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    US justice department joins lawsuit to block California’s new electoral map

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    The justice department on Thursday joined a lawsuit brought by California Republicans to block the state’s new congressional map, escalating a legal battle over a redistricting effort designed to give Democrats a better chance of retaking the House of Representatives next year.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, challenges the congressional map championed by Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, in response to a Republican gerrymander in Texas, sought by Donald Trump. The justice department’s intervention in the case sets up a high-profile showdown between the Trump administration and Newsom, one of the president’s chief antagonists and a possible 2028 contender.“California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” said Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.”Democrats have expressed confidence that the newly approved maps will withstand a legal challenge.“These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court,” Brandon Richards, a Newsom spokesperson, said in a statement.Republicans brought the lawsuit the morning after California voters decisively approved the redistricting measure, known as Proposition 50, which suspended the maps drawn by the state’s independent commission and installed new House districts designed to help Democrats secure up to five GOP-held seats. It was the most significant counterpunch by Democrats in the unprecedented redistricting war that began in Texas and spread across the country as Trump attempts to secure House Republicans’ fragile majority for the final years of his second term.The plaintiffs assert that California’s map improperly used race as a factor to heavily favor Hispanic voters in violation of the US constitution. It asks a judge to block California from taking effect.“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Prop 50,” Jesus Osete, the second-highest ranking official in the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement, quoting from the lawsuit. “Californians were sold an illegal, racially gerrymandered map, but the US Constitution prohibits its use in 2026 and beyond.”The plaintiffs are being represented by the Dhillon Law Group, which was founded by Harmeet Dhillon, who is now assistant attorney general overseeing the US Department of Justice civil rights division. The firm also represented California Republicans earlier this year in their unsuccessful attempt to prevent the special election from taking place.Dhillon has been recused from this case, the justice department said.Unlike elsewhere, where Republican state legislatures have enacted gerrymanders, California’s plan required voter approval, which it received last week, with nearly 65% of the vote.Democrats need to flip just a handful of Republican-held House seats to take control of the chamber in next year’s midterm election. The party that holds the majority will shape the final years of Trump’s second term in the White House, determining whether a unified Republican Congress will continue to deliver on his agenda or whether he will be met with resistance, investigations and possibly even a third impeachment attempt. More

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      A year after devastating Trump loss, have the Democrats begun to find their way back?

