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      Gavin Newsom Promotes Biden and Himself in a Delicate Dance

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      The California governor has made himself the most visible Democrat-in-waiting. Still, he says that it’s time Democrats “buck up” and get behind President Biden.Over the past four months, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, has traveled to six Republican-led states. He has goaded Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate from Florida, to debate on Fox News. He has assembled a small staff of political advisers and created a political action committee to distribute $10 million to Democratic causes and candidates.And this week, he raised $40,000 for a long-shot candidate for the United States Senate in Tennessee, one of the red states he has criticized his own party for neglecting.By all appearances, Mr. Newsom is a man with an eye on the White House, building a national network of supporters and accumulating the kind of good will among donors, party operatives and voters that could prove critical should he decide to move beyond Sacramento. Mr. Newsom said in an interview that he was not running for president, and that the time has come for Democrats to rally around President Biden.“The train has left the station,” Mr. Newsom said. “We’re all in. Stop talking. He’s not going anywhere. It’s time for all of us to get on the train and buck up.”But it may be difficult for Mr. Newsom to quiet speculation about his own future. He has spent months positioning himself as one of his party’s leading voices during a time of deep Democratic worry and lingering unease about the political strengths of Mr. Biden, who is 80, and his vice president, Kamala Harris.A CNN poll released on Thursday found that 73 percent of all respondents were “seriously concerned” that the president’s age might affect his mental and physical competence. Some 67 percent of Democrats said the party should nominate someone else.Mr. Newsom has, by his account, sought to reassure the White House in both public and private that he is no threat to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign. And in turn, Mr. Biden’s team has appeared to pull him closer. The governor will be a top Democratic surrogate defending Mr. Biden when Republican candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library later this month.This dance — of raising one’s profile without undercutting the president — is the challenge for a class of Democrats-in-waiting, which also includes Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. But Mr. Newsom, a 55-year-old telegenic, popular-in-his-own-state leader, has made himself the most visible in this group, and he may serve as a reminder of Mr. Biden’s shortcoming as he seeks re-election.Mr. Newsom has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them.Doug Mills/The New York Times“He’s got to be careful about it,” Joel Benenson, a pollster who advised Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, said of Mr. Newsom’s effort to raise his profile. “You don’t want to be too cute by half. If you are going to run, do it. If not, go out there and make the connections and talk to Democrats, learn about these states. The worst mistake would be the way to do it and seem sly about doing it.”Mr. Newsom presents his travel to Republican states as an attempt to build up the Democratic Party in places he argues it has neglected. And while defending Mr. Biden, particularly on questions about his age and fitness, he also engages in a debate over cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have sometimes avoided.Mr. Newsom spent nearly an hour with Sean Hannity on Fox News in June to make the case for Mr. Biden and to defend his own record in California. “You have to give Gavin Newsom a lot of credit,” Mr. Hannity said in an interview. “He knew it wasn’t going to be an easy interview.”Mr. Newsom recently turned up at a Boise, Idaho, bookstore to denounce “the insane book bans happening across the country. ” He has picked arguments with Republican governors like Mr. DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, on abortion, gun control and trans rights.“He is taking the fight to the Republicans,” said Jared DeLoof, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Idaho, where Mr. Newsom appeared in July. “Too often Democrats shy away from things like critical race theory or transgender rights or some of these issues that Republican like to pop off about. The governor showed he was really effective on this issues — we can take them on, and we can win.”On his tour of Republican states, Mr. Newsom has engaged in the kind of cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have at times avoided.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesMr. Newsom said his activities were done with the consultation and approval of the White House, an assertion confirmed by White House aides.“I am sensitive to that,” he said, noting that he has made a point of not visiting states that are at the center of the presidential battleground. “I am trying not to play into the presidential frame.”(Mr. Newsom, however, did suggest that his still-unscheduled debate with Mr. DeSantis take place in, among other states, Nevada and Georgia, both of which are likely to be in play in 2024.)A spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, T.J. Ducklo, said in a statement Friday that Mr. Newsom had “forcefully and effectively makes the president’s case publicly and is an enormous asset to our fund-raising and organizing operations.”There are other potential sources of friction as Mr. Newsom’s profile rises. Mr. Newsom and Ms. Harris are both ambitious Democrats from the same state who are of similar ages — she is 58 — and have, over the years, had to navigate around each other as they traveled down the same political roads. Ms. Harris would almost certainly be a rival in a Democratic presidential primary in 2028.Mr. Newsom said he and Ms. Harris speak regularly and rejected the suggestion that his success comes at her expense. “This is a true story — I shouldn’t even share it. There were a couple of unknown numbers on my voice mail the other day, and it was Kamala checking in,” he said. “I am really proud of her, and I don’t say that to be patronizing.”Ms. Harris’s aides said she had most recently called the governor to ask how California was faring after it was struck by Hurricane Hilary and an earthquake.Mr. Newsom, who is barred from seeking a third term as governor, has assembled a skeleton structure of campaign aides, in effect a campaign-in-waiting.He has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them. He is also distributing money from his political action committee, Campaign for Democracy, further enhancing his standing with Democrats candidates and political operatives around the country. “If he ever ran for national office, he has a record to run on,” said Sean Clegg, one of Mr. Newsom’s top advisers.Still, should Mr. Newsom seek to expand his political ambitions, he faces some serious obstacles.Mr. Newsom has rejected the notion that his rising profile was undercutting Vice President Kamala Harris, about whom Democrats have expressed doubt.