VOTERS

Though I don’t regularly attend Mass, I fondly remember the two years in high school when I prepared for the sacrament of Communion.

In the basement of St. Boniface Church in Anaheim on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings in the mid-1990s, my sister, about 20 other teenagers and I learned about the tenets of our faith.

We were inculcated with the importance of charity, love toward all, good works and humility, and urged to carry those virtues into adulthood. I didn’t agree with everything our lay teachers espoused — why abortion should be outlawed, why necking was bad, why only men could become priests — but I learned enough important moral lessons that I still proudly call myself Catholic.

Confirmation is meant to bring recipients closer to God and “imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark,” according to the Vatican’s official guide to its doctrine. What especially stayed with my classmates and me was, well, us.

We were white, Filipino, Vietnamese and Latino, children of working-class parents and equals in the eyes of God. Church fairs were as likely to serve pancit and spring rolls as hamburgers and tacos. When we finally received confirmation at a special Mass at St. Boniface attended by then-Bishop Norman McFarland, we exemplified not just the future of the church but also the promise of a better tomorrow for the United States.

Our parish lived and practiced American Catholicism’s long tradition of welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the refugee — following the example and words of the Gospel we read every Sunday. But even as we committed ourselves to the path of Christ, politicians in California waged a war against illegal immigrants and anything that suggested diversity — a xenophobia that would culminate decades later with President Trump’s election.

Trump is a walking manifestation of the seven deadly sins, to the point that he has depicted himself as Jesus and a pope on social media. Nevertheless, a majority of Catholics — thankfully no one in my immediate family — voted for him in each of his three presidential elections, with support topping out at 55% in 2024, per the Pew Research Center.

Catholics were a key constituency in every sector Trump needed for his historic victory against Kamala Harris. Swing states with old-line communities like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Boom states like Nevada and Florida. And especially Latinos, who voted for Trump in numbers never before seen for a Republican presidential candidate. Latino Catholics went even harder for Trump: The Public Religion Research Institute found their support for him increased by 17 percentage points from 2016 to 2024, even as his white Catholic support dropped from 64% to 59%.

Issues from abortion to the economy to transgender rights spurred Catholics to side with Trump, but his hard-line stance against immigration was especially popular. As immigrant Catholics were being demonized, echoing previous eras of American history, too many Catholics sided with the demonizers.

Maria Marin and her husband, Martin Marin, pose with a cardboard cutout of Pope Leo XIV during the Archdiocese of Chicago’s celebration of Leo at Rate Field on June 14, 2025.

(Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via Associated Press)

A June 2024 survey by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks American Catholic life, showed that 43% of respondents supported lower levels of immigration. A month into Trump’s second term, 41% of American Catholics thought that increased immigration in recent years had changed the U.S. “for the worse,” compared with 33% who felt it made life better, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I argued about the dignity of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants with people from my parents’ native ranchos in Mexico, who came to this country without papers and are regular churchgoers. I sighed in disappointment as former confirmation classmates whose refugee parents fled tyrannical rulers, just like the Holy Family, posted approvingly on social media about Trump’s vow to build a bigger, nastier border wall.

Catholics have frequently exemplified the best and worst tendencies of American society. We’ve been brutal conquistadors and the huddled masses yearning to be free, trailblazing politicians and the millions who stood silently during our church’s sex abuse scandals. Trump’s support among Catholics represented a new low. But by some miracle of God, more and more of those supporters are finally seeing him for who he is.

On Aug. 12 — the feast day of Jane Frances de Chantal, the patron saint of forgotten people — the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey showing that 62% of Catholics think unfavorably of Trump, while 57% oppose his handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. If this repentance transforms into votes against MAGA in the midterms, the rest of Trump’s presidency is doomed.

The poll offers no insight into why Catholic support for Trump has cratered. The easy explanation would be the president’s enmity toward Pope Leo XIV, who has preached a gospel of kindness toward the undocumented and spoken out against the quagmire in Iran. When the Trump administration invited the native-born Chicagoan to visit the U.S. for America’s 250th anniversary, Leo instead decided to spend his Fourth of July on Lampedusa, the Ellis Island of the Mediterranean.

But the poll noted that Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had higher favorability ratings among American Catholics during the same time in their respective reigns — 90% to Leo’s 75%.

Trump’s popularity is also collapsing among Americans as a whole. Only about a third support him, according to an a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — the poorest showing of his second term, matching the lowest numbers of his first term. But for Catholics, it’s not just high prices, the Iran War and Trump’s drift toward despotism that makes him so onerous.

The Catholics in his government, from Supreme Court justices to Cabinet members to Vice President JD Vance, are acting as a rubber stamp for an imperious ruler, instead of imitations of Christ. Trump’s immigration sweeps are hitting American Catholicism so hard that bishops have allowed the faithful to stay home instead of attending Mass.

What reason is there left for good Catholics to support Trump? If ever a group needed to break away from him, it’s us.

What’s been especially galling about Trump’s second term, from a Catholic perspective, is his gleeful cruelty.

Proverbs 21:13 states, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” Conservatives who have criticized Pope Leo for taking on Trump over his nastiness toward the meek don’t get that his motive isn’t political — this has been standard Vatican doctrine going back to his namesake, Leo XIII. In an influential 1891 encyclical urging the world to stand by the working class, Leo XIII pointed out that sacrificing oneself “for the benefit of others, is man’s surest antidote against the insolence of the world and immoderate love of self.”

Is there any statement more contrary to MAGA than that?

Cardinals Robert McElroy, Christophe Pierre and Joseph Tobin and Archbishop Bernard Hebda speak to reporters after a Mass in solidarity with migrants at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Feb. 27, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn.

(Mark Vancleave/Associated Press)

The Catholics who supported Trump may have forgotten Leo XIII’s words as they repeatedly voted for him. But that’s the beauty of our faith. We can admit our errors and seek to right them through another sacrament — confession.

“Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of,” reads the catechism of the Catholic Church. That way, people can “take responsibility” for their faults and reconcile with God “in order to make a new future possible.” And the way to do that is by “doing something more to make amends for the sin.”

Catholics are supposed to confess our sins privately. But we must repent of Trump publicly and loudly at the ballot box this November and urge others to follow.

We helped usher in Trump. We must now lead in exorcising him from American society once and for all.

Reporting from Washington — Will the second time be a charm for Judge Thomas M. Hardiman?

Hardiman, 53, was the runner-up last year in the seat that went to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

He has a solidly conservative record, including a strong defense of gun rights. And Hardiman’s working-class background could bring a fresh perspective to the nation’s highest court, giving him a special appeal to the voters who propelled President Trump’s drive to the White House.

He would become the current court’s only non-Ivy League graduate. The first in his family to graduate from college, Hardiman drove a cab to help pay his tuition.

As a young man, he learned Spanish, studied in Mexico and worked with Ayuda, a legal aid clinic in Washington, where he represented Spanish-speaking immigrants, including those who were seeking political asylum.

Beyond that, Hardiman had an inside advantage: He serves on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia along with Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who has reportedly urged her brother to choose him.

Hardiman’s compelling personal back story may make him harder for Senate Democrats to oppose.

But he has not appeared to be among Trump’s top three candidates in the search to replace retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

He has been seen as a capable, hardworking and well-liked judge. But he did not have a national reputation as a legal thinker, and even lawyers in Pittsburgh said last year that they do not see him as Supreme Court material.

“He takes the case before him and looks at the facts and precedents, but without imposing an overarching view of the law,” said University of Pittsburgh law professor Arthur Hellman. “It’s hard to assess what he would be like as a Supreme Court justice. My guess is that he will be a cautious judge, at least for a few years.”

President George W. Bush chose Hardiman to become a district judge in 2003 and then elevated him to the appeals court two years later, when he won unanimous confirmation from the Senate.

Hardiman does not have record of strident comments on issues such as abortion or gay rights that could fuel opposition in the Senate.

He grew up in Waltham, Mass., where his father ran a company that provided taxi service and school transportation. Hardiman won a merit scholarship to go the University of Notre Dame, and he earned his law degree at Georgetown University in Washington. He practiced law in Washington before moving to Pittsburgh. His wife, Lori Zappala Hardiman, comes from a prominent Democratic family long active in Pittsburgh politics.

He staked out a strong position four years ago in favor of the 2nd Amendment right to carry a gun in public. He dissented when the 3rd Circuit upheld a New Jersey law that required people seeking gun permits to demonstrate a “justifiable need” to be armed. Several plaintiffs who had been turned down for permits sued, alleging the restriction violated the 2nd Amendment.

A district judge upheld the law — as did the 3rd Circuit, by a 2-1 vote. The majority said that although the Supreme Court had recognized a right to have a gun at home for self-defense, it had not ruled the Constitution protected the right to carry a gun in public.

Hardiman wrote a 40-page dissent, arguing the high court and Justice Scalia described the 2nd Amendment as protecting a right to “self-defense.” Because “the need for self-defense naturally exists outside and inside the home, I would hold the 2nd Amendment applies outside the home,” he wrote in Drake vs. Filko.

In passing the law, “New Jersey has decided that fewer handguns legally carried in public means less crime…. It is obvious that the justifiable need requirement functions as a rationing system designed to limit the number of handguns carried in New Jersey,” he wrote, maintaining that the law could not stand in the face of 2nd Amendment challenge.

The law survived an appeal to the Supreme Court, however. The justices, without comment, turned down a petition in 2014 asking them to review the 3rd Circuit’s decision.

Hardiman also wrote an important opinion that upheld the power of jailers to strip-search all new inmates, even those being held briefly for failing to pay a fine who do not appear to a pose a security risk. A class-action suit was brought on behalf of people who had been arrested and strip-searched in a county jail in New Jersey. They alleged these full-body exams amounted to “unreasonable searches” in violation of the 4th Amendment. The lead plaintiff, Albert Florence, had been arrested and briefly jailed for not paying a fine. It later turned out he had paid the fine.

A district judge ruled for the plaintiffs, but Hardiman spoke for a 2-1 majority to throw out their claim. “We do not minimize the extreme intrusion on privacy associated with a strip search by law enforcement officers,” he wrote, but he added that “the prevention of the entry of illegal weapons and drugs is vital to the protection of inmates and prison personnel alike.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case, Florence vs. Board of Chosen Freeholders, but affirmed Hardiman’s 3rd Circuit decision by a 5-4 vote in 2012.

However, Hardiman’s judicial record is not uniformly conservative, which raises concerns among conservatives.

In 2009, one of his opinions for the 3rd Circuit revived a claim of “gender stereotyping discrimination” brought by a man who said he was harassed, ridiculed and finally fired from his job at a specialty printing company because he was seen as effeminate.

Hardiman noted that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court had outlawed discrimination based on an employee’s sexual orientation. However, he said, the justices had said employees may sue if they are fired for failing to conform to “gender stereotypes.” In the case of Prowel vs. Wise, he cleared the way for the fired employee to take his claim before a jury.

david.savage@latimes.com

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RON UNZ

* Born: Sept. 20, 1961, Los Angeles

* Residence: Palo Alto

* Current position: Full-time candidate for governor, on leave from managing his small software company.

