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      Kamala Harris’s home town cheers historic White House run: ‘She’s going to do it’

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      As Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic frontrunner to replace Joe Biden, residents of her home town of Berkeley, California, greeted the news of her potentially history-making White House run with enthusiasm – and some trepidation.Those who once knew her as a little girl living above a daycare on Bancroft Avenue were proud of their home town hero and – like many Democratic supporters in the US – hopeful she has a better chance than Joe Biden of beating Donald Trump.“This was where her story began,” said Carole Porter, 60, standing on a corner where she and Harris waited for the school bus starting as first-graders, both participating in a city campaign to desegregate local schools. “For people of color and for women, once she breaks that glass ceiling – and I’m sure she’s going to do it – there’s no going back.”Days after Biden’s historic decision to exit the US presidential race, Democrats have largely coalesced around the vice-president – raising a record $81m in 24 hours for her campaign and gaining the support of top party members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi and Biden himself.Born in Oakland, Harris moved to the neighboring city of Berkeley where she lived until she was 12 with her single mother, Shyamala, and sister, Maya. She later served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, before becoming the state’s junior senator.The East Bay neighborhood where Harris and Porter rode bikes as children is steeped in political and cultural history. Across the street is the former home of the first Black mayor of Berkeley, and several blocks away sits a school where the radical Black Panthers organization first organized free breakfasts for children. Its founder, Huey P Newton, frequented the area.Harris joined that legacy in 2020, when she became the first woman in US history and the first Black woman and woman of south Asian descent to be elected as vice-president. Now she stands poised to make history once again as the first woman of color to lead a presidential ticket and – if she wins – the first female president of the United States.Porter said coming from this area, historically a red-lined district primarily inhabited by Black and immigrant families, gives her “a broad perspective”.View image in fullscreen“I think because we were in such an accepting environment of all people, that is where her baseline is,” Porter said. “She has no obstacles, no judgment and no thinking that she has to do or be anything different than who she is.”Biden’s decision to step aside came as a relief to many, following weeks of concern among Democratic party members and voters that the president was not fit to run for re-election. Still, some voters in Harris’ former stomping grounds are wary of her chances in November.Tina, a 60-year-old voter who requested not to be quoted by last name, said she was “thrilled” to hear Harris is being considered as the top candidate, but questioned whether she will be able to win. “She’s got a lot stacked against her,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t even able to vote a white woman into the White House before.”Other voters echoed those concerns. “I worry about the misogyny vote,” said Pat Roberto, a woman strolling down Solano Avenue, a street adjacent to Thousand Oaks elementary school, which Harris attended as a child. “She wouldn’t have been my ideal, but she is better than Trump, and that’s what we need – to get him out.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Trump is expected to attack Harris as being further left than Biden on many issues, voters in her blue home state have often criticized the former prosecutor for being too centrist or even conservative on some issues.View image in fullscreen“I have never been a big supporter of her, because she is a prosecutor and I am kind of on the other end of the spectrum,” said Paula Dodd, a 69-year-old voter who has lived in the Bay Area her whole life and was enjoying lunch near Harris’s former elementary school. “She’s definitely not a traditional Californian in that regard – she’s not super progressive.”Brian Dodd, lunching at the same table, said that could be seen as a strength for Harris. “That’s what gives me hope, that she can appeal to more people,” he said.Polling has shown Harris’s favorability ratings are similar to those of Trump and Biden. A June AP-Norc poll found about four in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her, though the share of those who have unfavorable opinion was slightly lower than for Trump and Biden.Despite misgivings, there was an air of excitement in the neighborhood on Monday. “We figure they’ll be renaming the school after she gets elected,” Brian Dodd said. More

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      Why We Came to California, and Why We Stay

