republicans

The protracted uncertainty over control of Congress reverberated through both major political parties on Wednesday, as Democrats basked in the relief of the red wave that wasn’t and Republicans became increasingly clear-eyed that the lingering influence of former President Trump had hamstrung their party.

President Biden’s emphasis during the campaign season on the extremism of “MAGA Republicans” had been greeted skeptically by many. In the Democratic Party’s better-than-expected showing, though, he saw vindication of his appeals for civility and normalcy.

“This election season, American people made it clear: They don’t want every day going forward to be a constant political battle,” Biden said at a White House news conference. “The future of America is too promising to be trapped in endless political warfare.”

Amid high inflation and Biden’s lackluster approval numbers, Democrats’ hopes had hinged on voters being more put off by Trump’s imprint on the Republican Party — be it the divisive candidates he endorsed, the political violence that festered from his lies about election fraud, or the reversal of federal abortion protections made possible by justices he appointed to the Supreme Court.

“We knew going into the cycle that there was going to be an opportunity to rally a moral majority that is an anti-MAGA coalition,” said Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a progressive donor network. “When I say that, I include everyone from [GOP Rep.] Liz Cheney to [democratic socialist Sen.] Bernie Sanders. Think about that spectrum of the middle to the left coming together to say Republicans are just too damn extreme.”

If recent history is any guide, Trump’s not going anywhere. The once and likely future presidential candidate is unpopular, but he continues to exercise outsized sway over the Republican base, and could hobble the party for the next two years and beyond.

“While in certain ways yesterday’s election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal standpoint it was a very big victory,” Trump said on his conservative social media network, Truth Social, pointing to the record of candidates he endorsed. “219 WINS and 16 Losses in the General – Who has ever done better than that?”

The specter of the former president hampered the GOP’s ability to frame the midterm as a referendum on Biden, said Ken Spain, a GOP strategist and former spokesman for the party’s House campaign arm.

“Trump was always a looming shadow over this election, more than Republicans probably wanted to admit,” he said. “This essentially became a choice election between an unpopular president and an even more unpopular Trump.”

There were signs that patience was running thin among Republican power brokers. Notably, Trump’s much-beloved New York Post, the tabloid owned by conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, featured Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on its cover Wednesday with the headline “DeFuture.” DeSantis is widely considered Trump’s biggest threat for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Republicans still had a chance of winning both chambers of Congress as vote-counting continued Wednesday. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) projected confidence that his party would win the five additional seats necessary to take the majority there, and announced his intention to run for speaker of the House.

Whether he secures a majority may come down to his home state. California’s 11 competitive races remained unsettled as of Wednesday evening, with results trickling in slowly, as is common with the state’s methodical ballot-counting procedures.

Republicans had targeted incumbent Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Mike Levin in Orange County, as well as an open seat in the Central Valley, as possible pick-ups. But Democrats were also watching the returns for the potential to oust vulnerable GOP Reps. David Valadao of Hanford and Ken Calvert of Corona.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin notched a close win over Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes, giving Republicans a 49-48 advantage in the Senate, with races in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada yet to be decided.

With neither candidate in Georgia winning more than 50% of the vote, the race will go to a Dec. 6 runoff, like the one that decided Senate control in 2020. A 50-50 split in the Senate would let Democrats maintain control with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote.

Republicans made some successful pushes into blue territory; in New York, for example, they appeared likely to win four Democratic-held House seats. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat who led his party’s efforts to keep the House, conceded his own race Wednesday morning to Mike Lawler, a Republican state assemblyman.

Still, the night was distinctly underwhelming for a party that contemplated a blowout win in the House and an assured majority in the Senate.

“Definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday night on NBC as he predicted a narrow win for Republicans in the Senate.

Paradoxically, a small Republican majority in the House would likely give Trump more leverage there, as McCarthy would have to depend on continued support from acolytes of the former president, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, to exercise the GOP’s majority power.

Biden, speaking at the White House on Wednesday, said he had not had much occasion to interact with McCarthy but planned to talk with him later in the day. The president promised to work with Republicans in Congress, but noted pointedly that the American people had also sent the message that they wanted the GOP to show similar cooperation.

The president was happy to point out that his party had defied expectations, noting that “while the press and the pundits [were] predicting a giant red wave, it didn’t happen.”

National exit polls gave a glimpse into why Republicans fizzled. The surveys showed inflation was a top concern among voters. But abortion ranked second. That, and the relative weakness of Trump-backed candidates, helped Democrats stay in the fight.

Many voters appeared willing to swallow their disappointment with Biden. An NBC exit poll showed Democrats narrowly winning — 49% to 45% — among voters who “somewhat disapprove” of Biden’s performance.

Results in Michigan underscored the extent of the Republican Party’s disappointments. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom Trump had attacked relentlessly, defeated his endorsed candidate, Tudor Dixon, and Democratic incumbents held on to the state’s attorney general and secretary of state posts and gained control of the Legislature as well.

The GOP failed to oust Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a vulnerable Democrat in a Michigan swing district that barely backed Biden two years ago. Elsewhere in the state, a Trump-backed candidate — who in the primary beat Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican who had voted to impeach the former president — lost in the general election, costing Republicans a seat in the surprisingly tight battle for control of the House.

Michigan voters also approved a ballot measure striking down a 1931 ban on abortion, and voters in Kentucky rejected an initiative that would have amended the state constitution to make clear it did not protect abortion rights.

The Republicans’ loss of a Senate seat in Pennsylvania could prove the most consequential if Democrats keep the chamber. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated Mehmet Oz, a television doctor and first-time candidate backed by Trump. Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, painted the untested Oz as an elite carpetbagger.

Many of the gubernatorial candidates Trump backed also lost or were in danger of losing as of Wednesday afternoon. DeSantis’ double-digit win in Florida, as well as his strong coattails for Republicans in the House, served as a stark contrast. But Trump has said he will run again even if party leaders prefer DeSantis. Opinion polls, at least for now, show the former president as the prohibitive favorite to capture the party’s nomination.

Jason Miller, an advisor to Trump, told the BBC on Wednesday morning that he was urging Trump to postpone an announcement that he will run again from next week — as he has been teasing — to December, to avoid distracting from a potential Senate runoff in Georgia. But Miller said he remained 100% certain that Trump would run.

“Many of the people who are championing Ron DeSantis for president are the same people who were skeptical of President Trump ever since he came down the escalator in 2015,” Miller said, recalling Trump’s improbable announcement for the 2016 race.

Miller predicted that Trump would “have his hands full” but would ultimately win the nomination again.

Mason reported from Los Angeles and Bierman from Washington. Times staff writer Erin B. Logan contributed to this report from Washington.

Democrats on Wednesday celebrated an election win in Virginia that could put them slightly ahead in the national redistricting competition that President Trump triggered in an attempt to preserve his party’s House majority in this year’s midterms, but it will not be the final round.

Now that it’s been approved by voters, the new Virginia map will have to clear additional legal hurdles. On Wednesday, the state attorney general’s office said it would immediately appeal a ruling earlier in the day from a judge in rural southern Virginia who ordered that the results of Tuesday’s vote not be certified.

Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court will decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win as many as four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map voters narrowly approved Tuesday.

What happens next in Florida also will matter.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature is to meet in a special session next week that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis called in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to issue an opinion by the end of June in a Louisiana case that could overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and lead to redrawn political maps across the South, though almost all of those could not happen until 2028.

After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats could tentatively claim that they netted 10 seats nationally from the mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine that Republicans claim. Even if things swing again in the GOP’s favor, the net result of Trump’s campaign would be at best an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval rating is dropping and Republican anxiety over losing control of Congress in November is rising.

“We have successfully blunted Trump’s attempt to completely hijack the midterms,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Many Republicans agreed.

“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you’re going to pick a fight, at least win it,” Ari Fleischer, who was a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on the social media site X after the Virginia vote. “All this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, argued that it is too soon to declare one party a victor.

“It’s an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it’s far too early for sweeping statements on the final outcome,” he said.

Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling groundless accusations of fraud similar to ones he made after losing the 2020 presidential election. He called the Virginia vote “RIGGED” and “Crooked” in a post on his social media site and added, “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

Redistricting spread from Texas to other states

Redistricting is typically done every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed a redrawing in Texas, prodding the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to add up to five winnable House seats for his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have since created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.

Democrats began to fight back, even though they were more constrained because several Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than lawmakers and governors.

To counter Texas, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, pushed the Democratic-controlled Legislature to place a redistricting initiative on last fall’s ballot. After voters overwhelmingly approved it, the measure will replace a commission-approved map with one that could gain Democrats five seats.

Democrats reclaimed the Legislature and governor’s office in November in Virginia and swiftly moved to replicate California’s move with an even more aggressive redistricting plan. It replaces a congressional map imposed by a court after the last census that had resulted in a 6-5 edge for Democrats with one that could allow Democrats to win as many as 10 seats.

“We are not going to let anyone tilt the system without a response,” state Senate President L. Louise Lucas said at a news conference Wednesday.

Courts could still have a say on redistricting

In Washington, U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York warned Florida Republicans, who have been openly nervous about redrawing their district boundaries and potentially spreading their core voters too thin before an election that appears to be trending against them.

“Our message to Florida Republicans right now is, ‘F around and find out,’” Jeffries said.

House Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the super political action committee aligned with House Democrats, has spent nearly $60 million to push back against Republicans’ redistricting efforts. Some $40 million of that was on the Virginia campaign.

Another obstacle in Florida is an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that was approved by state voters in 2010. It is likely that any new Florida map would trigger significant litigation, although six of the state Supreme Court’s seven justices were appointed by Republicans.

Nicholas Stephanopolous, a Harvard law professor, said a challenge for DeSantis is that the Florida amendment forbids drawing lines for purely partisan purposes, so he has to find some other excuse for revising the map. “Even with that sort of acquiescent state supreme court, I don’t think it’s a done deal,” Stephanopolous said.

The Virginia move comes with its own legal issues. Republicans have challenged the process that Democrats used to place the measure on the ballot and the state Supreme Court opted to wait for the vote before even scheduling arguments in the case. It is unclear when a ruling could come.

Wednesday’s ruling stopping certification came from a separate case that Republicans filed with the same lower court judge, whose initial ruling against the initiative was put on hold by the state supreme court.

“The ballot box was never the final word here,” Terry Kilgore, the Virginia House Republican leader, said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Serious legal questions remain about both the wording of this referendum and the process used to put it before voters.”

The biggest legal wild card is held by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its conservative majority could throw out a requirement under the Voting Rights Act that in areas with a large minority population, mapmakers draw districts that are more favorable to the election of minority candidates.

That provision has led to the creation of several majority-minority congressional seats, especially in the South. Without it, Republicans in conservative states could shrink the number of U.S. House seats winnable by Democrats even further.

But it’s unlikely that any state other than Louisiana, which brought the lawsuit the high court will rule on, would be able to adjust its congressional lines in time for November even if the court eliminates that provision, known as Section Two. That’s because the November election is already officially underway in most states and candidate filing deadlines — and, in some cases, primary elections — have already passed.

Riccardi and Lieb write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Leah Askarinam in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Many of the groups that helped elect Donald Trump as president again are deeply unhappy with his performance, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

Trump’s return to the presidency was fueled by a wide-ranging coalition that built on his loyal base of supporters. Now that Trump has been in the White House for more than a year, the survey of more than 2,500 U.S. adults from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that many key groups — including Hispanic adults, younger adults and men — are increasingly dissatisfied with his presidency.

The poll was conducted from April 16 through Monday, as oil prices fluctuated and Americans spent more at the gas pump.

It’s a particularly bad moment for Trump, a Republican whose economic approval slumped over the past month as the Iran war drives prices higher. But AP-NORC polls show that discontent has been building among critical segments of the population over the past year.

Trump’s overall approval among Hispanic adults has fallen 16 percentage points since March 2025, and his support has declined by 9 percentage points among men.

And while Trump’s base is still largely behind him — most Republicans approve of his performance — there are signs that his second term may not be living up to their expectations.