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      It has been a year of soul-searching, hand-wringing, and self-flagellation for Democrats after a ballot-box rejection so thorough that some had come to believe that the party had lost not only the White House and Congress but the culture itself.Shell-shocked, Democrats entered Donald Trump’s second term in a political stupor – unsure of who they were or what they stood for. Their base had lost faith in its aging leadership class, and their brand, in Democrats’ own words, had become “toxic”: a party increasingly confined to coastal states, big cities and college towns. And even there, warning signs were flashing.Then came Tuesday night – a coast-to-coast romp in the first major elections of Trump’s turbulent return to the White House that exceeded even the party’s most optimistic projections.“What a night for the Democratic party,” California governor Gavin Newsom marveled, after news networks projected the redistricting ballot measure he spearheaded had passed so decisively that some voters were still in line to cast ballots. “A party that is in its ascendancy,” he continued, “a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”Abigail Spanberger, a congresswoman and former CIA agent, stormed to victory in Virginia, becoming the first woman elected governor of the state, an office currently held by a Republican. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, another congresswoman and former Navy pilot, turned what was expected to be a close race into a rout. And in New York, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, made history by vanquishing the former three-term Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, in a race that drew the highest turnout in decades.“Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” Spanberger proclaimed in her victory speech, while in New York, Mamdani celebrated “a new era of leadership” and declared that “no longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great”.Their wins did little to resolve the big, existential questions of whether Democrats’ future lay in a full-throated adoption of leftwing populism or a tactical turn to pragmatic centrism. The night offered ammunition for either path, or perhaps both.Yet a year after Kamala Harris’s concession to Trump, Democrats have repeatedly found success not by picking a single ideological lane, but by embracing the forces of disruption that have dominated Trump-era politics. Their victories, while strikingly different in style and approach, point to a party less bound by orthodoxy and old notions of decorum – a recognition that the times have changed, and so must they.“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the next morning. “We are not going to play with one hand behind our back. We’re not going to roll over. We’re going to meet you, fire with fire.”For much of the past decade, Democrats cast themselves as guardians of the system – defenders of the democratic institutions under siege by a “wrecking ball” former builder who bulldozed his way into the White House and then clawed his way back.After the tumult of Trump’s first term, Democrats turned to Joe Biden, a consensus-builder and institutionalist who once predicted that history would view his adversary “as an aberrant moment in time”. In office, Biden dedicated his presidency to restoring domestic political norms while preserving the liberal international order abroad. But with his legacy now framed by Trump’s re-election, many Democrats have abandoned Biden’s return-to-normalcy appeal, seeing it as ill-suited to the politcal moment.Instead, as Trump moves aggressively to consolidate power and tilt the electoral map in his favor, the party’s instincts have shifted sharply away from caution, yet many progressives felt they had been too slow to adapt. Shortly before the 2024 election, a survey found that the overwhelming majority of voters valued a candidate who could deliver “change that improves people’s lives” rather than one who was committed to preserving institutions.Tensions built earlier this year, when angry Democrats began calling on their leaders in Washington and in state capitols around the country to do something – anything – to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal government, the rule of law and his political opponents. Those fears grew into the No Kings protest movement, which saw an estimated 7 million people in all 50 states take to the streets last month.Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, argued that Tuesday’s wins, following mass days of protest, were proof that a more combative and less deferential politics was the way to defeat Trumpism. “The No Kings era is here to stay,” he wrote.That assertive posture extended to Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats are refusing to lend the votes needed to reopen the government – now the longest federal shutdown in US history – unless Republicans extend healthcare subsidies: a bare-knuckle approach they had resisted as recently as few months ago.Meanwhile, in the redistricting battles unfolding across the states, party leaders and longtime champions of fair maps including Barack Obama campaigned for California’s retaliatory gerrymander, as Newsom called on other Democratic governors to follow suit.View image in fullscreen“Politics has changed. The world has changed,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, told NBC earlier this month. “The rules of the game have changed.”In nearly every election held this year, Democrats improved on their 2024 showing. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey show that both governors-elect not only held their base but peeled off Trump voters, while re-engaging young men and Latino voters who defected in 2024. In New York, Mamdani saw enormous youth turnout for his candidacy.“On Tuesday night, we saw a lot of different kinds of Democrats win – and that’s kind of the point,” said Rebecca Katz, a veteran political strategist whose political firm, Fight, worked for Mamdani’s campaign. “To win big, we need a big tent.”Voters, she said, sent a clear message that a back-to-basics formula – a relentless focus on improving affordability and a campaign built around authentic and visible candidates – resonates.Katz, who also advised the successful swing-state Senate campaigns of John Fetterman in 2022 and Ruben Gallego in 2024, argued that the central divide in the party was no longer where a candidate falls on the moderate to liberal spectrum but a choice between boldness and caution: “Playing it safe is the riskiest thing Democrats could do right now.”Winning has given the wounded party a much-needed morale boost. In a fundraising appeal this week, Democrats told supporters to “remember this feeling”. Yet beneath the celebration, the old fault lines – over age, ideology, tactics, and style – still run deep.Several seasoned House Democrats are facing contentious primary challenges, fueled by generational impatience and a desire for the party to take a more combative approach to Trump. Democrats’ prospects in 2026 may hinge on whether progressives and moderates can unite behind a message that addresses both economic anxiety and the fears of Trump’s presidency.In 2028, Democrats say they need a nominee who can articulate a vision beyond their opposition to Trump, the glue that has held together a Bernie Sanders-to-Liz Cheney coalition.Appearing at a live taping of the podcast Pod Save America this week, Obama said it was exhilarating to see progressives “get off the mat”. But, he added, “we’ve got a lot of work to do” and cautioned progressives in the audience against pushing ideological “litmus tests”.“We had Abigail Spanberger win and we had Zohran Mamdani win,” the former president said, “and they are all part of a vision for the future.”Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator who campaigned for Mamdani, told reporters this week that ideological divisions in the party were “no great secret”.But he sensed a party-wide shift: “I think there is a growing understanding that leadership and defending the status quo and the inequalities that exist in America is not where the American people are.”Republicans have sought to downplay Democrats’ string of victories this year. Since 2016, Democrats have tended to perform better when Trump was not on the ballot, their coalition proving more reliable in off-year and special elections.“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” Trump said this week. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”Historically, the party out of power typically fares well in the midterm elections. But redistricting efforts are expected to tilt the 2026 House map toward Republicans. In the Senate, the task is even more daunting for Democrats, who will have to win in states Trump carried by double digits. While Trump’s plunging popularity has Republicans worried, Americans hold markedly negative views of the Democratic party as well.Still, Democrats see momentum building in parts of the country where they haven’t been competitive for years.This summer, Catelin Drey, a Democrat and first-time candidate, won a special election for a state senate seat in Iowa, breaking the Republican supermajority by flipping a district that backed Trump in the 2024 election. It was a consequential victory and one that gave Democrats a jolt of hope.For weeks after her election, she kept getting the same question: how did she pull it off?“I knocked on thousands of doors,” said Drey, 38, a mother whose campaign centered on affordability, especially the rising cost of childcare. “I had people tell me, ‘I’ve never had a candidate come to my door before,’” she said. “Seeing that kind of work ethic – having someone show up and say, ‘Yeah, life is really tough right now. What’s the hardest thing for you? How can I help? What would make things better?’ That type of attention is not what we’re seeing across the board right now.”Since Harris’s defeat last November, Democrats have produced a glut of election postmortems, polling memos and policy white papers offering theories about why they lost — and how to win again. Drey thinks the answer might be surprisingly simple.“Show up and work for the people you serve,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.” More

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      What does Prop 50’s passage mean for California, Gavin Newsom and the US?