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      The best of our readers’ love letters to California.The Golden Gate Bridge in 2023.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesA year and a half ago, I left the Los Angeles neighborhood that I had lived in for a decade and relocated to San Francisco. The move was daunting — just me and my rescue cat, Kit, in a quiet apartment overlooking Golden Gate Park.I felt awed by the beauty of the Bay Area, but the transition wasn’t all roses. Building a social life from scratch, I soon learned, was considerably harder than it had been in my 20s. I had heaped more tumult onto an already stressful, pandemic-inflected few years.There was, however, one helpful constant: the community built in this newsletter. As I’ve often said here, the observations, suggestions and notes that you send me are drops of delight in my inbox. And they’ve allowed us to find connection and common ground in a time when that feels increasingly rare.Together we’ve chronicled California culture, creating a comprehensive Golden State playlist, reading list and movie list. We’ve tapped into the California psyche by sharing how we mark time with disasters and rely on wacky roadside attractions to tell us that we’re almost home.And, of course, we’ve discussed why we continue to live in California, despite its myriad problems. Hundreds of you have sent me thoughtful emails over the years about your experiences in the state — how your family arrived here, what you adore about your block, your favorite places to visit on summer break. Reading these missives feels like indulging in a conversation among friends.Today, as I end my tenure leading this newsletter, I’m sharing some of my favorite California love letters from you. Thanks for sending them in.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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      Adam Schiff says Biden should ‘pass the torch’ and bow out of 2024 US election

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      Adam Schiff, the high-profile California Democrat and US Senate candidate, on Wednesday called on Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign, stating he had “serious concerns” about the president’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles-area congressman joined almost 20 other congressional Democrats in asking the president to step aside. Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history”, Schiff said, but it was time “to pass the torch”.“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff told the newspaper.The development comes as an increasing number of Democrats express doubts about whether Biden can win in November and concerns over his age and cognitive abilities following his debate performance against Trump.A new survey published this week found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Only about three in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that Biden has the mental capability to serve effectively, the AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research survey also found.Some of Biden’s top donors have said that he should bow out, and have paused donations until he does so. It was reported on Tuesday that Schiff had told donors he believed Democrats would lose the presidency, and probably the House and Senate as well, if Biden remained on the ticket. “I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” the New York Times reported Schiff told donors in New York.With Democrats in turmoil, the party backtracked on Wednesday on plans to expedite a virtual roll call to officially select Biden as its presidential nominee before August after facing opposition from several House members. The members had planned to send a letter to the DNC calling a proposal to fast-track Biden’s nomination a “terrible idea”.“We’re glad to see that the pressure has worked and the DNC will not rush this virtual process through in July,” said a spokesperson for the congressman Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, who heads the DNC’s rules committee, confirmed during a press conference in Milwaukee on Wednesday morning that the roll call vote will not be conducted this month. The governor’s spokesperson later confirmed that the process should wrap up by 7 August.The extended deadline buys Democrats more time for continued internal debate over whether Biden should remain the party’s nominee.For his part, Schiff said on Wednesday he would support whoever is the Democratic nominee, including Biden, and will do anything to help the ticket succeed.“There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high,” he told the LA Times. More

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      ‘A dystopian plot’: how will Trump’s Project 2025 affect California?