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Newsom won a second term as governor in 2022 with nearly 60 percent of the vote. But he is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state and has never had to face a tough Republican opponent.Mr. Newsom has become the face of a state with a long history of innovation and prosperity, but that state also brings with it some of his party’s biggest challenges: homelessness, a housing crisis and what may be the end the kind of growth that has defined the California dream. California has always been a political and cultural outlier and has, more than ever, become a rallying point of the right on issues like crime.Jessica Millan Patterson, the leader of the California Republican Party, said Mr. Newsom could prove an appealing national candidate, but that he would not play well with swing voters in many states.“It’s a really difficult sale,” she said. “I don’t think most of the country is looking at California and saying, ‘That’s what we should be doing.”The last California governor elected president was Ronald Reagan, a Republican; but by the time of that election, in 1980, he had been out of office for five years.Jerry Brown, a former California governor who ran for the White House and lost three times, said that none of the hurdles Mr. Newsom faced were insurmountable. “The most important thing is the candidate and the times,” Mr. Brown said. “If the candidate fits the time, I don’t think the geography and the cultural differences matter as much.”Mr. Newsom acknowledged all the hurdles. “It’s the surround-sound nature of the anger machine that is 24/7, wall-to-wall anti-California,” he said. “People’s entire careers are built on tearing this state down.”But Mr. Newsom argued — while insisting he was engaging in a hypothetical discussion, since he is not running for president — that being governor of a state like California would make someone particularly qualified to run the nation.Not that it matters, by the governor’s telling. Mr. Newsom said becoming president was “never on my list” and that he was not one of those Democrats who grew up with a photograph of John F. Kennedy on his wall, as he put it, drawing an unstated comparison to Bill Clinton and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who ran for president in 2020 and may well run again in 2028.“Look, in 2028, 99.9999 percent of people will not remember a damn thing about what we did in this election,” he said. “They will all fall in love with whomever it is — and there will be 30 of them on the stage. No one is naïve about that.”Michael D. Shear More

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      Pelosi, Defying Predictions, Says She Will Seek Re-election in 2024

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      Since she stepped down from leadership last year, many observers expected Representative Nancy Pelosi of California to head toward retirement. But she has kept people guessing about her future.Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who served for decades as the Democratic Party’s House leader and was the first woman to become speaker, announced on Friday that she would seek re-election in 2024, ending months of speculation about her political future.“In light of the values of San Francisco, which we’ve always been proud to promote, I’ve made the decision to seek re-election,” Ms. Pelosi said on Friday at an event in her hometown focused on organized labor.Since she stepped down from leadership last year after Democrats lost the House majority, many observers expected that Ms. Pelosi, who at 83 is the seventh-oldest member of the chamber, was headed for retirement. Some had been surprised to see her stay in Congress at all, a rare move for a former speaker, and speculated that she would not finish her term.But colleagues said she has relished her lower profile as a rank-and-file member with emeritus status. In that new role, Ms. Pelosi offers advice on an as-needed basis to her party’s new leadership team, often sits in the back rows of the House floor gabbing with her closest friends and focuses her attention on San Francisco while quietly remaining a fund-raising powerhouse for Democrats.“I’m emancipated now!” an ebullient Ms. Pelosi said in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times.Even after Ms. Pelosi made clear she would stay on after giving up her leadership post, some Democrats assumed that she would leave Congress early, potentially clearing the way for her daughter Christine Pelosi, a party activist and a Democratic National Committee executive committee member, to run for her seat.Ms. Pelosi’s decision to carry on with her 36-year career in the House comes at a moment of renewed scrutiny on the advanced age and health status of the country’s leading public servants — including President Biden, 80, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, 81, the longtime Republican leader — and questions about whether they have overstayed their time in power. Ms. Pelosi managed to somewhat insulate herself from those critiques when she decided last year to step down from leadership, essentially giving herself a demotion.Senator Dianne Feinstein, another California Democrat who at 90 is the oldest member of Congress, plans to retire after her term ends next year. But she is facing calls to step down sooner amid a precipitous health decline that has raised questions about her ability to do her job. Ms. Pelosi recently attributed those calls to sexism.A major factor in Ms. Pelosi’s decision to not only finish her term but to seek another, according to people close to her, was the health of her husband, Paul Pelosi, who was brutally beaten with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco last year by an assailant who later said he had been targeting the speaker. With Mr. Pelosi on a solid path to recovery, allies said, Ms. Pelosi did not feel it was necessary to step away from a job she loved.