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      Californians overwhelmingly backed Proposition 50, the crucial redistricting measure that Democrats have said is essential to safeguarding democracy and pushing back against the Trump administration.“We stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday after the ballot measure passed.The effort was a direct attempt to counteract Texas’s partisan gerrymander, undertaken at Trump’s behest, to create several new safely Republican districts. Under Prop 50, California will halt the work of its independent redistricting commission until after 2030 and allow the legislature to redraw congressional districts to carve out five additional Democratic seats.The new map is expected to oust longtime Republican officials, and have significant effects on the 2026 midterms.How did the state vote?As of Wednesday morning, results showed that some 63.8% of voters approved the proposition with just 36.2% voting against the measure in what the Associated Press described as a “swift and decisive victory”. More than 8 million people voted in Tuesday’s election and the measure won the majority of votes along much of the coast and in southern California. It was largely unpopular in the northern and inland regions that will be most affected by redistricting.Who is at risk of losing their seat?These Republicans are at risk under California’s new congressional map: Darrell Issa, whose district covers east San Diego county; Doug LaMalfa, who has represented a large swath of rural northern California for more than a decade; Ken Calvert, a Riverside county representative who has served in the US House since 1993; David Valadao, who represents the southern San Joaquin valley; and Kevin Kiley, the representative for much of eastern California. Kiley introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide, but his proposal did not advance.After the measure passed, Republicans in California sued over Prop 50, and asked the court to block the new maps from taking effect. An attorney representing the plaintiffs – which include Republican state lawmaker David Tangipa, 18 California voters and the state’s Republican party – said that Democrats drew congressional boundaries to increase the voting power of Latinos. The new congressional districts will leave racial representation almost unchanged, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California.How will Prop 50’s passage affect the midterms?The measure is expected to have a major effect on the outcome of the 2026 midterms. Past elections have shown that the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections, and Democrats argued Prop 50 will help ensure Republicans do not retain full control of the federal government.“The passage of this new map – which is designed to protect a slew of vulnerable Democrats and will cost Republicans three to five seats in 2026 – is the most consequential development to date in the mid-decade redistricting wars due to the sheer number of seats that it impacts,” Erin Covey, with the Cook Political Report, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The outcome of these races in California could ultimately determine which party wins control of the House next November.”What does this mean for Gavin Newsom?The decisive victory of Prop 50 is a major win for the proposal’s biggest champion, Gavin Newsom. The California governor has been one of Trump’s most high-profile opponents and helped rally massive support for the proposal. Newsom is widely expected to seek the White House in 2028 and the win has further raised his profile nationally and elevated his status as a Democratic leader.Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant who leads the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, told the Guardian this week that Newsom had gambled on Prop 50 and it appeared it would pay off.“But more than that is the fact that he fought back – that he dared to do this, that people said it was dangerous for him, and he forged ahead with it anyway.” More

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      California set to approve Prop 50 as voters signal displeasure with Trump

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      California’s Proposition 50 began as a warning from the nation’s largest blue state to its largest red one: don’t poke the bear. But when Texas moved ahead with a rare, mid-decade gerrymander, pushed by Donald Trump as Republicans seek to shore up their fragile House majority in the midterm elections, California made good on its threat.Now, California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who have cast it as a chance to check Trump’s power.“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said at a rally, formally announcing the initiative, known as the Election Rigging Response Act.Proposition 50 asks voters to temporarily scrap the state’s independently-drawn congressional district lines in favor of new maps carved up to help Democrats win five additional safe seats – a tit-for-tat response to Texas, where Republicans secured five new, friendlier districts earlier this year.Voting has been underway for weeks in the Golden State. As of Saturday, nearly 6m ballots had been returned, about one in four of the total mailed out, according to Political Data Inc, a firm that tracks voter data. Voting ends on Tuesday, 4 November.Early returns and polling suggest the ballot measure is on track for a comfortable victory. Though it can be difficult to predict turnout in an off-year special election, several recent surveys showed it passing by more than 20 points.The focus on Trump has galavanized Democrats in the deep-blue state, averting what some initially feared: an esoteric debate about the political minutiae of redistricting, a process that until just a few months ago typically took place at the start of each decade.National Democrats lined up behind California’s retaliatory plan. Their closing ad features Barack Obama, Newsom, and prominent congressional Democrats – including New York House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – telling voters they have the power to “stand up to Donald Trump”.“Democrats have won the messaging war in California because they’ve successfully framed it as an anti-Trump campaign,” said Dave Wasserman, the senior elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Republicans just did not cobble together the resources or the momentum to stop it.”Opponents of the effort initially promised a formidable fight, but their campaigns were vastly outraised and support from national Republicans never materialized. In the final weeks, Republicans had largely retreated from the airwaves.California Republicans focused part of their attack on Newsom, denouncing the plan as a “Gavinmander” designed to help the term-limited governor build a national profile and donor base ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. Millions of conservative voters in the state will be disenfranchised, they’ve warned, appealing to the fairness of the independent redistricting commission’s current work.California representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican whose district would be redrawn under the new maps, has called for a nationwide ban on mid-decade redistricting. The proposal has not gained traction.“What Newsom is trying to do here is to entrench even more power in the hands of a corrupt political class that has caused California to go from being the most beautiful state in the country to being the most popular state to leave,” Kiley said in an interview this week on Fox Business Network.Republicans hold just nine of the state’s 52 House seats. If successful, the gerrymander could slash the number of Republicans California sends to Washington by more than half.Former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Trump critic who championed the commission’s creation, harshly criticized Proposition 50. And Charles Munger, the wealthy Republican donor and longtime supporter of independent redistricting, poured more than $30m into the effort to stop California from “returning to the evils of partisan gerrymandering”.Amid the immigration raids and the federal takeover of US cities, California voters were more concerned with the stopping the Trump administration than saving their fair maps, said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist advising Munger’s opposition group, the Protect Voters First committee. Madrid suspected that most people who voted for Proposition 50 hadn’t even bothered to study the new districts.“It has nothing to do with redistricting,” he said. “This is about sending a message to Donald Trump.”National good governance groups such as Common Cause, which has historically fought partisan redistricting, opted to stay neutral on California’s gerrymander.“The question was, are we going to unilaterally disarm one side?” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the CEO and president of Common Cause. Instead, the group developed a six-point “fairness” criteria, an effort to put “guardrails” on the process, which she said were reflected in the California measure.The view that politicians should not draw their own districts remains popular in California. Trump, however, is not. Nearly two in three voters agree that the president treats California “worse” than other states, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey. Among those voting for the measure, 75% said opposition to Trump was a factor in their decision.“It brings me no joy to see the maps that the commission drew being pushed aside,” said Sara Sadhwani, a professor of politics at Pomona College who served as one of the mapmaking panel’s Democratic members in 2020. “However, I do believe that in this moment, there is a greater fight that we have to wage in order to ensure a level playing field across the nation for the 2026 election.”Sadhwani appeared in one of the yes campaign’s first ads, in which she warned: “Donald Trump’s scheme to rig the next election is an emergency for our democracy”.View image in fullscreenThough Trump is at the center of the yes campaign, he was unusually muted on the ballot measure itself. Last month, he weighed in on Truth Social to preemptively discredit, without evidence, the “totally dishonest” results of Tuesday’s election.The Trump administration announced that it was deploying federal election monitors to New Jersey and California to watch the vote. In response, Newsom accused Trump of attempting to “suppress the vote” while the Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the state would dispatch its own observers to watch the federal monitors.Heading into election day, Democrats’ confidence has given the campaign an air of inevitability – so much so that Newsom, to the surprise and delight of supporters, took the unconventional step of telling them last week: “You can stop donating now.”But the yes campaign say it is taking nothing for granted. Newsom spent the final weekend before Tuesday’s special election traveling “up and down” the state, his team said, as tens of thousands of volunteers knocked doors and sent text messages reminding voters to return their ballots. “This election is not over,” the governor cautioned.Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Newsom made it a point to say he was “deeply confident” that California voters would approve Proposition 50 – and said Trump was “changing the rules” and Democrats had to adapt.“We want to go back to some semblance of normalcy, but you have to deal with the crisis at hand,” he said.In the national redistricting arms race, California remains the farthest along of any Democrat-led state to retaliate. Wasserman estimates that passage of the California ballot initiative would probably improve Democrats’ chances of winning the House majority next year by between 10% and 15%. But, with Trump having pushed Republican-led states such as Missouri and North Carolina to approve new maps and others poised to follow suit, he noted: “The problem for Democrats nationally is that they don’t have enough Californias.”As the gerrymander war escalates, supporters outside the Golden State are pleading with Californians to, in the words of their governor, “fight fire with fire”.“We’re depending on California to help a friend out, to help us out as a country,” said Texas state representative Nicole Collier, who fled the state with roughly two dozen of her Democratic colleagues to prevent a vote on the Republican gerrymander there. “The future direction of this country hangs in the balance.” More

