race

As soon as enough votes were counted to officially knock Tom Steyer out of the California governor’s race, the anti-billionaire schadenfreude kicked in.

Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have a rare melding of the minds, delivering endless variations of, “How dare he try to buy elected office! We showed him.”

“I hope you received the message from California that a power-hungry communist billionaire cannot buy the state!” wrote one detractor on social media. “How much money did you waste spamming Californians? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars you wasted?”

“What a waste,” screamed a New York Times headline, slamming Steyer for not donating that money directly to building houses or funding Planned Parenthood — one-off actions that prop up broken systems instead of changing them.

I get it.

In an age when income inequality is reaching serf-lord levels, hating the rich seems easy and reasonable. You could take several zeros off the $200 million Steyer spent on his campaign and it would still be more than most of us make in a lifetime. That’s a rage-inducing reality for many, if not most of us, for whom pairing a full tank of gas with a restaurant dinner seems like careless luxury these days.

I’m not here to defend the nine-zeroes class. But maybe we should take a beat and make sure our outrage is working for us, not against us. While Steyer has spent the last few months advocating for universal healthcare, better pay and protections for workers, and putting curbs on out-of-control corporations from the energy sector to AI, other billionaires have spent that time actively undermining democracy and our financial system. Heck, some even seem to be undermining humanity. Why aren’t we raging at them?

Take, for example, a certain billionaire who seemingly would prefer to be a trillionaire: Elon Musk.

Last week, his SpaceX held an IPO in which somehow the rules of Wall Street meant to protect small investors and pension plans were set aside to his benefit. Like it or not, if you hold a public pension or a 401(k) in America that uses index funds (which most do) you will likely be an investor in his unproven and possibly risky business. I’m sure that will work out fine.

Or consider the hundreds of millions of dollars right-wing AI and surveillance-company billionaires, some Californians, are dumping into political races across the country right now to ensure that their dangerous and unpredictable technologies are not regulated, or regulated in largely meaningless ways. It’s a situation so dire that one wealthy insider last week warned in his own op-ed that if his former colleagues are successful, “It could concentrate economic power in ways that would make the Gilded Age look quaint.”

Then there’s our president, king of self-enrichment, whose wealth has skyrocketed to more than $6 billion during his time in office. Much of that moola is in opaque cryptocurrency holdings, an industry he has championed as his fortunes in it have increased.

But don’t think Trump is in it only for himself: He’s enriching his family, too.

His daughter Ivanka recently made her own “eat cake” headlines over an alleged $1.5-billion project that would convert an uninhabited Albanian island into a luxury resort. The Albanians are so mad, they’ve been protesting in the streets for nearly two weeks. Meanwhile, her brothers have coat-tailed off their dad’s crypto-ventures to make their own fortunes, as other investors suffered losses.

Those are our individual billionaires, never mind the corporations, who can dump as much money as they want into our politics thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen’s United decision. In 2025, the oil and gas industry in California, led by Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Assn., spent about $34 million on lobbying. Not to be outdone, the Golden State’s water and electricity interests, including PG&E, spent about $35 million to bend politics to their will.

But sure, hate the goofy guy in the vintage Nikes pointing all this out.

“I’m proud of the enemies we made,” Steyer said in his concession. “In this race, those corporations revealed that they see a government that puts working people first as an existential threat — even when proposed by a billionaire. By spending $55 million — the most ever against a single candidate in a California primary — they showed the lengths they would go to in order to protect a status quo that only serves them and their profits.”

I don’t like the amount of money in our political system either, but the truth is, it’s there. And worse, the majority of those who have it seem intent on diminishing the political and economic power of those who don’t.

We are increasingly moving toward a country where the well-being of the majority of people will depend on the largesse of the few — Silicon Valley’s tech industry now talks about a universal basic income as a great boon for the coming mass unemployment they are creating.

But is existence off a charity-pittance really what we want for ourselves and our children? Do we really want these ultra-wealthy overlords to use their money unchecked to make decisions that will shape our future, diminish our rights and ultimately leave us without the power to fight back?

If Steyer wants to use his money to join this battle to keep power by the people and for the people, then the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Like it or not, us average worker bees need money to fight money. In this age when animus eats discernment like the rich eat caviar, the luxury we really can’t afford is hating the good guys just because it’s easy — even if they’re billionaires.

Now in its 40th iteration, Grand Performances will celebrate this milestone with dazzling performances all summer long at the California Plaza in downtown L.A.

The free concert series kicks off with a performance by the Latin hip-hop funk band Ozomatli on June 13. Tropicalia group Healing Gems and the Afro-Latin fusion band Jungle Fire will also make special appearances, all while DJ Liza Richardson keeps the groove going.

“For 40 years, Grand Performances has been a gathering place where Los Angeles comes alive through music, culture, and shared experience,” said Rafael González, president and CEO of Grand Performances, in a press release. “This year, we honor that legacy by continuing to open our stage, free and for everyone, so that every Angeleno can find themselves in the experience and feel part of something larger.”

On June 27, the Chicano troupe Culture Clash will return to the Grand Performances stage with comedic sketches colored by political and social satire. The trio — which includes Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Sigüenza — formed in 1984 in the San Francisco Mission District. Through its avant-garde live skits, the group has weighed in on topics like race, immigration and politics, including the 2016 election race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Also joining the comedy show are retro cumbia-quebradita musician É Arenas (bassist of Chicano Batman) and the cumbia-fusion, luchador-masked cumbia group La Nueva Ola de Cumbia, as well as DJ Dali. (Editor’s note: De Los is co-presenting the Grand Performances on June 27.)

This summer will also pay tribute to a host of musical legends.

There will be an intergenerational dance party on July 18 with DJ Spinna on the booth, in honor of 76-year-old R&B-pop artist Stevie Wonder — who performed a memorable summer concert in 2013 alongside Ozomatli and La Santa Cecilia.

On Aug. 1, a 12-piece jazz ensemble will gather in tribute to the late Roy Ayers, the pioneering jazz-funk vibraphonist and godfather of neo soul.

Chicano trailblazer Ritchie Valens, best known for classic rock tracks “La Bamba,” “Donna” — will also get his due on Aug. 22, with a stacked program that features live music, narration and archival visuals honoring the late Pacoima legend. There will be performances by Nick Waterhouse, Shannon Shaw (of Shannon & the Clams), Joey Quiñones (Thee Sinseers), Bryan Ponce (The Altons), Denise Carlos & Hector Flores (Las Cafeteras), Angie Monroy (The McCharmlys), Irene Diaz and Jose Varela (Cutty Flam).

The season will wrap up on Aug. 29 with Mexico City cumbia punks Son Rompe Pera, joined by the all-femme percussion ensemble Bloco Obini and violinist Quetzal Guerrero, also known as QVLN (Q-Violin).

Grand Performances has hosted free outdoor performances annually since 1987. The organization’s focus is on giving a platform to both global and local performers, including previous headliners iLe, Adrian Quesada and Ana Tijoux. The full 2026 lineup can be found here.

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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On election night, Santa Ana City Council member Jessie Lopez found herself in third place, far behind fellow Democratic council colleague David Penaloza and Republican business owner Mayra Ruiz in the race to represent Orange County’s 68th Assembly District.

Tearful supporters at a California Working Families Party shindig at the Mission Control bar and arcade in downtown Santa Ana hugged Lopez, gifted her flowers and wished her well.

If the 37-year-old was sad, she didn’t show it. Lopez had seen this game play out before.

In 2023, the councilmember decisively beat back a recall attempt funded by Santa Ana’s police union and apartment owners who didn’t like her unabashedly progressive views in a city where centrist Democrats have dominated politics for decades and lefty ones were long ostracized.

I wrote a column shortly after, heralding Lopez’s overwhelming victory as a new era for Latino politics in Orange County, where Latinos make up a third of the population but still wield little power.

Lopez spent the next three years along with her fellow progressive Santa Ana council members shoring up the city’s rent control policies and its immigrant defense fund. Nevertheless, few gave Lopez a chance in her assembly race.

Penaloza — who declined to vote when the council deadlocked on whether to cancel Lopez’s recall election — had the backing of the Orange County and California Democratic Party establishment, from current 68th District Assemblymember Avelino Valencia (who’s running to represent the 34th Senate District) to Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas to Katie Porter, a former Orange County congresswoman who ran unsuccessfully for governor this year.

Penaloza’s campaign mailers and video ads were so ubiquitous these past few weeks that they filled up my mailbox and interrupted my binging of Hulu’s “Vanderpump Villa.”

So did anti-Lopez mailers and commercials, funded by nearly $2.7 million in independent expenditures. Yet Lopez once again beat back her well-funded opposition.

As of Wednesday evening, the latest Orange County Registrar of Voters election results had her in second place — less than 1,000 votes away from Penaloza.