“Nancy Pelosi has always been untraditional,” said Stacy Kerr, who for a decade served as a senior aide to Ms. Pelosi. “She’s done things her own way her whole career, driven by the needs of her district and the country. We shouldn’t expect that she won’t continue to be a trailblazer now.”Still, Ms. Pelosi, famous for keeping her own counsel, had not shared her plans with anyone. People close to her said on Friday that she had ultimately decided to run again because she also viewed it as an urgent priority to re-elect Mr. Biden and help Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, become the next House speaker.Ms. Pelosi is still her party’s most prolific fund-raiser in Congress, a political skill that could be determinative in helping Democrats win back the House majority next year.The National Republican Congressional Committee quickly tried to frame her decision to stay on as a sign of Mr. Jeffries’s weakness.“The babysitter agreed to stay late!” the group’s press secretary, Will Reinert, said in a statement, noting that House Democrats still relied on Ms. Pelosi as the main engine of their fund-raising machine.In an online post, Ms. Pelosi characterized her decision to run again as one driven by local and global concerns.“Now, more than ever, our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our recovery,” Ms. Pelosi said in announcing her plans. “Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there, with liberty and justice for all.” More

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      California senate leader, first gay person to hold post, to step down

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      The leader of the California senate said on Monday she will step down from her leadership post, ending a historic run as the first woman and first openly gay person to lead the upper legislative chamber of the nation’s most populous state.Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego, said she will step down next year. Mike McGuire, a Democrat from the state’s North Coast region, will replace Atkins as the Senate’s president pro tempore.Atkins made the announcement at a news conference with McGuire and most of the senate Democratic caucus standing behind her. The display of unity was in stark contrast to the leadership battle that embroiled the state assembly last year, when the new speaker, Robert Rivas, replaced former speaker Anthony Rendon.Atkins cannot seek re-election because of term limits and must leave the senate at the end of next year. She said the caucus chose to announce the transition now because “a long, drawn-out successor campaign would not be in the best interest of the senate nor the people who we were elected to represent”.“We have a lot of work to get through in the next few weeks,” Atkins said, referring to the chaotic final days of the legislative session when lawmakers will vote on hundreds of bills. “This work does not mix well with internal caucus politics being at the top of everyone’s minds.”The leader of the California senate is one of the most powerful positions in state politics, acting as the body’s chief negotiator with the governor and the assembly speaker on key legislation and the state’s more than $300 bn annual operating budget.Atkins is one of only three people in history to hold both top spots in the legislature. She has led the senate since 2018. Before that, she was speaker of the state assembly from 2014 to 2016.McGuire was first elected to the senate in 2014. He has been an outspoken critic of Pacific Gas & Electric, the nation’s largest utility, whose equipment has sparked a number of huge wildfires that have killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes.In 2019, McGuire took on Donald Trump by authoring a law that required candidates for president to disclose their tax returns as a condition of appearing on the ballot in California. The part of the law that applied to presidential candidates was ultimately struck down by the courts. But the law still applies to candidates for governor.McGuire praised Atkins as “a California trailblazer” and pledged to carry on her work, including focusing on climate issues, housing and access to abortion. But McGuire made it clear Atkins was still in charge.“There is one leader, one leader at a time. And our leader here in the California state senate is Toni Atkins,” he said. “The pro tem and I, we are unified in our transition. And we can make this promise to each and every one of you. The next three weeks, getting these bills off the floor and into the governor’s desk is going to be smooth, successful and focused on the success of the Golden state.”McGuire is known throughout the state capitol for his seemingly unending energy, often referred to by his nickname of the “Energizer Bunny”, according to the veteran lobbyist Chris Micheli.His ascension to the senate’s top post means the legislature will have two leaders who represent mostly rural parts of California, a rare occurrence in a state where political power has historically been concentrated in the dense urban areas of southern California and the San Francisco Bay.Rivas, who took over as assembly speaker earlier this summer, represents a district in the state’s mostly agricultural Central Coast region. McGuire’s district stretches from the northern tip of the San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border.“I think these are parts of the state that deserve a little more attention and focus,” said Jennifer Fearing, a longtime lobbyist whose firm – Fearless Advocacy – represents non-profit organizations. “I look forward to it, what the difference their leadership can make on addressing longstanding disparities.”McGuire’s term in office will be a short one. He is required to leave office after 2026 because of term limits.Democrats control 32 of the 40 seats in the state legislature, giving them total control of what bills can pass. State senator Brian Jones, the Republican leader, said McGuire has “respect for differing viewpoints”.“He has shown a willingness to work in a bipartisan manner and we are excited to continue this cooperation,” Jones said. More

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      Senator Dianne Feinstein hospitalized after falling in her home