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      Donald Trump has not been shy about attacking California on the presidential campaign trail, telling fellow conservatives that “the place is failing” under Democratic party leadership. And all signs suggest that a second Trump administration would not hesitate to take a sledgehammer to principles and policy priorities that the Golden state and other progressive bastions hold dear.The Project 2025 policy document, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency drawn up by former Trump administration officials and sympathetic thinktank analysts, takes specific aim at California on abortion rights, fuel emissions standards and the transition to electric vehicles.The document also raises the possibility of a large-scale crackdown on immigration and an intense focus on border security – a cornerstone of the Trump campaign that could upend the lives of millions of immigrants living in California as well as parts of the state economy, especially agriculture, that depend heavily on immigrant labor.That is not to mention the other ways Project 2025 envisions overhauling the US government, with implications for California as much as the rest of the country: enhancing the power of the presidency and eroding the independence of the justice department, dismantling what it calls “the administrative state”, abandoning efforts to combat the climate crisis and curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.“Project 2025 is more than an idea,” the California congressman Jared Huffman has warned, “it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”What remains to be seen, though, is how much of the wishlist laid out in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is actually achievable. Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the document, as Democrats like Huffman have started using it as a cudgel with which to attack his campaign. And a number of policy experts at one remove from the heat and hyperbole of the election campaign believe that any dystopian plot might quickly give way to a lot of lawsuits likely to slow or halt parts of the Trump agenda for months or years.“I don’t think they are capable of pulling off a lot of the things they want to pull off,” said Christopher Thornberg of the Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. While an immigration crackdown similar to the one in Trump’s first term seems inevitable, mass expulsions of millions of people as promised by the former president would be dizzyingly expensive and near-impossible to pull off, he argued.As for California’s more ambitious environmental targets that Project 2025 wants to disrupt, some – getting rid of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example – are probably unfeasible.On many other issues, California can draw on its experience of the first Trump presidency to throw up roadblocks or pass its own state legislation. The Project 2025 document may be a sign that Trump and his allies are more ready to govern this time, but – as the political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Mike Madrid argues – California and other blue states are better prepared, too.“Whatever the federal government decides to do, California can compensate,” Madrid said. In the event of a second Trump presidency, he expected the state to start filing lawsuits almost immediately, as it did more than a hundred times during the 2017-21 presidency, and find administrative or legislative solutions to many of the problems a new Trump administration might try to create.“This state is good at finding ways around the policies,” he said. “The size of the economy makes it easier to do that.”In one instance – a proposal in the Project 2025 document to end a legal waiver that has enabled California to set its own fuel efficiency standards for the past half-century – the courts have already heard a suit brought by several Republican-run states and ruled in California’s favor.None of that diminishes the threats that Trump and his supporters have been directing at California’s political leadership, or the nastiness of some of their language. In speeches over the past year, Trump has mischaracterized California as a place with so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers, a place where shoplifting and other crimes are so rampant the only solution is to shoot criminals on sight, a place where undocumented immigrants are, implausibly, offered pension funds and mansions on arrival and can vote illegally multiple times over. “The world is being dumped into California,” he told state Republicans last September. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”Project 2025’s approach has been less fanciful and much more focused on policy detail. It rails, for example, against what it calls “abortion tourism” in California and other states and proposes a number of administrative remedies to track women who travel there because of abortion bans in their states, and to withhold Medicaid and other federal funding if California continues to insist that insurance companies make abortion part of their health coverage.None of this, though, is as frightening to abortion rights activists in California as the part that is left unsaid: the desire of many on the political right to institute an outright national abortion ban. Asked whether she believed Trump when he said he would not support such a ban, Jodi Hicks of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California responded with a flat “No.”To her, the fight in California is not about the fine print of the Hyde amendment or the Weldon amendement – tools invoked by Project 2025 that Republicans have used in the past to try to restrict abortion around the country – but rather about control of Congress to avert even the possibility of a national ban.Hicks has identified eight swing districts in California that she believes can determine control of the House of Representatives and her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democratic candidates there. “The road to reproductive freedom runs through California,” she said. “We know what the intention is – they want to take away abortion rights all across the country, including California. What we need is a Congress that can push back and protect us.”The best way to thwart the Republicans’ plans, in other words, is to vote against them. California, as a solid-blue state, will do its part to keep Trump out of the White House. What the rest of the country does remains to be seen. More

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      What to Know About the Wildfires in California

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      The state has had more than 3,500 wildfires this year, and the peak of the annual fire season has yet to arrive.Californians are once again thinking about the familiar perils of deadly wildfires as high temperatures and winds have made for an active early fire season.In recent weeks, more than 3,500 wildfires have erupted across California, the nation’s most populous state, from its northern boundary with Oregon to the Mexican border. Tens of thousands of people have had to flee their homes, including most residents in the city of Oroville last week.After two relatively calm fire years, Californians fear that the blazes will be more intense this summer and fall, threatening towns and polluting the air with smoke up and down the West Coast. Here’s what to know.What’s the latest on the most intense fires?On Friday, the Lake fire started in the grassy hills of the Los Padres National Forest, about 50 miles northwest of Santa Barbara. In mere days, it has burned almost 29,000 acres and has become the state’s largest wildfire so far this year, according to Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency.The fire initially drew attention because it threatened the property formerly known as Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Firefighters made early progress controlling the fire line and keeping it away from the ranch and other properties in the hills, but strong winds have continued to push the blaze southeast.Most of the fire has been in rural, rugged terrain, officials say, and it was 16 percent contained as of Wednesday. But it has still forced about 440 people to evacuate, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department, while more than 1,100 are under evacuation warnings.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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      Neverland Ranch Threatened by ‘Lake Fire’ in California