* Education: Bachelor’s degrees in physics and history, Harvard University. Phi Beta Kappa. Recipient of a Churchill Science Fellowship to Cambridge University in England, where he studied quantum gravitation under Stephen Hawking.

* Career highlights: In the late 1980s, Unz took a leave of absence from Stanford University, where he was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics. He worked as an associate at a New York City mortgage finance company. In 1988, he founded Wall Street Analytics Inc., a financial services software company.

* Family: Unmarried

The Record

Ron Unz has no public record and brings an unusual, if not unique, background to his quest for California’s top public office. He has a strong record of academic and intellectual achievement. His IQ has been estimated at 214–what one expert calls “one in a million”–and as a teen-ager he won first place in the national Westinghouse talent search competition for a paper on black holes. He is a physicist as well as an expert on the Spartan naval empire.

After working for a New York City mortgage finance company, Unz founded his own small firm that sells specialized computer programs to Wall Street firms. The firm has become highly successful during the last six years and has made Unz a wealthy man.

Although he has no political experience, he says he has long had an interest in politics and has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative think tanks and causes.

Unz says his years in the business world have prepared him well to govern California. “In terms of the sectors of the American economy that create wealth, I have more experience than the other four candidates together, times a factor of a few,” he said.

The Speech: In His Own Words

I believe that the Republican Party stands for clear principles and firm ideas–smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations and traditional values–and that Pete Wilson stands for nothing except his political ambition.

Over the past three years, Pete Wilson and the Democrats have enacted the largest state tax increase in American history, deepening our recession and destroying jobs. Pete Wilson and the Democrats have led our Golden State to the brink of ruin. A choice between Pete Wilson and the Democrats means no choice at all for the people of California.

Unlike Pete Wilson, I have not abandoned the mainstream of the Republican Party . . . and its basic principles. . . . Under Ronald Reagan, these were the ideas which swept the nation and the world. I am the Republican candidate for governor.

Unlike Pete Wilson, my affiliation with the Republican Party is not hereditary: I come from a family of Democrats. But when that former Democrat Ronald Reagan transformed the Republican Party into the party of the ordinary working people of America, it became my party.

Unlike Pete Wilson, I didn’t attend an elite prep school, but received my education in the public schools of Los Angeles, back when they still provided an outstanding education for all of our children, rich and poor alike. It was this education which provided me with the tools of opportunity I needed to achieve economic success. But today, I am disgusted by the decay of our school system.

Unlike Pete Wilson, I don’t believe we should raise taxes again and again, until our entrepreneurs and small businesses are faced with some of the highest tax rates in America, driving our jobs and prosperity to other states. . . .

Unlike Pete Wilson, who has been on government and political payrolls for almost 30 years as a lifelong career politician, I come from the private business sector, the part of our economy which actually creates the wealth, provides the jobs and pays the taxes. I understand the value of money and the long hours required to earn it. I reject the waste that is routinely accepted by the special interest politicians who don’t understand what it’s like to earn a living in the real world.

Unlike Pete Wilson, who has little or no comprehension of the industries of tomorrow, I come from a scientific and technological background. I know that California’s future prosperity cannot be based merely upon jobs to build and maintain Pete Wilson’s endless array of future prisons.

I know that the high-technology industries of tomorrow such as computers, telecommunications, biotechnology and the entertainment industry can be the foundation of California’s prosperity. I see that the widespread adoption of telecommuting could make our freeway traffic jams a thing of the past. . . .

My grandparents came to California in the 1920s and 1930s as poor European immigrants, willing to work hard to provide a better life for their children.

I am a native-born Californian who remembers the hope and optimism and endless sense of possibility which the California Dream once meant to us. Our state has the finest climate, enormous natural beauty, and tremendous scientific and technological resources unequaled any place in the world.

The primary obstacle on our road to recovery is the deep failure of our own overgrown state government. Join with me in overcoming this one obstacle, and together we can restore the Golden State which we all remember.

The polls have opened in Clacton-on-Sea as a record number of candidates vie to become the resort’s next MP.

An electorate of 79,785 registered voters have the chance to vote for one of 34 candidates standing in the Essex resort – the most ever to stand in a British election.

Fifty-one polling stations have opened, covering Clacton and the surrounding towns of Jaywick, Frinton and Walton-on-the-Naze. The constituency also has rural villages including St Osyth, Weeley and Great Bentley.

Voters will need to show a form of acceptable ID – such as a driver’s licence or passport – to be able to cast their ballot.

They will receive the longest ballot paper in British electoral history at 90cm – about 3ft long – to choose their candidate and cast their vote.

There are 12 political parties and 20 independents standing.

Polling stations will remain open to anyone registered to vote until 22:00, with the count taking place overnight.

Los Angeles County election officials are examining steps ahead of the November midterms to respond to the rising popularity of election trading via prediction markets, including a possible ban on wagering for county election workers.

The discussions follow a fracas during the June ballot count, when a handful of influencers suggested fraud could be occurring in L.A.’s mayoral primary because the results began diverging from the market’s prediction.

That incident, the most prominent interaction of prediction markets and a U.S. election to date, revealed a new dynamic in the battle for public trust in elections. Now, election administrators around the country are considering the possible implications of the markets’ forecasts, including whether they have the power to affect voter confidence in election results.

“We’re … trying to find our way in this,” L.A. County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said in an interview. “It’s opened up a lot of questions that we’re grappling with.”

Three months before the midterms, with much of the American public concerned about democracy and trust in elections dropping, officials are paying attention to anything that could create further uncertainty around how elections are run.

The midterm contests are high stakes for both parties, which are battling for control of Congress amid a difficult economy, the war in Iran and low approval ratings for President Trump. And many Americans are wagering on what might happen — users have traded nearly $200 million on the midterm elections so far, a July analysis by NBC News found.

Prediction market platforms and their proponents say trading contracts on the markets is not the same as betting, likening it instead to trading on the stock market. Critics say it amounts to gambling, regardless of how the markets are set up.

The timeline for election administrators to think through the issue before November is tight, and it poses challenges for offices that already are stretched thin preparing for other possible election-day scenarios. What happened during the L.A. mayoral primary, however, has prompted discussions around the country, said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, or PLEJ, a nonpartisan organization that represents election administrators.

“The potential effect on confidence [in elections] is significant,” Lopez said.

A spokesperson for Kalshi, one of the leading trading platforms, said the platform bans insider trading and welcomes any policy measures doing the same. The company takes “seriously our responsibility to be a responsible actor in this space,” spokesperson Jacki McGavick said.

Los Angeles could become one of the first major election jurisdictions to implement guidance or policy related to prediction markets. Delaware County, Pa., in suburban Philadelphia, already has taken such a step — adding prediction markets to an oath poll workers already were required to sign affirming that they have not wagered on the election.

Last month, Maryland’s top election official asked the state prosecutor to open an investigation into the legality of prediction markets. In late July, Wisconsin’s election administrator warned voters that it is illegal under state law to both vote in and bet on an election. That drew swift attacks from executives at Kalshi, one of whom claimed the state would “disenfranchise voters who use Kalshi.”

In L.A. County, Logan said his office is in the research stage for an insider-trading policy for staff. His office also is creating public messaging to deploy in various scenarios and factoring the potential dynamics around prediction markets into security planning.

Any potential for unrest or protests related to people’s monitoring of market forecasts is likely to come in the days following the election, while ballots still are being counted, Logan said.

Elections staff also is preparing FAQ documents about prediction markets and discussing how to talk about the issue with reporters, gaming out different scenarios, he said.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page said he advised his office’s staff before the primary, and plans to do so again before November, that participating in election markets could create a conflict of interest prohibited by county code. Staff betting could been seen by the public “as improper,” Page said he told his staff, “ which would undermine trust in the integrity of the election.”

Thirty-nine percent of likely midterm voters in a recent survey commissioned by PLEJ said their confidence in an election outcome would be reduced if the official result differed from prediction market odds. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they believed prediction markets create confusion around elections.

A majority was unable to correctly identify what prediction market odds represent, according to the survey results, with more than a third believing they showed the current number of votes for each candidate or an official projection from election officials.

The rise of the exchanges, which allow users to stake money on the chance that a given event will happen in the future, has provided a way to create predictions that some experts say are more accurate than political polling.

Leaders of the platforms have suggested they can help combat election misinformation by providing predictive insights and help decision-makers understand public sentiment. Kalshi launched what it termed a “midterms hub” late last month, which it said would contain not only market forecasts but also news, polling and fundraising data.

“Election markets have been my dream since the start of Kalshi,” Luana Lopes Lara, a co-founder of the platform, said on social media upon the hub launch. “The holy grail of prediction markets, they shed light on some of the most consequential, decentralized and human processes in the world, where good data is crucial and hard to find.”

She added: “It’s changed the way I interacted with the electoral process and made me smarter — I hope it does the same to you.”

McGavick, the spokesperson, said about 75% of Kalshi visitors view the odds without buying anything in order to understand what “the crowd forecasts.”

“Kalshi has become a leading indicator of where elections are headed,” she said.

As users trade contracts — each one representing a bet for or against a given event, such as a certain candidate winning an election — the market generates odds. On Tuesday, for instance, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass had a 61% chance of winning in November on Kalshi, while City Council member Nithya Raman had a 39% chance.

Either Bass or Raman could win, but if the public’s understanding of the markets is murky, experts say, voters may confuse their speculation for certainty.

In June, the market odds appeared to drive some public belief about what the results would be, Logan told reporters at a briefing last month — in this case, that Republican Spencer Pratt would be one of the top-two vote-getters, which ultimately did not happen.

“That put us in a position as election officials of having to respond to a whole new layer of misinformation,” Logan said. “Not only were we being asked how were the polls wrong … but [people were saying], ‘We saw numbers’ or ‘We saw odds.’”

Experts worry it could become more common for market odds to be cited by people who are dissatisfied with an election result as a new way to attempt to discredit a ballot count, adding a new quiver in the bow of election deniers and potentially confusing the public.

The existence of prediction markets “provides one more source of information” that could be used by bad actors to stir up confusion or distrust in election results, said Mindy Romero, executive director of the California-based nonpartisan Center for Inclusive Democracy.

“People might think … prediction markets are a good thing or a bad thing,” Romero said, “but you can’t deny that it is one more thing that could potentially be manipulated.”

Separately, prediction markets have drawn the attention of lawmakers in Congress for various reasons, including fears of insider trading. Members of both parties have proposed guardrail legislation this year. Several states are locked in legal battles with the federal government over whether they can regulate the markets under state anti-gambling laws.

Last week, as destructive wildfires raged in Washington, Oregon, California and elsewhere, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla joined with other Democratic senators from western states to urge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to restrict the markets from offering betting on wildfires. They cited concerns that people could be tempted to influence fires or commit arson in order to “make sure their bets are successful.”