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      The California US senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, was hospitalized on Tuesday evening after suffering a fall in her home, a spokesperson said.“Senator Feinstein briefly went to the hospital yesterday afternoon as a precaution after a minor fall in her home,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “All of her scans were clear and she returned home.”TMZ first reported the news. The Feinstein spokesperson, Adam Russell, then told the San Francisco Chronicle the senator was only in hospital for “an hour or two”.At 90, Feinstein is the oldest serving US senator. She has said she will retire at the end of her term next year. Three Democratic House colleagues are competing in the race to succeed her. Former Trump impeachment manager Adam Schiff is facing off against the longtime progressive, anti-war congresswoman Barbara Lee and the rising star and consumer protection crusader Katie Porter.But continued health problems have stoked calls for Feinstein to step aside sooner.Earlier this year, Feinstein was absent from Congress for nearly three months while recovering from shingles. During her hospitalization, some progressive House Democrats publicly called on her to resign, saying she had grounded the push to confirm Joe Biden’s judicial nominees. Leading Democrats, including Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, publicly stood beside her.Since her return, Feinstein has at times appeared frail and confused. The Chronicle said Feinstein had been due to attend an event celebrating San Francisco’s cable cars on 2 August, but had missed it after developing a cough.The first woman to be mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein was elected to the US Senate in 1992. As a senator, she led the effort to pass a landmark 1994 assault weapons ban. Between 2017 and 2021, she led Democrats on the judiciary committee, where she helmed a landmark investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.Feinstein’s health challenges have renewed attention on the age and health concerns of some of the US’s most prominent politicians and fueled debates about age limits for members of Congress.The 81-year-old Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has suffered a number of falls and last month froze during remarks to reporters, prompting both expressions of concern and calls for him to step down.At an event in Kentucky on Saturday, McConnell was heckled with calls of “Retire!”The two candidates expected to contest the presidential election next year, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, and the former Republican president Donald Trump, are 80 and 77 respectively.But Feinstein’s age and health problems – side effects of shingles include encephalitis, or swelling of the brain – came into sharp focus when she was absent from Congress, given the need for her vote on judicial nominations.Some observers said calls for her to retire were ageist and sexist, and would not have been aimed at the likes of Chuck Grassley, the 89-year-old Iowa Republican who also sits on the judiciary committee.Rejecting such claims, the Vanity Fair columnist and politics podcaster Molly Jong-Fast said Feinstein was “fundamentally … a public servant, there to serve the public. And this idea that somehow because she’s a woman or because she’s older that she should be immune from [calls to quit] is really ridiculous”.Feinstein has defended her ability to perform her job, though her office said in May that she was still experiencing vision and balance impairments from the shingles virus.If Feinstein resigns before the 2024 election, Gavin Newsom, the California governor, would name her replacement, potentially reordering the race to succeed her. The governor said in 2021 that he would nominate a Black woman to fill the seat if Feinstein were to step aside.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      San Francisco Mayor London Breed Draws Early Opponents in 2024 Race

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      The mayor is drawing challengers more than a year before the election, a sign that she will face a tough race in a city where most voters remain in a foul mood.London Breed sailed to victory as the mayor of San Francisco. A local who rose from the housing projects to become the first Black woman to lead the liberal city, she won a special election in 2018 and then a full term in a landslide the following year. Times were good; the pandemic had yet to happen. If homelessness and crime worried San Franciscans, few of them blamed her.No longer. Now San Francisco is reeling, its downtown plagued by fentanyl markets and tent camps, its employers straining to repopulate office buildings with a decidedly more remote labor force. More than 70 percent of voters have told pollsters that the city is on the wrong track, and some 66 percent disapprove of the mayor’s job performance.With more than a year to go before the next mayoral election, Mayor Breed has already drawn a challenge from a former ally, Ahsha Safaí, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who outpolled her in a recent survey and who was building a campaign on addressing crime, especially what he called the “retail theft crisis.” And last week, word leaked from San Francisco political circles that Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was also planning a mayoral run.The list will inevitably grow, said Jim Ross, a longtime Bay Area political consultant who ran the 2003 San Francisco mayoral campaign of now-Governor Gavin Newsom of California.London Breed sailed to re-election four years ago as the mayor of San Francisco.Clara Mokri for The New York Times“Anything less than 10 people running in a race for mayor is a small field for San Francisco,” Mr. Ross said. “But people getting in this early and with these kinds of resources? It’s not a good sign for any incumbent. She’s going to have a challenging race.”As the pandemic has ebbed, its fiscal, spiritual and human impact has bedeviled mayors from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. But San Francisco has struggled more than most places from the fallout of Covid-19 lockdowns. Tech workers who fled downtown high rises and lofts when the pandemic hit have gotten used to remote work and have resisted returning. One-third of offices in commercial buildings downtown are vacant.Homeless people and drug users who overtook sidewalks in the city core, filling the vacuum left by absent pedestrian traffic, have sorely tested San Francisco’s ability to house and treat them, and to take back its public spaces. Exhausted and unnerved, San Franciscans have split across political, racial and class lines over how to move forward.Parents in the city school district last year led the successful recall of three board members who were criticized for keeping students out of classrooms too long during the pandemic and prioritizing social justice goals. Four months later, in June 2022, voters ousted a progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, who was faulted for being too lenient in his prosecutions.One-third of offices in commercial buildings downtown are vacant, and many employees have stayed home to work remotely.