Here’s what polling shows about Trump’s current status with four important groups:

Hispanic adults

Hispanic Americans have grown increasingly discontented with Trump over the past year.

About one-quarter of Hispanic adults approve of how he’s handling the presidency in the new poll, down from about 4 in 10 in March 2025.

That decline has been visible since late last year — suggesting that it’s not just the war in Iran or recent spikes in gas prices that are leaving this group unhappy.

Trump’s restrictive immigration approach may be playing a role. Only about one-quarter of Hispanics approve of his handling of immigration, down from 36% at the beginning of his term.

His immigration tactics appear to be particularly unpopular among younger Hispanics — a group with which he made gains in 2024. Only 18% of younger Hispanic adults approve of his performance on immigration, compared with 40% of Americans overall.

There is also broad discontent about the state of the U.S. economy among Hispanics. Only about one-quarter of Hispanic adults approve of how Trump is handling that issue, and about 2 in 10 say they approve of his approach to the cost of living. Few Hispanic adults, about 2 in 10, describe the nation’s economy as “good.”

Young adults

Trump’s overall approval with Americans under age 45 has slid over the past year, falling from 39% in March 2025 to 28% in the latest poll.

Younger women have a particularly dim view of Trump’s handling of the economy.

Only about 2 in 10 women under age 45 approve of how Trump is handling the economy, including only 7% of younger Hispanic women who approve of his economic approach. More young men, about 3 in 10, approve of him on this issue.

Trump’s struggles among young adults extend to other groups, too. Only about one-third of white adults under age 45 approve of his overall performance, compared with 45% of white adults age 45 or older.

A downtick among men

Trump made broad appeals to men throughout his 2024 campaign, and most male voters backed Trump in the presidential election over Democrat Kamala Harris. In particular, he made slight but significant gains with Black and Hispanic men, who were drawn by his vows to revitalize the economy.

Since he reentered office, though, American men have become slightly less likely to approve of his performance, declining from 47% at the start of his second term to 38% in the most recent poll.

There are signs that Black men, in particular, aren’t seeing Trump’s economic promises pan out. Black men are more likely than white or Hispanic men to disapprove of Trump’s approach to the presidency, as well as his approach to the economy, the cost of living and Iran. Only about 1 in 10 Black men say they approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living, and roughly 2 in 10 approve of how he’s handling the economy.

Hispanic men, too, have a relatively dim view of Trump’s overall performance. About 3 in 10 approve of how Trump is handling the presidency, regardless of their age. That support is stronger among white men, with about half approving of Trump.

While young Republicans are frustrated, MAGA still backs Trump

Trump has benefited from Republicans’ loyalty for years, but there are recent signs of frustration even within his base.

Roughly two-thirds of Republicans approve of Trump’s job performance. That is down slightly from 82% near the start of his second term and is generally in line with the GOP low point from his first term.

But only about half of Republicans overall approve of Trump’s approach to the cost of living, and a majority of Republicans under age 45 disapprove of him on that issue.

Trump is still buoyed by the support of his MAGA base, even as he faces backlash from conservative media figures on some of his recent actions in Iran.

About 9 in 10 MAGA Republicans — those who consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement — approve of Trump’s job performance, and a similar share approve of his handling of Iran.

It’s a good sign for Trump that his most robust supporters are still in his corner, but not all Republicans identify with MAGA. About half of Republicans, 54%, say they consider themselves MAGA supporters.

Among non-MAGA Republicans, Trump’s approval is much lower, at 44%.

Sanders and Thomson-Deveaux write for the Associated Press. The AP-NORC poll of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

April 23 (UPI) — Senate Republicans have again blocked the Democrats from curbing President Donald Trump‘s ability to wage war with Iran, as negotiators try to find a diplomatic end to the conflict during the fragile cease-fire.

The Senate voted 51-46 on Wednesday afternoon against Sen. Tammy Baldwin‘s War Powers Resolution, the fifth time since March 4 that the Senate has voted against directing the removal of U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran until authorized by Congress.

As with previous votes, Wednesday’s was mostly along party lines with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky again voting with his Democratic colleagues, and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania again voting with the Republicans.

“This entire war has been unnecessary, illegal and unwise. And we need to put a check on this president before it gets even worse,” Baldwin said from the Senate floor on Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, the president has shown us that he did not have a plan after day one. The president said the war would be over in a matter of days; we are coming up on the two-month mark with no real end in sight. And over the course of 50-plus days we have seen nothing short of a disaster.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a veteran, vowed in a statement that the Democrats will continue to do all in their power to end the war.

“It’s infuriating that Senate Republicans keep shirking their oaths and giving Donald Trump the green light to plunge our nation even deeper into his war of choice, further endangering our troops abroad and surging prices at home,” she said.

“This wanna-be dictator keeps breaking every single promise he’s made to the American people who are sick and tired of watching Republicans duck their responsibility to stop this chaos.”

The war began Feb. 28 with the United States and Israel attacking Iran.

Since then, 13 Americans have been killed. At least 3,646 people have been killed in Iran, according to HRANA.

Gas prices have surged as Iran has restricted access to the important Strait of Hormuz energy transportation route, and the United States is enforcing a blockade of Iran’s ports, cutting it off from sea-based trade.

The vote was held as a two-week cease-fire was to end before President Donald Trump announced an indefinite extension amid negotiations. On Wednesday, Iran’s military claimed to have seized two cargo ships in the conflict over the waterway.

Since the war began, Democrats have been seeking to rein in Trump’s war powers, arguing the ongoing war with Iran violates the Constitution, which mandates that only Congress has the power to declare war.

Democrats in the Senate have pledged to use their powers to force weekly debates on the war as well as weekly votes, forcing Republicans to repeatedly and publicly state their position on the conflict.

The vote was held less than a week before the 60-day limit of the war passes. On April 28, the War Powers Act will compel Trump to seek congressional authorization for the war.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has said that Trump should have sought Congress’ authorization, and appears to be leading Republican efforts to draft legislation for the continuation of the use of military force as that deadline comes.

“My focus is on the safety of America’s armed forces and the American civilians who are on the ground in the Middle East,” she said in a statement in early March, just days after the war began.

“At this point, we have little choice but to continue the military operation to degrade and destroy Iran’s capability for nuclear weapons.”

WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center says it’s the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and faces possible charges over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

The civil rights group made the announcement on Tuesday, saying President Trump’s administration appears to be preparing legal action against it or some of its employees.

“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.

The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

The SPLC previously paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities, often sharing it with local and federal law enforcement, Fair said. It was used to monitor threats of violence, he said, adding that the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

He said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The SPLC regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.

The SPLC came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The SPLC included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the SPLC, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the SPLC had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.

House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”

Binkley and Richer write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump had something urgent to address while flying back to Washington from his Mar-a-Lago estate on a recent Sunday.

It wasn’t the Iran war, nor the partial government shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding. He was focused on a monumental issue of a different kind, hoisting artist renderings of the $400-million White House ballroom he’s building, complete with hand-carved “top-of-the-line” Corinthian columns.

“I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. I’m fighting wars and other things,” Trump said before extensively detailing plans for “the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”

His divided attention has become a Democratic point of attack and a concern for some Republicans who worry he’s not spending enough time on issues that voters care most about ahead of November’s midterm races.

The contrast was on full display Thursday, when, as Trump flew to Las Vegas to discuss tax cuts for Americans earning tips, his administration was pushing ahead with another of his splashy projects: Plans to build a 250-foot Triumphal Arch near the Lincoln Memorial replete with a Lady Liberty-like statue and a pair of golden eagles.

The president’s ability to speak to the concerns of working people has always seemed incongruous with his biography as a billionaire real estate developer. Yet his populist policies and emphasis on the economy during his 2024 campaign helped catapult him back to the White House.

Republican strategist Rick Tyler noted that, when Trump first ran for president in 2016, his wealth was a selling point.

“While other people, like Mitt Romney, played down how rich he was, Trump was giving free helicopter rides at the Iowa State Fair,” Tyler said. “People loved it.”

Still, Trump’s preoccupation with some of the gilded trappings of the presidency, as more Americans worry about bills, has drawn accusations that he’s a modern-day Marie Antoinette.

“ ‘Fighting wars’ and surging gas prices, yet Trump has time to brag about his billionaire backed ballroom,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) responded on X to Trump’s Air Force One presentation.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential hopeful, has been more direct in comparing Trump to the last queen before the French Revolution, who has come to embody extravagant opulence — even posting an AI-generated image of Trump’s face on her body on social media.

“TRUMP ‘MARIE ANTOINETTE’ SAYS, ‘NO HEALTH CARE FOR YOU PEASANTS, BUT A BALLROOM FOR THE QUEEN!’” Newsom wrote in October 2025, at the start of last fall’s 43-day government shutdown.

White House says Trump’s success benefits all Americans

Asked about opponents invoking Marie Antoinette, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump “is going to go down in history as the most successful and consequential president in our lifetime.”

“His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him,” Ingle said in a statement.

The president faced similar critiques during his first term. But lately he’s been unabashed about accusations he’s disconnected from Americans’ worries about high costs, which could leave Republicans with an uphill battle to retain control of Congress.

Republicans have been loath to question Trump, though notably there has been little criticism of a federal judge’s ruling that work on the project must stop until it has congressional approval. The GOP-controlled House and Senate also haven’t prioritized legislation to move the ballroom project forward.

“I’m not much into architecture,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said last fall.

About two-thirds of Americans said Trump is “out of touch” with the concerns of most people in the United States today, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from February, though the same percentage said the same about the Democratic Party.

Presidents are usually removed from voters, separated by layers of security and surrounded by adoring subordinates. In her book “Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again,” Elaine Kamarck argues that presidents get too focused on their own political narratives rather than the public’s concerns. Yet, when it comes to Trump, “All of this stuff is frankly unique to him.”

She pointed to the ballroom as well as Trump’s other White House renovations, soon adding his signature to paper currency and renaming the Kennedy Center after himself.

“It’s a reflection, I think, of his own background as a businessman and somebody who made his fortune selling his name,” said Kamarck, who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House.

While Trump focuses on the ballroom and other Washington projects, some public work projects in other parts of the country have languished.

Joe Meyer, the former mayor of Covington, Ky., spent years pushing for critical improvements to the Brent Spence Bridge connecting his town with Cincinnati, a project listed as a top federal priority dating back to Trump’s first administration.

Federal funds for improvements were approved under President Biden but held up by a Trump-ordered review. Work is finally set to begin later this year, though delays will likely limit design options and slow the project, Meyer said.

“The ballroom is Washington inside-baseball,” Meyer said. “The bridge is just a wreck. It’s frustration that we’ve been dealing with forever.”

A $100 tip and a golden tractor

Trumpeting new tax deductions for tips, Trump staged ordering McDonald’s to the Oval Office — which he has adorned with gold flourishes — and tipped the grandmother making the delivery $100. When she described large medical bills from her husband’s cancer treatments, Trump said she should bring him to an upcoming UFC fight on the White House lawn.

When hundreds of farmers were invited to the White House for an agricultural policy speech, they stood on the South Lawn beside a tractor that had been painted gold. It drizzled, but Trump stayed dry, addressing them from a covered second-floor balcony.

“You don’t mind rain,” the president told the farmers below.

He then flew to Miami for a conference of Saudi investors who, the president noted, were too rich to be impressed by U.S. families scrounging to save up $5,000.

“I know they’re looking like, ‘What the hell is $5,000?’ ” Trump joked. “Their shoes cost them more than $5,000.”

When asked in February, meanwhile, for his message to young people wanting to buy a home, Trump replied: “Save a little longer. Wait a little longer.”

Members of the Cabinet have also fed the perception that Trump’s promised “Golden Age” may not be arriving for everyone. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. advised Americans to buy liver instead of beef.

“If you go and buy a steak, it’s still pretty expensive. But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it’s great meat. And it is very, very affordable. Or liver, or, you know, all these alternatives,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said people could still afford meals consisting of “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing.”

Texas-based Republican consultant Brendan Steinhauser said he thinks that Trump “can kind of get away with” building a ballroom because voters have come to expect that from him as a brash dealmaker and businessman.