Schiff introduced a bill to prohibit such trading in March. Kalshi has a ban on markets tied directly to death and war. Kalshi and the other leading platform, Polymarket, also regularly report suspected insider trading to the federal government for investigation. Last month, federal investigators alleged that Trump’s teleprompter operator had used inside knowledge to win more than $100,000 after Kalshi spotted his activity.

In Los Angeles, Logan said his office may issue guidance by November, but the task will extend beyond the next election day.

“What we want to do is defend against anything that would devalue the elections process,” Logan said. “We don’t want voters to be discouraged from participating.”

Esther Kim Varet has gotten a lot of questions recently from “depressed” liberals wondering whom they should vote for in November to represent them in the redrawn 40th Congressional District, which covers a large swath of inland Orange County and portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The Democratic art gallery owner placed third in last month’s closely watched primary for the seat, behind Republican incumbent Reps. Ken Calvert of Corona and Young Kim of Anaheim Hills. Calvert and Kim were pushed into the same district by last year’s Proposition 50 and will be the only two candidates facing off for the seat in November.

Kim Varet said her supporters have “obviously put a lot of thought into” which of the incumbents to support, but they have had a hard time swallowing the idea of voting for either. So she tells them why, “if we’re playing a kind of longer game,” they should vote for Kim.

She says Calvert is favored to win, so supporting Kim will “force both sides to spend more on this race” and reduce Republican spending on other races where Democrats still have a shot at beating a GOP incumbent. She says Calvert is “much more senior” than Kim, so ousting him would be “more significant.” And Calvert, as chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, has funded Trump’s war in Iran and would be “morally the better target.”

In last month’s primary, Kim Varet and other Democratic candidates collectively won 42.9% of the district vote, compared with Calvert’s 34.9% and Kim’s 20.6%. If enough of those Democratic voters coalesced behind Kim, they could end Calvert’s 33-year run in Congress.

Whether they will, however, is unclear. Such “orphaned” voters — those left without a candidate of their party in a general election — are historically just as likely to abstain from voting or to vote based on far less strategic considerations. Californians created that dilemma more than a decade ago when they approved the top-two primary system that puts all candidates on the same ballot and only allows the top-two finishers to advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.

Paul Mitchell, a Democratic redistricting expert who devised California’s new congressional map under Proposition 50, said the backers of California’s primary system sold it years ago as a moderating force, where those orphaned voters would be encouraged to select the least partisan general election candidate.

But in reality, Mitchell said, “it doesn’t work that way.”

Voter decisions

Mitchell said intraparty matchups in the past have shown 35% of orphaned voters or more simply abstain from voting in that race.

A recent analysis Mitchell conducted of races, including for seats in the state Legislature, showed such undervoting among orphaned voters in every intraparty race for a state Senate seat in 2024 — one clear example being the competitive and costly battle between two Democrats, Laura Richardson and Michelle Chambers, in South Los Angeles.

Many others vote based on “tertiary things,” he said, such as a candidate’s race or gender, or whether they seem local or a Washington insider.

“Traditionally, it isn’t so much about somebody being more moderate,” he said, in part because voters can’t always discern moderation among candidates of an opposing party. “Republicans might be able to tell the difference between a moderate Republican and a conservative Republican, but Democrats can’t tell the difference.”

Incumbency can also be a drag on a candidate if orphaned voters dislike their track record, even if their opponent is even further from those voters politically. As one example, Mitchell pointed to rural, more conservative parts of the state going for Kevin de León over Sen. Dianne Feinstein when he challenged her in 2018, despite his running to her left.

“You’re like, how in the hell did these rural counties vote for Kevin de León? And it was because there were a lot of Republicans who, if they were going to vote in the U.S. Senate race, just wanted to vote against Feinstein,” Mitchell said.

Katelyn Stauffer, an associate politics professor at University of Georgia who has studied voter behavior in top-two races in California, said people “like to make decisions that are easy,” and “for most people, the ultimate cue is, does this person share my party?”

When party doesn’t differentiate candidates, voters tend to rely on other “simple cues or heuristics,” Stauffer said.

For example, based on her research, she said, women regardless of party and Democrats regardless of gender are more likely to vote for a woman in such scenarios.

Candidate messaging

Candidates could consider moderating their message to attract orphaned voters, though that can be perilous.

In a statement to The Times, Calvert accused Kim of trying to woo orphaned voters with a more bipartisan message, as evidence she is untrustworthy.

“Young Kim has bragged to some voters that she’s a moderate who censured President Trump. She’s then claimed to others that she [is] a 100% Trump Republican. It’s obvious Young Kim will say anything to try and hold on to her job, which is why voters from every party just can’t trust her,” Calvert said.

He said he has “been a consistent conservative in Congress for many years and that’s not going to change.” He also claimed to be “one of the most effective members of Congress,” saying he has secured funding to reduce traffic congestion, fight fires and improve water infrastructure in his district — things “voters from all parties want.”

Chris Pack, a spokesman for Kim, denied that Kim is changing her tune depending on her audience, and dismissed Calvert’s claims of serving his constituents well, calling him a “do-nothing dinosaur” who has failed to improve his constituents’ lives for decades.

“The truth is he’s had more than enough time to deliver for the people of California, and he hasn’t,” Pack said.

Similar intraparty battles are playing out in other congressional races between Democrats.

In the 4th Congressional District, which stretches through the Napa and Sacramento valleys, Republican voters could help decide between incumbent Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) and his challenger from the left, venture capitalist Eric Jones.

Thompson — who has been in Congress since 1999 and sits on the powerful Ways and Means Committee — won 41% of the vote in the primary, while Jones won 22.2%. A slate of six Republican candidates collectively won 36.1%.

Jones, who backs progressive measures to expand Medicare and cut working-class taxes, said he hopes voters of all stripes look beyond political labels and see that he is the only candidate in the race who will take on big utilities, healthcare lobbyists and other big-business interests who fund Thompson’s campaigns.

“I want voters to realize that there’s a real choice in front of them,” he said.

Thompson said he is focused on doing his job, introducing himself to voters in the new parts of his district, reconfigured under Proposition 50, and “figuring out how I can work with them” to address their concerns. He said there is “a lot of commonality” among voters of all parties who want “good roads, clean air, water, strong [agriculture], safe communities,” and that he’s been endorsed by local Republicans and Democrats alike.

Thompson also rejected Jones’ criticism of his fundraising, saying he has “done a lot of good work that’s not necessarily in the interests” of those who have contributed to his campaign. He also said fundraising is necessary in a race against a wealthy opponent like Jones, who donated millions of dollars to his own campaign.

In the 7th Congressional District, Republican voters will help decide between incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) — who has been in Congress since replacing her late husband there in 2005 — and her challenger from the left, progressive Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang.

Vang won 31.2% of the primary vote. Matsui won 29.1%. Two Republican candidates together won 37%.

In a statement to The Times, Matsui said November’s general election “will be a significantly different race because there will be many more voters that didn’t vote in the primary,” and that she will “work harder to court voters by meeting them where they are and informing them how I’ve delivered on my promises,” including on healthcare, public safety and jobs.

Vang did not respond to a request for comment but has previously accused Matsui of not delivering on her promises for decades.

“After 20 years, families are living paycheck to paycheck, people of my generation are no closer to owning a home, and you still can’t afford a doctor visit,” Vang said last month.

Party involvement

Political parties have traditionally shunned meddling in races where they lack a candidate of their own, experts said. They sometimes endorse in races where two members of their own party are facing off against each other, but not always.

Nick Poche, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, said his organization is largely focused on three races in which Republicans are either looking to hold or win seats from Democrats: the 13th Congressional District, where Republican Kevin Lincoln is challenging Rep. Adam Gray (D-Merced); the 22nd Congressional District, where Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) is trying to fend off Democrat Randy Villegas; and the 48th Congressional District, where Republican Jim Desmond is facing off against Democrat Marni von Wilpert for the seat of retiring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall).

He called the Democrats in those races “radical socialists and emblematic of California’s far-left failures,” and said his party would be campaigning against them. But he declined to speak to the Calvert-Kim race, or the races in which two Democrats are facing off.

The California Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.

Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, said his party is focused on “fulfilling the promise of Proposition 50” to flip five seats to help his party win control of the House, and is also focused on three competitive races: those for Valadao’s and Issa’s seats, and one in the 6th Congressional District, where Democrat Richard Pan is taking on Republican-turned-independent Rep. Kevin Kiley of Rocklin.

Hicks said the party will not endorse Calvert or Kim, whom he called “two rotten choices,” but has endorsed incumbents Matsui and Thompson in their races against fellow Democrats because they have “been leading” on issues of affordability and access to healthcare and “are best positioned to be reelected.”

Jones scoffed at his party endorsing his opponent. “Are we really excited that the Democratic machine keeps trying to choose our electeds for us?” he said.

TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas voters will decide Tuesday whether to elect state Supreme Court justices rather than have the governor appoint them, a push from conservatives who have chafed for years over court decisions they disagreed with on issues such as abortion, school funding and the death penalty.

If the constitutional amendment passes, supporters hope to elect at least four conservative, antiabortion justices to the seven-member court by 2033.

Kansas is considering the change amid concerns that increasingly contentious and expensive judicial elections in other states are making their courts more partisan and less independent. Spending in a single state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin last year topped $100 million.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a term-limited Democrat who opposes the measure, said gerrymandering and dark money have put the Legislature out of step with the state’s voters, and “to think you can make the judicial branch a part of that dysfunctional system is frightening.”

Rulings the GOP dislikes

GOP lawmakers cite rulings by Kansas courts over the last two decades as reasons a change is needed.

Most recently, a district court judge in July reinstated a three-day grace period for voters to return mail ballots after election day, which GOP lawmakers had eliminated. Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, called the decision “outrageous” and urged people to vote yes on the ballot question.

The same judge — a finalist to fill the most recent Supreme Court vacancy — blocked enforcement of a 2025 law banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Masterson described him as “radical.”

The list of rulings Republicans criticize also includes rulings on education funding back to 2004. Supreme Court decisions forced lawmakers to increase funding to comply with the state constitution.

“If we elect our Supreme Court, they won’t force you to spend money on schools,” Masterson said in remarks in November to a conservative group, the Marion County Patriots for Liberty, the Marion County Record reported.

Abortion remains a key issue

Electing state Supreme Court justices gained currency among Republicans after a 2022 public vote affirming the high court’s landmark 2019 decision that Kansas’ Bill of Rights guarantees bodily autonomy and access to abortion. Total spending by both sides has exceeded $12 million.

Legislators who worked to overturn the Supreme Court’s protections, including Masterson, helped write this proposal.

Seven weeks after that 2022 vote, state Atty. Gen. Kris Kobach, then a GOP candidate for the office, told a Republican club in Wichita that electing justices would “slowly and quietly” put antiabortion justices on the high court.

The vote-yes campaign’s biggest donor — providing $1.7 million toward the campaign’s $3.7 million in spending — is a Nashville-based nonprofit that supports Republican candidates, groups and causes. Kansans for Life, the state’s most influential antiabortion group, has spent at least $87,000 in a recent 11-day span on mailers and texts.