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesMayor Breed herself has fed into the outrage. In December 2021, she pointedly declared that she was sick of the petty crimes and drug use in San Francisco. She never took a position on the recall of Mr. Boudin, which political insiders viewed as a tacit endorsement. And she backed the school board recall.“It’s an incredibly difficult environment to be an incumbent in,” said Maggie Muir, a spokeswoman for Ms. Breed’s campaign.“The mayor is working incredibly hard,” Ms. Muir added. “She is making progress on downtown revitalization. She’s making progress — and yes it’s not as fast as some folks would have liked, on attacking the open-air drug markets.”Police data show homicides up by 12 percent and robberies 13 percent higher over the past 12 months. Motor vehicle thefts increased by 9 percent, but burglaries were down by 8 percent. The overdose crisis has continued unabated, with an average of about two people dying of drug overdoses every day.A pro-business moderate with progressive roots, Ms. Breed, 48, won the mayor’s job five years ago in a special election after the death of Ed Lee, the former mayor. She was re-elected with 70 percent of the vote the next year. Her current term was set to expire in 2023, but voters last year agreed to move city elections to even-numbered years starting in 2024, grouping them with federal and statewide elections, dramatically changing the mix of voters likely to turn out.More than 70 percent of voters have told pollsters that the city is on the wrong track, and some 66 percent disapprove of the mayor’s job performance. Jim Wilson/The New York TimesFurther complicating the picture is the city’s system for electing local officials, which allows voters to choose up to 10 candidates in order of preference. It is unclear how the combination of the presidential year timing and the ranked-choice system will shake out for Mayor Breed. Some analysts predict the even-year vote will yield an electorate that is more progressive than the mayor, but in elections past, the ranked-choice system has benefited her.“In the general election especially, you’ll have a lot more young people and a more ethnically diverse population,” said Adam Probolsky, president of the nonpartisan California-based polling firm Probolsky Research, whose surveys since April have shown a marked drop in support for the mayor. The timing could also attract San Franciscans who vote less regularly, he added, and who may not be as familiar with the candidates.That could create lanes for challengers to Mayor Breed.Mr. Safaí launched his candidacy in May and has been especially vocal about retail theft. “It’s the brazen nature of it. It’s the way in which people believe they can just walk into stores, grab things and walk out with impunity,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. Crime, he said, “is hitting every corner of our city.”Mr. Safaí, who was born in Iran and has a graduate degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began his San Francisco political career working in City Hall under former mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom.He has firsthand experience of the city’s crime problem. Thieves broke into his house last fall while it was undergoing renovations and hauled away the stove and microwave. Mr. Safaí is calling for the hiring of 500 additional police officers.Speculation also has focused on Phil Ting, a liberal state legislator who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee and is favored by the city’s progressives; his spokeswoman said on Wednesday that he declined to comment. The progressive president of the Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, is also discussed as a potential candidate, although Mr. Peskin, a fixture of San Francisco politics for the past quarter century, seemed unequivocal in an interview Wednesday that he was not running.“I am tired, and my next chapter in life is not in electoral politics,” he said. “It’s time for me to exit the stage.”Two people with knowledge of Mr. Lurie’s campaign plans confirmed that he was hosting gatherings and recruiting staff in advance of a mayoral run but declined to be named because the campaign has yet to formally launch. Mr. Lurie did not respond to requests for an interview. The San Francisco Standard, a city news site, was first to report last week that Mr. Lurie intended to challenge Ms. Breed.This week, word leaked from San Francisco political circles that Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who declared in March that “we have to rebuild our reputation and our city,” was also planning a mayoral run. Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated PressA native San Franciscan, Mr. Lurie is descended from one of the city’s most prominent families. His father, Rabbi Brian Lurie, was the executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco; his mother, Miriam Lurie Haas, known as Mimi, is a billionaire businesswoman; and his stepfather, the late philanthropist Peter Haas, was a descendant of Levi Strauss.Mr. Lurie is a prominent philanthropist, too, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for anti-poverty programs through Tipping Point, a San Francisco nonprofit that he founded. His wife, Becca Prowda, is director of protocol for Governor Newsom. But in a city whose fierce local politics have been described as “a knife fight in a phone booth,” Mr. Lurie remains a political novice. He has never held office, and the knives are already out.“When you’re born or married into a billionaire family, you don’t have the experience to face hard challenges,” said Ms. Muir, the campaign spokeswoman for the mayor.Other political veterans said that Mr. Lurie might struggle to overcome his lack of name recognition among voters. “I’m sure he’s well known in the foundation community, and possibly with homeless organizations,” said Mary Jung, a longtime San Francisco political operative who supports the mayor.Mr. Probolsky, the pollster, warned that it is far too soon to count out Mayor Breed.“If you want to make the case that she’s vulnerable, she is,” he said. “But if you want to make the case that she’s done? Finished? Over? You can’t because you don’t know who will oppose her and how viable they’ll be.” More