“Voters proved that while money can influence politics, it can’t buy community support,” Lopez said this week as she unsuccessfully tried to enjoy tacos and guacamole at Lola Gaspar in downtown Santa Ana, where well-wishers kept calling her or congratulating the candidate in person. “This race is about the future of California — whether we answer to corporations and insiders or to the hard-working people we’re elected to serve.”

With Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento easily winning reelection and Unite Here Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño currently coming up short in her bid to represent the 67th Assembly District, which includes parts of Los Angeles County, Lopez may be the sole O.C. Latino progressive running in November for a seat beyond the local level.

Expect Lopez versus Penaloza to become a referendum on whether the leftward trend of Latino voters in Orange County continues — or whether its center holds.

“I’ve chosen my side,” Lopez told me. “I’m proud to stand with working people.”

Then she excused herself — someone else wanted to say what’s up.

California Democrats made it out of last week’s primary election having kept the promise of Proposition 50 alive — advancing candidates to November runoffs in all five Republican-held Congressional districts that last year’s redistricting measure targeted.

They now head into November bullish about turning those districts blue, wresting control of the U.S. House from Republicans and delivering their party important leverage to challenge President Trump through the remainder of his second term.

“As Democrats, we are united in our fight to flip this seat and to take back the House for Democrats here in ‘26,” progressive college professor Randy Villegas told The Times on Wednesday after besting his Democratic challenger to advance and take on Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) in the redrawn 22nd Congressional District. “We know the path to taking back the House runs through the Central Valley.”

Robert Jones, a Valadao campaign strategist, said Valadao “is always humbled to receive the support of Democrats, independents and Republicans across the Central Valley,” and that his “brand of independent, bipartisan leadership is all too rare in Congress and California.”

“We look forward to a campaign that puts the Central Valley ahead of any political party and wins again in November,” Jones said.

In a social media post Wednesday, former state Sen. Richard Pan, who advanced in the redrawn 6th Congressional District in the Sacramento suburbs to take on Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Rocklin), cheered his race being added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” program highlighting winnable seats. He said his race is “one of the top chances to flip a House seat and take back the majority.”

Kiley did not respond to a request for comment, but wrote on X that the November race between him and Pan “will be a choice between the extreme partisan policies that have made California the most unaffordable state in the country, and the independent leadership that allows our local communities to thrive in spite of the state’s failures.”

The two races are considered among the most competitive in California in November, but primary results to date show substantial momentum in the Democrats’ favor, experts said.

In the 22nd Congressional District race, Valadao had received substantially less than half of the vote as of Wednesday, while Villegas and his Democratic rival, moderate Assemblymember Jasmeet Kaur Bains (D-Delano), had together received well over half the vote.

In the 6th Congressional District race, Kiley and the leading Republican candidate had together received well under half the vote as of Wednesday, while Pan and four other Democratic candidates had collectively won well over half the vote.

Those results are not final, nor do they necessarily reflect how voters will break in November’s head-to-head competitions. Just because a voter cast a ballot for a Democrat or Republican in the primary doesn’t mean they will back another candidate of the same party or partisan alignment in the general, experts said.

Still, the Democratic candidates clearly have an advantage in a year when the electorate — facing high gas prices and other economic headwinds — appear to be shifting against the president’s party, said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in the state.

“We’re in an anti-Republican moment,” Madrid said. “Is there time to turn it around? I guess. But there’s also time for it to get worse — and that’s the way it seems to be heading.”

Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic strategist and director of the Dornsife Center for the Political Future at USC, said Democrats stand to perform even better in November based on historical trends that show much larger Democratic turnout in general elections.

“I would not be surprised if Democrats won all five targeted seats, and the primary certainly increases the possibility that happens when you look at the results,” he said. “Maybe one of these places will surprise us, but right now, just looking at the numbers, I don’t think Republicans are in good shape.”

In the redrawn 1st Congressional District in Northern California, where incumbent Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) died in January, Republican Assemblymember James Gallagher handily won a special election — using the old district lines — for the remainder of LaMalfa’s term.

However, in the primary race for the next full term using the newly drawn district, state Sen. Mike McGuire and other Democrats collectively outperformed Gallagher by a substantial margin as of Wednesday — giving McGuire the momentum heading into the November runoff with Gallagher.

In the redrawn 41st Congressional District in Los Angeles and Riverside counties, Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Whittier) and Republican Mitch Clemmons advanced. As of Wednesday, Sánchez and her fellow Democratic candidates had collectively outperformed Clemmons by a wide margin.

In the redrawn 48th Congressional District in San Diego and Riverside counties, where Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) retired rather than run for reelection, moderate Republican San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond advanced alongside Democratic San Diego Councilwoman Marni von Wilpert. Results as of Wednesday showed Von Wilpert and other Democrats in the race collectively outpacing Desmond and the other Republican in the race.

Republicans have long held on to hope that Valadao might be able to hold on to his San Joaquin Valley district, spoiling Democratic hopes for a flip there. They also seemed buoyed by early results in the Kiley race. But neither race went as Republicans hoped — and both Kiley and Valadao face a tough road ahead, experts said.

Having abandoned the Republican Party to run as an independent in a district that was designed to favor a Democrat, Kiley “now has to work all three lanes,” Madrid said. “He has to get a consolidation of the Republican vote, he has to communicate directly to independents, and he’s going to have to get crossover Democrats.”

That’ll be extremely difficult, especially given that any move he makes back toward Trump, to woo Republican voters, risks alienating moderate voters he also needs to win, Madrid said.

Shrum blamed Trump for the difficult spot in which the GOP now finds itself, referring to the president calling on Texas Republicans to redistrict in favor of Republicans.

“These California Republicans are paying the price for Trump starting this mess in Texas,” Shrum said.

“Kiley in his old district probably would have been easily reelected. This new district is a whole different story.”

Shrum also said it “doesn’t look good” for Valadao, despite the political argument picked up by GOP leaders that Villegas is too progressive for the Central Valley.

“Randy Villegas endorses every far-left policy that would destroy any hope for Central Valley residents looking for relief from Gavin Newsom’s high-tax, high-fraud system,” Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said in a recent statement.

Shrum said he doubts that message will resonate with enough voters to sway the race to Valadao “in an environment where the things people are worried about are the cost of living, the war.”

Madrid had even less confidence in a Valadao victory, saying that “in an environment like this, a tree stump could beat Valadao” given how frustrated voters are with the economy and the president’s party.

Villegas, who racked up endorsements Wednesday from a raft of Democratic leaders in the state, said the district’s primary results were “rooted in the reality that Central Valley residents are fed up with David Valadao” — not just Trump — and want a change.

SACRAMENTO — Democrat Xavier Becerra holds a major advantage over Republican Steve Hilton as the race for California governor heads toward the November election, a new poll shows.

The two candidates topped a crowded field of gubernatorial hopefuls in the June 2 primary, earning them the opportunity to face-off in the general election.

Among registered voters in the state, 52% supported Becerra in a head-to-head matchup against Hilton, who was backed by 31%, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll which was co-sponsored by The Los Angeles Times. The remainder were undecided.

“It looks very much like a traditional, partisan-based general election, with most of the Democrats, over 80%, behind Becerra as the campaign starts,” said IGS Poll Director Mark DiCamillo. “Even though Hilton has over 80% of the Republicans, the Democrats outnumber Republicans by 20 points in the state, and that gives the Democratic candidates a huge advantage, which Becerra is clearly taking advantage of in this election.”

The survey of California voters was conducted before the primary, from May 19-24.

The poll found that Democratic and Republican voters were extremely loyal to their party’s candidate. Among Democrats, 82% said they would support Becerra in the general election, while 84% of Republicans said the same about Hilton.

Becerra also had an edge among voters registered as no party preference or registered with other parties — who make up almost a third of the state electorate. Among those voters, 43% backed Becerra, 28% supported Hilton and 29% were undecided, the poll showed.

Along age, gender, racial and geographic lines, voters preferred Becerra to Hilton nearly across the board. The only geographic region where voters preferred Hilton to Becerra are those in the North Coast/Sierra region, which makes up about 2% of the electorate, DiCamillo said.

Hilton, who served as an advisor to former British Prime Minister David Cameron before immigrating to the United States, in April secured the endorsement of President Trump, which helped him gain enough support among Republican voters to outpace his GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

More than a third of Republicans, 37%, said Trump’s endorsement made them more likely to support Hilton. But while it helped Hilton consolidate the Republican vote in the primary, helping him finish in second place, it will likely hurt him in the general election, DiCamillo said. Trump remains deeply unpopular in California; the poll released Thursday showed 69% of voters disapprove of the president’s performance while 29% approve.

“A majority of Californians have a very strong negative view of the president, so Hilton’s backing by the president will not be nearly as beneficial to him in the general as it was in the primary,” he said.