“Kansans can bring an end to this reign of abortion by voting ‘yes,’” Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said in an editorial written by a staffer on the antiabortion group’s website.

Meanwhile, the national and state affiliates for abortion provider Planned Parenthood contributed $1.6 million toward the vote-no campaign’s $8 million-plus in spending.

Jamie Swan, an engineer and college teaching assistant who knocked on doors for abortion rights in 2022, is doing the same to try to halt the proposal.

“I really believe that this is just a power grab,” she said.

Legislators have no say in appointments

Backers of the Kansas proposal brush aside arguments that electing the justices will give wealthy donors control over the Supreme Court.

“Globally and over history, even in its imperfection, the best system is democracy,” said Elizabeth Patton, state director of the low-tax, small-government group Americans for Prosperity, which has spent $935,000 to promote the vote-yes campaign.

Twenty-two states elect their top court’s judges, eight in partisan races. Governors in 26 states appoint them. In South Carolina and Virginia, legislators pick the justices.

Kansas elected justices for nearly 100 years before voters amended the state constitution in 1958. The governor now picks one of three finalists named by a nominating commission controlled by attorneys. Legislators have no role.

A review of every state’s current and past constitutions shows that the last state to add an amendment like the one Kansas is contemplating was Mississippi in 1914. Since then, 18 states’ amendments went the opposite way.

Voters weigh in every six years on whether a justice remains on the bench through a yes-or-no ballot question, but they’ve never booted a sitting justice. Conservatives say that means justices face no consequences for errant decisions.

Retirements and deaths on the bench allowed Kelly to appoint four of the current justices. Recently, the governor picked a district court judge who blocked enforcement of long-standing abortion restrictions in 2023.

“We don’t have a good way to fight back,” said state Sen. Mike Thompson, a conservative Kansas City-area Republican, who backs the measure.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin voters who have already returned their absentee ballots for the state’s primary are not allowed to void those and request a new one, a judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling deals a blow to Democrats, who filed a lawsuit seeking to give voters a do-over because of a chaotic party primary in the governor’s race.

The ruling is almost certain to be appealed with voting already underway in the state’s primary for governor. It creates another level of uncertainty in the waning days of a primary season that saw Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who had been seen as a Democratic front-runner, drop out on July 17. A day later, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had bowed out on July 8, reentered the race.

Rodriguez’s name remains on the ballot, along with former state economic development director Missy Hughes, who dropped out in June.

More than 117,000 absentee ballots had been returned by Wednesday. Democrats were concerned that many of those might have been cast for Rodriguez.

The attorney for voters who filed the lawsuit with support from the Wisconsin Democratic Party argued in a Tuesday hearing that state law allows voters who have submitted absentee ballots to change their mind before those ballots are counted on election day.

“Voters across Wisconsin will be disenfranchised” if not allowed to do that, attorney Eduardo Castro argued before Dane County Circuit Judge David Conway.

The bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission had voted on July 9 to distribute guidance to clerks saying absentee voters cannot change their ballot after it has been returned. The rarely used process is known as ballot spoiling.

But Conway on Wednesday ruled that “the unambiguous language of the statute does not allow a voter to spoil an absentee ballot after it is returned.” He said the guidance issued by the elections commission to the roughly 2,000 clerks who run elections at the local level was consistent with the law.

The judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order sought by Democrats. They had wanted the judge to order the state elections commission to rescind its guidance.

Spokespeople for the Wisconsin Democratic Party and the state elections commission did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the ruling.

Ballot spoiling was the subject of a 2022 lawsuit brought by a Republican group. In that case, a Waukesha County judge agreed that the elections commission must rescind its guidance that allowed voters to cast a second ballot. But the state appeals court earlier this year vacated that ruling on technical grounds and did not rule on the merits.

The winner of the Democratic primary will advance to November’s general election, most likely against Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas P. Tiffany, who has only token opposition in his party’s primary. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is not seeking a third term.

Democrats hope to keep the governor’s office and flip both chambers of the Legislature to gain full control of state government for the first time since 2010.

Bauer writes for the Associated Press.

Reporting from Sacramento — Gov. Jerry Brown’s effort to revise and ultimately loosen state prison parole rules appears to be on its way to passage on Nov. 8, as a new poll finds strong support across a wide swath of California voters.

Fifty-seven percent of likely voters in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times survey backed Brown’s Proposition 57, and only 31% were opposed. While earlier polling showed an even wider lead, the proposal has had consistently solid backing throughout the campaign season.

“Proposition 57 should pass comfortably,” said Ben Winston of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the Democratic pollster who makes up the bipartisan team that conducts the survey.

The measure, which would allow more prisoners a chance at parole and give additional authority to prison officials to award good-behavior credits, has wide appeal among the state’s young voters.

As many as two-thirds of the poll’s likely voters under the age of 40 supported Proposition 57, with the highest backing from younger white Californians. Support was at, or surpassed, the 60% threshold among Democrats, white voters who are “independent” of any political party and Latino women.

The only serious opposition came from registered Republicans, self-described conservatives and older, non-college-educated voters.

Young voters may be a harbinger of a dramatic long-term shift on crime and punishment in a state where long prison sentences for sensationalized crimes were once the hallmark of successful campaigns.

“This generation of California voters simply wasn’t alive when a tough-on-crime approach was necessary to win a statewide election,” said Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Unruh Institute of Politics.

Political analysts also point to a potential correlation in the poll between supporters of the parole overhaul and those who support Proposition 64, the effort to fully legalize marijuana. Seventy-one percent of the likely voters who support the marijuana measure also support Proposition 57.

“I think there are parallel issues here,” said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist. “They’re making the point that the criminal justice system is broken.”

The ballot box guide to California’s propositions »

Brown has fought bitterly with district attorneys across California over Proposition 57, which he contends is simply offering the chance for a prisoner’s request to be heard by the state Board of Parole Hearings. Under the measure, parole commissioners could consider releasing any prisoner whose primary sentence was not for one of the state’s specifically listed violent crimes, and then only for secondary crimes or enhancements added at the time of sentencing.

Prosecutors, on the other hand, argue that Proposition 57 would almost certainly lead to the early release of dangerous criminals. And they believe the initiative’s expansion of good-behavior credits would mean less time behind bars even for high-risk predators.

The USC/Times poll, like most nonpartisan surveys, tested voter opinions by using Proposition 57’s official ballot title and summary — a description that has become a bone of contention during the campaign.

“The ballot title and summary is a gross and blatant misrepresentation of what this measure would do,” said Merced County Dist. Atty. Larry Morse. “It is incredibly dishonest.”

Law enforcement opponents dispute that new parole eligibility would be given only to offender, who are “nonviolent,” a word that Morse said he believes downplays the threat and thus artificially inflates any estimates of true voter support for the governor’s policy proposal.

“He knows damn good and well this applies to crimes that anyone would see as violent,” Morse said of Brown.

Dan Newman, a spokesman for the Proposition 57 campaign, said the measure is “exactly what voters want in a public safety policy — a focus on keeping dangerous offenders locked up while rehabilitating nonviolent offenders before they get out.”

While most of the focus is on the impact of revising prison parole procedures, Proposition 57 also would revoke provisions of a 2000 ballot measure that has sent some juvenile defendants into adult courtrooms. Prosecutors helped lead the campaign for that proposal 16 years ago, but Morse said he and other district attorneys now agree those teenagers should remain in the juvenile justice system.

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The survey of 1,500 registered voters was conducted for USC Dornsife and the Los Angeles Times by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and American Viewpoint. Support for the ballot initiative was almost identical among the entire sample — 58% in favor — as it was among likely voters.

The poll results come as both sides in the Proposition 57 campaign ramp up efforts to persuade voters. Brown has raised more than $19.7 million in support of the measure, with the largest share of that money spent during the spring on gathering signatures to quickly qualify the initiative for the ballot after skirmishes in court over whether it was properly vetted under state election law. The governor’s effort had enough money left over for campaign mailers and a statewide radio ad blitz, while opponents, having raised less than $1.4 million, have had fewer opportunities.

That imbalance may help explain another strong marker for the initiative in the poll: It was winning with 63% of voters who said they already have cast a ballot.

john.myers@latimes.com

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Detailed poll results

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What you need to know about the 17 propositions on the Nov. 8 ballot

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July 25 (UPI) — The Trump administration admitted that it canceled nearly $8 billion in grants slated for hundreds of clean energy projects “based solely” on whether a state voted for Kamala Harris for president, it was reported Friday.

In a recent court filing, a lawyer for the Energy Department said none of the axed projects lost their funding “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

The Trump administration attorney added, “The 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The government’s admission, first reported by The New York Times, came out as part of a July 15 court filing in a class action lawsuit over the slashed grants.

The Department of Energy selected 600 grants for cancellation and sent the list to the Office of Management and Budget, which terminated 284 of them in October.

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” OMB Director Russell Vought wrote on X.

Despite also being recommended for cancellation from energy officials, the OMB left untouched hundreds of projects in places that voted for Trump, court documents show.

“The inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” Trump administration lawyers wrote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, called the move “unprecedented Trumpism and something we should never become numb to.”

“Trump admits he’s ripping the rug out from under hardworking families so he can get revenge on the Americans who didn’t vote for him,” the New York democrat added. “It’s sick and deranged. His ego is so fragile, he’ll punish families already struggling to put food on the table for a little bit of vengeance.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, “This mass partisan retribution is appalling, outrageous, dangerous, lawless, unconstitutional, unpatriotic and a massive offense against the Republic.”

“Every elected official must denounce this imbecilic deep betrayal of America,” Raskin added in a statement. “And the illegally impounded funds must be restored and released immediately to the blue states.”

Trump-endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton formally launched his general election campaign Wednesday by pitching himself to California’s abundance of anti-Trump voters.

In a speech, Hilton said Democrats had “abandoned” working-class and Latino communities and crushed small businesses. He criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom for leading the state into decline, pointing to low literacy rates and slow responses to crises such as the Boyle Heights warehouse fire.

Hilton, a British-born conservative political commentator and former Fox News host, faces an uphill battle in California, a Democratic stronghold. In June, Hilton clinched second place in California’s gubernatorial primary behind veteran Democratic politician Xavier Becerra.

In an effort to persuade voters who are dissatisfied with the status quo, Hilton bought a full-page ad in the Wednesday editions of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

The ad read, “Can you be anti-Trump and still vote for me?,” followed by a checklist readers could use to “test” if they shared common ground with Hilton.

“I can’t stand Trump, but I’m not happy with the way things have been run in California lately,” reads one line in the ad.

“I want to fight climate change, but $6.00 gas is crazy!” reads another.

At a news conference Wednesday, Hilton said the ad is aimed at voters who “know that we need change in California.”

Trump’s unpopularity in the state “doesn’t matter because we’re not talking about national policies here,” he said. “This is about what we can do in our state to make life better for Californians.”