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      In reversal, California school district adopts curriculum on LGBTQ+ figures

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      A school district in southern California has decided to adopt the state’s new social studies book and curriculum after previously rejecting it for its reference of LGBTQ+ figures in history.The Temecula Valley unified school district voted to accept the curriculum following a lengthy meeting on Friday where parents, teachers and community members spoke for and against it. The decision has been welcomed by Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, for thwarting an attempt to “whitewash history” and removed the threat of sanctions against the school district for not adopting the curriculum.The board voted to reject the material in May and even in its acceptance of the curriculum on Friday it said it would strike out anything mentioning Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and politician who was assassinated along with San Francisco mayor George Moscon in 1978. Milk, who has become a totemic figure in the push for LGBTQ+ equality in the US, is thought to have been the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California.Milk does not feature in the new social studies textbook, a school board member told CNN, but is listed in supplemental material along with a range of other historical figures’ biographies.“Fortunately, now students will receive the basic materials needed to learn,” said Newsom. “But this vote lays bare the true motives of those who opposed this curriculum. This has never been about parents’ rights. It’s not even about Harvey Milk – who appears nowhere in the textbook students receive. This is about extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children.”California’s department of education will investigate the school district over the episode, which pitted some board members against a 2011 state law that requires students to get instruction about “the role and contributions” of LGBT people, as well as those of different ethnicities, cultures and disabilities.The president of the school board, Joseph Komrosky, called Milk a “pedophile” during a May meeting that resulted in the textbook being barred. Komrosky has said he will resist any attempt to implement the new textbook and accused Newsom of overstepping his authority.“I’ve already instructed the superintendent, if books come from shipping and receiving, to say ‘no,’ and we’ll ship them right back,” Komrosky said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe furor in California follows a wave of book bans in schools and libraries across the US, often driven by conservative activists who have opposed mentions of LGBTQ+ people, or accurate portrayals of America’s history of slavery. Meanwhile, least 492 bills attacking LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced in state legislatures, according to the ACLU. More

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      California faces backlash as it weighs historic reparations for Black residents

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      As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed.Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.”In California, notions of deservedness may be tied to a commonly referenced facet of the state’s identity – that it joined the union as a free state in 1850.“The fact that supposedly serious people in San Francisco are considering a plan that would give $5,000,000 in reparations to every Black resident in their city in a state that never had slavery is a joke,” Republican representative Lauren Boebert tweeted in March.On Newsmax, Michael Reagan – son of President Ronald Reagan, who signed the 1988 bill apologizing and giving reparations to Japanese Americans for their imprisonment during the second world war – called reparations a “cash grab” and a “scam” that will force non-Black residents to “include the state in their will”.“No one should be taking this seriously at all. This is hilarious,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said of San Francisco’s proposal on The Five. “They don’t want this. What they want is to divide people, to create another commotion over race … White leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”Under the Fox clip online, a comment with nearly 700 likes reads: “A state that never ALLOWED slaves wants to take billions of dollars from people who never OWNED slaves to give to people who never WERE slaves. Welcome to California.”But the state’s history is more complicated, said A Kirsten Mullen, co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century with William A Darity Jr, professor of public policy, African and African American studies and economics at Duke University. Both she and Darity – who is also her husband – are members of the expert team appointed by the task force.Even though the state constitution banned slavery, Mullen said, the Fugitive Slave Law allowed slaveholders to use violent measures to return enslaved people who entered California before its statehood. Many Confederates traveled west, too: brothers John and Joseph Le Conte, for example, became prominent early faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. John Le Conte, a physicist who espoused white supremacy, served as its first acting president.The task force’s final report, which follows last year’s 500-page interim report, lays out the state’s role in detail, from how enslaved people were brought to California during the Gold Rush to how prevalent KKK members were among city officials. It also looked beyond slavery to the harms and ancillary effects of other forms of racism, such as housing segregation, unequal education, medical experimentation and sterilization, mass incarceration and greater risk of death from Covid-19.“California, though it has this reputation, it’s not necessarily well deserved for being a more liberal place,” Mullen said. “Ultimately, what [the people of that time] learned was there was no place where Black people were treated with respect and had equality.”That history left a stark economic divide. For every dollar that white families earn today, Black families earn 60 cents, according to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan thinktank.