A former Biden Cabinet secretary, state attorney general and longtime congressman from Los Angeles, Becerra had been wallowing in the low single-digits in public opinion polls less than three months ago. His fortunes changed when former Rep. Eric Swalwell, one of the Democratic front-runners, dropped out of the governor’s race after he was accused of sexual assault and misconduct, which he denies.

Democratic voters and interest groups quickly coalesced behind Becerra, who was seen as a steady candidate with a long resume in California politics and a record of fighting the Trump administration. In two months, he went from polling at 5% in a March IGS poll to 25% in a late May poll and finishing first in the unofficial primary vote count.

With 91% of ballots tallied as of Wednesday afternoon, Becerra led with 27.9% of the vote compared to 25% for Hilton, according to the Associated Press, which declared Becerra and Hilton the two winners. Billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmentalist Tom Steyer was in third place with 22.5% — knocking the Democrat out of contention for the November election.

DiCamillo said Swalwell’s dropping out of the race “really gave Becerra an opening and he capitalized on it.”

The poll also showed that in the end, “Becerra was the only one of the major candidates who ended the primary race with a favorable image among the overall electorate, even in the face of all the negative ads that Steyer was running” against him, DiCamillo said.

Just before the primary election, 44% of likely primary voters surveyed had a favorable view of Becerra compared to 38% who viewed him unfavorably.

Hilton and Steyer were upside down — 31% had a favorable opinion of Hilton compared to 38% unfavorable, and 39% had a favorable view of Steyer while 43% saw him unfavorably.

Though Steyer had aggressively courted progressive voters and secured the backing of left-wing individuals and groups like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-San Jose) and Our Revolution, a group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the final IGS poll before the election showed more progressive voters ended up backing Becerra.

Among those who self-identified as progressive, 39% said they would support Becerra while 29% preferred Steyer, according to the late May survey.

“It’s really one of the factors that was responsible for Steyer’s campaign not being successful,” DiCamillo said. Progressive voters were “a target audience for Steyer, but Becerra was able to have an advantage there.”

The poll was conducted online in English and Spanish among 8,578 registered California voters. The survey has a margin of error of 2% in either direction.

SACRAMENTO — State Treasurer Fiona Ma and former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero have been declared the two winners of a crowded primary election for lieutenant governor, securing themselves spots on the November ballot.

Ma is a Democrat. Romero is a former Democrat who said she registered as a Republican after splitting with Democrats over the push to oust President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.

Both were declared as the top-two winners by the Associated Press. Under California’s primary system, the first and second place finisher advances to the November general election, regardless of their political affiliation.

Ma is a certified public accountant serving as state treasurer. She previously sat on the California Board of Equalization and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She also served three terms in the California Assembly.

Romero is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine School of Public Policy. She served as a Democrat in the Assembly and state Senate, becoming the Senate’s first woman majority leader in 2005.

Other notable candidates included former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs and Josh Fryday, a member of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s cabinet. Both are Democrats.

The position is largely ceremonial. The lieutenant governor serves on various boards that oversee the University of California, California State University and community college systems, and can be called upon to break a tie in the state Senate. If the sitting governor dies, resigns or is removed from office, the lieutenant governor would assume the role.

Ma and Romero have offered some similar viewpoints. Both candidates previously expressed support for the death penalty and opposition to the state’s plan to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

Neither candidate supports the controversial Billionaire’s Tax Act. Romero, however, has further vowed to shun all potential tax increases.

Ma and Romero will now face off in November. The winner will replace Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who is finishing her second term and could not seek reelection. Kounalakis instead ran for state treasurer.

June 10 (UPI) — Maine Democrat Graham Platner secured his party’s nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins in November and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., failed to advance in her gubernatorial bid.

Primaries in Maine, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota shed some light on where voters stand heading into November’s midterms. Platner’s victory in Maine, running on a progressive platform seeking to shake up the establishment, came in spite of a series of controversies during his campaign.

Platner received nearly 75% of votes in his primary as of Tuesday. Among his main challengers was Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign when pre-primary polls showed Platner with a commanding lead.

“Over the last nine months I have seen Mainers come together behind a vision to take back our power from corporations and billionaires,” Platner said Tuesday.

Democrats have targeted Collins’ seat as a key to earning a majority in the Senate.

“Over the past year, we have created a path to win a Democratic Senate majority and put a stop to the chaos and damage of the Trump administration by defeating the Republicans who enable his harmful agenda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, wrote Tuesday. “In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.”

Trump’s endorsement in South Carolina’s gubernatorial race advanced to a June 23 runoff. State Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Attorney General Alan Wilson were the top two vote-getters on Tuesday but neither surpassed the 50% threshold. Trump endorsed Evette over Mace, who has often aligned with Trump throughout her career.

Mace was one of the few Republicans to criticize Trump and his administration over the release of files related to the investigation into convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“I chose to expose the abusers of children. And apparently, I chose wrong if the goal was winning an election,” Mace posted on social media on Tuesday. “I’m at peace with that. Because when a candidate is OK with corruption and cover-ups — something is broken. That’s not a political opinion. That’s a moral emergency.”

The race for Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham‘s Senate seat in South Carolina has been set as the incumbent earned more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff election later this month. Graham will be challenged by Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who ran for Congress in 2022.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, clinched one of the top spots in California’s gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, earning him the right to challenge veteran Democratic politician Xavier Becerra in the November election to determine the state’s next governor.

The contest offers voters two starkly different politicians. Hilton was endorsed by President Trump and has wooed his MAGA supporters, blaming Democratic policies for California’s homelessness crisis, high cost of living and other entrenched ills. Becerra campaigned as a battle-tested warrior against the Republican president and a champion of affordable healthcare. He could make history as the state’s first elected Latino governor.

Hilton’s victory was declared by the Associated Press on Tuesday, days after Becerra secured one of the top spots and a week after the June 2 election. Under California’s primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary advance to the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation. According to the latest vote count, which is ongoing, Becerra has a slight edge over Hilton.

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, center, flanked by lieutenant governor candidate Gloria Romero, left, and California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin, right, hold a press conference to discuss election and voting reforms at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk headquarters on Tuesday in Norwalk.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Democrat Tom Steyer finished in third place. The hedge fund founder and environmental activist spent $216 million of his own money on his campaign, and now joins the legion of other high-profile, self-funding candidates rejected by California voters.

Becerra heads into the Nov. 3 election with a distinct advantage — Democratic voters in California outnumber Republicans by an almost 2-to-1 margin, a telltale reason why no GOP candidate has won a statewide race since 2006.

The contrast between Becerra and Hilton, both on policy and political personas, couldn’t be more pronounced.

A British immigrant and former political advisor to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Hilton, 56, embraces traditional conservative ideals that have echoed across the country since the days of President Reagan — cutting taxes, weeding out government fraud and waste and promising to unbridle entrepreneurs and homebuilders from stifling state regulation.

But he’s also ventured into MAGA territory, declining to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and promising to extradite California doctors who provide abortion pills to other states for prosecution.

Becerra, 68, came up in Los Angeles politics in the 1980s and has long supported policies to expand protections and resources for immigrants with or without legal status. Married to Harvard-educated OB-GYN Carolina Reyes, Becerra has also staunchly opposed abortion restrictions throughout his career.

In Congress and other positions, Becerra earned a reputation as a cerebral, analytical politician who would fully commit to his positions after taking time to mull them through.

A straight-laced family man with a Catholic upbringing, Becerra was more reserved during the debates — a quiet confidence that drew some voters to support him. He also faced criticism from his rivals for failing to offer detailed housing and healthcare policies.

Hilton, who cuts an unmistakable image with his bald crown and clipped English accent, proved himself as a polished communicator during the debates, skills honed by his years as a Fox News analyst.

Television hosts must translate complex issues into easily digestible sound bites, said Republican strategist Matt Klink. “Most voters want a CliffsNotes version of the issues,” Klink said.

Republican strategist Kevin Spillane credits Hilton’s TV show, “The Next Revolution,” which ran for six years, with boosting his profile, calling Fox News the most important media vehicle within the conservative and Republican framework.

Hilton “understands how politics and how communications work,” Spillane said.

He often appeared relaxed during the gubernatorial debates, at points even complimenting or joking with his rivals as they parried on stage.

At a CBS debate earlier this year, Becerra referred to President Trump, who endorsed Hilton, as the Republican candidate’s “daddy.” Hilton responded with a quip that quickly deflated the attack.

“It would be rather amazing,” said Hilton, at the possibility of being Trump’s son. “My daddy was the goalie for the Hungarian national ice hockey team.”

In an interview last week, before the election, Hilton said he enjoyed the debates. “In a weird way, I was sad when we had the last one,” he said. “I’m looking forward to debating whoever it is.”

