harris into Michigan to save his flailing campaign,” said Alyssa Brouillet, Rogers’ spokesperson.

Rogers has been campaigning in Detroit, a predominantly Black city where his campaign is optimistic he can pick up support from voters hesitant to support El-Sayed.

Black voters could prove especially critical as El-Sayed also faces pressure among white Jewish voters who typically back Democrats.

“Jews in Michigan are currently scared” by their Senate options, said Barry Goodman, a Democratic National Committee member and major Michigan fundraiser in the party. Goodman backed Stevens in the primary.

The race is also seen as another referendum on progressives’ viability in battleground races. El-Sayed is running to the left of the Democratic Party establishment, including advocating for universal healthcare.

Goodman described himself and many other Jewish Democrats as “holding our noses and voting for Abdul” because they “believe in the Democratic ticket and they believe that one man can help win the Senate but can’t destroy the Senate.” Other moderates, Goodman said, are still deciding whether to back Rogers or sit out the Senate race.

El-Sayed has attempted to soften his approach on Israel and Gaza. He has apologized for some past controversial comments and said he is committed to Jewish safety.

Michigan will also be a key state for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary

For Harris, the trip comes as questions swirl about her intentions to run for president again. Under the Democratic National Committee’s recently revised nominating calendar, Michigan now will hold the fifth presidential preference primary in 2028.

It’s unclear whether Harris will use the trip to restate or recalibrate her past statements on Israel. But campaigning with El-Sayed is notable, nonetheless, given her past tensions with Democrats’ left flank.

“She probably figures she won’t lose her establishment folks, so maybe she makes gains to her left,” Goodman said.

Harris has said she’s in no rush to announce whether she will run in 2028. But ahead of Election Day this November, she also has campaign stops planned in Nevada and Georgia, two other important states on the political map.

Ganun and Barrow write for the Associated Press. Barrow reported from Atlanta.