Hilton then framed himself as a “pragmatic, problem-solving change-maker” focused on affordability, promising to lower gas prices, electricity costs and taxes and the cost of homes.

“We may not agree about national politics, but I think we can agree that we need change in California, and I’m going to bring that change,” he said.

The news conference, which marked the formal launch of Hilton’s general election campaign, took place at a Boyle Heights auto body shop across the street from the Lineage cold storage facility that was destroyed by a fire last month.

The location was chosen because it is a “symbol of Democrat failure,” Hilton said. The nauseating stench of rotting food filled the surrounding neighborhood. Swarms of flies buzzed about, occasionally landing on top of Hilton’s head.

Hilton said he’s not expecting Trump to campaign on his behalf in California. But, he added, “I’m proud to be endorsed by the president and I think it’s a very good thing to have a governor who has a good relationship with the federal administration.”

No Republican has been elected to a statewide office since 2006. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California published earlier this month showed Becerra with support from 61% of likely voters, compared with 36% for Hilton.

Hilton insists his campaign is different from previous Republican bids.

“We’ve got to the point in California where people are looking for a positive alternative,” Hilton told The Times. “We’re going to be fighting very hard … already in the last year and a half I’ve fought a campaign like no one’s seen in California for 20 years. I’ve been to nearly every single county in our state.”

Many white evangelical Christians view Donald Trump as chosen by God to lead despite not seeing him as personally devout. A recent study suggests 60 percent of them believe Trump has pushed the US closer to Christian principles, blurring the line between church and state.

For the full segment, watch Al Jazeera’s ‘This is America’.

The tight timeline to replace former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner has left Democratic hopefuls scrambling to woo his progressive base while trying to turn the focus from the disgraced oysterman to defeating Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

It’s a delicate balance for the candidates, who are vying to face Collins in a contest that could decide control of the Senate as Platner’s shadow hangs over the race. In their first debate Thursday night, one of the first questions candidates were asked was: What was Graham Platner’s best idea?

Moving past Platner is just one of the challenges facing Democrats. The never-before-used process to pick a new nominee means candidates have less than three weeks to pull off what typically takes campaigns months or years, from organizing volunteers to raising money and preparing for debates.

The whiplash many of the candidates are facing was on display Thursday.

Asked by debate moderators about President Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this year, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows gave inaccurate information about Collins not pushing back against Trump, a Republican. When a moderator called her on it, Bellows said she was on vacation on the Kennebec River last week after previously focusing on her unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign and hadn’t expected to be running for the Senate.

“When I need to know the facts, I will. I’ll do my homework,” said Bellows, who lost to Collins in 2014.

The field of 12 candidates also includes former public health leader Nirav Shah and union-backed logger Troy Jackson, who campaigned alongside Platner in a failed bid for governor.

Platner’s exit means the clock is ticking

Platner quit the Senate race last week after he was accused of rape, which he denies, and his campaign quickly imploded as supporters revoked their endorsements and resources.

Democrats have until July 27 to choose a new nominee, according to state law. The Maine Democratic Party’s succession plan calls for a state party convention at which 601 delegates will meet on July 25 and vote for Platner’s replacement. The majority of the convention delegates will be selected this weekend from each of the state’s 16 counties.

Candidates hoping to replace Platner have been recruiting delegates who will vote for them at the convention. The candidates also must collect 500 voter signatures needed to qualify for the convention vote.

“I don’t think anyone’s happy that we’re in this situation,” said Dan Jenkins, a Maine Democrat who has applied to be a delegate. “We would have preferred that this had broken many, many months ago and then Graham had exited the race when there was a time for a democratic process. But it’s where we are.”

Some candidates might see a boost from prior campaigns

Jackson is among the handful of candidates pivoting to the Senate race after running for other political offices, likely giving them a leg up in not having to launch from scratch.

Our Revolution, a progressive organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont that had originally backed Platner, has thrown its support behind Jackson, the former Maine Senate president. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, has not endorsed in the race.

Shah, former director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, also unsuccessfully ran in this year’s Maine Democratic governor’s primary. He has been pitching Platner’s supporters that he’s also an outsider who can unify a fractured Democratic Party.

“You have an important place in this campaign, and we welcome your voices,” Shah said earlier this month speaking to Platner’s base.

Bellows also ran for governor. She’s hoping that her previous battles with Trump will bolster her argument that she’ll be an advocate for the working class.

Bellows previously attempted to run against Collins in 2014 as the Senate Democratic nominee and lost in a landslide. She later went on to win a seat as a state senator before becoming Maine’s secretary of state. She’s since downplayed her prior loss to Collins by pointing to the Democratic establishment’s unwillingness to take on the Republican in 2014.

Another candidate, Jordan Wood, initially announced his intent to run in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. He dropped out last fall to run in the state’s 2nd District but lost that race.

Candidates seize on recent ICE shooting

The fatal shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Maine this week has been top of mind among the potential Senate nominees.

The Embassy of Colombia has identified the man killed Monday in Biddeford, roughly 15 miles southwest of Portland, as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national. The Department of Homeland Security has since said an ICE officer fired his weapon when the man officers were pursuing attempted to flee the scene, threatening “public safety.”

Many have rushed to connect Collins to the embattled federal agency.

All the candidates who debated Thursday said they agreed with the call to “abolish ICE,” though Wood stopped short of saying the agency should be completely dissolved.

“I believe that when I say we have to abolish it, what I mean is that we need a new law enforcement agency that has the trust of the people,” Wood said.

Jackson disagreed, calling ICE a “rogue agency that goes around doing things that they’re being told to on high.”

Candidates asked about Platner’s best ideas

Platner attracted more than 150,000 votes during the June 9 primary, an eye-opening number that signaled a progressive base eager to support a candidate known for his promise to defend the working class and ability to rally large crowds.

With little more than a week until the state convention to find Platner’s replacement, it still remains unknown just who will be able to capture that same excitement seen among Platner’s base.

When pressed during Thursday’s debate about Platner’s best idea on the campaign trail, Jackson pointed to his commitment to “Medicare for All.” As a gubernatorial candidate, Jackson also voiced support for replacing job-based and individual private health insurance with a government-run plan that guarantees coverage for all with no premiums, no deductibles and only minimal copays for certain services.

Bellows said that she agreed with Platner’s description that democracy in the U.S. has been corrupted by those in power.

Shah said he would take up Platner’s commitment to “abolish ICE,” while Wood said he admired Platner’s decision to say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, something Israel denies.

“Graham got into this race saying, ‘this is genocide.’ And I learned that it is so important in these moments to draw those moral lines,” Wood said.

Kruesi writes for the Associated Press.

MADISON, Wis. — Over the last month, Democratic socialists have notched victories in the liberal strongholds of New York City, Washington, D.C., and Denver.

Now Francesca Hong, a single mother who has worked as a dishwasher and line cook, is trying to do the same with her campaign for governor in Wisconsin, a swing state known for razor-thin election margins where winning over moderate, independent voters is crucial.

Hong’s candidacy has turned the Democratic primary on Aug. 11 into the latest test of just how far left voters are willing to go in the November midterms.

“We do this in Wisconsin, we’re going to change politics across the country,” the 37-year-old Hong said as she headed into the final month of campaigning. “People who are frustrated and have a lot more to lose — and I’m one of those people — are ready to coalesce around someone they can believe in.”

John Ravdabaugh, an undecided independent voter, came away impressed after hearing Hong speak at the retirement home where he lives. Even though the democratic socialist label concerns him, Ravdabaugh said he would consider voting for Hong.

“Every system reaches a point where change is necessary,” he said.

Whoever wins the primary will advance to almost certainly face Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, one of the most conservative members of the House, who has President Trump’s endorsement. Tiffany has only token opposition in the primary.

The governor’s race is integral to Democrats’ hopes of earning full control of Wisconsin state government for the first time since 2010, and it will send a signal about where the country’s politics are headed by shaping a key political battleground that helps decide presidential campaigns.

Trump-backed Republican derides Democratic rivals as ‘crazy’

Tiffany has focused much of his criticism on Hong and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, another Democratic candidate for governor.

“This November, the choice is common sense or crazy,” Tiffany posted on social media in June. Tiffany included screenshots of a Barnes post where he voiced support for cutting prison populations by half and Hong’s posts where she advocates for defunding and abolishing the police.

As a candidate, Hong has not backed away from her calls to defund and abolish the police. Hong also supports increasing taxes on the wealthy and creating a state-owned bank to help pay for free health care and free child care, a $20 minimum wage, and a moratorium on data center construction.

Hong dismisses concerns that she’s too liberal to win over key independent voters in a state Trump carried twice and narrowly lost a third time.

“I worry that’s a miscalculation of where voters are at in our state, that we’re underestimating what people want,” Hong said in an interview.

There’s a history of socialism in Milwaukee

Last month, democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, setting herself up to clinch the office in November.

Then three congressional candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, another democratic socialist, defeated establishment-backed politicians.

And just last week, democratic socialist Melat Kiros beat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in the Colorado primary, a stunning victory for the 29-year-old, first-time candidate against an incumbent who took office before she was born.

But those victories have been in either congressional or mayoral races in large urban centers, a far different landscape than Wisconsin.

In 1910, during socialism’s heyday in the United States, Milwaukee sent the first socialist to Congress and was the first major American city to elect a socialist mayor. Milwaukee elected two more socialist mayors before 1960.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the best known democratic socialist, won all but one county in Wisconsin in the 2016 Democratic primary. In 2023, two state lawmakers from Milwaukee revived the socialist caucus in the Legislature, which had been dormant since 1935.

Hong, the first Asian American elected to the state Assembly in 2020, is one of four members of that caucus.

Barnes, 39, served four years in the state Assembly before his four years as lieutenant governor under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. In 2022, Barnes came within 27,000 votes of ousting Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.

“I’ve been around longer than anybody fighting these fights,” said Barnes, who grew up in Milwaukee and is vying to become Wisconsin’s first Black governor.

He played down the idea that democratic socialists are surging.

“People aren’t looking for labels, necessarily,” he said. “People are looking for bold solutions.”

Longtime Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki, who is not working for any of the Democrats running this year, said Barnes has an advantage as the most well-known candidate in the race.

“I have believed from the day since Mandela Barnes got into the race, he’s the favorite,” Zepecki said. “It is his race to lose.”

Hong rival leans into electability argument

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, a former nurse and health care executive who is also running for the Democratic nomination, said she’ll have broader appeal in November. She cites her experience in the private sector and her flipping of a state Assembly seat in a conservative Milwaukee suburb, and she emphasizes her ideas for lowering costs for working people.

“I’m not worried about other candidates in this race,” Rodriguez said in an interview. “What I’m worried about is making my argument to Wisconsinites about why I’m the best person to lead the state, how I am going to fight for them.”

She launched a $1 million television ad campaign this week that features her in nursing scrubs talking about taking on Tiffany and lowering health care costs.

Other Democratic candidates are state Sen. Kelda Roys, who has the endorsement of the statewide teachers union, and Joel Brennan, a former top aide to Evers.