As a former political advisor to Britain’s Conservative Party, Hilton helped usher in a green, socially liberal strain of conservatism.

He also infuriated colleagues in the coalition government, the British press reported, proposing a stream of unconventional ideas: scrapping maternity leave, abolishing job centers, even buying cloud-bursting technology so Britain would have more sunshine. In 2012, he moved full time to the Bay Area.

Hilton, who founded a nonprofit on California policies, was known for his frequent visits in the last couple of years to the state Capitol for discussions with legislators.

Rival Republican candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who was trailing Steyer in fourth place in the latest vote count, ultimately didn’t seek to appeal to those beyond his rural, MAGA base, Klink said.

By contrast, Hilton presented himself as the “more cosmopolitan” candidate who “can talk to the hedge fund manager or the small-business owner or the Sacramento lobbyist,” said Klink said.

“Hilton was more energized at the end, when it mattered,” said Spillane, contrasting the two Republicans.

Past Republican candidates, including businessman John Cox in 2018 and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman in 2010, have self-financed their campaigns with their vast fortunes.

By contrast, Hilton spent just a few million dollars on media advertising, he said in an interview last week.

He said he ignored advice from consultants who told him to do a launch announcement and then unleash a wave of ads in the last month of the campaign.

“I just said, ‘I want to do it the old-fashioned way,’ and that’s what we’ve been doing,” said Hilton in the interview before the election. “We’ve been to nearly every single county…. stepped it up with our town halls.”

Nina Royal, 83, who lives in Los Angeles and is a community advocate for her Tujunga neighborhood, voted for Hilton, saying that he understands California’s problems.

“He’s a realist,” said Royal. “He has a clear view of what needs to be done.”

Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie contributed to this report.

AUSTIN, Texas — A lawyer who represented Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton for nearly a decade over accusations of corruption and securities fraud is supporting Democrat James Talarico — and not his former client — in one of the biggest U.S. Senate races.

Talarico on Monday drew attention to his campaign winning the endorsement of Houston attorney Dan Cogdell, who was part of Paxton’s defense team during the Republican’s historic impeachment trial in 2023 that ended in acquittal.

The legal troubles that shadowed Paxton in public office in Texas are a central attack line of Talarico’s campaign, though in his endorsement, Cogdell didn’t cite concerns about his client’s past.

Cogdell said he didn’t dislike Paxton as a person and felt that Texas lawmakers were right to eventually acquit the attorney general. But as a politician, Cogdell said, Paxton is too focused on appeasing President Trump.

“I worked my ass off for the man for nine years,” Cogdell said in an interview with the Associated Press. “But that’s a different inquiry, my obligation to Ken ended at the courthouse steps and my obligation as a citizen is to do what I think is the right thing.”

Cogdell said Texas needs a lot of work, pointing to education and health care, “and to simply bootlick or rubber stamp Trump, that’s not what we need in D.C. right now.” He also recently spoke to Talarico at length on Cogdell’s podcast.ty.

Asked for comment, an aide to Paxton’s campaign said Cogdell is a Democrat and called the endorsement unsurprising.

The lead defense attorney in Paxton’s impeachment trial, Tony Buzbee, reiterated that on X. Buzbee added that he was supporting Paxton in the race.

Cogdell described himself as a registered Democrat, although voters in Texas do not register by political party. He added, however, that he considers himself a moderate who has given more campaign contributions over the years to Republican candidates than Democrats.

Talarico has given Democrats hope of flipping the statewide seat in Texas blue as the party scrambles to retake control of the U.S. Senate in November.

Paxton’s insurgent campaign beat Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary runoff last month, helped by a Trump endorsement in the final days of the race.

Bedayn writes for the Associated Press.

June 8 (UPI) — Nithya Raman will advance to a Los Angeles mayoral runoff in November, besting Spencer Pratt for second place in last week’s primary vote, sources including CNN and NBC News said Monday evening.

Raman, a City Council member, will run against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass; both are Democrats. Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is considered a progressive challenger.

Raman emerged second Monday over Republican Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star. Pratt was in second place as of primary day, but late-counted votes swung the tally toward Raman. They were part of a14-candidate field in the primary.

“Right now, we have a city that feels rudderless,” Raman told CNN before the primary. “So many positions that haven’t been filled, places where Angelenos feel abandoned on some of the most important issues facing this city. I will bring that urgency, I will bring that accountability, I will bring that focus that Los Angeles needs and that Angelenos need.”

Raman and Bass had close political ties before Raman entered the election late. Pratt campaigned on criticism of Bass’ response to the 2025 wildfires — he lost his house in last year’s Palisades fires — and homelessness.

NBC News reported that while President Donald Trump did not officially endorse a candidate in the election, he praised Pratt’s bid before the primary, saying, “I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character.”

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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Before long, what had been a soporific race turned into a surreal one.

First, Stroll crashed his Aston Martin at the final corner, causing a first safety car.

As the cars prepared to get going again, Leclerc crashed at the same place in the same way even before the race had restarted.

That led to a red flag as officials took a look at the track surface at the crumbling final corner, known as Antony Noghes.

And that meant another restart that Antonelli had to negotiate, this time with the fast-starting Ferrari alongside him.

But again he was perfect and the race surrendered to him.

Hadjar drove an excellent race battling power-unit problems and was helped by a masterstroke from Red Bull in not stopping under the first safety car, which gained him positions on Russell and Piastri.

Racing Bulls had a good day with Arvid Lindblad taking the best result of his rookie season with sixth place behind team-mate Liam Lawson.

Gasly was seventh ahead of the Williams of Alex Albon and Esteban Ocon’s Haas.

And Sergio Perez took 10th for what could be the first point for the new Cadillac team, although he faces an investigation for being incorrectly positioned on the restart after the red flag.

If he is penalised, the final point will mark the first of the season for Aston Martin, for whom Fernando Alonso finished 11th.

And there may be questions as to why so many drivers – more than a quarter of the grid – ended up speeding in the pit lane.

The votes are still being tallied but the result of Tuesday’s top-two primary election in California seems pretty clear.

Despite an uptick in his performance, hopes for third-place finisher Tom Steyer are fading along with the number of uncounted ballots, suggesting Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will face off in November.

Given the overwhelming Democratic advantage — both attitudinally and in registration — the outcome of the governor’s race might seem preordained. But it’s voters who decide elections, not know-it-all columnists.

Two of that breed, Mark Z. Barabak and Anita Chabria, can’t see into the future. But they can try to make sense of what just passed, starting with a primary season that was a strange mix of ennui and white knuckles.

Barabak: So Anita, now that the election is over how are you feeling? Relieved? Giddy? Depressed?

Chabria: Tired, with five months to go. And while it’s true neither of us can see into the future, it’s not too much of a long shot to predict that in a state where registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, the next governor will likely be blue.

So while the primary was bruising and confusing, the general election will be much more predictable — it’s Becerra’s to lose, and he’d have to try really hard to do that.

But here’s what I’ll be looking for in the lead up to November: How far will Hilton go to capitalize on this moment for personal gain? There are plenty of real issues to be discussed where the Republican-Democrat divide could offer worthy debate. What should we do about gas prices? What is the right balance between environmental regulation and building housing?

But my fear is, with little chance of winning, Hilton will instead focus on boosting his MAGA credentials.

In the past week, we’ve seen him dive headfirst into voter-fraud conspiracies, following the lead of President Trump. Hilton’s campaign is providing Trump with the biggest platform for this false propaganda of rigged elections that California has ever endured.

That is bad for our state and bad for democracy, and it’s troubling that we will likely be subjected to these lies — and that California could be used to further erode voting rights nationally — for the entire summer leading up to the midterms.

What will you be keeping an eye on?

Barabak: How Becerra spends the next five months.

One presumes he’s smart enough not to take anything for granted. Meaning he won’t spend the time between now and Nov. 3 at some swank beach resort, sipping one of those colorful cocktails with a little paper parasol while musing over his inaugural address.

So it will be interesting to see how Becerra campaigns and whether he uses the next several months to build a mandate and also to prepare California voters for the rough road ahead.

Becerra is smart enough, one would think, not to run as Mr. Sky Is Falling and tell voters, “Boy, oh, boy things are really gonna suck going forward.” But the next governor is going to face some really tough challenges, including a structural budget deficit that’s probably going to require both painful cuts and unpopular tax hikes.

On top of that, there are the inevitable disasters, be they earthquake, fire or flood, the latter quite possibly exacerbated this winter by what may be an epic El Niño. There’s also the continued challenge of dealing with a president who treats California the way a dog regards a fire hydrant.

Finally, there’s the unknowable but certain catastrophes the next governor will face.

All of it makes you wonder why anyone would want the job — though Steyer panted after it enough to burn through more than $215 million of his fortune in a bonfire of vanity.