But Steinhauser said he worries that dramatic increases in gas prices and a potentially weakening economy could resonate with voters. Ahead of the midterms, Steinhauser said, Democrats could score points “trying to make it more about Trump and his oligarch friends.”

Price and Weissert write for the Associated Press. AP writers Linley Sanders in Washington and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Senate approved a short-term renewal until April 30 of a controversial surveillance program used by U.S. spy agencies, following a chaotic, post-midnight scramble in the House to keep the authority from expiring.

The measure cleared the Senate by voice vote, without a formal roll call, as Congress raced to meet a Monday deadline. It now heads to President Trump, who had pushed for a clean 18-month extension, for his signature.

GOP leaders in the House rushed lawmakers back into session late Thursday with a series of back-to-back votes that collapsed in dramatic failure, before they quickly pushed ahead the stopgap measure as they race to keep the surveillance program running past Monday’s expiration date.

First they unveiled a new plan that would have extended the program for five years, with revisions. Then they tried to salvage a shorter 18-month renewal that Trump had demanded and Speaker Mike Johnson had previously backed. Some 20 Republicans joined most Democrats in blocking its advance.

Shortly after 2 a.m. they quickly agreed to the 10-day extension, which was agreed to on a voice vote without a formal roll call. It next goes to the Senate, which is gaveling for a rare Friday session, as Congress races to keep the surveillance program running.

“We were very close tonight,” said Johnson after the late-night action.

But Democrats blasted the middle-of-the-night voting as amateur hour. “Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., during a fiery floor debate.

At the center of the standoff that has stretched throughout the week is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies to collect and analyze vast amounts of overseas communications without a warrant. In doing so, they can incidentally sweep up communications involving Americans who interact with foreign targets.

U.S. officials say the authority is critical to disrupting terrorist plots, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage.

Surveillance program fight is a debate over privacy and security

Its path to passage has teetered all week in a familiar fight, as lawmakers weigh civil liberties concerns against intelligence officials’ warnings about national security risks.

Opponents of the surveillance tool point to past misuses. FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when searching intelligence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a 2024 court order.

Trump and his allies had lobbied aggressively all week for a clean renewal of the program, without changes.

A group of Republicans traveled to the White House on Tuesday, and on Wednesday CIA Director John Ratcliffe spoke directly with GOP lawmakers. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday there had “been negotiations late into the night with the White House and some of our members.”

“I am asking Republicans to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this week. “We need to stick together.”

The result of days of negotiations

Thursday’s proceedings came to a standstill as lawmakers retreated behind closed doors and Johnson reached for an agreement to resolve the standoff.

Shortly before midnight GOP leaders announced a new proposal, a five-year extension, with revisions. The changes were designed to win over skeptics of the surveillance program who have demanded greater oversight to protect Americans’ privacy.

Among the changes are new provisions to ensure that only FBI attorneys can authorize queries on U.S. persons, and to require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to review such cases, said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., during the debate.

But the final product, a 14-page amendment, did not go far enough for some holdouts in either party.

With Johnson controlling a slim majority, he has little room for dissent. As the Republicans fell short on both efforts before the short extension, a handful of Democrats stepped in to try to help them advance the longer extensions, but most Democrats were opposed.

“We just defeated Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a 5-year FISA authorization tonight,” said Democratic Rep, Ro Khanna of California. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.”

Cappelletti and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — In a rare bipartisan moment, the House passed legislation Thursday that would extend temporary protections for Haitian immigrants, a long-shot effort fighting back against President Trump’s attempts to end the program.

The bill, pushed forward by House Democrats with a group of Republicans over the objections of the GOP leadership, would require a three-year extension of temporary protected status for Haitians by the Trump administration. That would allow hundreds of thousands of qualifying immigrants to remain in the United States without fear of deportation.

The vote was 224-204, drawing applause in the chamber. But it faces uncertainty in the Senate, and the Republican president would almost certainly seek to veto it.

“I know firsthand how important our Haitian neighbors are to our communities, to our civic life, to our culture, to our workforce, to our economy,” said Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who is co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus and represents one of the largest Haitian communities in the country.

During the debate, she recounted the number of Haitian immigrants working in healthcare, housing construction and other industries. Haitians with temporary legal status “are not the problem, quite the contrary, they are part of the solution,” she said.

Pressley has said deporting Haitians back to the troubled Caribbean country would be a “death sentence,” given the effects of natural disasters and gang violence. “Congress can do the right thing,” she said.

Ten Republicans, many from districts with large numbers of Haitian residents, joined all Democrats and one independent in voting for passage.

Congress tries to act before the Supreme Court does

The effort to help 350,000 Haitians living lawfully in the United States comes as the administration is working to end the temporary legal status for several groups, exposing them to deportation.

In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court is prepared to consider a fast-track case that would end the protected status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants in a challenge widely seen as threatening the broader program. The administration filed emergency appeals after lower courts stopped the immediate end of the program.

It is part of the administration’s efforts to strip certain immigrant groups of legal status as the White House works to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of conducting the largest mass deportation operation in history. Some 1.3 million people fleeing countries around the world have been granted temporary protected status in the U.S.

The protections for Haiti, first approved after a devastating 2010 earthquake, have been extended multiple times. The State Department warns Americans not to travel to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest.”

Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy organization, fought back tears as she described the fear of deportations coursing through the community.

“We are asking, where will you be? On the right side of history?” she said at a news conference outside the Capitol. “Or continuing to cause trauma to people who are asking for nothing other than safety and protection?”

Trump has described migrants from poorer countries in vulgar terms, and he has falsely accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.

The conservative majority court has allowed the end of temporary legal status for a total of 600,000 people from Venezuela while lawsuits play out, leaving them to face potential deportation.

Lawmakers debate whether to help Haitians or stick with Trump

Rep. Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) whose district includes Long Island’s Haitian community, said she promised constituents she would work to protect their status. She introduced the legislation with Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York as soon as she took office last year.

“It’s cruel to expect Haitians to be forced to return to these deadly, dangerous conditions,” she said at a news conference. “Human lives are at risk.”

Lawler said there are differences of opinion on immigration policy, but that Haitian immigrants have become vital to his community and forcing them out would be unjust and unwise.

“They are small business owners, they are nurses, they are caregivers, they participate in our economy and take care of American citizens,” he said. “Congress has a responsibility to act.”

But Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) decried the number of immigrants, including Haitians, who have entered the U.S., and cited Democratic efforts to halt funding for enforcement and deportation efforts.

“Make temporary permanent,” he said, “that’s their plan.”

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) said the program was “backdoor amnesty” for foreigners.

To Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), the temporary status first granted under the Obama administration has become “an open-ended invitation” for immigrants to enter the country, including some illegally, and remain.

“The Trump administration has heeded the cries of the American people,” he said.

Using a discharge petition to force votes

The vote was the latest effort by House Democrats to maneuver past the Republican majority using a discharge petition — once a rare tool, but now used increasingly to form bipartisan coalitions.

The discharge petition process forces the bill to the House floor for consideration, powering past House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leaders. It was used to help pass legislation that required the Justice Department to release the files of the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and are typically able to swat back such efforts from Democrats. But Democrats and Republicans have formed bipartisan alliances to reach the majority needed on the discharge petitions.

Pressley’s effort to discharge the bill won support from four Republicans on the initial petition, and several more once it came to the floor vote.

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

Americans could be forgiven if they’re unaware that President Trump recently performed one of his most essential tasks and sent his annual budget request to Congress, though months late and stunningly incomplete.

After all, so much else has been dominating the news lately: the Mideast war that Trump promised not to start. Price rises he’d vowed to end. His repeated insults of Pope Leo XIV. His portraying himself as Jesus Christ, then lying about having done so. An incompetent attorney general to fire. And the president’s actual priorities — plans for a $400-million White House ballroom and a massive “Triumphal Arch” nearby!

It’s a lot.

Once again, as in Trump’s first term, the public and press are inattentive to the nation’s fiscal health relative to past years. But that reflects the president’s own disengagement with reconciling spending and revenue — this from a president many Americans voted for based on his purported prowess as a businessman. For decades back to Ronald Reagan’s time, so-called deficit wars in Washington were a big story. Now, even Republicans in Congress complain of Trump’s absence from the fiscal fray as they struggle to belatedly finish this year’s budget work that was due last fall, and to end a weeks-old partial government shutdown, before turning to the budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

Yet it’s worth paying attention to U.S. budgets even if Trump won’t, for the sake of our children and grandchildren who’ll inherit the bills. In one document, a federal budget reflects the nation’s priorities. And these days, in the perennial guns-versus-butter debate, Trump has made his feelings all too plain.

“We’re fighting wars,” he told a group at the White House on April Fools’ Day. “We can’t take care of day care … Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”

Forget that Trump swore to end wars. Or that last year, long before he went to war against Iran, he cut $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and other healthcare programs in his misnamed “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Yes, budgets can be boring, especially to a president with a famously short attention span. Trump and many of us Americans are distracted constantly by all the shiny objects he throws at the national consciousness by his words, acts and social media postings at all hours.

Yet the budgetary trend is clear to anyone bothering to look: As president, Trump is once again exacerbating the nation’s unsustainable course of piling up debt. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, among other credible sources, debt is now approaching the highest level in U.S. history, which was reached during World War II. It already surpasses the size of the entire economy and threatens higher borrowing costs and reduced investments.

For all the achievements Trump likes to claim — ending eight wars in a year! — here’s one that’s real: He is on a path to break his own record for the most debt in a single presidential term, $8.4 trillion in Trump 1.0, which was nearly double the increase under President Biden.

Need further proof of Trump’s brazen mendacity? Of course you don’t, but here it is: In the face of the well-documented budget record, Trump declared both this year and last year to a joint session of Congress, on national television, that he would balance the federal budget —“overnight,” he said in February.

The inequitable tax cuts and big spending increases for the military and immigration crackdowns that Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress enacted last year are significantly greater than in his first term, and are driving up the debt despite Republicans’ deep healthcare cuts. Just months after Trump took office, the ratings firm Moody’s downgraded the nation’s sterling credit rating for the first time in more than a century.

And now, in his new budget request, Trump seeks to inflate military spending from under $1 trillion when he regained office to $1.5 trillion, for the biggest year-to-year increase in military budgets since World War II.

This fiscal irresponsibility is happening at the worst possible time. For the last quarter of the 20th century, presidents and Congresses of both parties annually debated how to reduce deficits and several times reached consequential multi-year deals, culminating during the second Clinton term in four straight years of surpluses. (Those surpluses ended — wait for it — with Republicans’ tax cuts and war spending during the George W. Bush administration.)

Politicians back then were moved not just by the deficits of their time — deficits that, as a share of the economy, were less than half what they are now. They also were responding to experts’ warnings of a demographic tsunami by the 2020s: With the aging of the huge baby-boomer population, spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would greatly increase even as the workforce whose payroll taxes support those programs shrank. Today the number of people 65 or older is almost three times what it was 50 years ago, and rising.

This reckoning is upon us, though you wouldn’t know it as Trump keeps calling for cutting revenue and spending more for lawless wars, immigration raids and monuments to himself. Barring bipartisan action, in 2033 Social Security’s retirement fund and Medicare’s hospital fund will no longer be able to cover beneficiaries’ full claims, according to their trustees’ annual report, necessitating reduced benefits or shifts of money from other worthy programs.

Trump did put Vice President JD Vance in charge of a “war on fraud.” But that holds about as much promise as Elon Musk’s fiscal fiasco — remember DOGE? — that cost money instead of cutting $2 trillion as promised.

Like other problems, Trump likely will leave the fiscal follies to his successor, who, should he or she win two terms, would preside as Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. I’ve yet to hear any of the early 2028 presidential aspirants — or Trump — address or be asked about that.

Let the debate, belatedly, begin.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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WASHINGTON — Most Americans still think their taxes are too high, according to recent polls, even after last year’s tax law fulfilled several of President Trump’s tax-related campaign promises.