“The racial wealth gap is a premier indicator of the cumulative effects of intergenerational racism in this country,” Mullen said.Those who oppose reparations for the wrongs of centuries past may not think modern recipients deserve compensation, Nteta said, but they also don’t think they deserve to be the ones responsible for compensation.“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, whose ancestry includes slave owners, told reporters in 2019. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”In recent research that he plans to investigate further, Nteta and his team found greater support for a range of reparations for victims of Jim Crow policies – many of those harmed are alive today, and so are their children.This recency is also likely a part of why the Civil Liberties Act, which offered $20,000, an official apology and other redress to Japanese Americans incarcerated during the second world war, saw success, Nteta said. It was co-sponsored by Congressman Norman Mineta, the nation’s first Asian American cabinet member, who was incarcerated with his family as a boy. While the legislation encountered its own hurdles, it eventually saw enough bipartisan support to make it to the desk of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who signed the bill in 1988.In California, Mullen and the economists on the expert team were tasked with determining dollar figures for specific harms.The preliminary projection to address housing discrimination, for example, estimated up to $148,099 per Black resident, or $3,366 for each year in California from 1933-1977, the height of redlining practices. The estimate to address these harms could exceed $800bn, more than 2.5 times the state’s budget of $300bn. Restitution over time could take a variety of forms, such as cash payments, community investments, tuition assistance and housing grants, like the city of Evanston, Illinois, introduced in 2019.Cash payments are less popular than other types of compensation in the UMass polling data, and California governor Gavin Newsom has not endorsed the idea of large cash payments. For many in the reparations movement, Nteta said, the larger conversation goes beyond the payments themselves.“This is about recognizing one of the nation’s original sins, and the nation as a collective entity atoning for that and doing so substantively,” Nteta said.But backlash against progress towards racial equality is nothing new. Mullen said this is the human response to change, particularly when any majority’s station is challenged.It happened when newly emancipated Black people were denied 40-acre land grants, when the black codes restricted their rights following the end of the civil war, through Jim Crow and beyond. Historically, she said, punishments also extended to white allies who aided Black people.“There are still lots of ways that folks are protecting their hegemony,” Mullen said.What is new is the pervasiveness of discussion. She credits this to the expanded availability of information – documentation of more than 100 massacres between Reconstruction and the end of the second world war, online archives of Black newspapers, databases through the Library of Congress and more.“It’s impossible to read it, to learn it without at least having to question what you’ve been taught, what you’ve read, and wonder what the implications are,” Mullen said. “Some of it is our fear of what we stand to lose.”Both Nteta and state assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a member of the nine-person task force, noted that the size and influence of California – the nation’s largest economy – drives the volume of discussion about reparations.“As California goes, so goes the rest of the country,” Jones-Sawyer said. “I think that’s why there’s pushback, because people really do understand that if we’re able to resolve this in some fashion, it will start the resolution of a lot of these problems across the nation.”As the nation enters a presidential election cycle, Nteta expects the potential for political fallout to limit Democratic focus on reparations. Decades of scholarship, he said, makes the case that Democrats tend to lose national elections when they center the interests or experiences of African Americans.“I think this will go under the broad umbrella of ‘This is where “wokeness” gets you – to a place where you’re sending $5m to individuals simply because of the color of their skin,’” Nteta said. He expects to hear Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech used to make the case that reparations are antithetical to our overarching values – content of character – even though King himself supported reparations.For decades, the idea of studying reparations found little traction at the federal level. Beginning in 1989, Representative John Conyers opened each session of Congress with HR 40 – named after the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for the newly emancipated – until his retirement in 2017.But public attitudes might be changing slowly for a number of reasons, Nteta said, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the work of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to the ways white supremacy surfaced during the years of the Trump presidency.Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has since revived HR 40 and, in 2021, Congress voted to advance the bill. It was met with unanimous opposition from Republicans on the House judiciary committee, who saw a panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion.But if any state could pass legislation, it’s California, Nteta said, since a large percentage of the legislature is progressive, many of whom can avoid fallout because their term limits are approaching, and it has a progressive governor who has sometimes bucked national trends. If it passes in California, it may hit the dominoes of states with similar political characteristics, like Massachusetts or New York.The task force’s final report makes a significant number of recommendations, including a formal apology, updates to the language of the state constitution, recruitment of more African American educators, declaration of election day as a paid holiday to increase access to the polls, expanded rights for incarcerated people and more.Jones-Sawyer and state senator Steven Bradford, also a member of the task force, will work to put forward legislation next year. He said he hopes it will serve as a blueprint for other marginalized people, too.“It is so critically important to do this for the welfare of the economy, the welfare of the social system, the welfare of public safety, the welfare of our educational system,” Jones-Sawyer said. “All of that benefits when we are not kept down.” More