Chabria: Steyer was bashed for being a self-funded billionaire, but what his support showed is that there is a significant contingent of voters who are tired of the status quo and want a governor with bold ideas.

California definitely faces many problems, but we are also historically a state that pushes forward on hard issues.

Universal healthcare and standing our climate ground in the face of federal rollbacks were two of Steyer’s big talking points, along with standing up to corporate influence. Becerra now inherits those thorny problems if he wants to form a more cohesive Democratic base.

Becerra hasn’t yet offered up his vision of the Golden State, as you point out. As much as it may benefit Hilton to focus on Trump in coming months, the same could be true for Becerra.

Why get into messy policy when you can run on opposing MAGA in a very blue state? I fear the next few months will be more about Trump than California.

Barabak: That’s a charitable way to look at $teyer’s campaign.

Sure, he had plenty of ideas, though I think the promise of delivering universal healthcare — a political nonstarter — was cheap pandering, not visionary leadership.

There’s no shortage of people with good ideas. The only reason anyone paid attention to Steyer, who’s never served in any elected office, was the obscene amount of money he spent on his luxury-class ego trip. So it pleases me voters didn’t reward his arrogance or buy his billionaire-turned-populist, “Amazing Grace” spiel. (“I once was blind, but now I see.”)

And I’m be gladder still that voters showed — once again — the governor’s office is not for sale.

I do agree, however, that Becerra should to more than just cry MAGA! MAGA! MAGA! for the next five months, as if that incantation is magic and will solve all our problems. That applies, by the way, to Democratic candidates everywhere.

All of that said, we should note the governor’s race has yet to be officially decided and Steyer still has at least a theoretical possibility of slipping into the top two.

What do you think about California’s prolonged, much-derided long ballot count? Is the criticism warranted?

Chabria: First, we’ll have to agree to disagree. California is on a healthcare cliff and even middle-class Americans (not just Californians) can’t afford either insurance or care.

Single-payer may be a dream, but it’s my dream — for my kids, for my community and for my state, because healthcare shouldn’t be just for the rich and that is increasingly the direction we are going. So any politician, Steyer included, who fights for inclusion rather than accepting exclusion will get my consideration.

And let’s be real — self-funded or corporate-funded — our elections are, to their detriment, too much about money. My outrage is for the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which unleashed the current no-limits mess and created a system in which it requires hundreds of millions from somewhere, anywhere to run for our highest offices.

But back to ballots: Slow is not fraud. Slow is not bad if it’s accurate. Slow allows for greater voter participation by allowing mail-in ballots, and carefully checking all ballots for problems. Slow takes into account the federal mangling of the post office that has, yes, slowed down our mail.

And, slow happens because most of our county elections offices are understaffed and budget-starved. If you want fast, you’ve got to pay for it.

So keep your britches on people and don’t buy Trump’s (or Hilton’s) manufactured hype. Every system can be improved, but there’s far worse problems than slow.

What’s your take on the ballot controversy?

Barabak: Here’s one where we agree.

California goes out of its way to make it easy to vote, which, I believe, is a very good thing. Kim Alexander of the non-partisan California Voter Foundation, who’s spent decades on the matter, has suggested ways we can have both wide access and a faster count, starting with better funding of the state’s over-extended county election offices.

This prolonged count is something Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-run Legislature could have anticipated. Shame on them for not doing more to address it.

Chabria: Any final thoughts?

Barabak: Just this. I’ve read the many plaintive pieces written about this boring, wholly-unworthy-of-the-Great-Golden-State field of gubernatorial candidates.

I, too, yearn for that perfect candidate who is firm but flexible, old but youthful in his or her thinking, masculine but also feminine, brilliant but not too smart and larger than life but also totally relatable.

Maybe in 2030.

When Nithya Raman stepped up to a podium on the night of L.A.’s mayoral primary election, she thanked her supporters for standing up to the “powerful interests” who spent millions of dollars trying to “preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo.”

“At a time when so many people have written Los Angeles off or have lost hope in the future of this incredible city,” the democratic socialist L.A. mayoral hopeful said, “you are proof that Angelenos are hungry for change.”

But as election results rolled in, the movement for change was underwhelming, or at least divided. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was in the lead, advancing to the November runoff. That left Raman locked in a battle for a second spot with Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

Bass is one of several high-profile establishment Democrats to emerge on top. In California’s gubernatorial race, centrist Xavier Becerra, a veteran of the Biden Cabinet, advanced to the runoff after being challenged from the left by billionaire green activist Tom Steyer and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter. Steyer is now behind Steve Hilton, a Republican, and battling to make the runoff.

Still reeling from the rise of Donald Trump, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling to figure out the future direction of the party.

Some progressives, inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory, saw 2026 as an opportunity to move the city further left. But the results have been mixed in key races, with veteran Democrats like Bass and Becerra eking out leads even as polls show dissatisfaction with status quo politics in California.

“This was supposed to be a change revolution, but voters clearly said no to the revolution,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “Voters want change,” she noted, “but it doesn’t appear right now that there has been an appetite for a major shift in the ideology of the city or the state.”

Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Becerra emerged as the Democratic favorite late in the election and won support from many establishment party leaders. Pundits said after a wild primary that included the implosion of Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign amid sex assault allegations, Becerra emerged as a “safe” choice.

Some opponents attacked his moderate views and his willingness to accept campaign donations from big oil companies like Chevron. But that did not stop his rise.

Bass was also beset with challenges, being an incumbent in a city beset with problems.

For her, election night marked a “victory with an asterisk,” Sadhwani said, noting that Bass is first incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades to face a runoff. “It would be wrong for Karen Bass to think that this victory … is a ringing endorsement of the work she is currently doing.”

The results underscore Bass’ unpopularity as an incumbent, garnering just 35% of the vote so far. If Raman can catch up and eventually surpass Pratt in the vote count, she could pose a considerable challenge to Bass as more young voters come to the polls in November.

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member who leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said if Bass exceeded expectations it was because they were very low.

“Coming in first in a runoff isn’t a huge victory for an incumbent mayor,” he said. “Two-thirds of the city did not vote for her. That’s not a position of strength.”

James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis, said that Becerra and Bass coming through indicates the centrist Democratic candidates were in a stronger short-term position than their rivals. But problems loom ahead, he said, as the longtime Democratic establishment that’s been governing California for the last 15 years failed to make notable progress in solving problems with affordable housing, homelessness, public transportation and education.

“I think the Democrats’ prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans’ dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,” Adams said. “But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they’re setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state’s problems while getting reelected anyway.”

Democrats in California, he said, were suffering from being in power too long.

“Whenever one party gets into a long-term, dominant position, usually because the other party is just in the midst of self-destructing … the whole thing ends in tears, because the party that is in a dominant position, they don’t have to be that good.”

As the vote count continues in the mayor’s race, democratic socialists in Los Angeles already have some wins down-ballot.

“We are gaining momentum,” said Leslie Chang, a co-chair of the 5,000-member L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a decentralized anti-capitalist group that advocates for rental protections and defunding the police. Over the last six years, Angelenos have elected four DSA-backed City Council members and a DSA-recommended city controller.

The DSA did not officially endorse Raman, because she entered the race after the group had issued endorsements and another DSA candidate was also running for mayor. However, three of the six DSA-backed candidates for citywide office were projected to win outright.

DSA Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez were reelected by such large margins they avoided runoffs. In the city attorney’s race, DSA-endorsed Marissa Roy was in the lead and the mainstream Democratic incumbent became the first city attorney ousted in a primary in nearly a century. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a progressive anti-establishment candidate who is not a DSA member but an ally of the group, led by nearly 20 percentage points.

When Chang knocked on doors, she said, some voters asked: “Well, what’s the difference between Nithya and Karen Bass?”

A few voters told her that after reviewing Bass’ and Raman’s websites, they found their platforms similar. Chang was surprised. She thought Raman articulated a clear and novel strategy for how to get L.A. out of the housing crisis, but she said some on the left took issue with her working with housing developers to reduce red tape.

Neel Sannappa, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said Raman was stymied by getting into the race late and having only a few months to campaign. It also didn’t help that a more left-wing challenger, Rae Huang, already had some momentum — not enough to win, but enough to split the left.

“Nithya does represent something real and growing in Los Angeles,” Sannappa said. “There is a hunger for more progressive, left-leaning candidates that want to make sure that we’re investing in people and not so much investing in just police … and being able to build things that are new and innovative.”

Supporters watch election results come in on their phones during Nithya Raman’s election night party at Boomtown Brewery on Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Some have criticized Raman’s coalition-building, noting she was not endorsed by her fellow DSA-backed City Council members. Others said the MIT and Harvard graduate, who has been a councilmember for six years, performed tepidly in a May televised debate and suffered from Pratt’s attempts to tie her to the establishment.