In fact, a new Fox News poll indicates people are more upset about taxes than they were last year. The findings from the survey, which was conducted in late March, are another sign that Americans are on edge about their personal finances as the U.S. experiences a spike in inflation and sluggish economic growth. Other polling finds that frustration goes beyond personal tax obligations, with many believing that wealthy people and corporations are not paying their fair share, while others worry about government waste.

The surveys come after Trump and Republicans passed a massive tax and spending cut bill last year. The legislation enacted a range of tax breaks, including a boosted child tax credit and new tax deductions for tips and overtime. Tax refunds are up this season, and many households are expected to see more income from the Republicans’ tax legislation, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated it will ultimately give the largest benefits to the richest Americans.

Republicans have touted the law as evidence that they are making life more affordable for working families. But polling shows that many Americans may not be feeling the benefits, especially as their tax refunds get eaten up by higher prices.

Most say taxes are too high

About 7 in 10 registered voters say the taxes they pay are “too high,” according to the Fox News poll. That’s up from about 6 in 10 last year. The poll shows heightened concern among very liberal voters and Democratic men, but there has also been a sizable increase among groups that Republicans want to court ahead of the midterm elections, such as moderates, rural voters and white voters without a college degree.

Discontent about taxes has been rising for the past few years. Recent polling from Gallup, conducted in March, found about 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the amount of federal income tax they have to pay is “too high,” a finding that’s been largely consistent in the annual poll since 2023. That’s approaching the level of unhappiness found in Gallup’s polling from the 1980s through the 1990s, before President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Now, about half of Democrats and about 6 in 10 Republicans say their federal income taxes are too high. Republicans tend to view their tax bill more negatively than Democrats, but Gallup’s polling shows that this gap often shrinks when a Republican is president.

Many believe the rich aren’t paying enough in taxes

Most Americans are troubled by the belief that some wealthy people and corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in January. About 6 in 10 Americans said each of those notions bothers them “a lot,” a measure that is largely unchanged in recent years.

By contrast, only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults in that poll said the amount they personally pay in taxes bothers them a lot.

About 8 in 10 Democrats are bothered “a lot” by the feeling that some corporations and rich people aren’t paying their fair share, the Pew survey found, compared to about 4 in 10 Republicans. Government spending is a bigger issue for Republicans, according to the Fox News poll, which found that 75% of registered voters — and a similar share of Republican voters — say “almost all” or “a great deal” of government funding is wasteful and inefficient.

That points to a perception problem for many Americans. Even if their own tax bill is manageable, the idea that the wealthy are underpaying — or that the government is wasting their dollars — bothers many. About half of Americans, 49%, in the Gallup poll say the income tax they will pay this year is “not fair,” which is in line with the record high from 2023.

Broad unhappiness with Trump’s tax approach

Americans’ tax frustration was rising before Trump re-entered the White House, but it’s still a problem for the president’s party — especially if Americans are not feeling the relief that he promised.

The Fox News poll found that about 6 in 10 registered voters, 64%, say they disapprove of how Trump is handling taxes, up from 53% last April. Disapproval has risen most sharply among independents, but also among Democrats and Republicans.

This aligns with a broader feeling that Trump isn’t doing enough to address inflation. Most Americans said Trump had hurt the cost of living “a lot” or “a little” in his second term, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January. Roughly 9 in 10 Democrats and about 6 in 10 independents said Trump has had a negative impact on the cost of living.

Less than half of Republicans, 43%, said Trump had helped the cost of living, while 33% said he hadn’t made a difference and only 23% said he’d helped.

Sanders writes for the Associated Press. The Fox News poll was conducted among 1,001 registered voters from March 20-23. The Gallup poll was conducted among 1,000 U.S. adults from March 2-18. The Pew Research Center poll was conducted among 8,512 U.S. adults from Jan. 20-26. The AP-NORC Poll was conducted among 1,203 U.S. adults from Jan 8-11.

SAN DIEGO — While their spring convention was held beneath mostly sunny San Diego skies, delegates and leaders of the California Republican party basked in a different sort of glow over the weekend as the campaign for a leading Democratic candidate for governor imploded because of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.

The party did not endorse a candidate for governor on Sunday because neither of the top Republicans — Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton — received the support of 60% of delegates. Bianco won 49% while Hilton had 44%; 7% of delegates voted not to endorse in the race.

“We’re very happy,” Bianco said after the vote. “We got the popular vote here, right? Ultimately, our goal is to win California, and you win California with the popular vote … Californians are looking for a leader. Californians are looking for integrity. Californians are looking for honesty. And they want someone that they know is going to be looking out for them, working for them, and that’s why I won this vote.”

Hilton also said he was pleased by his showing.

“Chad came into this convention thinking he had it in the bag,” Hilton said. “I think we made a lot of progress this week and I think the endorsement of President Trump is the one that’s gonna be decisive in the primary.”

The convention took place as a former staff member for Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) accused him of forcing himself on her twice when she was too intoxicated to consent, according to reports published by the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. Three other women also accused Swalwell of misconduct that included sending and soliciting explicit photos and messages.

Swalwell has not withdrawn from the race, but within hours of the allegations top supporters withdrew endorsements of the East Bay Area congressman, including Sen. Adam Schiff, campaign co-chairs Reps. Jimmy Gomez and Adam Gray, and prominent labor unions including the California Teachers Assn.

The collapse of Swalwell’s campaign brought a surge of energy to leaders and hundreds of die-hard members of a state Republican Party that holds a superminority in the state Legislature and no statewide elected offices. The news broke Friday, just as the party convention was getting underway at the bayside Sheraton San Diego Resort and hours before the Artemis II crew splashed down off the nearby coast.

Sean Spicer, a former press secretary during President Trump’s first term who is promoting a new book, joked during a Saturday brunch panel about landing in San Diego just in time to see “the fall.”

“Sorry, I was talking about Swalwell,” he said to laughter. “It was also cool to see Artemis come back down.”

Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2006 and some hoped Swalwell’s controversy would fuel voters already beleaguered by the cost of living to consider supporting GOP candidates this year.

“Quite frankly, Californians are, by and large, looking for viable alternatives. They’re looking towards the California Republican Party,” Chairwoman Corrin Rankin told reporters.

Republicans running to succeed Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom shared similar visions during five-minute speeches at a Saturday afternoon candidate forum.

“We meet here today, full of energy and hope and optimism, with a spring in our step on this beautiful spring day. Why? Because every party has its season, and for the California Democrats, the leaves are cascading from the trees,” Hilton told delegates.

Hilton, who served as a top political advisor to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, argued that 16 years of Democratic rule has led to dysfunction, chaos and scandal that alarmed voters in the overwhelmingly blue state even before the Swalwell scandal.

“And now, it’s been a couple of hours, so I think we’re due for another Eric Swalwell intern eruption,” he said.

Hilton touted Trump’s endorsement, describing it as a “tremendous asset for us, the energy, the resources, the precious gift of having the boost that makes the biggest difference in a midterm year turnout.”

Bianco emphasized his decades serving in law enforcement in the state, one of his main selling points to Californians concerned about liberal criminal justice policies of past Democratic administrations.

“I have spent every day serving California residents, making our lives better and safer. I have fought for you, and I have bled for you,” Bianco said.

Bianco refuted Hilton’s allegations that he coddled undocumented immigrants, sympathized with Black Lives Matter protesters and threatened county residents with punishment if they did not abide by mask mandates during the pandemic. He said he was the first law-enforcement official in the nation to defy a lockdown order after the pandemic. Bianco said that while he prayed with protesters in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, he also “forcefully” expelled “rioters and domestic terrorists” from his county.

Bianco also obliquely referred to attacks Hilton has lobbed against the sheriff on the campaign trail.

“This was never supposed to be about a dishonest smear campaign and bullseyes,” Bianco said, referring to a mailer Hilton’s campaign sent to voters that pictured Bianco’s head with circles around it that resemble a shooting target.

As Bianco walked through the bayfront convention hotel after the forum, he was swarmed by supporters chanting his name.

Saturday night, Bianco hosted a western-saloon themed party for delegates. Attendees wearing cowboy hats line danced, petted fluffy white calves and posed for pictures in front of an inflated cactus.

A Hilton-hosted party took on the feel of a candidate forum as he and Republican allies running for other statewide offices gave another round of speeches, often punctuated by shushing attendees who chattered in the back of the room.

Under California’s top-two primary system, the two leading candidates advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. For weeks, Hilton and Bianco have led polls while eight prominent Democrats including Swalwell split the support of liberal voters, stoking anxiety among Democrats that the party could end up shut out of the November election.

The chances of that happening diminished with Swalwell’s fall from grace and Trump’s endorsement of Hilton, political experts said, but those in the conservative wing of California politics celebrated the apparent downfall of the once-powerful Democrat.

Swalwell is “in denial right now, but once he realizes he doesn’t have any friends left and his campaign team is leaving him, people are laughing at him in the restaurant, I think, and I hope for his sake, he has enough self-awareness that he’ll quietly drop out and go to the south coast of France and put on a wig,” said Republican National committeeman Shawn Steel.

One of the convention’s celebrated speakers, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took shots at other California Democrats during a Saturday evening banquet, describing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass as “the Democrats’ national ambassador for disaster management” and Newsom as a contender for “Texas Realtor of the year, because no person in human history has sold more homes in the state of Texas.”

“Look, as a Texan, I gotta say, just isn’t fair. [You have] an economy that has been a monstrous engine driving America forward for decades, and yet you were cursed with idiot politicians,” Cruz said.

While Hilton‘s and Bianco’s campaigns have sparred about their respective records, the candidates largely avoided direct confrontation until a debate earlier this month in Rancho Mirage. The two GOP candidates tore into each other about issues such as immigration, their credentials and their honesty.

Delegates also sparred about Bianco and Hilton’s records in the halls of the convention.

Shiva Bagheri, a Bianco supporter from Beverly Hills, said that Hilton’s political positions are not constitutional.

“Steve said that anybody that makes under $100,000 shouldn’t pay [income] taxes,” said Bagheri, 52. “That’s against the 14th Amendment. I’m a constitutionalist.” She said she preferred Bianco’s plan to cut income taxes for everyone to avoid class warfare.

Celeste Greig, a Hilton supporter from Northridge, initially supported Bianco and donated to his campaign. But she grew troubled after hearing about Bianco’s comments about immigration, seeing images of the sheriff taking a knee alongside BLM protesters and learning of what she believes was an unlawful arrest of a person outside of President Trump’s 2024 rally in the Coachella Valley.

Some Republicans longed for a return to a bygone era when state lawmakers regularly worked across the aisle. State Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach) described teaming up with Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla when they served in the Legislature, adding that he still considers Padilla, now the state’s senior U.S. senator, a friend.

“We’re in a divided era right now,” Strickland said. “If we actually pick up a few more seats, I think it will give more comfort to some of those moderate Democrats to come over and work with us.”

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — As Republicans vie for their best shot to win the California governor’s office in two decades, the fight between the most prominent candidates to win over the party of President Trump has switched from subdued to vicious.

Conservative commentator Steve Hilton, at their first one-on-one debate in Rancho Mirage earlier this month, accused rival Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco of coddling illegal immigrants and called him “wishy-washy.” The law enforcement chief called Hilton, a British immigrant, a “fraud” and heartless for denying others the same pathway to U.S. citizenship he received.

“What an outrageous and offensive insult that Chad just made to every legal immigrant in this state and in this country,” Hilton fumed.

The heated exchange took place days before the California Republican Party weighs making an endorsement in the 2026 race for California governor. Hundreds of party delegates will gather in San Diego this weekend to decide, though it’s unclear if either candidate will be able to win the 60% vote threshold to receive the official party nod.

Most polls have shown the two Republicans as the top candidates in the race, despite registered Democratic voters outnumbering Republicans nearly 2-to-1 in California.

Bianco and Hilton are competing against eight heavyweight Democrats who are splintering their party’s votes in the election to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. Under California’s unique primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary will move on to the November general election, regardless of party affiliation.

The prospect has alarmed state Democratic leaders, who unsuccessfully urged struggling candidates to drop out to avoid their party being shut out of the November election.