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      The fire erupted on Friday near Zaca Lake, northeast of Los Olivos, Calif. As of Sunday, it had burned more than 16,000 acres and was zero percent contained.A wildfire that erupted in the mountains of Santa Barbara County in Southern California has burned more than 16,000 acres, prompting an evacuation order and threatening ranches, including Michael Jackson’s former Neverland Ranch, the authorities said.The fire, called the Lake Fire, broke out shortly before 4 p.m. on Friday near Zaca Lake, just northeast of Los Olivos, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.The cause of the fire, which was zero percent contained as of Sunday, remained under investigation.The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation order for an area near the Los Padres National Forest that includes the property once known as Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, a 2,700-acre property in Los Olivos, about 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles.About 100 residents were affected by the evacuation order, said Kenichi Haskett, a public information officer for Cal Fire. No structural damage, injuries or fatalities have been reported so far.Winds were blowing the blaze southeast. Neverland Ranch and other ranches were in immediate danger on Sunday, Mr. Haskett said.Mr. Jackson bought the ranch for about $17 million in 1988 and transformed it into a private entertainment complex, complete with a zoo, a train and an amusement park that included a Ferris wheel and a 50-seat theater.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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      Record-Breaking Heat Broils Much of Western U.S.

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      From Oregon to California to Arizona, several cities have seen scorching temperatures in recent days. And there is little relief in sight, forecasters say.Millions of people across the Western United States were broiling under record-breaking heat on Saturday, with little relief in sight over the coming days, according to forecasters.From Oregon to California to the deserts of Arizona, several cities have seen stifling temperatures in recent days. Jacob Asherman, a forecaster for the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, said the blistering temperatures were being fueled by a ridge of high-pressure air that had parked over much of the West, preventing hot air near the surface from rising higher in the atmosphere.While many of these cities — like Las Vegas, where temperatures were forecast to reach 117 degrees over the weekend — expect triple-digit temperatures every summer, some residents in other regions were caught off guard by what is predicted to be a long stretch of sizzling days.In Portland, Ore., temperatures were forecast to hover around 100 degrees for five straight days starting Friday, conditions that once would have been considered unusual for a region where summers were so mild that people rarely needed air-conditioners. The sweltering temperatures prompted Gov. Tina Kotek to declare a statewide heat emergency, warning that the extreme heat represented a “new normal” of a changing climate.“Both the record-breaking temperatures and the duration of heat present a clear and present danger, particularly for children, elders, people with disabilities and people who work outside,” Ms. Kotek said in a statement.A person cooled off during the Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland, Ore.Jenny Kane/Associated PressWe 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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      13,000 Are Ordered to Evacuate as Wildfire Spreads in Northern California

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      A wildfire that began in Butte County, Calif., on Tuesday morning has burned more than 3,000 acres and threatened residents of the city of Oroville.The authorities in Northern California ordered about 13,000 people in Butte County to evacuate on Tuesday night as a wildfire spread, burning more than 3,000 acres as of Wednesday morning.California’s firefighting agency, Cal Fire, said that the fire began on Tuesday morning and that its cause was under investigation. It was not clear how many structures had been damaged by the blaze, called the Thompson fire, but photos showed several homes and vehicles engulfed in flames. No fatalities had been reported as of Wednesday morning.Sheriff Kory Honea of Butte County said at a news conference on Tuesday night that about 13,000 people had been ordered to evacuate. Many of the evacuation orders affected the city of Oroville, Calif., which is about 68 miles north of Sacramento and has a population of about 20,000 people.Track Wildfires in the U.S.See where wildfires are currently burning.The fire risk in Northern California has been made worse this week by low humidity and gusty winds, which can cause fires to rapidly spread. Red flag fire warnings, meaning that the risk for wildfires is heightened by weather conditions, were in place in more than a dozen counties on Tuesday and Wednesday.There is also a dangerous heat wave in Northern California, with temperatures on Wednesday expected to reach 110 and higher in cities including Sacramento, Chico and Redding. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning that affects most of Northern California, including Oroville.Butte County was the site of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history. The Camp fire in 2018 killed at least 85 people and destroyed more than 90 percent of the homes in Paradise, a small town about 20 miles north of Oroville.Last week, residents of the nearby town of Palermo were ordered to evacuate because of the Apache fire, which burned 691 acres and has been contained. More