“If you’re a part of the institution, which she is,” Sadhwani said, “then you can’t exactly claim that you’re going to bring massive change.”

Sadhwani said that California’s left, in contrast to New York’s, appears to have a charisma deficit. While Pratt and Hilton had an advantage with their television backgrounds, they also spoke “in plain terms about the real problems that the state faces.”

Part of Bass’ success can also be attributed to assembling a coalition that included the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the L.A. police officers union, the L.A. County Democratic Party and immigrant rights groups.

In the mayoral race, Sadhwani said, “the dominant political coalition still has power, money, the organization.”

“If you can garner the support of the unions, then having a broader message, maybe it’s less important,” she said. “You don’t have to work quite so hard, because the unions have the base machine.”

People attend Mayor Bass’ election party for the California 2026 primaries at the LINE Hotel on Tuesday.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

Yusef Robb, a longtime Democratic strategist who is an advisor to Bass, attributed the mayor’s lead to her campaign’s success in building a broad coalition and communicating across the political spectrum. Most voters, he said, tend to think less about ideology — and whether a Democrat was mainstream or DSA-supported — than candidates’ positions on bread and butter issues.

“Mayor’s races are first and foremost about what people see outside of their front doors, when they walk their kids to school, when they drive to work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the voters look at the field and say, ‘OK, who do I trust to keep my kids from having to skip around a tent on the way to school?’ ‘Who can I trust to hire more officers?’ … and ‘Who can I trust to fight back against ICE in court through executive action and even in the streets?’ And that’s Karen Bass.”

For Democrats in this robustly blue state, part of the challenge in figuring a path forward is that every candidate — even those already in power — pitches themselves as a bona fide progressive against the status quo.

“We have led a grassroots campaign because we want to bring change to our city,” Bass said on election night. “And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

Raman also tried to tout herself as a change candidate. Articulating her platform in broad strokes rather than bread-and-butter detail, Raman said she wanted L.A. to be a place “where government actually functions and delivers every day on this city’s beautiful bighearted values, where we stand up against ICE, where we show up for our gay and trans siblings.”

But as she talked of neighborhoods “full of trees and shade … and people and good food,” she seemed low-key and equivocal. Her message was a far cry from the pressing one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward in his presidential campaigns, highlighting the millions of Americans working for “starvation wages” and a young single mother in Nevada struggling on $10.45 an hour.

Ultimately, the fight between Bass and Raman, as a struggle between mainstream and progressive Democrats, is complicated by the fact that Bass came up through the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, founding the grassroots Community Coalition in South L.A. in the 1990s.

Campaign worker Khai Dombroe prepares balloons before Nithya Raman’s election night party.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

And even though Raman is a DSA member, she has tacked to the center during the campaign, distancing herself from past calls to defund the police by saying she did not want the LAPD to lose more officers.

While Raman and Bass have much in common, the most significant difference between them is on homelessness, Sannappa said. Even though Bass comes from a political tradition of not wanting to criminalize the unhoused, he said, she understood her voters include people wanting to move homeless people off the streets.

“Brass tacks is that we need people that are going to be willing to fight for mental health services,” Sannappa said.

“I think Nithya more so represents the direction where the Democratic Party is going to have to go.”

As L.A. becomes less affordable and homeownership becomes out of reach for many Angelenos, young renters have become a rising political constituency — a shift that many say will likely propel the city leftward.

Bonin said he expected the next new rising Democratic coalition in L.A. to be a labor-renter coalition. He cited Councilmember Soto-Martinez, a renter and union organizer, as probably the best avatar of that.

But as the middle-class splinters along generational lines, other political experts warn that many ordinary Angelenos feel increasingly shut out of L.A. politics.

“Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, and today it has become the party of the educated elites,” Sadhwani said. “Perhaps one of the gifts that Donald Trump has given to Democrats is to force them to contend with the everyday issues of voters, which they seem to have distanced themselves from.”

As many Angelenos feel worse off now than four years ago, Chang said Bass was not directly responsible for every problem. Still, she said, she could have done more to move the city in the right direction.

Delaying the wage boost tied to the 2028 Olympics, she said, was a move that failed working people at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.

“My fear, of course, is people pivot away from corporate Democrats and they choose the MAGA Republican, because that is the most visible fight,” Chang said. “Or because they think, ‘Oh, well, a democratic socialist running on the Democratic Party line, this is just more of the same status quo.’ ”

WASHINGTON — After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut nine Navy officers, including all the women, from a promotion list, several female officers say they see the unusual intervention as a sign that their careers now have a ceiling and worry for the future generation of female military leaders.

The Navy had selected 31 sailors to promote from the rank of captain to one-star admiral, but Hegseth recently intervened to strike nine people from the list, including three women and two Black men, according to a Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information not permitted to be released publicly.

As a result, the Navy is not promoting a single woman to the one-star admiral rank this year even though women make up about one-quarter of all Navy officers and nearly one-third of the sea service’s midgrade ranks, according to military data from 2024.

The Associated Press spoke with eight female Navy officers of varying ranks and time in service after Hegseth’s cuts, which were reported earlier by the New York Times, became public. They spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from their superiors.

The more junior officers said they saw the development as a sign that their careers would become politicized if they rose too far in the ranks, and some said they felt they now had a limit on how far they could be promoted. Some said it made them feel less valued within the military and wondered whether that wasn’t part of the intent.

The Pentagon has not offered any rationale on why the women, or any of the other six people, were removed from the promotion list.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, said on social media last week that “military promotions are given to those who have earned them” and that the Pentagon “will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions.” The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request seeking further comment.

The Navy’s process for choosing which officers to promote to the one-star rank has been relatively constant and transparent over the years. The service convenes a group of officers, called a promotion board, that examines the records of eligible officers and chooses those deemed to be the most qualified.

The board that selected the initial slate of 31 officers for promotion was directed by then-Navy Secretary John Phelan, an appointee of President Trump, to “recommend for promotion the best qualified officers within their respective competitive category.”

The order from Phelan, who abruptly departed his post in April, said the board should consider an officer’s performance, competence and character, among other traits, as part of those qualifications.

It also said that given China’s prominence in the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, “special consideration shall be given to officers who have excelled in their knowledge of the political military affairs and U.S. strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific region, and operational contingency planning for Indo-Pacific war plans.”

Hegseth has long argued, without offering evidence, that women in the military benefit from preferential treatment and are not suited for combat roles.

“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” Hegseth told hundreds of military leaders in September.

The approach, he asserted, made the Pentagon “less capable and less lethal.”

‘A break from tradition’

Phelan’s order said the Navy cannot discriminate based on criteria such as race and sex, and it specifically noted that “this guidance shall not be interpreted as requiring or permitting preferential treatment of any officer or group of officers on the grounds of race, religion, color, sex.”

The full list of 31 people to be promoted was approved by Phelan, other Navy leaders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, before it reached Hegseth, who chose to make the changes, the Defense official said.

While Hegseth is within his rights to intervene in the list, “it’s just not the norm” and is “a break from tradition,” said Katherine Kuzminski, a researcher specializing in military recruiting and retention at the Center for New American Security think tank. She said that promotions historically have been seen as “the services’ business.”

Kuzminski noted that “this is a decision that’s not being made by the Navy — it’s being made by the secretary of Defense,” and she said Hegseth’s growing interference in operational aspects of the military services such as promotions is creating “tension” about what “normal” will look like going forward.

Some of the more senior Navy officers who spoke with the AP expressed concerns about the message it sends to the next generation of young sailors.

In addition to pulling the recent promotions of three women to admiral, Hegseth shortly after he took office fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the service’s top officer and the first woman to hold the job. He never explained his rationale.

Since then, he also has fired two other female three-star admirals without explanation.

Some of the officers who spoke to the AP said that while they were encouraging female sailors to stick with the Navy, they acknowledged that message is coming at a difficult time.

Kuzminski said the rhetoric and actions surrounding women in the military “affects individual service member decision-making and it also affects family unit decision-making,” including whether people make a career of the military.

Kuzminski said that following the months-long hold on military promotions by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) during the Biden administration, surveys showed that partisan politics spilling into the day-to-day lives of troops affected their decision-making.

One officer said this impact was not confined to women.

In conversations with other sailors in her unit, she said that male sailors were hesitant to deal with what appears to be a growing politicization of simply following the orders of previous administrations.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman cut deeper into the lead of reality television personality Spencer Pratt on Saturday, as his lead slimmed to just a single percentage point.

Pratt fell to just over 27% of the vote while Raman jumped up to slightly over 26%, according to the results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder. Pratt now leads Raman by just 7,494 votes.

“We’ve seen Nithya Raman catching up on every update and the last two in particular she’s accelerated,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data Inc. “She’s continued to gain at a rate that means she will eventually catch up unless Pratt starts getting some ballots coming in that are either geographically or demographically better for him.”