Still, a lot can happen before the June 2 primary to stir up the race. President Trump endorsed Hilton late Sunday, which could significantly influence the state’s GOP voters. More than 6 million Californians voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, though he was trounced by Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the state’s top Democrats.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor, and Kate Monroe, chief executive of VETCOMM, talk with a woman lying on the sidewalk on Skid Row in Los Angeles in January.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

On the campaign trail, Bianco and Hilton have frequently raised the prospect of a Republican being elected governor as the result of failed Democratic rule of the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fourth-largest economy.

“For the first time in probably our lifetimes, really since Ronald Reagan … every legitimate poll has either shown me or Steve Hilton at the top two Republicans at the top of [every] statewide poll,” for the last six months, Bianco recently told about 100 attendees at a Valley Unity Republican Women luncheon at the Woodland Hills County Club overlooking verdant fairways.

Hilton, who has participated in more gubernatorial forums and debates than Bianco, said polling that shows him besting Democratic rivals proves that Californians are fed up with 15 years of one-party rule.

“I tell you right now, there is not a single one of them who represents to the slightest degree the change we need in California,” he told a few hundred people at Big Bear’s Calvary Chapel. “We are going to do it this year.”

From afar, Bianco appears to be out of central casting for a GOP candidate for governor: an armed lawman, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and close-cropped hair who has dedicated his life to protecting the vulnerable and locking up criminals.

Bianco, echoing independent pollsters as well as political strategists in both parties, said having “Riverside County Sheriff” next to his name on the official state ballot will be a major boon to his campaign.

“I will tell you this, if we took the names and the party off of the ballot and simply went up with resume — we made you all read a resume of who you’re going to put as your next governor — I would win this election 100% to nothing,” Bianco told the GOP women’s group.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton greets a member of the Big Bear Valley Republican Assembly before speaking at a town hall at Calvary Chapel in Big Bear in March.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

But Bianco’s badge hasn’t shielded him from Hilton’s blistering attacks about the sheriff’s past statements about immigration, pandemic mask mandates and Black Lives Matter protests — which is disqualifying for some GOP voters.

Bianco opposes “sanctuary city” laws, calls for the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants and says the border must be secured. But he has also supported a pathway to citizenship for lawful, working undocumented people and told his constituents that his deputies were not taking part in ICE raids.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bianco ordered county residents to wear masks or face punishment, though he later pushed back at Newsom’s stay-at-home orders.

That same year, he and his deputies were photographed kneeling and speaking with protesters in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, an action he has since recast as praying.

Bianco’s wife, Denise, on Thursday accused Hilton of endangering her husband by sending mailers to voters that featured Bianco’s face surrounded by circles that she described as a “bullseye target.”

“We have all watched way too much political violence directed at law enforcement officers in recent years. I never imagined it would come from a political candidate directed at my husband,” she said in an Instagram post. “Steve, why on God’s earth would you think it’s acceptable to put my husband’s face, a dedicated sheriff, on a shooting target?”

Election security has also highlighted differences in the candidates’ views.

Hilton and Bianco echoed Trump’s call to make GOP voter turnout “too big to rig.” But their statements about alleged malfeasance differed.

Hilton decried “total corruption in the voting system in California.”

“I’ve said for the longest possible time that I don’t understand why we can’t do things the way that most places do it, which is vote on one day, count on one day, get the results on one day,” he said.

Asked by a voter about electoral fraud in California in March, Bianco replied that he was confident that law enforcement in California ensures that such fraud is “not happening here,” while agreeing that such “cheating” occurred in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election.

But the same month, he seized more than 650,000 ballots from the November election as part of an investigation to determine if they were fraudulently counted.

Bianco put the investigation on hold shortly before the California Supreme Court halted it pending further review.

California voters have not elected a Republican as governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger won reelection in 2006. Two Republicans on the ballot in the June 2 primary election hope to change that.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Hilton has sought to capitalize on these positions, labeling Bianco the “shifty sheriff,” an attack that resonates with some voters.

“The man lies. The man is not honest about taking a knee to BLM, which is unacceptable,” said Agnes Gibboney, 71, of Rancho Cucamonga. “And coming up with three, four different excuses is unacceptable. And then to get mad at the voters for asking the question.”

Bianco has labeled Hilton as a shape-shifting opportunist, pointing to him championing a climate change agenda while advising British Prime Minister David Cameron and expressing support for views expressed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 presidential election, and posting a picture of Hilton hugging Newsom on social media.

“Steve is a fraud. He’s a liar, and I’m not going to sit by and just let him do it anymore,” Bianco said after the Rancho Mirage debate. “When he starts attacking me, he starts attacking my deputies, my profession, I’m not gonna let it happen anymore.”

“He remade himself just for this governor election, and everyone is starting to see through it,” Bianco said.

The son of Hungarians who emigrated to Britain, Hilton served as an advisor to Cameron before becoming an American citizen. At campaign events, supporters have gifted Hilton with a Kézimunka, a traditional Hungarian embroidered cloth, which was stitched with a heart, as well as stars-and-stripes bathing trunks.

“My parents are Hungarian refugees from communism,” Hilton said. “I am fighting to make sure that this state that I love does not turn into the country that I left …. I have renounced my U.K. citizenship. I’m all in for California and America.”

Of the two candidates, Hilton has been more publicly visible, and benefits from GOP voters seeing him speak on Fox News for several years.

Both men argue one-party Democratic rule of California has destroyed a state once viewed as the epitome of the American dream.

Hilton describes state leaders as “far-left lunatics.” They’ve ruined the most amazing, the most beautiful place on earth,” and tweaked a popular Texas slight about someone being all hat and no cattle to describe Newsom.

“He’s all hair, nothing there. Don’t you think it’s time in California we have a governor with less hair?” said Hilton, who sports a smooth crown.

Bianco calls the state’s Democratic leaders “far-left psychopaths” who have enacted policies, taxes and fees that are forcing Californians to flee the state.

“We all know government has completely failed and we’re ready to take our state back,” he said, later adding, “They don’t want our lives better. I do …. No one leaves California because they want to. It’s government agenda and policy that is harming California and making it bad.”

Most of the candidates’ pledges, such as tackling unaffordability, reducing gas prices, increasing capacity in state prisons, protecting gun owners’ rights and keeping trans athletes out of girls’ locker rooms, are nearly identical.

They both promise to slash California’s vehicle registration fees, a proposal that echoes former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pledge to repeal the car tax during the 2003 recall election that was immortalized by his campaign dropping a wrecking ball on an Oldsmobile in Costa Mesa.

Schwarzenegger was elected governor soon after.

No candidate in either party can match Schwarzenegger’s global appeal, or voters’ familiarity with the state’s most recent Democratic governors — including Jerry Brown, the scion of a storied political family — or Newsom’s charisma, added GOP strategist Rob Stutzman, a former Schwarzenegger advisor who is not aligned with any candidate in the 2026 race.

“Voters are finding this to be an uninspiring list of candidates. And in fact, the impressive list would be those that chose not to run, right?” he said, referring to Harris, Sen. Alex Padilla and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “So it’s not a surprise that there isn’t much interest.”

Though Hilton and Bianco were previously cordial in person, such as when they crossed paths at September’s state GOP convention, their public criticism of each other has ratcheted up in recent weeks, which could sway the many undecided GOP voters in the race.

“My main contention is looking to see whether or not they’re gonna follow the will of the Lord. So I’m paying attention to what they say and what they do,” said retired Air Force IT specialist David Solomon, 42, after seeing Hilton speak in Big Bear. “It really just comes down to who’s gonna be able to enact their plan.”

Jane Price, a 77-year-old Sherman Oaks resident, said she worried that Republicans failing to unite behind a candidate would give Democrats an edge in the governor’s race.

“We don’t want to split, right? That’s a problem,” the charter member of the woman’s GOP group said after seeing Bianco speak. “The state of California is at stake. We were thriving here in California. But now, it has been nothing but a downhill slide. We need people who appreciate what California is all about.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s threats to wipe out Iran, “a whole civilization,” ended the restraint that Democrats have mostly practiced when it comes to questions of removing him from office in his second term.

By the dozens, Democrats came out to say that Trump should no longer serve in the White House, either through the impeachment process or the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and the Cabinet to declare that a president is no longer able to perform the job.

While Trump eventually pulled back on his threat and agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, the episode highlighted the growing demands for Democrats to oppose the Republican president in the strongest possible terms. Calls about Iran flooded into congressional offices, lawmakers said.

The breadth of the Democratic pushback underscored the gravity of Trump’s apocalyptic threat to a country of more than 91 million people. It also served to raise the domestic political stakes for a conflict that is far from over. The Trump administration faces mounting calls to testify about the war and justify its demands for hundreds of billions of dollars in new military spending.

“We cannot excuse what the president said as a negotiating tactic,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat, told reporters at the Capitol Thursday.

“It is important that even though we were able to get this ceasefire, which I pray holds, that we hold this president accountable for what he threatened because threatening genocide is not just against international law, it’s against our federal law, too,” she added.

Still, Democratic leaders and many moderates in the party have steered clear of endorsing impeachment, and any attempt to remove Trump from office is seemingly doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress.

In the near term, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are instead pushing Republicans to join them and pass legislation that would force Trump to get congressional approval before carrying out any more attacks on Iran.

A few Democrats attempted during a brief session of the House on Thursday to pass what’s known as a war powers resolution on Iran, but Republicans, who control the chamber, did not acknowledge their request.

“We need Speaker Johnson to call us into session,” said Democratic Rep. Emily Randall of Washington. “The American people deserve that.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has defended Trump’s rhetoric as effective.

“I think it was a very, very strong threat from the president of the United States that led the Iranian regime to cave to their knees and ask for a ceasefire and agree to reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” she said at a Wednesday White House press briefing.

Callers jam congressional phone lines

As they press their case against Trump, Democrats are responding to the worries of their own base and constituents. Congressional offices were bombarded with phone calls and emails this week, largely from people alarmed by the president’s rhetoric.

In the House, the office of Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) received a “ton” of calls and emails Monday and Tuesday, mostly about Iran but also about impeaching Trump or removing him by deploying the 25th Amendment, said one aide who was not authorized to discuss the internal office situation and requested anonymity.

When her district staffers in the state office took a break Tuesday, they returned to 75 voicemails on Iran an hour later, the aide said.

“My office phones have not stopped ringing,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) at a press conference in Portland, urging House colleagues to immediately return to Washington.

Dexter’s office received more calls on Tuesday, 257, more than it has ever received in a 24-hour period since the first-term lawmaker’s team began keeping track.

The groundswell appeared to be organic, rather than an orchestrated campaign to pressure lawmakers to act.

While outside groups have been circulating some discussion points, including the legal details around invoking the 25th Amendment, there has not been an organized effort to flood the congressional offices with a strategic message, said one Democratic strategist familiar with the situation who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

It was simply the “horror” of what Trump was saying, the strategist said, and the scale of the president’s threats, that appeared to have sparked the mobilization.

On the political right, several prominent figures including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, also suggested Trump should be removed from office through the 25th Amendment.

Will Democrats make an impeachment push?

Democrats twice impeached Trump for actions taken during his first term, but he was acquitted each time. They have tried to avoid such debates for the last 16 months as they tried to center their midterm message on kitchen table issues rather than opposing a president who narrowly won the popular vote.

Republicans also have the majority in the House and have easily fended off two previous efforts to impeach Trump in his second term. A significant number of Democrats have either joined with Republicans or voted “present” as the House blocked impeachment resolutions sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas).

Then came Trump’s threat on Tuesday morning to wipe out “an entire civilization.”

“Temporary ceasefire or not, Trump already committed an impeachable offense. Congress needs to get back to work and remove him from office before he does more damage to our country and the world,” said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a veteran of the war in Iraq.

It’s unclear how House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries will handle the demands for another impeachment push. But Democratic leaders are holding a call on Friday with members of the House Judiciary Committee that is focused on “Trump administration accountability and the 25th Amendment.”