Missy Hughes, the state’s former economic development director, dropped out of the race in June and endorsed Rodriguez. David Crowley, the top elected official in Milwaukee County, dropped out this week and also backed Rodriguez.

Mainstream Democrats worry about winning in November

More moderate Democrats worry that nominating Hong could hurt them in the general election, especially in Wisconsin where independent voters are key in statewide races that are often decided by tiny margins.

Neera Tanden, who leads the Center for American Progress, said “it’s especially important in the age of Trump” to select viable candidates.

“In Wisconsin, whoever wins the general election will be the person overseeing elections in 2028 and whether people are seated in 2029.”

Evers won his two races for governor by just over 1 percentage point in 2018 and just over 3 points in 2022. Trump won Wisconsin by less than a point in 2024, and lost by less than a point in 2020.

Dave Smith, 72, a retired doctor from Madison who heard Hong speak Tuesday, said the democratic socialist label will be tough for voters of his generation to accept.

“The platform, much of that resonates well,” said Smith, who is undecided whom he will vote for in the Democratic primary. “My vote will likely go to who is the most electable in the fall.”

Bauer writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

Overseas voters moving to the UK would be prevented from giving more than £100,000 in political donations for a year after their arrival, under new proposals.

Ministers announced the planned restriction alongside tougher checks on company donations, which they believe will help stop foreign money from influencing UK elections.

The government previously announced a £100,000 annual cap on donations from British citizens living overseas backdated to 25 March.

They now want an individual to be based in the UK for a minimum amount of time before their donations can exceed this limit. The change could hit two of Reform UK’s biggest backers, who have previously donated millions to Nigel Farage’s party.

British billionaire Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman, last year gave a single donation of £9m to Reform – the biggest single donation to a UK political party by a living person.

The cryptocurrency investor and aviation entrepreneur gave £12m in total to Reform in 2025 and a further £3m in January.

The Times last month reported Harborne has registered to vote in the UK, external, and in April he said the government’s planned crackdown on political finance would not stop him from giving money to the party.

Electoral Commission figures also show that Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire, donated £4m to Reform between January and March.

Delo, writing in The Telegraph in April,, external said he will move back to Britain from Hong Kong so he can contribute more to Reform.

Under the government’s planned changes, both Harborne and Delo would be among those donors still covered for a year by the £100,000 cap once they return.

Ministers said other changes will include political donations from companies being assessed against post-tax profits over the previous five years rather than revenue alone.

The government’s aim is to ensure only legitimate UK-linked businesses will be able to donate.

People running for election will also be required to prove that any funding they received before becoming a candidate has come from legitimate sources.

They will have to declare donations above £2,230 received prior to officially becoming a candidate.

The government said the proposals will be introduced as amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, which is currently scheduled to return to the House of Commons for further consideration on 14 July.

Communities Secretary Steve Reed said: “British democracy is not for sale.

“These tough new rules will shut down dodgy funding, stop foreign money influencing our elections and keep our democracy strong.

“By holding overseas donors to tougher standards and requiring candidates to prove where their funding comes from, we are taking world-leading action to protect the integrity of our elections and tackle the threats we face from abroad.”

The changes are part of the government’s response to a review of political funding, external led by former senior civil servant Philip Rycroft.

The review was commissioned last year in response to threats posed by foreign states attempting to meddle in British democracy.

In March, the government announced that donations in cryptocurrency to UK political parties would be banned alongside the move to cap donations of British citizens living abroad at £100,000 annually.

Reform was critical of the changes, with the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf accusing Labour of “choking off legal funding for its main rival”.

Reporting from Sacramento — Proposition 10, a ballot measure to expand rent control in California, was decisively rejected by voters Tuesday in a victory for the state’s top landlords who spent millions to defeat it.

The campaign was one of the most expensive initiative battles in California history with more than $104 million in total fundraising. With Proposition 10’s failure, a statewide ban on most new forms of rent control remains in effect.

“The stunning margin of victory shows California voters clearly understood the negative impacts Prop. 10 would have on the availability of affordable and middle-class housing in our state,” Tom Bannon, CEO of the California Apartment Assn., said in a statement.

It’s expensive to be a tenant in California. Will Proposition 10’s rent control expansion help? »

The campaign to expand rent control was pitched to voters as housing has become less affordable in the state. About 9.5 million renters — more than half of California’s tenant population — are burdened by high rents, spending at least 30% of their income on housing costs, according to a UC Berkeley study.

To address the issue, tenant advocates decided to go after the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a state law passed 23 years ago that blocks cities and counties from imposing rent control on single-family homes and apartments built after 1995, among other prohibitions. After a bill to repeal Costa-Hawkins failed in a legislative committee in January, groups turned in signatures for a ballot measure, Proposition 10, that would have done the same thing. Had the initiative passed, local governments would have been free to add new restrictions on rents, something Los Angeles, Berkeley and other cities were considering.

But polling showed Proposition 10 never really caught on with voters. A September survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California revealed just 36% of likely voters backed the initiative. A month later a poll from the same organization showed support had decreased to 25%.

That drop came amid a blitz of TV advertisements from opponents who, as of Friday, had raised nearly $80 million to defeat Proposition 10. They argued that expanding rent control would increase the state’s housing shortage, exacerbate overall affordability issues and hurt the investments of single-family homeowners. Much of the funding for the No on 10 campaign came from national real estate investors with large apartment portfolios in California.

The Proposition 10 campaign was watched beyond California’s borders. Market analysts have paid close attention to the campaign, which had the potential to spur similar rent control measures across the country. The National Multifamily Housing Council, an apartment industry group, called Proposition 10 an “existential threat to the industry.”

Supporters of Proposition 10 raised $24.6 million, 94% of it coming from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit. Backers contended that the initiative offered the quickest and cheapest way to provide housing cost relief for renters, and that cities and counties should be allowed to tailor rent stabilization rules to their communities.

Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said the campaign revealed the influence that corporate landlords have over the state’s housing market.

“They may be enjoying their victory at the polls tonight,” Weinstein said. “But this campaign exposed who they are and what they represent.”

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has argued that housing stability is crucial to its mission of serving low-income AIDS patients, now has lost four high-profile California and Los Angeles ballot measures it’s bankrolled since 2016. Voters have also rejected statewide efforts to limit prescription drug prices and mandate the use of condoms in adult films and a Los Angeles measure to slow growth in the city.

Despite Proposition 10’s defeat, rent control is likely to remain in the spotlight. Residents in Sacramento, the state’s sixth-largest city, have qualified a 2020 initiative that would implement rent controls on the city’s older apartment buildings. Democrat Gavin Newsom, who was elected governor on Tuesday, opposed Proposition 10, but he has said the state should have stronger protections for tenants.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation officials have said that if Proposition 10 didn’t pass they would immediately begin discussing whether to push a stronger rent control measure for the 2020 statewide ballot. After the results came in Tuesday night, Weinstein said he wanted to work with Newsom first.

“Gavin Newsom, who is the incoming governor of California, has said affirmatively that he intends to solve this problem. I take that at face value. It’s incumbent upon us to exhaust that opportunity before we go to the ballot again.”

Coverage of California politics »

liam.dillon@latimes.com

@dillonliam

UPDATES:

11:45 p.m.: This article was updated with quotes from an interview with Michael Weinstein, which replaced written statements from Proposition 10 supporters.

10:12 p.m.: This article was updated with a quote from Proposition 10 proponents.

This article was originally published at 9:45 p.m.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, David Zahniser and Melissa Gomez, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles voters won’t get a chance to increase the size of the City Council. They won’t take up a plan to give noncitizens the right to vote, either.

These and other proposed ballot measures got put on the back burner, delayed for a future year as the council scrambled to finish its work before its summer break.

One proposal did survive the sometimes blunt vetting process: decreasing the number of council meetings.

On Tuesday, council members sent voters a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot that would only require a single council meeting per week. The City Charter currently mandates a minimum of three.

Councilmember Tim McOsker was among those pushing for the change, saying it will make the council more efficient and effective.

“It will also allow council members to take care of more business in their districts,” said McOsker, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Watts to the Port of Los Angeles.

The council, which voted 12-0 to place the measure on the ballot, has been thinking about cutting back on the number of meetings for a few years.

In 2024, McOsker and Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky tried to place a measure before voters that would have made the same change. But other council members were not prepared to put it on the ballot.

Yaroslavsky said at the time that much of the city’s public comment period was occupied by “15 people screaming racist, misogynistic, antisemitic epithets.”

Any change to the City Charter would not preclude the council from scheduling additional special meetings.

The proposal drew sharp criticism from Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, who spent much of the past year tracking the effort to rewrite the charter. He fears that a reduction in meetings will also lead to a decrease in opportunities for Angelenos to address their council representatives.

One of the reasons council members, who each make $244,727 a year, don’t get as much business done is that they frequently use their Friday meetings for ceremonial activities — honoring civic leaders, community groups, youth sports teams, Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani and beloved bands from the 80s.

“Do we really need that? Not necessarily,” Quan said.

Quan said the proposal to cut the number of meetings received zero vetting from the council. The 13-member Charter Reform Commission, which spent nearly a year examining various changes to city government, took up the idea and rejected it.

If voters approve the change, council meetings could end up resembling those of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which meets most Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. The supervisors frequently don’t finish their business until well after 5 p.m.

Former prosecutor will stay away from Lee case

We told you last week that Councilmember John Lee is suing the city Ethics Commission over a $138,000 fine he received for allegedly violating city gift laws — a case that stems largely from a notorious 2017 trip to Las Vegas. The council responded to that lawsuit by voting to retain the law firm Hecker Fink to defend the Ethics Commission, at a cost of $120,000.

As it turns out, at least one Hecker Fink lawyer knows plenty about that Vegas trip.

Mack Jenkins, who heads the firm’s L.A. office, was one of the federal prosecutors who brought the criminal case against Lee’s onetime boss, Councilmember Mitchell Englander, in 2020. That case stems from the duo’s trip to Sin City in 2017.

Federal prosecutors said Englander and Lee, listed in court filings as Staffer B, were plied with fancy meals, expensive alcohol and other freebies by people seeking to do business with the city. Englander went a step further, walking into a casino bathroom and picking up $10,000 cash in an envelope from a Los Angeles-area businessman. He later pleaded guilty to providing false information to investigators.

The city’s lawyers say they cannot represent the Ethics Commission because Lee is one of their clients. But does Jenkins’ history with the case create any type of conflict for Hecker Fink?

Nancy Jackson, a spokesperson for the Ethics Commission, says no. In an email, she said Jenkins will be walled off from Hecker Fink’s work on the matter.

“That former prosecutor is recused from the case and will have no involvement in the case,” she said.

What went wrong with the lighting assessment?

Property owners resoundingly rejected a recent request to pay more to fund streetlight repairs. One of the reasons might have been the wording on their ballot.

The city mailed letters asking if they would like to increase the yearly assessment, using language that didn’t offer a lot of explanation.