Democratic consultant Michael Trujillo, who doesn’t represent anyone in the mayoral race, said the results suggest Raman will surpass Pratt as more votes are counted.

“I think it’s over,” Trujillo said. “It appears Nithya will be in the runoff. Pratt doesn’t appear to be growing much more.”

The second-place finisher in the mayoral primary will face Mayor Karen Bass in a Nov. 3 runoff. On election night Tuesday, the Associated Press determined that Bass had secured enough votes to qualify for the runoff.

Pratt has been in second place since then, but Raman has gradually eroded his lead as mail-in ballots have been counted. The updated vote tally released Thursday showed Pratt with 29% of the vote and Raman with 23%.

With Friday’s update, Raman’s share had risen to 25% and Pratt’s shrank to 28%, for a 3 percentage point gap.

In the most recent batch of mail-in ballots counted, Raman received 23,514 votes, while Pratt gained 10,336.

Election analysts expected Raman to gain ground as the mail-in ballots were tallied, reasoning that many left-of-center voters — Raman’s base — held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates. They also say younger, more progressive voters tend to hold onto their ballots longer generally.

Although the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, Pratt is a Republican in a city that is overwhelmingly dominated by Democratic voters and elected officials.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, had Pratt running in third place behind Bass and Raman.

The poll of 1,351 likely voters conducted May 19-24 had Bass with 26% support, Raman with 25% support and Pratt with 22% support, with a 3% margin of error.

Los Angeles voters have become accustomed to seeing election results change as late-arriving ballots are tabulated. In the 2022 mayoral primary, real estate developer Rick Caruso led the pack for about a week before Bass pulled ahead.

Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for Caruso, according to a Times analysis of precinct-level returns provided by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on Wednesday, when an estimated 62% of the projected vote had been counted. Raman, by comparison, made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Pratt, whose Pacific Palisades fire home burned in the January 2025 fire, was strong there and on the Westside, as well as in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth and Sunland-Tujunga.

Raman dominated precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park, including her home base of Silver Lake.

Mail-in ballots with an election day postmark will continue to be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — One thing about the Triple Crown: Fans do not get cheated, at least when it comes to the number of races on the big day.

Just as Churchill Downs did for the Kentucky Derby and Laurel Park did two weeks later for the Preakness, Saratoga Race Course has scheduled 14 races Saturday, highlighted by the Belmont Stakes. It’s the third and final year the Belmont will be run at the upstate New York track while Belmont Park is being rebuilt.

While Laurel started its card at 7:30 a.m. PDT, the Saratoga card follows Churchill’s schedule and begins at 8 a.m. PDT, or 11 a.m. on the East Coast. And, just like the other two headline races, the Belmont is scheduled to start at 4:04 p.m. PDT, or 7:04 p.m. EDT.

It will be the 13th race of the day, with official post time listed at four minutes past the hour.

The biggest difference Saturday from the Derby and Preakness is where fans can watch the races. Fox, not NBC, has the rights to the Belmont.

The first seven races can be seen on FS2 as part of the New York Racing Assn.’s regular “America’s Day at the Races” program, which starts at 7:30 a.m. PDT and continues until noon. The eighth race, at 12:25 p.m. PDT, also will be covered by that crew but will air on Fox.

The network’s official Belmont show begins at 1 p.m. and continues until 4:30. Curt Menefee again is the host, with analysts Tom Amoss and Richard Migliore, plus handicappers Jonathan Kinchen and Chris Fallica, with other contributors such as Charissa Thompson and Tom Rinaldi.

Thompson also will host an alternate telecast geared for horseplayers from 1-4:30 on FS1.

The last of Belmont’s 14 races is set to begin just past 5 p.m. PDT, or 8 p.m. in the East. But don’t worry … FS2 will carry that and it won’t interrupt the Belmont Stakes post-race coverage.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — The Belmont Stakes is less than 34 hours away, and Cherie DeVaux is feeling stressed.

Not about the race. DeVaux has done what she can do to prepare her 3-year-old colt, Golden Tempo, for Saturday’s third leg of the Triple Crown. Questions about post position, track bias, even the increasing threat of potentially severe thunderstorms before the evening post time (4:04 PDT, Fox) are brushed aside because, as she said, those are all out of a trainer’s control.

No, it’s her makeup bag.

She forgot to bring it with her to Saratoga Race Course and she has a Fox Sports TV interview scheduled right after she finishes speaking with a reporter inside her small office adjacent to Barn 83.

“I have to be on national TV, and I have not a stitch of makeup on right now, all the while having to try to make sure I enter my horses and not forget and mess that up too badly,” DeVaux said, smiling. “So it’s been a lot.”

But DeVaux is not complaining, because it’s been a lot since 7:10 p.m. EDT on May 2, the exact time Golden Tempo crossed the finish line first in the Kentucky Derby. And those 35 days have been filled with many great experiences.

Golden Tempo’s trainer Cherie DeVaux kisses a trophy after winning the Kentucky Derby.

(Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

The coolest?

“We won the Derby,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s anything cooler than that.

“There have been a lot of really neat opportunities,” she added. “A lot of different people have reached out. But you know, just the whole experience itself.”

Winning the Derby changes anyone’s life, but it’s magnified when you make history, as DeVaux did by becoming the first female trainer to win the world’s most famous horse race. It began a whirlwind that included more than 65 TV interviews and dozens upon dozens of text messages and phone calls.

And, truthfully, there was one experience that, for a college softball player and lifelong New York Yankees fan, exceeded the others.

“I did get to throw the first pitch out at a Yankees game, which I thought was amazing,” DeVaux said. “To stand on the field and look at the cheap seats [where I sat] when I was a kid. … And I’ve had much better seats in recent times, but to really sit there and have that dichotomy of that was where you started and this is where you are, was really a profound feeling.”

Kentucky Derby winning trainer Cherie DeVaux and jockey Jose Ortiz throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on May 7.

(Ishika Samant / Getty Images)

Technically she’s back home for the Belmont, which is being run at Saratoga for the third and final year while Belmont Park is rebuilt. But she has few memories of Saratoga as a child; the family moved to Florida when she was 9 and she lived there until she was 19. Much of her family, including her parents and several siblings, live in the area, though, and DeVaux, who spends most of the year in Kentucky, said she’s been able to enjoy some time with them this week.

The big question is whether her large cheering section will be able to celebrate another victory. Handicappers are more than a bit pessimistic. Saturday’s Daily Racing Form has 1-2-3-4 selections by 19 experts, and not one selected Golden Tempo. Just two picked him second and five had him third. The consensus was he would not finish in the top four.

His chances in Kentucky were aided by a fast pace that tired out the front-runners, and on paper the Belmont figures to be run at a more moderate pace, which doesn’t always help a late-running horse. But he is a colt who relishes the distance and he has improved his Beyer Speed Figure with every start.

DeVaux is excited for the race, obviously, but she’s also eager for this “season” to end. She knows life will never be the same as it was before May 2, but she’d like to slow down a bit, in part, so she can enjoy the feeling of winning the Derby.

“I couldn’t prepare myself,” said DeVaux, who had never had a Derby starter. “I didn’t really think about winning the race. I thought Golden Tempo was going to run really well. I thought he would hit the board, … but I never allowed myself to think that he would win and what that would look like.

“And I’m one of those people I want to think about, you know, we win the race, what does that look like? But I was just so excited to be at the Derby and I wanted to just really be present, that it really didn’t cross my mind what would happen if we won the race.”

Golden Tempo’s trainer Cherie DeVaux holds her nephew while speaking to reporters after winning the Kentucky Derby on May 2.

(Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

Others weren’t prepared, either. DeVaux was carrying one of her nephews on her hip immediately after the Derby, and some people watching on TV immediately praised her for being a working mom. One problem: She doesn’t have children of her own (her husband has full custody of a teenage girl).

“Can I just not be a really good horse trainer that did something really profound and amazing in a short amount of time after I had to work my rear end off for it?” DeVaux said. “Like, why can’t that just be the story?”

Etc.

The Belmont is the 13th race on a 14-race card that begins at 8 a.m. PDT. The first seven races will be on FS2 before coverage shifts to Fox at noon (the Belmont show starts at 1). A separate handicapping-oriented show will air from 1-4:30 p.m. on FS1.

There are five Grade 1 races scheduled, including Bob Baffert’s Nysos against Michael McCarthy’s Journalism in the Met Mile (2:32 p.m.) and Baffert’s Crude Velocity against DeVaux’s Englishman in the Woody Stephens (1:52 p.m.). The Belmont is slated to start at about 4:10 p.m.

The last time Angelenos sacked an incumbent city attorney in the primaries, almost 30% of them were unemployed.