Standing on the Capitol steps Thursday, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said she supports impeachment, but nevertheless hit the brakes on it for now, as the Democrats are in the minority. Instead, she called on Republicans to stand up to Trump’s threats, including by invoking the 25th Amendment.

She predicted the imperative to remove Trump from office could only grow as negotiators navigate a fragile framework for a peace deal. Dean and other Democrats criticized the plan as “chaotic” and unworkable.

Yet Dean said Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization should have already been enough. “The president brought the entire globe to watch his madness,” she said.

Groves, Mascaro and Freking write for the Associated Press.

MADISON, Wis. — The bluntest assessment of Republican failures during this week’s elections in Wisconsin came from one of their own.

“We got our butts kicked,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor.

He was referring to Democratic victories in campaigns for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the mayor’s office in Waukesha, a conservative suburb outside Milwaukee. But some Republicans were also rattled by a special election in Georgia, where their candidate to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress won by a much slimmer margin than the party enjoyed in the past.

Taken together, the swings from red to blue added more data points to an increasingly clear picture of Democratic momentum heading into the November midterms, when control of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate and state governments around the country are up for grabs.

“In rural, urban, red, blue, Democrats have overperformed everywhere,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant whose clients include Keisha Lance Bottoms, a candidate for Georgia governor. “That is a significant canary in the coal mine about what November of ’26 is going to look like.”

Some Republicans insisted there was no need to panic, and their fundraising remains stronger than Democrats’. Stephen Lawson, a Georgia strategist, said “the sky is not falling.”

But he also said his party is running behind where it has been in the past, and Republicans need to be “looking at these results carefully.”

‘A red alarm for Republicans’

Special elections can be notoriously unreliable as political benchmarks, but Democrats have consistently demonstrated surprising strength. They flipped a Texas state Senate district. They won a Florida state House seat in a district that includes President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

Then they gained ground on Tuesday in the race to replace Greene, who resigned from Congress in January after a falling out with Trump.

Clay Fuller, the Republican candidate, prevailed by 12 percentage points. Two years ago, Greene won by 29 percentage points and Trump carried the district by almost 37 percentage points.

“That’s a red alarm for Republicans,” said Democratic strategist Meredith Brasher.

Fuller defeated Shawn Harris, who plans to challenge him again in November.

Jackie Harling, the district’s Republican chairwoman, said she believed that Greene’s resignation energized Democrats while her party is suffering from “election fatigue.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene was like a freight train that you couldn’t stop, and when she pulled out, it gave Democrats hope and it gave them a shot at winning something they believed was unwinnable,” Harling said.

‘Slightly bluer side of purple’

Georgia has key races this year, including an open contest for the governor’s office. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, is trying to defend his seat as well.

There’s reason to think that simmering discontent could boomerang on Republicans just two years after Trump harnessed voters’ anger with his comeback presidential campaign.

In November, Democrats defeated two Republican incumbents in statewide races for seats on the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities. Rising electricity rates have been a fault line in recent campaigns, especially as enormous data centers are built to power artificial intelligence.

But Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey is trying to maintain modest expectations.

“We could cement ourselves, put ourselves, on the slightly bluer side of purple,” he said. ”We’re not going to overnight turn into Colorado.”

‘A very clear sign of momentum’

Wisconsin holds statewide elections for Supreme Court seats, and liberals expanded their majority with a 20-percentage-point blowout victory on Tuesday.

Democrats saw gains in red, blue and purple counties when compared with another judicial race last year, which was also won by the liberal candidate.

“This to me was a very clear sign of momentum and enthusiasm for Democrats in the fall,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Devin Remiker.

The state has its own open race for governor this year, and Democrats are hoping to take control of the state Legislature and oust Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

“It’s time for us to put this thing in overdrive,” said Mandela Barnes, a Democratic former lieutenant governor who is running for governor.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, another Democratic candidate for governor, said it’s clear that “people are really upset with the Republican Party and their brand right now.”

“But that doesn’t mean that they’re automatically going to come over to the Democrats,” Crowley said. “And that’s why we have to continue to focus on the issues and speak to the values of all the voters here in the state of Wisconsin.”

‘A lot of anxiety’

Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, cautioned against reading too much into Tuesday’s results.

He said “every election is unique,” and he wasn’t making any changes to his campaign. He said the key to winning will be to “paint that clear contrast of how we are going to help everyday Wisconsinites.”

But Democrats seemed to be making inroads, including in Waukesha. The city is located outside of Milwaukee in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha County.

Democrat Alicia Halvensleben, president of the city’s Common Council, defeated Republican Scott Allen, one of the most conservative members of the state Assembly.

She said Trump came up “a lot” when she was campaigning, although she thinks her victory came down to local issues and how the state legislature wasn’t addressing them.

“There’s so much uncertainty at the national level,” Halvensleben said. “I think that level of uncertainty is causing people a lot of anxiety, all the way down to the local level.”

Bauer, Amy and Cooper write for the Associated Press. Amy reported from Atlanta, and Cooper from Phoenix.

RINGGOLD, Ga. — Republican Clay Fuller on Tuesday won Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former U.S. House seat in Georgia, turning back a Democratic challenge with the help of President Trump’s endorsement despite uneasiness over the war in Iran.

In a deep red district that Greene won by 29 points and Trump carried by almost 37 points two years ago, Fuller was on track to prevail by about 12 points with almost all votes counted. The result added to a string of special elections where Democrats performed better than expected, a track record that the party hopes will create momentum toward November’s midterm elections when control of Congress hangs in the balance.

In another election held Tuesday, a Democratic-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court won by double-digit margins, growing the liberal majority there.

Fuller insisted that his victory over Democratic candidate Shawn Harris in Georgia was a testimony to Trump’s staying power.

“They couldn’t beat Donald Trump and they never will,” he told supporters in Ringgold, near the border with Tennessee. “And I will be on Capitol Hill as a warrior to have his back each and every day.”

However, Trump’s escalating rhetoric had some Republicans concerned, even in this deep red district. The president had set a deadline for Tuesday at 8 p.m. — one hour after polls closed in Georgia — for Iran to reach a deal with the United States, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” However, he later announced a two-week ceasefire to allow negotiations to continue.

Acworth resident Jason McGinty said he was worried Trump was “about to go too far” and “may be committing a war crime” if he followed through on threats to bomb power plants and other infrastructure in Iran. He voted for Fuller to “make sure the America First party is still in place.”

Retiree Judy McDonald agreed with the president’s decision to go to war but was “very anxiety-ridden” over the conflict.

“Eventually we will have peace and the Iranians will kind of come to a conclusion that they won’t have a country if they don’t stop the terrorism,” she said.

Some Democrats hoped the election would send a message to Trump

Fuller will serve out the remaining months of Greene’s term, bolstering the party’s slim majority in the House, where Republicans control 217 seats to Democrats’ 214, with one independent.

He’ll have to face another Republican primary on May 19 to win a full two-year term, and could face a June 16 party runoff. Harris is already the Democratic nominee for November.

Retiree Melinda Dorl supported Harris “so it sends a message to Trump and his cronies that people aren’t happy,” she said.

“This war was totally uncalled for. Trump is a liar. Everything he says is a lie,” Dorl said, adding that Trump was wrecking relationships with countries that have traditionally been American allies.

Harris, a cattle farmer and retired general who describes himself as a “dirt-road Democrat,” stirred enthusiasm even among supporters who expected him to lose.

“I voted for the Democrat even though this is a very red district and the Democrat has almost no chance of winning,” said Michael Robards, a software engineer from Kennesaw who calls himself a center-right independent. He said he wants to see Trump’s policies rolled back and the president again impeached.

Georgia’s 14th District stretches across 10 counties from suburban Atlanta to Tennessee. After losing to Greene two years ago, Harris said his strong showing this time would be a stepping stone to November.

“We’re going to beat him next time,” Harris said on Tuesday in Rome, Georgia.

Fuller said he had withstood Democrats’ best punch.

“The left did their best. They poured in millions upon millions of dollars,” Fuller told reporters. “And what you’re seeing is the best that they can accomplish.”

Fuller had presidential support

Trump endorsed Fuller, a district attorney who prosecuted crimes in four counties, to succeed Greene in February, boosting him over other Republican candidates in a crowded field.

Greene, once among Trump’s most ardent supporters, had split with the president by criticizing his foreign policy and his reluctance to release documents involving the Jeffrey Epstein case. The president eventually had enough, saying he would support a primary challenge against her. Greene announced a week later that she would resign.

Outside of Congress, Greene has continued to assail Trump.

“Trump was elected to go to war against America’s deep state and to end America’s involvement in foreign wars,” she wrote on social media on Tuesday. “Not to kill an entire civilization while waging a foreign war on behalf of Israel, another foreign country.”

However, Fuller has backed Trump to the hilt — including the war — and has identified no issue on which he disagreed with the president.

Trump reiterated his support for Fuller on Monday night and then again on Tuesday.

“To the Great Patriots in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District: GET OUT AND VOTE TODAY for a fantastic Candidate, Clay Fuller, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” the president wrote on social media.

Amy writes for the Associated Press.

House Democrats and a panel of elections experts expressed unwavering confidence in state voting systems and dismissed Trump administration claims of widespread fraud and other vulnerabilities during a special “shadow hearing” in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

They accused President Trump and his Republican allies of pushing sweeping federal reforms — including stricter voter ID laws and new restrictions on voting by mail — that would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, especially low-income, rural and elderly voters, as well as voters of color and those with disabilities.

“They are taking us backward, and not to a good place,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who helped lead the hearing at the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo.

They also stressed that they and their allies were working hard to prevent such backsliding.

“While Republicans are expecting Democrats to just sit idly by as they attempt to steal yet another election, Democrats are getting out in the community, raising the alarm bells about the GOP’s efforts to rig these elections and fighting back in the courts, in Congress and in our communities,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), chair of the Democratic Caucus. “We won’t let Republicans get away with their anti-democratic and un-American schemes.”

Such “shadow hearings” allow Democrats to highlight issues their majority-Republican counterparts won’t schedule for formal hearings in Washington. This week’s discussions — a second is scheduled Thursday in San Francisco — follow others in California in recent months, including on Trump’s immigration raids.

Pelosi, the former House speaker, led the hearing alongside Aguilar and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of elections. Joining them were fellow Democratic Reps. Nanette Barragán of San Pedro, Judy Chu of Monterey Park, Gil Cisneros of Covina, Laura Friedman of Glendale, Luz Rivas of North Hollywood, Linda Sánchez of Whittier, Norma Torres of Pomona and Maxine Waters of L.A.

Pelosi noted the setting on the grounds of the Japanese American National Museum, where Japanese Americans were detained before being unconstitutionally stripped of their belongings and taken to internment camps during World War II.

“To be here on a day when the president of the United States has talked about destroying the civilization of a country is so appalling. It’s so appalling, and I don’t think we can ignore comments like that, especially in a setting like this,” Pelosi said.

She also said that securing the nation’s elections against Trump’s threats and getting out the Democratic vote was the surest way of restoring order to U.S. relations abroad — and far more likely than getting Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

“We have to make sure that the mentality that would obliterate a civilization, undermine a democracy by fighting free and fair elections, just cannot prevail,” she said.

The hearings were designed to challenge a narrative Trump has pushed for years — that U.S. elections are badly compromised by widespread fraud, that mail ballots such as those used in California are a particularly large source of abuse, and that noncitizens are voting in large numbers — none of which he has supported with evidence.

Trump tried unsuccessfully to challenge his 2020 loss to Joe Biden using similar arguments. When he returned to the White House, he immediately directed his administration to pursue the claims anew, including under executive orders he issued asserting new and sweeping federal authority over elections, which by law are controlled by the states.

The Justice Department in September sued California and other states for their voter rolls, which courts rejected. The FBI in January raided and seized 2020 election records from an elections office in Fulton County, Ga., where Trump rejected 2020 results. Trump in February said Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting.” Last week, he issued an executive order purporting to give federal agencies control over ballot processing by the U.S. Postal Service, which followed a previous order seeking to place new federal requirements on voter identification and proof of citizenship.