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      Democrats should be taking the fight to Trump – the problem is, he’s got them battling each other | Jonathan Freedland

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      Every year is election year in the US, but the contests of 2025, which reach their climax on Tuesday, will be especially revealing. These “off-year” battles – a smattering of governors’ races, statewide referendums and the election of a new mayor in the country’s biggest city – will tell us much about the national mood 12 months after Americans returned Donald Trump to the White House and one year before midterm contests that could reshape the US political landscape. Above all, though, they will reveal the division, the confusion and sheer discombobulation Trump has induced in the US’s party of opposition.The verdict on Trump’s first 10 months in office will be delivered most clearly in the two states set to choose a new governor: New Jersey and Virginia. By rights, these should be relatively easy wins for the Democrats. Both states voted for Kamala Harris a year ago, and the current polls are grim for Trump. This week, an Economist/YouGov survey registered Trump’s lowest rating of his second term – 39% of Americans approve of him, while 58% disapprove – the lowest number they’d recorded for him bar one poll in his first term. Trump’s handling of the economy gets especially low marks, and a plurality of voters blame the continuing government shutdown, now in its second month, on Trump and his party. If an off-year election offers an opportunity to kick an unpopular incumbent, then Tuesday should be plain sailing for Democrats.And yet, the contest in New Jersey, for one, is looking far from comfortable. Democrats there are mindful that a year ago Trump surged in the state: after losing to Biden by a whopping 16 points in 2020, he trailed Harris by just six. Current polls show the Democratic candidate for governor ahead, but only narrowly: one survey put her just one point ahead of her Republican opponent. The party is funnelling serious money into the contest and deploying its biggest guns: Barack Obama will campaign in New Jersey on Saturday.It may work. But the fact that, after all that voters have seen from Trump these past 10 months – the power grabs; the wild on-again, off-again moves on tariffs; the failure to shrink inflation; the indulgence of corruption; the vanity projects, including the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for a gilded Trump ballroom – a Republican is even competitive in a state such as New Jersey should be troubling Democrats. And, if my conversations in Washington and New York this week are anything to go by, it is.The problem is that, even after a decade in which Trump has dominated US politics, Democrats are still not sure how to confront him, or even, more fundamentally, what they should really be. Take the mayoral contest in New York City, which is exposing the depth of the divide.The frontrunner is Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old newcomer who came from nowhere to storm his way to the Democratic nomination. Hugely charismatic and a master of social media, he has energised voters who had long regarded the Democrats as stale and tired: in the Democratic primary earlier this year, turnout was highest among those between ages 25 and 35. His chief opponent is the man he beat in that primary, the former Democratic governor of the state and scion of one of the party’s most storied families: Andrew Cuomo.Their clash captures what Cuomo, now running as an independent, calls the “quiet civil war” among Democrats in almost cartoonishly stark terms. Mamdani is a socialist beloved by the young, but feared by the old – and by those alarmed by his refusal to denounce the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase they believe sanctions attacks on Israel-associated, meaning Jewish, targets in the US and elsewhere. Cuomo is 67, previously endorsed by the party establishment and tainted by the bullying and sexual harassment scandal that drove him out of office in 2021.It is a divide that is both ideological and generational. Plenty of younger Democrats see Mamdani as radical and inspiring, drawn to his message of “affordability” of housing and public transport. They see Cuomo as the embodiment of an exhausted, morally compromised centrism that cannot beat Trump. Meanwhile, many older Democrats see Mamdani as radical and untested, carrying too little experience and too much ideological baggage – the same leftist liabilities that the right ruthlessly exploits and ultimately always leads to Democratic defeat. I got a glimpse of that divide when, at a live event in Manhattan for the Unholy podcast, I asked Hillary Clinton whether, if she had a vote in New York City, she would cast it for Mamdani, who is, let’s not forget, the official Democratic nominee for mayor: “You know what? I don’t vote in this city. I’m not involved in it. I have not been at all even asked to be involved in it, and I have not chosen to be involved in it.”If Mamdani wins, and either of the comparatively moderate Democrats running in New Jersey and Virginia loses, then the party’s progressive wing will take that as confirmation that its approach – the path of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders – represents the party’s best hope. But if all three win, and especially if the gubernatorial candidates improve on Harris’s performance in 2024, then the moderate wing will be buoyed, and the argument inside the Democratic party will rage on. In fact, it’s a fair bet it will rage on whatever happens.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd that is because the age of Trump has been utterly confounding for his opponents. How do you play against a player who breaks all the rules of the game? If you stick to the old ways of doing politics, if you obey the traditional proprieties and conventions, you cast yourself as part of the very establishment or deep state or elite that Trump has so profitably railed against for 10 years. But if you don’t, if you disrespect past norms, then you become part of the problem, the danger, Trump represents, weakening the guardrails that keep democracy on track.An example of that dilemma is on display in California. The state’s ambitious governor, Gavin Newsom, has tabled a ballot initiative – a referendum – that would redraw the boundaries of California’s congressional districts to give the party about five more seats in the House of Representatives in time for next year’s midterm elections. It’s retaliation for a Trump-approved gerrymander in Texas that will hand Republicans a similar advantage in that state. Democrats have hailed Newsom’s move as an act of resistance, fighting Trumpian fire with fire. And so it is. But it also burns away one more democratic norm, turning boundary changes into a routinely partisan battleground.Democrats are struggling because there are no good options when fighting a nationalist populist unafraid to wreck democracy. If you stay high while he goes low, you lose – and he is free to wreak further destruction on the democratic system. But if you sink to his level, you risk damaging the very thing you want so desperately to protect. The havoc of Donald Trump is never confined to Trump. It engulfs his opponents too.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

      Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More

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      Gavin Newsom confirms he is considering 2028 presidential run

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      Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told CBS News Sunday Morning he plans to make a decision on whether to run for president in 2028 once the 2026 midterm elections are over.“Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” Newsom said in response to a question on whether he would give serious thought to a White House bid after the 2026 elections. “I’d just be lying. And I’m not – I can’t do that.”Newsom’s term as governor ends in January 2027 and he is not able to run again due to term limits, but cautioned that a decision is years away.“Fate will determine that,” he said.The California governor has emerged as a high-profile critic of the Trump administration through his social media accounts and push of a ballot measure that would increase Democrats’ congressional seats in response to Republican redistricting efforts – a move that has made him a target for critics.Donald Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, accused Newsom of not caring about Californians in an interview with Fox News on Sunday as Duffy revealed plans to pull federal funds from California and threatened to revoke California’s ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses.“I’m about to pull $160m from California,” Duffy said, after US homeland security said earlier this week an undocumented semi truck driver caused a fatal crash in California that killed three people and injured four. Newsom’s office noted the federal government reauthorized the driver’s employment multiple times, which allowed him to obtain a commercial drivers license under federal law.Duffy already said he was withholding $40m from California for not enforcing English language requirements for truck drivers.“Former D-list reality star, now Secretary of Transportation, still doesn’t understand federal law,” Newsom’s office said in a statement last month in response to Duffy threatening to withhold federal funds from the state. “In the meantime, unlike this clown, we’ll stick to the facts: California commercial driver’s license holders had a fatal crash rate nearly 40% LOWER than the national average. Texas – the only state with more commercial holders – has a rate almost 50% higher than California. Facts don’t lie. The Trump administration does.”A CBS poll conducted earlier this month found 72% of Democrats and 48% of all registered voters said Newsom should run for president in 2028. Since Trump took office, Newsom’s favorability has increased to an average of 33.5% from about 30% and his unfavorability has decreased from an average of over 40% to 38.4%, according to Decision Desk HQ.Earlier this year, Newsom told CBS while on a trip to several battleground states around the US on whether he plans to run in 2028: “I have no idea.”He noted his earlier challenges in life, including being diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of five.“The idea that a guy who got 960 on his SAT, that still struggles to read scripts, that was always in the back of the classroom, the idea that you would even throw that out is, in and of itself, extraordinary,” he said. “Who the hell knows? I’m looking forward to who presents themselves in 2028 and who meets that moment. And that’s the question for the American people.” More

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      How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