That was May 2, 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, when sprawling encampments blanketed downtown, King Kong ruled movie theaters and violent crime reached a fever pitch not seen again for almost half a century.

Incumbent City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s near-certain defeat on Tuesday may have little in common with Erwin P. Werner’s primary loss 93 years ago, but themes of Depression-era Los Angeles echo through the contest.

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice who leads the race with ballots still being counted, wooed voters with shoe-leather and social media savvy, promising to use the office to fight for wage workers and tenants. But it was the city’s powerful unions and its increasingly democratic socialist bloc that propelled her to the top spot, mirroring the coalition that drove California’s sharp left turn in the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, county prosecutor John McKinney tapped into voter frustration with homeless encampments, a blighted downtown and general distrust of City Hall to pull off a last-minute heist of the second runoff spot. McKinney only started campaigning in earnest five weeks ago, but managed to win votes with a tough-on-crime campaign — even as some categories of city crime have dipped to historic lows.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, left, shares a laugh with L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, right, at Avance Democratic Club’s politics and tacos event on May 16.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As of Thursday morning, Roy had nearly double the number of votes of Feldstein Soto. McKinney led the incumbent by 13 percentage points for the second runoff slot. The race has not yet been called, but Feldstein Soto issued a statement effectively conceding the race Wednesday morning. She acknowledged that “the voters had spoken” and referenced “her successor’s administration.”

Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ouster of Feldstein Soto would be nearly unprecedented. Werner’s 1933 loss is the only similar instance since the city adopted its current primary ballot process in 1917, according to the City Clerk’s office. No other incumbent city council member or mayor has ever failed to advance out of the primary when facing two or more opponents.

“This is not something that has happened in the lifetimes of most people who follow city government,” said Mike Bonin, former City Council member and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

McKinney’s sudden emergence in the race in May saw him hijack the incumbent’s support from law enforcement. His campaign received $3 million worth of independent expenditures. An official with a group supporting McKinney — who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media — said an internal poll showed Feldstein Soto falling nearly 10 points outside the runoff a week before election day.

Since Roy had already captured the support of the county Democratic Party and energized left-leaning voters, that put Feldstein Soto in the center, analysts said, which left her vulnerable in a race that most people casting ballots hadn’t closely followed.

“To the extent that people had any information, they knew that one of them basically wanted to be tougher and somebody on the other side wanted to be kinder, that left her with very little room to maneuver,” said Roy Behr, a longtime consultant to veteran politicians in the city.

Roy “micro-targeted” likely progressive voters in social media spots, experts said, presenting as an affable presence in her ever-present purple blazer while sharing her vision of serving as the “people’s lawyer.”

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, appears poised to finish first in the June 2 primary race for L.A. city attorney.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Boosted by a massive influx of cash from rental giant Airbnb, some of McKinney’s ads played up his hard-luck upbringing in one of New Jersey’s most violent cities. His campaign also sent out texts that painted his opponents as “George Gascón”-style Democrats, invoking the former progressive district attorney as a bogeyman for voters anxious about crime.

AI-generated videos depicted McKinney as a stoic, suit-clad crime fighter walking through a dystopian version of L.A.’s Metro system.

“The debate isn’t necessarily two candidates on one stage appealing to one person, it’s for attention and information in the same sphere,” said Spencer Slovic of Mycorrhiza Digital, who ran Roy’s digital advertising. “That battle of information will play out almost in different realms.”

Without a compelling story for her powerful but poorly understood role, Feldstein Soto often struggled to explain her achievements in office.

In a recent interview with The Times, she said she delivered on “public safety, public integrity and public services.” She went on to discuss granular improvements she made to the office, such as limiting access to law enforcement databases by former employees, modernizing internal systems and improving the rapport between the city attorney’s office and LAPD. By her own admission, she doesn’t often publicly celebrate her accomplishments.

“I didn’t hold some big press conference and hop up on a white horse and declare myself Joan of Arc and the savior of all things Los Angeles,” she said. “Which I could have done.”

Tumult during Feldstein Soto’s lone term in office was easier for voters to identify. The cost of litigation exploded. A high-ranking city lawyer accused her of abusing her power, prosecuting political enemies, mistreating employees and engaging in “inappropriate alcohol consumption.” Feldstein Soto claimed she improved her office’s rapport with the LAPD, but the police union’s decision to rescind its endorsement of her and instead back McKinney cost her a key voting bloc.

Feldstein Soto’s messaging was at times muddled and lacked the flair of her challengers, political observers said. Campaign finance records show she paid for 80 email blasts, mailers and other messages that sought to influence voters.

John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, appears set to advance to a run-off against Marissa Roy in the race for L.A. city attorney.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

In one video, she stood in front of a static background and talked for three minutes straight about her record while describing her opponents as representing the “extreme left” and “extreme right.” She attacked both for receiving large sums of money from “special interests,” especially McKinney for accepting Airbnb’s largesse. Feldstein Soto sued the rental giant for price gouging in the wake of the 2025 wildfires.

Roy’s campaign sent out 180 communications, records show, the bulk of them ads for Instagram and Facebook, where her team said they saw instantly which stories resonated with likely voters and which were duds.

Slovic said a “clip of Hydee talking about how she wasn’t going to prosecute the Trump administration” seemed to touch a nerve with voters.

“That was by far our best performing ad,” he said, adding, “What Democrats really want in primaries is someone who will fight and have some sort of backbone.”

McKinney had just 23 communications, campaign records show, plus 19 more made by independent groups. He often leaned into the same gritty visuals that defined mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s viral AI spots.

In a race for a position most voters don’t understand, McKinney’s and Roy’s ability to play a consistent character may have proved critical, political analysts said.

“The vast majority of voters started off with no strong feelings about the race,” Behr said. “Nobody had any votes locked down other than their friends and neighbors.”

June 4 (Asia Today) — The biggest upset of Wednesday’s local elections came in Seoul, where People Power Party candidate Oh Se-hoon overcame early expectations of defeat and won a dramatic late comeback victory in the mayoral race.

Oh’s win allowed the conservative bloc to hold South Korea’s capital despite a strong nationwide showing by the Democratic Party. The result immediately raised Oh’s standing as a potential conservative contender in the next presidential race.

Oh narrowly defeated Democratic Party candidate Jung Won-oh after an extremely close vote count that continued into early Thursday morning, becoming the first person to win a fifth term as Seoul mayor.

“Citizens have once again upheld the democratic principle of checks and balances,” Oh said at a press conference Thursday. “They have left Seoul as the last safeguard of democracy so that South Korea does not tilt completely to one side.”

Political observers said Oh’s victory significantly changes his political status. Holding the capital while the People Power Party struggled nationwide could become a major asset for a future presidential bid.

Oh’s campaign strategy also drew attention because he kept some distance from the party leadership under Jang Dong-hyeok and focused on his own record as incumbent mayor. Analysts said that approach may allow Oh to emerge as an independent center of gravity in any future conservative realignment.

A People Power Party official said Oh had now fully risen as a national political figure representing the conservative camp.

“This Seoul victory is virtually close to a ticket toward the presidency,” the official said.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260605010001627

In the race for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass secured a place on the November ballot. But who will challenge her is yet to be determined, as votes are still being tallied.

With 62% of the expected vote counted, reality television personality Spencer Pratt sits in second place and City Councilmember Nithya Raman trails in third. Although Pratt has declared victory, the Associated Press, which estimates the expected votes in, has not called the race.

This story is based on a snapshot of precinct-level results provided by the L.A. County registrar on Wednesday. The Times analyzed the 525,326 votes processed so far. This story will be updated when winners are finalized in early July by the secretary of state.

This map shows the margin and density of votes by precinct. Areas where a candidate leads by a wide margin, such as Brentwood for Pratt, appear darker on the map. More densely populated neighborhoods — such as Bass strongholds in Baldwin Hills and Hyde Park — appear in brighter colors. As of Wednesday, an estimated 710,000 ballots were yet to be counted, according to L.A. County officials.

The preliminary results show narrow margins among precincts on the Eastside, with some precincts showing an almost 30% split across the top 3 candidates.

Bass retained a strong lead in precincts across South L.A. compared with her 2022 race against Rick Caruso. Pratt has garnered heavy support from his neighbors in Pacific Palisades, as well as precincts in Bel-Air and Shadow Hills.

Raman, who represents Los Feliz, Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks and Encino on the city council, has so far underperformed in her home 4th District. She led in 12 of the 66 precincts, particularly in parts of Los Feliz. A few precincts in East Hollywood swung heavily for Pratt; but Bass led much of CD-4.

To win the race outright, Bass needs to secure at least 50% of the vote. She currently holds 35% of the vote and a five-point lead over Pratt. A Berkeley IGS poll released last week found that Bass and Raman would likely defeat Pratt by double digits in the event of a runoff.

Mail-in ballots with a June 2 postmark will be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.