Trump has said his efforts are “common sense” steps average Americans support to secure elections against noncitizens voting and other threats.

Experts who provided testimony at Tuesday’s hearing roundly rejected that argument, saying the measures address problems that don’t existand are more geared toward securing wins for Republicans than ensuring election safety.

Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said that Americans are “more likely to be struck by lightning” than to commit voter fraud, and that many recent proposals framed around election integrity are really designed to narrow access to voting for certain groups. She also said California’s elections are particularly strong.

“We’re like the Dodgers of elections,” she said.

Darius Kemp, executive director of Common Cause California, said the state’s elections “are safe and secure,” and the Trump administration is threatening democratic participation in novel and alarming ways that his organization is watching carefully.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor, said Trump is trying to project power over elections “that he simply does not have,” and if local and state officials, the courts and pro-democracy groups stand their ground, he will fail.

“If we keep calm and carry on, we can make our voices heard loud and clear,” he said.

Hector Villagra, vice president of policy advocacy and community education at MALDEF, or the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said “the evidence could not be more clear — noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare,” and Trump’s proposals would simply “raise the cost of lawful voting” for groups already underrepresented at the polls.

“The question is not whether we can verify eligibility. We already do that,” he said. “The question is whether we will impose new barriers that will prevent eligible citizens from participating at all.”

Sonni Waknin, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said “democracy is under attack” across the nation, and that the photo identification requirement Trump and other Republicans are pushing would disenfranchise a million eligible voters in California alone.

When Cisneros asked about what could be done to prepare for the inevitable claims of fraud from Trump and other Republicans after the midterms, Levitt said that such claims must be called out for what they are.

“We call those lies, because they are lies,” he said.

When Waters asked the experts about the effect of federal immigration agents being deployed to polling places, as some in Trump’s orbit have suggested, Villagra said damage was already being done just from the rumors of such action — whether agents show up or not.

“It’s the threat that’s really what’s powerful here,” he said, as people — especially Latino voters — are already intimidated, and leaders should do more to reassure voters and offer alternatives to showing up to polls, such as voting by mail.

ATLANTA — Republican Clay Fuller will try to close the deal with Georgia voters on Tuesday to succeed Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress, while Democrat Shawn Harris seeks an upset.

Harris led a first round of voting on March 10 with 37% in the district that stretches across 10 counties from suburban Atlanta to Tennessee. While Fuller came in second in the 17-candidate all-party special election with 35%, the Republican candidates combined won nearly 60% of the vote. The 14th District is rated as the most Republican-leaning district in Georgia by the Cook Political Report.

President Trump in February endorsed Fuller, a district attorney who prosecuted crimes in four counties, to succeed Greene in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Greene, once among Trump’s most ardent supporters, resigned in January after falling out with the president.

Fuller has backed Trump to the hilt, finding no issue on which he disagreed with the president when asked in a March 23 debate.

“We need an America First fighter to stand strong for northwest Georgia,” Fuller said March 23. He was a White House fellow in the first Trump administration and is a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia Air National Guard.

Trump reiterated his support for Fuller on Monday night.

“I am asking all Republicans, America First Patriots, and MAGA Warriors, to please GET OUT AND VOTE for a fantastic Candidate, Clay Fuller, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” the president wrote on social media.

Harris, a cattle farmer and retired general who lost to Greene in 2024, has contrasted himself with Greene’s bomb-throwing style. He said he’s a “dirt-road Democrat” with common sense, and practical-minded Republicans should vote for him because he will focus on the district’s interest.

“He has sold his soul to Donald Trump,” Harris said of Fuller on March 23. “The reality of it is he cannot fight for you because he cannot go against the president.”

The winner will serve out the remaining months of Greene’s term. A Republican win would bolster the party’s slim majority in the House, where Republicans control 217 seats to Democrats’ 214, with one independent.

But if the winner wants to remain in Congress beyond January, he will have to run again. Republicans seeking a full two-year term are set for a May 19 party primary, and possibly a June 16 party runoff, before advancing to the general election in November. Harris is the only Democrat running, meaning he faces no primary election.

Greene was one of the most well-known members of Congress until she left in January. She remained loyal to Trump after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, promoting Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election. When Trump ran again in 2024, she toured the country with him and spoke at his rallies while wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

But Greene began clashing with Trump last year after he and other Republicans pushed back against her running for U.S. Senate or governor. Greene criticized Trump’s foreign policy and his reluctance to release documents involving the Jeffrey Epstein case. The president eventually had enough, saying he would support a primary challenge against her. Greene announced a week later that she would resign.

Amy writes for the Associated Press.

ATLANTA — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.

The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session.

“They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.

Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.

But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.

“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who backed a proposal to keep using the machines in 2026 that Senate Republicans declined to consider.

House Republicans and Democrats backed Anderson’s plan, which would have required that Georgia choose a voting process that didn’t use QR codes by 2028. Election officials preferred that solution.

“The Senate has shown that they’re not responsible actors,” Draper said. She added that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, seemed more interested in keeping Trump’s backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”

A spokesperson for Jones didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

Joseph Kirk, Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he’ll look to the secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule to instruct election officials how to proceed.

“This is uncharted territory,” he said.

Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for governor, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.”

Republican House Speaker Jon Burns told reporters that his chamber was seeking to minimize changes this year.

“You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” Burns said.

Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature” on the possibility of a special session. A spokesperson for Kemp didn’t answer questions about what the outgoing Republican governor would do.

Anderson said without action, the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November.

Election officials say switching to a new system within just a few months, as advocated by some Republicans, would be nearly impossible.

“They made no way for this to happen except putting a deadline on it,” Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said of the switch away from barcodes. Dover said one problem under some plans is that a very large number of ballots would have to be printed.

Lawmakers seemed more concerned about scoring political points than making practical plans, Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said.

“If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us,” Holden said.

Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say voters are more likely to trust in an accurate count if they can see what gets read by the scanner.

Right-wing election activists lobbied lawmakers for an immediate switch to hand-marked paper ballots, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so.

Anderson said he wasn’t sure if a special session could escape those political crosswinds, but said Georgia lawmakers must fix the problem.

“This is a legislative problem,” Anderson said. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”

Kramon and Amy write for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — This is not the run up to the midterm elections that Republicans wanted.

A year and a half after winning the White House by promising to lower costs and end wars, Donald Trump is a wartime president overseeing surging energy costs and an escalating overseas conflict that many in his own party do not like.

He offered little clarity to a nation eager for answers this week during a prime-time address from the White House, his first since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago, simultaneously suggesting that the war was ending and expanding.

“Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”

Trump’s comments come roughly six months before voters across the nation begin to cast ballots in elections that will decide control of Congress and key governorships for Trump’s final two years in office. For now, Republicans, who control all branches of government in Washington, are bracing for a painful political backlash.

“You’re looking at an ugly November,” warned veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. “At a point in time when we need every break possible to hold the House and Senate, our edge is being chipped away.”

Republicans confront evolving political landscape

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the political landscape has shifted.

At this time last year, many Republican leaders believed there was a path to preserve their narrow House majority and easily hold the Senate. Now they privately concede that the House is all but lost and Democrats have a realistic shot at taking the Senate.

Republicans are also struggling to coalesce around a clear midterm message on Iran.

The Republican National Committee has largely avoided the war in talking points issued to surrogates over the last month. The leaders of the party’s campaign committees responsible for the House and Senate declined interview requests. Many vulnerable Republican candidates sidestep the issue, unwilling to defend or challenge Trump publicly.

The president remains deeply popular with Republican voters, and he has vocal supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“That was the best speech I could’ve hoped for,” he wrote on social media after Trump’s address on Wednesday evening. Graham said Trump “gave the American people a clear and coherent pathway forward.”

Trump made little effort to sell the conflict to Americans before the initial attack. Five weeks later, at least 13 U.S. service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Thousands more troops have converged on the region, and the Pentagon requested $200 billion in new funding.

The Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for a fifth of the world’s oil, remains closed. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $4.08 on Thursday, according to AAA, almost a full dollar higher than on President Joe Biden’s last day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump insisted that gas prices would fall quickly once the war concluded but offered no solution for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he invited skeptical U.S. allies to do it themselves.

He insisted that the war would be worth it.

“This is a true investment in your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s future,” Trump said. “When it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who was once among Trump’s most vocal allies in Congress, lashed out against his Iran policy.

“I wanted so much for President Trump to put America First. That’s what I believed he would do. All I heard from his speech tonight was WAR WAR WAR,” she wrote on social media. “Nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans.”

Time is not on Trump’s side

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the U.S. military action in Iran has “gone too far,” according to AP-NORC polling from March. Roughly a third approve of how he’s handling Iran overall.

The possibility of sending U.S. forces into Iran also appears politically unpalatable.

About 6 in 10 adults are “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to deploying U.S. troops on the ground to fight Iran. That includes about half of Republicans. Only about 1 in 10 favor deploying troops.

At the same time, Trump’s approval ratings have remained consistently weak. About 4 in 10 Americans approve of how he’s handling the presidency, roughly in line with how it’s been throughout his second term.

Republican strategist Ari Fleischer, a senior aide in former President George W. Bush’s administration, acknowledged that Trump has not received the polling bump in this war that Bush got after invading Iraq.

Bush, of course, worked to build public backing for the Iraq War before going in. Immediately after the 2003 invasion, Bush’s popularity soared, as did the stock market.

Public sentiment and the economy soured only after the conflict stretched on. It ultimately spanned more than eight years, spawning a generation of anti-war Republicans — and sowing the seeds of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

“My hope is that the Trump experience is the exact opposite of the Bush experience,” Fleischer said.

He said Trump must win the war decisively and quickly to avoid a further backlash, saying there could be a “very significant political upside if things end well, oil comes down and markets rally.”

Fleischer added that Trump’s actions will matter much more than his words.

“Ultimately, he is not going to get judged on his persuasion or his explanations or his assertions, he’s going to get judged on results,” he said.

Peoples writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Less than a week after he and other House Republican lawmakers rejected a Senate plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security — but not its immigration enforcement operations — Speaker Mike Johnson has made a complete about-face.

Johnson’s embrace of a two-track Senate bill marks a sharp reversal, after he had derided it as a “joke,” and said he was “quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill.”

But now that Johnson appears to be fully on board, securing support from his own conference could prove more difficult after a sizable group of House Republicans blasted the Senate-passed bill last week.

President Trump said Thursday he will sign an order to pay all Homeland Security employees who have gone without paychecks during the partial government shutdown that has reached a record 48 days.

Trump used a similar maneuver to resume pay for the Transportation Security Administration after many employees had called out from work, resulting in long delays at airport security lines for travelers. Trump’s latest intervention is expected to apply to other non-law enforcement employees at the department, including many employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Coast Guard and the agency responsible for coordinating federal cybersecurity efforts.

Despite that unilateral move announced in a social media post, the funding lapse for some Homeland Security needs is likely to stretch into next week as the House contemplates passing the very same Senate plan it previously rejected.

There was no legislative resolution Thursday after both the House and Senate met for just a few minutes in pro forma sessions. Nonetheless, the Republican leadership and Trump have coalesced around a plan to fully fund Homeland Security as part of a two-step process. The agreement puts the congressional leaders on the same page for ending the impasse after they had pursued separate paths that resulted in Congress leaving Washington for its spring recess without a fix.

During the brief sessions, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) put aside the House plan to fund the entire department for 60 days. Then the House met briefly without taking up the bipartisan Senate plan that had been worked out with Democrats, though Thune is looking toward eventual passage.

“I don’t know the particulars around what the House will do with it,” Thune told reporters. “My assumption is, at some point, hopefully, they’ll move it.”

Johnson’s about-face

Johnson (R-La.) and Thune announced Wednesday that they would return to the Senate measure, which funds most of Homeland Security with the exception of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol. Republicans will try later to fund those agencies through party-line spending legislation that could take months to finish.

Neither outcome is guaranteed, and the strategy could potentially still face opposition from the GOP’s ranks even though Trump has given his support.