In the section where property owners had the option to vote yes, the ballot read: “Yes I am in favor of the proposed maximum assessment for Fiscal Year 2026/2017 and the proposed annual cost of living increases as described in the attached notice beginning Fiscal Year 2026/2027.”

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who chairs the council’s Public Works Committee, said the phrasing could have been a lot more persuasive — and better explained the need for additional money.

“Some of the language that was put out was not written in a way for us to be clear about what we were doing, and instead used language that really turned people off,” she said.

The assessment, which has not changed since 1996, currently generates about $45 million a year. For the average single-family home, the current payment is $58 annually.

The increase would have brought the average annual bill to $117, generating an additional $80 million a year as the city faces a backlog of broken streetlights due to stagnant funding and a rise in vandalism and theft.

After the vote failed to pass, the council approved a motion directing city staff to identify $6.6 million for the Bureau of Street Lighting. Without that money, the city will face “an immediate threat to public safety and our infrastructure at large,” the motion said.

“There will be a 15% cut in field workforces by the end of July 2026, making the timeline for streetlight repair to reach 2 years when the City had previously been able to do this work within 7 days,” said the motion authored by Hernandez and Yaroslavsky.

Hernandez voiced frustration over the defeat of the assessment. She took aim at Proposition 218, the state law that restricts how local governments can raise money, saying it disenfranchises renters who have to “live with the conditions that property owners choose for them.”

She added that the ballot measure’s wording, which she said was crafted by the City Attorney’s Office, failed to capture the reason for the increase.

“People really think that the main reason our lights are out is copper wire theft,” she said. “But the fact is that over 60% of our street lights are out because of lack of maintenance, because we just do not have the money to do that work.”

Hernandez said that next time, she would push for more community engagement so voters understand why the increased funding is needed. She also raised the possibility of reforming Proposition 218.

“No matter what, I’m going to get these streetlights on, and if that’s figuring different things out until we can get a significant effort to do another assessment, then we will do that,” she said.

State of play

— COLD FEET: The L.A. City Council decided against putting two major measures on the Nov. 3 ballot. One measure would have provided a pathway for noncitizens to vote in local elections, while the other would have given the council more authority over the LAPD.

— COSTLY COLLISION: The city of Los Angeles will pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of a teen who lost his leg in a 2023 hit-and-run in Boyle Heights. The lawsuit blamed the city for an intersection lacking signage, lighting and other traffic controls.

— LAHSuit: The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA, sued the Trump administration Monday to stop it from suspending the agency from receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. LAHSA argued that the decision would put thousands of people at risk of losing their government funded housing.

— FORWARDING ADDRESS: The only post office in Skid Row abruptly closed in January due to repeated break-ins and damage to employee property, according to the U.S. Postal Service. The closure has frustrated residents and business owners.

— BUILDING BLITZ: Senate Bill 79, the historic housing bill, took effect across the state on Wednesday. The law could bring townhomes, row houses and other developments to 57 neighborhoods across the city.

— AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT: A preliminary analysis showed that the recent inferno at a Boyle Heights warehouse contaminated the air with high levels of smoke and soot, rivaling the pollution that filled the region during the 2025 wildfires.

— MORE MEGA PROJECTS: Two large scale developments grabbed the attention of downtown Los Angeles this week. One, approved by the council, is slated to add 1,500 residences to Skid Row. The second, proposed this week, would transform the World Trade Center building into a 512-unit affordable housing complex.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelesssness went to the area near Olympic Boulevard and Menlo Avenue in Pico Union on Friday in Hernandez’s district, bringing 24 people indoors.
• On the docket next week: The City Council will be on summer recess until Aug. 4.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

For decades, Californians have generally said immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population and a third of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.

Now, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present a stark choice to voters in the race to be the next governor at a moment when public support for the state’s generous safety net is starting to fray.

Both frame the choice as an economic one.

Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services under President Biden, has said it would be “foolish” to exclude the poorest immigrants from routine care and push them into expensive emergency rooms on the taxpayer’s dime. Hilton, a conservative commentator backed by President Trump, has promised to eliminate their coverage and has echoed national Republicans who have skewered California’s expansions to bolster their claims of fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.

With voters nationwide worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, some Californians might feel less inclined to provide full healthcare coverage to those lacking legal status. What the state does next could have profound implications for its healthcare system and sprawling economy.

Over the past decade, California lawmakers used state dollars to expand Medi-Cal, offering all low-income residents comprehensive coverage regardless of immigration status. But enrollment surpassed initial projections, as did the cost. Medi-Cal coverage of immigrants without legal status costs the state roughly $10 billion a year, according to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, more than double the initial estimates.

California lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who championed the program, have approved major rollbacks of benefits for those residents. They said the state can’t afford ballooning healthcare costs amid massive federal cuts from the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the California Health and Human Services Agency projected up to 3.4 million Medi-Cal enrollees could lose coverage and the state could lose more than $30 billion a year in federal funding under the law, causing major disruptions in the safety net health program.Medi-Cal’s budget for fiscal year 2026-27 is $217 billion, and the program serves more than 14 million Californians.

Meanwhile, many legal U.S. residents and citizens have seen their health premium payments skyrocket this year after Congress let enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of December.

As the state grappled with a deficit last year, a majority of likely voters in California said — for the first time in nearly a decade — they opposed providing health insurance to immigrants without legal status, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“The state faces major challenges, and healthcare is one of the major expenditures,” said Mark Baldassare, the institute’s survey director. “People have become more selective about how they want to see those limited healthcare dollars spent.”

Hilton, running on a platform of affordability and lowering taxes, has seized on the sentiment, casting health coverage for immigrants without legal status as deeply unfair and a direct threat to the state’s ability to help citizens.

“Stop taking money from California taxpayers who can barely afford their healthcare to give free healthcare to citizens of other countries who shouldn’t even be here,” Hilton said in a Facebook video the morning of the June 2 primary.

In campaign stump speeches, Hilton promised to use the savings to lower healthcare costs for other Californians without detailing how. Hilton did not respond to requests from KFF Health News for comment.

“Their messaging is very, very simple: It’s an us vs. them,” said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who represents a coalition of healthcare advocates who argue providing coverage to people who can’t afford it strengthens the workforce and, as a result, the economy. “It’s just a question of convincing the average voter that it’s much better economically.”

A son of immigrants, Becerra for decades pushed to extend safety net benefits in Congress and has made a similar pitch in his campaign for governor. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Immigrants, whether documented or not, work hard. They pay taxes, and sometimes they get injured on the job or their children get sick,” Becerra said during a debate last month. “It would be foolish to tell a family that they don’t have access to the pediatrician or the family doc.”

Becerra, who could become California’s first elected Latino governor, objected last year when Newsom and legislative leaders decided to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for adults without legal status, cut benefits, and impose monthly premiums.

“Stop treating coverage as a budget variable that expands in good years and contracts when revenue dips,” Becerra wrote last month in response to an Orange County Register candidate questionnaire. He has vowed to pursue new, steady revenue to fund basic services, such as by upping taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians.

In 2023, California was home to about 2.3 million people without legal status, representing roughly 8% of the state’s labor force, according to the Pew Research Center. And 1 in 5 California children live in a family that includes at least one member without legal status, according to the California Department of Education. Healthcare economists say giving people access to preventive healthcare saves taxpayers money in the long run by keeping the workforce healthy and relieving pressure on an overburdened system.

That, Baldassare said, wasn’t a hard argument to make during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immigrants were celebrated as essential workers and the link between individual well-being and public health was more obvious.

But Medi-Cal costs to cover roughly 1.4 million immigrants have ballooned, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Health Care Services. Because only some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, states like California that cover other populations must do so exclusively with state funding.

California’s budget experts have warned that maintaining full Medi-Cal coverage for immigrants without seeking additional revenue would destabilize the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.

In a legislative hearing last year, Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio questioned whether California taxpayers would prioritize the expansions, saying he doubted “illegal immigrant healthcare in the general fund would be at the top of their list.”

After lawmakers approved the spending reductions, support for immigrant health coverage dropped, Baldassare said. Now lawmakers and Newsom are negotiating further cuts.

David Hayes-Bautista, who has spent his career studying the economic contributions of Latinos and immigrants, said Californians without legal status have higher labor force participation and tend to work in industries and occupations that don’t offer employer-based health insurance. As a result, many resort to Medi-Cal, saddling the state with the healthcare costs instead of employers.

“California, as a state, has the world’s fourth-largest GDP, which is true thanks to Latinos,” Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA, said. Without contributions from Latinos, many without legal status, it drops to eighth place, about the size of Italy’s economy, he added.

Immigrant advocates hope to have a more vocal champion in Becerra, the favorite to become governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

“He will fight, he will push back, he will do all that he can,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a former labor leader who has championed the immigrant healthcare expansions. “That’s the most we could expect.”

Mai-Duc writes for KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.

A new sales tax that would generate $345 million annually for the Los Angeles Fire Department will go before voters later this year, the City Council decided Tuesday, as a stubborn warehouse blaze burned for a seventh day on the city’s eastern edge.

The council voted 14-0 to put the half-cent sales tax hike on the Nov. 3 ballot, with supporters saying the additional funds would go toward more firefighters, new fire stations and new equipment, such as firetrucks and helicopters.

The vote came nearly 18 months after the outbreak of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and other coastal areas, leaving 12 people dead. But it more immediately coincided with the city’s fight to extinguish the blaze at the Boyle Heights cold storage facility, which has spread smoke across the region over the last week.

The campaign for the sales tax hike is being spearheaded by United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, the union that represents nearly 3,400 firefighters. Appearing before the council, union leaders pointed to the Boyle Heights fire as the latest sign that the city needs more money for emergency response.

“This is our plan to undo decades of under-investment in the department,” said Ryan Quigley, a 23-year firefighter/paramedic who also serves as the union’s secretary.

Mayor Karen Bass, through a spokesperson, said she is grateful to the union for bringing the tax proposal forward.

“[The mayor] has championed this measure from the very beginning,” the spokesperson, Paige Sterling, said in a statement.

The firefighters union began gathering signatures for the tax earlier this year, submitting them to the city clerk last month. Since then, backers have voiced confidence that it would pass, given the growing concern across the city about urban wildfires.

Still, the path to victory could be complicated by recent events.

Last month, Los Angeles County voters narrowly passed a different half-cent sales tax hike that’s expected to raise $1 billion annually to pay for healthcare. That measure, which received just above the 50% needed for passage, pushed the tax rate within the city of Los Angeles to 10.25 cents for every dollar of spending.

If voters approve the fire tax increase as well, the rate will jump to 10.75 cents per dollar.

The firefighters union also will be campaigning in a year when one of its recent leaders, Adam Walker, has been charged with one count each of grand theft and forgery. He has been accused of stealing more than $82,000 from a charity for injured firefighters to pay for his online gambling, his mortgage and other personal expenses.

Union President Doug Coates said Walker left his position two years ago. The union, he said, intends to make clear to voters that “the money is going to the right thing.”