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      Republican’s non-profit paid PR firm that also represents her for-profit work

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      The legal non-profit the Center for American Liberty, helmed by Harmeet Dhillon, paid more than $132,000 to a public relations firm that simultaneously represents the California Republican national committeewoman in her capacity as head of her own for-profit law firm and Republican activist.According to a client list published by Praetorian Public Relations, whose proprietor is Matt Shupe, the Contra Costa county Republican chair, the firm also represents other partners and associates of Dhillon Law, other state Republican officeholders, and individuals at the center of the Center for American Liberty’s culture-war driven lawsuits.The revelations further blur the lines between Dhillon’s non-profit work, her legal career and the political ambitions that saw her challenge the incumbent national RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, in an election held last January.Dhillon is also a rising media star on the Republican right.Asked about the ties between CAL and Praetorian PR, Joan Harrington, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the Santa Clara University and an expert on non-profit law and ethics, said: “Every way in which [Dhillon] is benefiting from the non-profit should be considered compensation,” adding: “it should be disclosed.”The Guardian previously reported that the CAL’s IRS filings showed that CAL had paid Dhillon Law $1.32m in fees, and that according to the 2021 filing, Dhillon additionally drew a $120,000 salary for a two-hour weekly commitment.In that reporting, the executive director of CAL, Mark Trammell, wrote: “The 2021 Form 990 should show Ms Dhillon working 40 hours per week. That correction will be made shortly through an Amended Form 990.”At the time of reporting, CAL had removed the 2021 IRS filing from its website. But a copy of the filing lists Praetorian alongside Dhillon Law, Blitz Digital and Eimer Stahl LLP as one of the four biggest contractors to the organization.Praetorian’s client list includes Trammell, who is billed as “executive director and general counsel to the Center for American Liberty”. The list bills Dhillon, however, as “Managing Partner, Dhillon Law Group”, “Chairwoman, Republican National Lawyers Association”, “California’s RNC National Committeewoman”, and only lastly as “Founder and CEO of the Center for American Liberty”.The client list also includes Dhillon Law attorneys who have worked on CAL cases, including Krista Lee Baughman and Ron Coleman.It also includes CAL clients: the rightwing Internet personality Andy Ngo (billed as an “investigative reporter”); 18-year-old “detransitioner” Chloe Cole; and “Social Media and Cultural Influencer” Rogan O’Handley, who posts on various social media sites under the handle “dc_draino”.CAL is assisting Ngo in a suit against Rose City Antifa which has been running since 2020, and whose delays led an Oregon judge to award a limited judgment last February, and forced Ngo’s team to move that the judgment be vacated. The Guardian contacted Ngo’s attorney, James Buchal, to ask about the delays but received no response.CAL is sponsoring O’Hanlon’s suit against the California attorney general over O’Hanlon’s Twitter ban in 2020, and Chloe Cole’s suit against Kaiser Permanente over gender-affirming care she received in her early teens.Neither CAL’s filings nor the Praetorian PR client list specify whose efforts CAL is paying for.In response to questions about the relationship between CAL and Praetorian PR, and on whether CAL was paying for promoting Dhillon’s non-CAL work, Trammell, CAL’s executive director, wrote in an email: “The Center for American Liberty compensates Praetorian Public Relations only for services rendered to the Center for American Liberty.”Trammell continued: “Any services that Praetorian Public Relations renders to its many other clients are not paid for by the Center for American Liberty. Any assertion to the contrary is categorically false.”He added: “GuideStar awarded the Center for American Liberty with a Gold rating for its commitment to transparency.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Guardian pressed Trammell to clarify whether CAL paid for none, some, or all of Dhillon’s PR services with Praetorian, but received no response.The Guardian also emailed Praetorian and the CAL clients Ngo, Cole and O’Hanlon, asking each whether they were paying for Praetorian’s themselves, or being subsidized by CAL.Although Ngo frequently screenshots and pastes reporters’ questions to his 1.3 million-follower Twitter account, neither he nor the other CAL clients responded.Social media posts suggest Shupe, the Praetorian boss, and Harmeet Dhillon have a warm personal friendship.In a January 2022 Instagram post, Shupe described Dhillon as “my favorite client”. The same month, Dhillon described Shupe on Twitter as the “best PR pro in CA”. In another Shupe Instagram post the previous October, the pair posed, smiling with the far-right congressman and former Ohio State assistant wrestling coach, Jim Jordan.Apart from managing PR for CAL, Dhillon, attorneys from her law firm and CAL and Dhillon Law clients, Praetorian lists various west coast Republican officeholders as clients, including Dhillon’s California RNC colleague Shawn Steel.According to his LinkedIn page, Shupe has been a Republican party office holder since 2011, serving variously as vice-chair of the California College Republicans, executive director of the San Francisco Republican party, and as chair of the Contra Costa county Republican party since 2018. He was communications director for the failed California gubernatorial campaign of John Cox in 2018, and a consultant in the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer’s failed attempt to displace Gavin Newsom in a 2021 recall election.Shupe did not respond to an emailed request for comment.Harrington, the non-profit ethics expert, explained that financial transparency was not just important for donors, and that “the public has an interest” in knowing how the finances of tax-exempt organizations are run.“Non-profits have the luxury of being tax exempt,” Harrington said, adding that “the rest of us pay more tax to support non-profits” as a result.“Transparency is important so that the world knows that this money is being spent properly.” More