House Republicans held a conference call later Thursday to discuss the next steps. The GOP leadership indicated to lawmakers that it does not expect to recall them to Washington during the spring recess; they are due back April 14.

Public backlash was swift after lawmakers left Washington last week without a resolution, with the tabloid website TMZ posting paparazzi-style photos of members at airports and out of town. The regularly scheduled break, while drawing criticism, is typically used by lawmakers to reconnect with constituents and travel abroad.

Lawmakers also heard from White House budget director Russ Vought. The White House is expected to release Trump’s 2027 budget proposal on Friday.

Funding ICE remains a hurdle

Democrats in both chambers were aligned last week with the Senate’s plan, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York blamed House Republicans on Thursday for taking no action on it during the brief morning session.

“The deep division and dysfunction among House Republicans is needlessly extending the DHS shutdown and hurting federal workers who are missing another paycheck,” Schumer said.

Johnson will look to persuade the most conservative lawmakers within his conference to go along with the two-step approach agreed upon with the president, and Trump’s latest social media post could help. The president thanked Thune and Johnson for their work, and sought to project Republican unity.

“Republicans are UNIFIED, and moving forward on a plan that will reload funding for our FANTASTIC Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement Officers,” Trump wrote.

Many in the GOP conference have taken the stance that ICE and the Border Patrol need to be included as part of any funding agreement.

“Let’s make this simple: caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) posted on X. “If that’s the vote, I’m a NO.”

Meanwhile, the budget package that Trump wants voted on by June 1 is expected to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the remainder of Trump’s term, as a way to try to ensure those agencies are no longer at risk from Democrats objecting to his immigration enforcement agenda.

Thune acknowledged the potential hurdles to that route, such as efforts to expand the scope of the bill. He said the goal is to keep it “as narrow and focused as possible” in order to pass it “with haste.”

The vast majority of Homeland Security employees have reported to work during the shutdown, but many thousands have gone without pay. As more Transportation Security Administration agents called out from work, there was increasing frustration for air travelers confronted by long waits at some airport security lines. Those bottlenecks appeared to be clearing this week as agents began receiving backpay after Trump signed an executive order.

About 10,000 FEMA workers are being paid because their wages come out of the non-lapsing Disaster Relief Fund. At least 4,000 FEMA employees are furloughed or currently working without pay.

Freking and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press. AP writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — Strong majorities of California voters believe American democracy is under attack and, in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court rulings narrowing federal protections, support enacting a new state Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination and efforts to suppress the ability to cast a ballot, a new poll showed.

The survey showed a sharp partisan divide over increasing voting rights protections, with Democrats and political independents overwhelmingly in favor and a majority of Republicans opposed. Fears that American democracy was either under attack, or at the very least being “tested,” were shared across political allegiances, according to a new poll released Thursday by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

“I think that it suggests that the California voters, especially Democrats and independents, are very worried about some of what they’ve seen going on in Washington, both the court decisions and the Trump administration,” said Eric Schickler, the institute’s co-director. “They see it as threatening kind of core American values.”

That anxiety comes after years of baseless claims by President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as well as Republican-led efforts to restrict the use of mail-in ballots and impose new requirements for voters to show identification and proof of citizenship.

Trump earlier this week signed an executive order to place new federal controls on voting by mail in states such as California, an action that Democrats called unconstitutional and vowed to challenge in court.

Schickler said Republican concerns about the fate of American democracy may stem in large part from allegations about voter fraud hyped by Trump and his supporters, including unfounded claims that droves of undocumented immigrants are swaying elections.

The survey found that 67% of California voters believe American democracy is under attack, including 84% of Democrats, 40% of Republicans and 64% of voters registered as “no party preference” or with other political parties. An almost equal number of Republicans, 38%, believed democracy was being “tested” but not under attack, compared with 13% of Democrats and 26% of independents. The remainder of those surveyed said American democracy is in no danger.

The partisan divide was more pronounced when voters were asked if they wanted California to enact its own Voting Rights Act after decisions by the Supreme Court limited federal protections against discrimination and unequal access to ballots, the poll found.

Overall, 66% of California registered voters backed adopting new state voter protections, with 88% of Democrats supporting new laws compared with 25% of Republicans and 66% of voters who are political independents or belong to other parties. Support for new state laws was strongest among Black voters — 72% — who historically have been targeted with discriminatory voting policies, including Jim Crow-era laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

The federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned those policies, ensuring that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race. The law also ensured that Black Americans and other communities of color had the opportunity to participate in all parts of the political system and elect the leaders of their choosing, influencing how political districts are drawn. The act was reauthorized by Congress in 2006 by an overwhelming bipartisan majority.

“Now it has come to the point where the president has tried to convince people that somehow equal voting rights is bad, because, in his words, ‘The wrong people are voting right,’” said Matt Barreto, faculty director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, referring to Trump. “You have super majorities, very large percentages of Californians, who want the state to do more to protect voting rights, I think, because of the very tenuous climate right now, with the president constantly going after states for vote by mail and trying to get their voter rolls and these other sorts of things.”

Recent rulings by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court also have rolled back federal protections under the Voting Rights Act. A pending case, Louisiana vs. Callais, which involves the drawing of congressional districts, may overturn some of the remaining protections, Barreto said.

“I think people should be extremely nervous this court has not shown a lot of support for voting rights, and that’s the reason why California has an opportunity to pass its own state laws,” he said.

Among the laws California legislators could adopt, Barreto said, would be protections for early voting, banning onerous requirements on voters to prove citizenship and provide identification, and ensuring that congressional and other political districts are created to allow minority groups to elect representatives of their choice.

The Berkeley poll also found widespread support among California voters for requiring that the top three financial backers supporting and opposing ballot measures be listed in official ballot voter guides. A majority of Californians also supported expanding access to translation and interpreter assistance for populations that make up at least 5% or 5,000 voters in a county.

The Berkeley IGS poll surveyed 5,109 California registered voters online in English and Spanish from March 9 to 15. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.

Funding for the poll was provided to IGS by the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, a private foundation based in San Francisco that aims to increase civic participation and improve the state’s democratic processes.

NASHVILLE, N.C. — Ricky Brinkley has lived in rural North Carolina nearly all of his 65 years, and he likes it “out in the county,” past the street lights and bustle of the small towns that carpet the landscape.

But the former truck driver can feel left out when elections roll around in this battleground state.

“People don’t come out like they should and ask you how you feel about things,” Brinkley said while he manned the counter at his daughter’s beauty supply store down the street from the Nashville courthouse. “You want somebody to vote, but you don’t want to do nothing to get the vote. No, it don’t work that way.”

Brinkley is among the rural Black residents who Democrats have often failed to mobilize as they try to dent Republican advantages here. It’s an urgent demographic puzzle for the party, which is normally strong with Black voters but tends to fall short in rural areas.

Success could help former Gov. Roy Cooper win a hotly contested U.S. Senate race this year and tilt the balance of power in Washington. It could also reshape presidential elections, providing Democrats with a wider path to the White House.

“People want to look at the word ‘rural’ in North Carolina and equate it to the word ‘white,’” said state party chair Anderson Clayton, a 28-year-old who won her job three years ago promising to expand the party beyond cities. “In my vision of a Democratic Party, when you talk about reaching out to rural voters, you are talking about rural Black voters.”

The Rev. James Gailliard, a former state lawmaker who leads a large Black congregation in Rocky Mount, put it even more bluntly.

“You don’t win this state in Durham,” Gailliard said. “You win it in the east.”

It’s about more than Cooper’s Senate bid

North Carolina is known for the university-heavy Research Triangle that includes Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill, along with Charlotte’s banking hub. But it also includes large swaths of small towns and rural areas where Democrats have lost ground in recent decades.

That’s not just because of white voters realigning with Republicans. It’s also because Black voters who lean Democratic don’t vote as often as their urban counterparts. Those rural Black voters are concentrated east of the triangle, extending along winding state highways through small towns, flatlands and farmland toward the Atlantic coastline.

Cooper, 68, won two terms as governor and four terms as state attorney general. However, Republicans control the state courts and the legislature, and they’ve redrawn the congressional map to expand their advantage in the U.S. House. Donald Trump carried the state for Republicans all three times he ran for the White House.

A native of rural Nash County, Cooper already in recent months held roundtable sessions with Black farmers, business owners and civic leaders in eastern North Carolina, along with students from North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black school that draws students from across the state. His campaign promises a statewide organizing effort before November.

Gailliard wants a more intentional effort

But Gailliard wants more.

The founding pastor at Word Tabernacle Church, Gailliard was among the Black state lawmakers who lost seats after Republican-led redistricting. He said regaining ground will require neighborhood-level organizing and investment from national Democrats, something he struggled to get from Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.

“I couldn’t get any traction,” Gailliard recalled. “I begged them to bring her to Rocky Mount. I said, ‘Listen, Rocky Mount is the gateway to the East. If we crack Rocky Mount, we’ve cracked the East.’ Could not convince them to come. Two weeks later, guess who’s in Rocky Mount? Donald Trump.”

The Harris campaign sent former President Bill Clinton to the area instead.

Gailliard said Cooper needs people like him to get elected.

“Roy is a great friend, and I’m gonna run my butt off to help him in every way, but I’m not banking on his coattails,” Gailliard said. “I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to grow coattails for him.”

The state party tries to fill gaps

Clayton, the state party chair, said the national party and its donors haven’t prioritized North Carolina early enough in recent cycles.

She said she’s relied mostly on local money to finance 25 full-time staffers, more than three times what the state party had heading into the 2022 midterms.

Bertie County Democratic chairwoman Camille Taylor, whose hometown of Powellsville has fewer than 200 residents, said she’s felt the shift.

She speaks regularly with a field organizer in nearby Greenville, the city closest to the northeastern counties with large proportions of Black residents. But she said it’s especially difficult to persuade rural voters to care about voting beyond the presidency, even though she tells them “these are the races and the people that you’re going to interact with more.”

Democrats have recruited candidates in all 170 legislative districts — two are Democratic-aligned independents — and every U.S. House district. State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, a noted civil rights attorney and Black woman, is running statewide for reelection.

Gailliard said he’s identified a few hundred nonprofits, neighborhood associations and other groups that can do issue-orientated work in his district as the election approaches. He wants to match each of them to specific precincts, routing money for them to reach voters and persuade them to vote.

He wants volunteers to get training from Democratic and left-leaning organizations rather than have the outsiders themselves knocking on rural Black voters’ doors.

“We can’t have 21-year-old recent college graduates from Utah knocking doors at $22 an hour in the hood,” Gailliard said. “That just does not work. They’re not a trusted messenger.”

Marginal voting changes add up

About 2 in 10 North Carolina voters in the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections were Black, according to AP VoteCast, as well as in the 2022 Senate election.

Roughly 4 in 10 Black voters in North Carolina’s last presidential election said they live in small towns or rural communities, similar to the share who said they live in the suburbs. Only about one-quarter reported living in urban areas.

Small shifts in persuasion matter, particularly when races are close. In 2008, Barack Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina, by a margin of just 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million votes cast.

Voter turnout between the 2020 and 2024 elections declined more in North Carolina counties that have larger Black populations.

Counties where Black voters make up about 30% to 40% of the electorate saw the biggest drop, with turnout falling by more than 3 percentage points. Counties with smaller Black populations saw more modest declines of about 1 percentage point. Overall, turnout remains higher in counties with fewer Black voters.

An old Cooper schoolmate just wants to be asked

Gailliard said Democrats cannot underestimate how much it means for someone to simply get asked for their vote.

“Black and rural voters are not transactional,” he said. “They are relational.”

Back in Nashville at the beauty supply store, Brinkley agreed.

“You get to be a big wheel, and you can forget where you came from,” Brinkley said. “I ain’t gonna say Roy forgot. He’s a hometown guy, so to speak, but I don’t expect to see him out here walking.”

Brinkley made it clear that if he votes, it would be for Cooper and other Democrats — but only if he votes.

“I could. I could. I may vote,” he said. “There’s just so much going on.”

Barrow and Sweedler write for the Associated Press. Sweedler reported from Washington. AP journalist Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.