So far, no one has emerged as an opponent of the tax increase. The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group, is supporting the fire tax.

Susan Shelley, spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said her organization has not taken a position on the proposal. Still, she argued that sales taxes in general are “extremely regressive,” hitting the hardest for Angelenos who can afford it the least.

“Our view is that the city budget should be prioritized to fund the fire department from the first dollar, not the last dollar,” Shelley said. “And that there shouldn’t be a need for a tax increase.”

The sales tax hike, if approved by voters, would represent the most significant public investment in the fire department since 2000, when voters passed a $532-million bond measure to pay for new facilities. Backers said the tax increase would help the department speed up emergency response times, while also building new fire stations and repairing existing ones.

The firefighters union began work on the tax proposal more than two years ago, before the inferno that erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, and carved a lethal path through Pacific Palisades and other communities. Still, the push for more funding gained greater attention in the wake of the fire.

While the flames were still raging, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley went on local and national television to accuse city leaders of failing to give her department the resources it needed. The media blitz shocked some at City Hall, who believed Crowley should have waited until the emergency was over before publicly assigning blame.

Crowley and the union said city leaders had forced the department to scale back its operations amid a budget crunch. Bass and the city’s policy analysts pointed out that fire department spending grew that year, largely because of pay increases given to firefighters.

Bass ultimately ousted Crowley, saying the chief failed to properly deploy firefighters amid warnings of dangerous Santa Ana winds. Crowley, who was demoted to another position, filed a lawsuit against the city, saying the mayor engaged in a retaliation campaign.

The fire that broke out last week at the Lineage Logistics cold storage facility has helped to rekindle calls for additional fire department funding.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, whose Eastside district has been enveloped in smoke in recent days, told her colleagues Tuesday that climate change and corporate negligence are making such emergencies “more frequent and more severe.”

“Whether it’s the devastating fires that hit Altadena and the Palisades last year, or the Boyle Heights warehouse fire currently affecting air quality and public health across the whole city, every one of our districts is feeling the impacts,” she said, before voting to put the tax on the ballot.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades, said the fires in the Palisades and Boyle Heights have “exposed Los Angeles’ urgent need to modernize LAFD for the realities and demands of a modern century.”

Fire Chief Jaime Moore, in an interview Monday, said he asked Bass to declare a state of emergency last week so that his department could obtain additional resources to fight the Boyle Heights fire, including firefighters, firetrucks, drone pilots and hazardous materials teams.

“I had firefighters work Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I talked to my incident commander, and he goes, ‘Chief, these guys are getting their butts kicked.’ And that’s when I said, ‘I’m gonna reach out to the mayor, and I’m gonna see what I can do to get the state of emergency declared.’”

Supporters of the sales tax increase contend the department lacks the personnel to serve a city of nearly 4 million people. According to the union, L.A. has nearly 3,400 firefighters, roughly the same number as 50 years ago.

If voters pass the sales tax hike, the city would have the funds to bring the department up to 5,000 firefighters by 2050, union officials said.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders of the California Legislature plan to approve a proposed constitutional amendment this week that would ask voters to give them more flexibility over state spending and allow them to save money that could otherwise go back to taxpayers.

The proposal seeks to exempt deposits into state savings accounts from a spending limit that voters adopted through a series of ballot measures dating back to the late 1970s and to increase the share of tax revenue that can be put into the rainy day fund.

“Putting money aside to protect ourselves from future uncertainties isn’t just good government; it’s common sense,” Newsom said in a statement. “California is strong and resilient, but we’re not immune to economic headwinds. At a time when our essential services are under pressure, we have a responsibility to safeguard the programs and investments that Californians rely on.”

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 20, which Democrats are calling the “Save for California’s Future Act,” could receive push back from taxpayer advocates.

Under an existing state appropriations restraint, also known as the Gann limit, lawmakers cannot spend more than an amount determined by a formula that takes into consideration annual tax proceeds and changes to the population and cost of living. Tax revenue above the limit must be divided between schools and refunds to taxpayers.

With few exceptions, the limit applies to most appropriations of tax revenue, including money that lawmakers tuck away into the rainy day fund and other reserves. California voters have also capped the amount of money lawmakers can set aside in the rainy day fund to 10% of general fund proceeds in a given year.

Since taking office, Newsom has argued that it doesn’t make sense for savings to count as spending under state law.

State budget revenue is subject to dramatic swings from year to year based on stock market activity. The law, Newsom has said, prevents the state from saving more money in good years to stave off cuts to programs in bad years.

The proposed changes would exempt deposits into the rainy day fund and a short term reserve, called the “Projected Surplus Temporary Holding Account,” from the state appropriations limit. The cap on the rainy day fund would grow from 10% of general fund tax revenue to 20%.

“Californians live by a simple, bipartisan truth: set money aside when times are good so you’re ready when they’re not,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) said in a statement. “The Save For California’s Future Act is what responsible leadership looks like — and future taxpayers will thank us for it.”

The measure could incentivize Democrats to save more money because funds tucked away in the rainy day fund would no longer be considered expenditures counted toward the spending limit. By allowing lawmakers to set aside more money that is not subjected to state spending limits, it could also allow them to hold onto money that would be returned to taxpayers under current law.

The measure is slated for a vote Thursday. If approved by two-thirds of lawmakers, voters will consider the proposal on the November ballot.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s election integrity strategy is unlawful and can no longer be used.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”

The decision is a major legal setback for President Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.

The department referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that Homeland Security help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.

“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” the judge wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.

“They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn’t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.

Swenson and Hussein write for the Associated Press. Swenson reported from New York.

WASHINGTON — It is no secret that a lack of job creation has emerged as a pivotal election issue. But a new Los Angeles Times Poll suggests that Americans’ pocketbook concerns extend well beyond the labor market, and the public thinks that Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry would better look out for their financial futures than would President Bush.

Asked to name the candidate who would be “best at protecting the financial security of the average American,” 47% named Kerry, while 34% picked Bush.

Among independents, a group that could play a crucial role in determining the winner of the presidential election in November, the gap was even wider: 49% for Kerry and 26% for Bush.

Those polled also view the Bush White House as much more aligned with business interests than the interests of ordinary workers, and they express widespread doubts about the integrity of corporate America.

A 63% majority said the president was more concerned about corporations, while 21% said he was more concerned about workers. The view that the president sides with big business over rank-and-file workers has become more prevalent over time. In an August 2002 Times Poll, 55% felt that way.

The results suggest that the economic battleground in the presidential election campaign is taking an untraditional shape that transcends meat-and-potatoes issues such as employment and price levels. These days, people are also concerned about corporate scandal and the integrity of the financial markets — and the way their leaders are dealing with these matters.

“This poll tells me that Bush’s economic troubles are of the new post-inflation, post-unemployment form,” said Samuel L. Popkin, a UC San Diego political scientist and a Democrat.

It further indicates that “Bush hasn’t been able to convert military security into financial security,” he added.

The Times Poll of 1,616 adults nationwide was conducted between March 27 and March 30. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In the survey, 69% of those earning less than $50,000 a year saw the president as more concerned with corporations. That figure dipped to 56% among those earning $50,000 or more.

Follow-up interviews with some of those surveyed underscore that Americans have mixed feelings about Bush’s approach to corporate America and the economy.

Greg Voorhees, a registered independent from Bradenton, Fla., feels the economy has changed for the worse, with corporations aiming only for the bottom line, deserting employees for cheap labor overseas and paying top executives “millions and millions while their workers barely get the minimum wage.”

The Bush administration, he is convinced, has been too quick to craft policies that benefit corporate interests at the expense of the public. Ordinary Americans, the 51-year-old said, are not informed of the real agenda on matters ranging from energy policy to drugs and Medicare: The White House, he said, is “hiding something.”

But others disagree. Curtis Blevins, a warehouse worker in northeast Ohio, said he believed the president was helping regular employees by responding to the needs of large corporations.

“Ordinary people work for big business,” said Blevins, 38. “If he doesn’t help big business, ordinary people are out on their duff…. I’m an ordinary person. I work for a big company. The more he helps the big companies, the more we get to hire. The easier our jobs become.”

The poll suggests, however, that many Americans harbor strikingly negative feelings about big companies and those who run them.

Revelations of phony bookkeeping at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other companies first grabbed public attention more than two years ago. Since then, news of financial scandal has remained highly visible — most recently centering on the trials of Tyco International Ltd. executives accused of looting their company and of Martha Stewart, who was convicted of lying to investigators about her stock dealings.

Half of those polled said they would describe corporate fraud as “a widespread problem” in a system that is failing; 40% said only “a few corrupt individuals” engaged in such behavior. Three out of four Americans said they could trust executives “only some of the time” or “hardly ever.” Slightly fewer than 1 in 4 said they could trust executives most of the time.

Revelations of fraud also have affected personal behavior. Thirty-seven percent said they were less willing to invest in the stock market in light of the corporate scandals, while 31% said the revelations had not affected their willingness to invest. Many of the rest said they did not own stock.

Almost half of those surveyed — 45% — ranked economic issues as the most important problem facing the nation, about the same percentage that put security concerns at the top.

Democrats contend that the ongoing attention to corporate scandal aggravates public worries about financial security, in part because the series of high-profile frauds rattled the stock market and eroded long-term savings accounts for college and retirement. The scandals also raise questions about whether a greedy business elite operates on a different ethical playing field from the rest of society.

“Every day there’s a new scandal on television that makes our point,” said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. “You want to have somebody looking out for the economy that makes sure that corporations play by the rules and stockholders are protected.”

But Republicans maintain that corporate corruption is not an issue that will harm Bush. They often point out that the president has supported Justice Department prosecutions of white-collar criminals and ultimately endorsed sweeping legislation for corporate reform.

“Voters don’t hold the commander in chief in a position of corporate leadership,” said Scott Reed, a Republican consultant. “It’s very difficult for Kerry in his campaign to tie this knot around Bush’s neck.”

Reed asserted that strong economic growth, combined with Bush’s “optimistic message of hope,” presents a winning case for the president when it comes to financial security.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Financial assessment

Q: ‘He would be the best at protecting the financial security of the average American’: Does this apply more to George W. Bush or more to John Kerry?

Neither 9%

Bush 34%

Kerry 47%

Both equal 2%

Don’t know 8%

Q: Do you think George W. Bush cares more about protecting the interests of ordinary working people, or more about protecting the interests of large business corporations?

Ordinary people 21%

Large corporations 63%

Both 8%

Don’t know 8%

Q: Have corporate scandals in this country made you more willing or less willing to invest in the stock market, or have corporate scandals not played a role in your investing in the stock market one way or the other?

Don’t invest 23%

More willing 6%

Less willing 37%

No role 31%

Don’t know 3%

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How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll contacted 1,616 adults nationwide by telephone March 27 through 30, 2004. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the nation and random digit dialing techniques were used to allow listed and unlisted numbers to be contacted. The entire sample of adults was weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age and education. The margin of sampling error is 3 percentage points in either direction. For certain subgroups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results may also be affected by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.

Source: Times Poll