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    Sen. Laphonza Butler Discusses the Election During Her Last Days in Office

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    An interview with Senator Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, during her final week in the Senate.Laphonza Butler will have served as a senator from California for only about 15 months. But she has been a close ally of Vice President Kamala Harris for 15 years.This week, I spoke with Butler, whose long partnership with Harris — they first met when Butler was a Los Angeles-based union leader — gives her an intriguing perspective on why her party lost the presidential election and how it might rebuild.Harris hasn’t said much publicly about why she lost. In Butler’s view, some of the fault starts with President Biden, who she believes broke what was a clear campaign promise by running for re-election. But just blaming Biden isn’t enough: Democrats, she says, must stop talking and start listening. Really listening.Butler was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein in September 2023. Because she decided not to run for re-election, this week is her last in the body: On Monday, Representative Adam Schiff will be sworn in as the state’s newest senator.This interview was edited for length and clarity.LL: Why do you think Harris lost?LB: The American people wanted a change. They wanted a candidate who they thought represented change. And I think that might simply be it.Should Biden not have run?President Biden said initially that he was going to be a transitional leader. I think that is the expectation that people had. So in that sense, I think that he probably would have been better to remain in that posture. We can’t deny the success of his presidency. When history looks back, his presidency will be one of the most impactful in my lifetime, for sure. But I think once you sort of create an expectation with people, there is the need to hold to that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Begins Final Phase of Accelerated V.P. Search

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      The law firm hired by the Harris campaign to investigate potential vice-presidential candidates has completed its work, leaving the final decision — the most important yet of the still-new campaign — squarely in Vice President Kamala Harris’s hands.Covington & Burling, the Washington law firm tasked with the vetting, completed the job on Thursday afternoon and turned over its findings to Ms. Harris, according to two people briefed on the process.Ms. Harris has blocked off several hours on her calendar this weekend to meet with the men being considered to join the ticket, according to two people who had viewed her schedule and who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private process. The Harris campaign has suggested it will announce the decision by Tuesday evening, when the vice president and her to-be-named running mate begin a five-day tour of presidential battleground states, starting in Philadelphia.Several of the contenders, including Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, canceled events this weekend, reflecting both a desire to be available for those conversations and to avoid drawing additional speculation from the news media about their chances. The choice of a running mate is one of the most consequential decisions of Ms. Harris’s political career, one that can pay dividends in votes and years of counsel or backfire disastrously. In some ways, Ms. Harris is setting a direction for the future of the party, a reality she intimately understands given her own head-spinning ascension to the top of the ticket.But unlike previous nominees, who spent months considering candidates, she must make her decision on a compressed timeline. The shortened process clashes with what some former aides described as her typically deliberative decision-making approach.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Steve Garvey, Republican Former Baseball Player, Will Run for Senate in California

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      Mr. Garvey, 74, announced on Tuesday that he would enter the race for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, running against at least three Democratic candidates.The former baseball player Steve Garvey announced on Tuesday that he would run as a Republican for the California Senate seat left open by Dianne Feinstein’s death.Mr. Garvey, 74, was a first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres from 1969 to 1987. He has never held elected office.His campaign announcement video, filled with references to baseball and his career, opens with a voice-over of an announcer calling a home run and ends with Mr. Garvey declaring: “It’s time to get off the bench. It’s time to put the uniform on. It’s time to get back in the game.”“I never played for Democrats or Republicans or independents. I played for all of you,” he says in the video. “Now I’m running for U.S. Senate in California, a state that I believe at one time was the heartbeat of America, but now is just a murmur.”The positions outlined on Mr. Garvey’s campaign website are standard for Republican candidates, including a promise to “take a stand against out-of-control inflation,” a statement that “rising crime is destroying our communities” and a call for “more choices” for parents in terms of their children’s education. But he has broken from Republican orthodoxy on one issue, saying he would not support a federal abortion ban.He told The Los Angeles Times that he had voted for Donald J. Trump in both 2016 and 2020.Mr. Garvey will be running against at least three Democrats: Representatives Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. A poll released last month by The Los Angeles Times and the University of California, Berkeley, found that if Mr. Garvey entered the race, he would start in a distant third place, tied with Ms. Lee, but trailing Mr. Schiff and Ms. Porter by double digits. Laphonza Butler, the Democrat who was appointed to complete Ms. Feinstein’s term, has not said whether she will run next year.“Based on his announcement, it sounds like he’s ready to take up the fight for everyone born on third base — thinking they hit a triple,” Mr. Schiff said on X on Tuesday.California’s electoral system is unusual in that it does not have separate Democratic and Republican primaries; the top two candidates in the first round of voting, regardless of their affiliation, will advance to the November 2024 general election. That means the general election could feature two Democrats and no Republicans, an outcome well within the realm of possibility in a state as blue as California.If Mr. Garvey did make it to the general election, he would face long odds. California has not elected a Republican to the Senate in more than 30 years. More