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      There are many ways to characterize Proposition 50, the single ballot initiative that Californians will be voting on this election season.You could say it’s about redrawing congressional district lines outside the regular once-a-decade schedule. You could say, more precisely, that it’s about counterbalancing Republican efforts to engineer congressional seats in their favor in Texas and elsewhere with a gerrymander that favors the Democrats. You could, like the measure’s detractors, call it a partisan power grab that risks undermining 15 years of careful work to make California’s congressional elections as fair and competitive as possible.The way California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Democrats are selling it to voters, though, boils down to something much simpler and more visceral: it’s an invitation to raise a middle finger to Donald Trump, a president fewer than 40% of Californians voted for and many loathe – for reasons that extend far beyond his attempts at election manipulation. For that reason alone, the yes campaign believes it is cruising to an easy victory.“There’s actually a double tease here,” said Garry South, one of California’s most experienced and most outspoken Democratic political consultants who has been cheer-leading the measure. “Trump and Texas, the state Californians love to hate. How can you lose an initiative that’s going to stick it to both?”Proposition 50, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act, proposes amending the California constitution and suspending the work of the state’s independent redistricting commission until 2031 so the Democrats can carve out five additional safe seats. That wouldn’t significantly change the power balance in California, since Democrats already occupy 43 of the state’s 52 House seats.But it would compensate for the five seats that Texas Republicans, acting on Trump’s direct urging, wrested for themselves earlier this year. “Fight fire with fire,” has been Newsom’s mantra, and several influential national figures in the Democratic party – everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the prominent New York congresswoman, to former president Barack Obama – have signed on.Democrats are optimistic they will see a significant vote shift in their favor next year, because Trump’s approval ratings are already underwater in the swing states that he narrowly won last November, and in California he is polling as low as 29%.But that won’t translate into more congressional seats if district boundaries are redrawn in a way that protects vulnerable Republican incumbents and eliminates meaningful competition. According to one estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans already have a net 16-seat advantage for themselves in House races, thanks to gerrymandering efforts across the country in the wake of the 2020 census. The Texas move increases that advantage to 21 seats. And similar, smaller-scale moves in Missouri and North Carolina bring it to 23.“Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years,” Obama charges in a widely aired campaign ad that began circulating last week. “With Prop 50, you can stop Republicans in their tracks.”Polls and focus groups suggest many Californians have mixed feelings about abandoning their state’s non-partisan district maps, but a slim majority say they see the need to do so anyway and plan to vote yes on 4 November.Support for the measure has been rising steadily. Earlier this month, the yes vote was barely cracking 50% in most of the polling, and about 15% of poll respondents said they were undecided. Another 30% indicated that their support for or against was soft.Two surveys published this week, however, showed Proposition 50 passing by at least a 20-point margin and the yes vote is now up in the high 50s or low 60s. Fully three-quarters of those intending to vote yes told a CBS News poll conducted by YouGov that they were doing so to oppose Trump, just as the yes campaign has been urging.Ballot initiatives are not quite like other elections, though, especially in an off-year election likely to result in lower turnout than usual.“The history of [these] campaigns in this state shows that late-deciding voters tend to vote against initiatives,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant who teaches political communications at Berkeley and the University of Southern California. “They’re expressing an inherent skepticism that arises if voters don’t know a lot about a measure. They want to guard against it making their lives worse.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe latest polling data suggests that such last-minute skepticism may not apply in this case, most likely because Trump is such a polarizing, and motivating factor. Polls consistently show higher support for Proposition 50 among so-called “high propensity” voters – those who show up at the polls time after time – and early mail-in voting returns indicate stronger than usual numbers, with registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans by almost a two-to-one margin.The “yes” side has outraised the “no” side and been far more visible in campaign ads and appearances. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who represented a southern California district for 16 years, promised over the summer to raise $100m to defeat Proposition 50 but has managed only a tiny fraction of that – less than $6m, according to the secretary of state’s office. And the big Republican guns who might ordinarily have hit the campaign trail have been conspicuous by their absence – something that suggests to many political observers they think the fight is unwinnable.Overall, the yes campaign has outraised the no campaign by about $138m to $82m.Even the pleas of the no campaign’s most visible advocate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have proven ineffective. According to an Emerson poll, two-thirds of voters say it makes no difference to them what Schwarzenegger thinks. As a Republican, he lacks credibility with many Democrats, and as a moderate who loathes Trump, he has little traction with the Republican base. More than 20% of voters say his advocacy actually makes them more likely to do the opposite of what he wants.The problem for the no campaign, according to South and others, is that there is no message persuasive enough to counter the visceral appeal of “screw Trump”, particularly at a time when California voters are angry about ICE raids, military deployments in US cities including Los Angeles, federal funding cuts, the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and more.Some groups, including one led by the billionaire Charles Munger Jr that has ploughed more than $30m into the no campaign, have pushed the argument that Proposition 50 is undemocratic. But national polling has consistently shown that appeals to democracy do little to sway voters because both sides think it is at stake. Calling Proposition 50 a “power grab” merely reminds voters that Republicans in Texas grabbed power first.Other opponents, including Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate in next year’s governor’s race, have sought to stir voter discontent with Newsom and cast the initiative as one more distraction cooked up by a governor with national ambitions when he should be focusing on the state’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. Hilton calls Proposition 50 an “illegal and corrupt contribution to [Newsom’s as yet unannounced] presidential campaign”.That works as red meat for the Republican base. But the last time Republicans tried to turn the California electorate against Newsom in a stand-alone ballot initiative – a recall vote in 2021 – Newsom prevailed by a 62-38 margin. And Newsom’s approval numbers have only increased as a result of Proposition 50.“The no side has two problems with its core argument,” South said. “It’s too complicated, and it’s too abstract. The average voter doesn’t have a clue what their congressional lines are. And, in addition to that, they don’t care.“So the choice comes down to: you can screw Trump, or you can pay homage to a redistricting commission that voters approved in 2010 and probably don’t remember. There’s no way this thing loses.” More

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      Trump vows to ‘take care of Chicago’ after backing off plan to send troops to San Francisco – live

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      Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.Speaking to reporters at City Hall, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie elaborated on his Wednesday evening call with Donald Trump.Lurie said he had not reached out to Trump but that the president “picked up the phone and called me”. During the call, Lurie said he told Trump that crime was falling in San Francisco and the city was “on the rise”. Pressed on whether Trump sought any concessions from the city in exchange for calling off the “surge” Lurie said he “asked for nothing”. Lurie said he did not know if Trump’s decision extended to the rest of the Bay Area and acknowledged that the mercurial president could yet change his mind.“Our city remains prepared for any scenario,” Lurie said. “We have a plan in place that can be activated at any moment.”Asked if other Democratic mayors could learn from his approach, which has been notably less antagonistic than the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, Lurie demurred, suggesting that was more a question for the political chattering class than for a mayor “laser-focused” on his city.“Every day I’m focused on San Francisco,” he said. “Heads down. How do we keep our city safe?”Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has condemned a racist AI-generated ad posted – and then deleted – by Andrew Cuomo’s campaign depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani”.On Thursday, De Blasio wrote on X: “This is disqualifying. No candidate who approves a racist, disgusting ad like this can be allowed to govern. Bye, @andrewcuomo.”The ad which was shared on Cuomo’s official account on Wednesday featured Mamdani, the popular democratic socialist state assemblyman, eating rice with his hands before being supported by a Black man shoplifting while wearing a keffiyeh, a man abusing a woman, a sex trafficker and a drug dealer.In June, Mamdani, who if elected would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, accused donors of Cuomo’s campaign of “blatant Islamophobia” after an altered image of him in a mailer to voters depicted him with a visibly darkened and bushier beard.Outside of San Francisco’s city hall on Thursday afternoon, local leaders and organizers were grappling with the whiplash.“At this time, do not know which federal agencies are being called off. We don’t know if that’s the National Guard. We don’t know if it’s ice, if it’s Border Patrol,” said Jackie Fielder, the San Francisco city supervisor representing parts of the city’s Mission neighborhood. “I also want to be clear that ICE, CBP, any federal agency deputized by Trump, to help him carry out his mass deportation plans, are absolutely not welcome in San Francisco.”Fielder also criticized Benihoff, Musk and other tech leaders who had voiced support for a National Guard deployment in the Bay Area. “I condemn every tech billionaire who supported this,” she said. “This city doesn’t belong to them.”Fielder and other leaders and organizers emphasized that even as the region awaits clarity on whether and where there will be a federal deployment, and the extent to which the administration plans to ramp up immigration enforcement in the city, local leaders are going to continue to mobilize rapid response networks, legal aid and other support systems for the residents most impacted.“We don’t need to get ready because we’ve been ready,” Fielder said. “This is not a time for panic. It is a time for power across this area.”Organizers urged residents to check in regularly with friends and family, and prepare for the possibility that they may be arrested by immigration officers, urging immigrants to entrust their full legal names and A-Numbers with trusted allies. “Without this information, it becomes very challenging, and it takes time to locate our loved ones,” said Sanika Mahajan, Director of Community Engagement and Organizing for the local advocacy group Mission Action. Organizers who had lent support during the militarized raids in Los Angeles this summer encouraged San Franciscans to store important documents at home, and let loved ones know where to find them.“Mexico is run by the cartels, I have great respect for the president”, Donald Trump just said near the end of the White House event to justify what he calls the success of his militarized war on drugs. “Mexico is run by the cartels and we have to defend ourselves from that”.After a first phase of the roundtable discussion, in which senior administration officials took turns praising Trump and claimed that the crackdown on drugs has been a spectacular success, the president then took questions from reporters invited to cover the event.Many of the correspondents he called on were from partisan, rightwing outlets who also laced their questions with praise for the president.Clearly aware that many of the correspondents he called on to ask questions were on his side, Trump even said “This is the kind of question I like” to Daniel Baldwin of the pro-Trump news channel One America News, before Baldwin even asked his question.When Trump did not recognize a correspondent, he asked them who they were with.And when he did call on a reporter he views as adversarial, Kaitlan Collins of CNN, he even made a point of joking that her question would be a bad one.No matter what the questions were, Trump repeated many of his familiar talking points, exaggerations, insults and lies, including that the Biden administration had “lost” hundreds of thousands of children.At one point, unprompted, he said: “Let me tell ya, Barack Hussein Obama was a lousy president.”Donald Trump was just asked about a call from Daniel Goldman, a Democratic congressman from New York, for the New York police department to arrest federal agents “who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority” during immigration raids or outside immigration courts in New York City.Goldman referred specifically to a woman who was hurled to the floor by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer outside a court.“Well, you know, I know Dan, and Dan’s a loser,” Trump replied. “It’s so ridiculous, a suggestion like that.”What Trump did not explain is that he no doubt knows Goldman primarily from his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment of Trump, over his attempt to force Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden in 2019 by withholding military aid.Rather than address the issue, Trump then pivoted to suggesting that Democrats were desperate for attention and even imitating him by cursing more in public. Goldman did not curse when he told reporters on Tuesday: “No one is above the law – not ICE, not CBP, and not Donald Trump. Federal agents who assault or detain New Yorkers without legal authority must be held accountable and the NYPD must protect our neighbors if the federal government refuses to.”Donald Trump was just asked by a French reporter about the vote in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on formal annexation of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, where hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers now live, in a violation of international law.He asked the reporter to repeat the question but louder. She did, in a distinct French accent.Trump asked Pam Bondi, seated next to him to answer, saying, “I cannot understand a word she’s saying”.When the question was then explained to him, the president told the reporter: “Don’t worry about the West Bank, Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank.”Earlier on Thursday, the vice-president, JD Vance, said that Israel would not annex the West Bank, the day after Israeli lawmakers voted to advance two bills paving the way for the territory’s annexation.“If it was a political stunt it was a very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance said on the tarmac as he wrapped up his visit in Israel.Israeli analysts have pointed out that Israel currently rules the entire West Bank, except for limited urban enclaves under Palestinian self-rule, as if it were formally part of its territory.As is customary of Trump’s public-facing events, he has spent much of his time speaking blaming the Biden administration for the country he inherited.“By the way, the cartels control large swaths of territory. They maintain vast arsenals of weapons and soldiers, and they used extortion, murder, kidnapping, to exercise political and economic control,” he said. “Thank you very much, Joe Biden, for allowing that to happen. Biden surrendered our country to the cartels.”Donald Trump continued his threats to send the national guard to Chicago.“They don’t have it under control,” Trump said. “It’s getting worse, so we’ll take care of as soon as we give the go ahead.”This comes as the administration filed an emergency appeal to the supreme court after a federal judge blocked the administration’s from deploying troops to the Chicago indefinitely.The president has spent his opening remarks claiming his administration’s efforts in curbing cartels had been successful.“These groups have unleashed more bloodshed and killing on American soil than all other terrorist groups combined. These are the worst of the worst. It should now be clear to the entire world that the cartels are the Isis of the western hemisphere,” he said.We’re waiting for Donald Trump to appear in the state dining room for an announcement on cartels and human trafficking. Several cabinet members are already seated. Including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, attorney general Pam Bondi, and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.It’s important to note that so far, Donald Trump has paid members of the military by ordering the Pentagon to use any unspent funds for the 2025 fiscal year. A move that experts and lawmakers alike say is squarely illegal.Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato Institute, emphasized that Congress has the sole prerogative to authorize funding.“The executive can’t just look for money under the cushions. It’s not their money to spend,” Boccia said. “If Congress doesn’t step up and reclaim its spending authority, the administration here is potentially setting very dangerous new precedents for executive spending that was never envisioned by America’s founders.”She added that there is the option for the administration to repurpose “unobligated balances” using the rescissions process. However, this isn’t playing out in this case because it still requires Congress’s authorization.“What we’re witnessing is the executive taking unprecedented steps to repurpose funding unilaterally,” Boccia said.While today’s failed Senate vote might give Trump the “political justification” for inappropriate government spending, there was no “legal justification”.Pivoting back to the Senate, where lawmakers failed to pass a bill to keep certain government workers and members of the military paid during the government shutdown.As I noted earlier, only three Democrats broke ranks with their party to vote in favor of the legislation. Most Democratic lawmakers voted against the bill, arguing that it would give Donald Trump the ability to handpick which workers and departments get to receive paychecks. Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called the bill a “ruse” that “doesn’t the pain of the shutdown” but “extends it”.Democrats also offered alternative pieces of legislation. This included the True Shutdown Fairness Act, which would pay all roughly 700,000 furloughed federal employees, and inhibit the administration from carrying out any more mass layoffs while the government is shutdown. Senate Republicans, however, objected to their attempt to pass this bill by unanimous consent.John Thune, the upper chamber’s top Republican, said that Democrats are “playing a political game” by blocking today’s bill, in an attempt to appease their “far-left base”. On the Senate floor, Thune said that the failed legislation introduced by Republicans today would include the more than 300 federal workers at the Capitol who had to “work through the night and into the next day” during Oregon senator Jeff Merkley’s marathon speech lambasting the Trump administration, which lasted almost 23 hours. More

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      Newsom to sue Trump over California national guard deployment to Oregon

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      California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Sunday that he is suing Donald Trump over the alleged deployment of 300 California national guard personnel to Oregon.“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said in a press statement. “The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words – ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents.”Newsom’s proposed lawsuit follows a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon national guard to Portland. US district judge Karin Immergut agreed with arguments it would inflame rather than calm tensions in the city.Immergut said in her ruling, which delays sending the guard until at least 18 October, that there was a lack of evidence that the recent protests in Portland justified the move.Caroline Turco, Portland’s senior deputy attorney, said that there had been no violence against Ice officers for months and that recent Ice protests were “sedate” in the week before the president declared the city to be a war zone, sometimes featuring fewer than a dozen protesters.“This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” Newsom said. “We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the President of the United States.”In a statement on X, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield said the state is “quickly assessing our options and preparing to take legal action.“The President is obviously hellbent on deploying the military in American cities, absent facts or authority to do so,” he wrote. “It is up to us and the courts to hold him accountable. That’s what we intend to do.”The California national guard referred questions to the defense department. A department spokesperson declined to comment.“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement. For once, Gavin Newscum should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country,” read a response from the White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson.The news from Oregon came just a day after Trump authorized the deployment of national guard troops to Chicago, the latest in a string of similar interventions across several US states.Trump had first announced the plan on 27 September, saying he was “authorizing full force, if necessary” despite pleas from Oregon officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who said there had been a single, uneventful protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.For years, Trump has amplified the narrative that Portland is a “war-ravaged” city with anarchists engaging in chaos and unlawful behavior.During his first term in 2020, he deployed federal forces to the city amid the protests over the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protests spread across the US but were especially heightened in Portland. Despite protests against Ice being relatively small in the state this year, Trump has used them as a justification to deploy troops.Speaking on X about the latest move from Trump, Newsom said: “It’s appalling. It’s un-American, and it must be stopped.” More