Politics
Here’s the final list of candidates for L.A. city elections
The list of candidates running for Los Angeles city and school board offices is set, with a number of incumbents facing what could be competitive primary elections on June 2.
Fourteen Angelenos have qualified to run for mayor, including incumbent Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.
Seven City Council incumbents face at least one challenger, while Councilmember Monica Rodriguez is running unopposed to represent her northeast San Fernando Valley district.
City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto is running against three opponents — deputy attorney general Marissa Roy, human rights attorney Aida Ashouri and Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney.
In the race for city controller, incumbent Kenneth Mejia will battle it out against Zach Sokoloff, who is on sabbatical from his job as senior vice president of asset management at Hackman Capital Partners.
For the last week and a half, workers at the City Clerk’s Office have been verifying the legitimacy of voter signatures submitted by the candidates, finishing the last batch on Friday.
Gathering the required 500 signatures is relatively easy in citywide races but harder in council and school board districts. Some candidates who submitted petitions by the March 4 deadline failed to qualify because some of their signatures were deemed invalid.
In each race, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in June, the top two finishers will compete in a November runoff.
The field of 14 for mayor narrowed significantly from the roughly 40 who filed initial paperwork on Feb. 7. The qualifiers include a game streamer, a singer-songwriter and a tech entrepreneur, as well as government veterans like Asaad Alnajjar, a longtime engineer for the city. Rae Huang, a pastor and housing advocate, will also appear on the ballot.
Raman, a former Bass ally, shook up the race with her surprise entry, hours before the filing deadline.
A recent poll found that about 51% of Los Angeles voters are undecided on who they want for mayor. Bass led at 20%, followed by Pratt at just over 10% and Raman at slightly more than 9%, according to the Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics poll.
Tech entrepreneur Adam Miller was supported by just over 4% of those polled, with Huang at about 3%.
In District 1, which stretches from Glassell Park and Highland Park to Chinatown and Pico Union, four challengers are looking to unseat City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. They are Maria Lou Calanche, a former Los Angeles Police Commissioner and founder of the nonprofit Legacy LA; Nelson Grande, an executive consultant and former president of Avenida Entertainment Group; Raul Claros, founder of CD1 Coalition, which organizes cleanup days; and Sylvia Robledo, a small-business owner and former council aide.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield is terming out in District 3, leaving the race to represent the southwestern San Fernando Valley open to a newcomer. The three candidates are Timothy K. Gaspar, who founded a private insurance company; Barri Worth Girvan, a director of community affairs for an L.A. County supervisor; and Christopher Robert “C.R.” Celona, a tech entrepreneur.
In District 5, which includes Bel-Air, Westwood, Hancock Park and other West L.A. communities, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky faces two challengers: tenants rights attorney Henry Mantel and accountant Morgan Oyler.
With Councilmember Curren Price terming out in District 9, six candidates are vying to represent parts of downtown and South L.A. They are Jose Ugarte, who was formerly Price’s deputy chief of staff; Estuardo Mazariegos, a lead organizer at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment; nonprofit director Elmer Roldan; entrepreneur Jorge Nuño; professor and therapist Martha Sánchez; and educator Jorge Hernandez Rosas.
Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Westside communities of District 11, including Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Venice, will face off against civil rights attorney Faizah Malik.
In District 13, which includes Hollywood and East Hollywood as well as parts of Silver Lake, Echo Park and Westlake, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez is defending his seat against three challengers. They are Colter Carlisle, vice president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council; Dylan Kendall, an entrepreneur and founder of Grow Hollywood; and Rich Sarian, vice president of strategic initiatives for the Social District.
And in District 15, which includes San Pedro and other harbor-area communities as well as Watts, Councilmember Tim McOsker is running against community organizer Jordan Rivers, who is continuing his campaign after reports that he stabbed a neighbor when he was 12. Rivers said it was an “accident” that happened a decade ago.
Three seats are open on the Los Angeles Unified School District board.
In District 2, incumbent Rocío Rivas is being challenged by Raquel Zamora, an LAUSD teacher and attendance counselor.
In District 4, incumbent Nick Melvoin is facing off against Ankur Patel, director of outreach at the Hindu University of America.
District 5 school board member Kelly Gonez is running unopposed for her third term.
Politics
Your guide to the L.A. Unified Board of Education District 6 race: Incumbent Kelly Gonez is unopposed
Three seats are on the June 2 primary ballot for the seven-member Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, but the District 6 race is essentially a foregone conclusion: The only name on the ballot is two-term incumbent Kelly Gonez.
The nation’s second-largest school system, with close to 400,000 students, faces evolving challenges and uncertainties that could alter the direction of the district for years.
In mid-April L.A. Unified officials barely averted a strike by agreeing to significant employee raises, rescinding about 200 layoffs and agreeing to hundreds of new hires of counselors, school psychologists and other student support staff. The contracts with three district unions, including teachers, will cost nearly $1.2 billion a year, and board members now must find a way to pay for them amid budget pressures.
Standardized test scores have trended upward since the nadir of the COVID-19 pandemic, recovering faster than the state average, but the pace remains too incremental for critics.
The future of L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho is uncertain. He’s on paid administrative leave following FBI raids of his San Pedro home and downtown office. At least part of the investigation centers on a failed chatbot project that was supposed to revolutionize and individualize education.
Carvalho said he’s done nothing wrong and would like to return to work. If he does not return — and cannot serve out his new four-year contract — board members would select a superintendent.
L.A. Unified also faces declining enrollment — which reduces state funding and increases pressure to save money by closing many campuses.
Heightened federal immigration enforcement also has affected enrollment and attendance while creating anxiety that spills over into the classroom. Officials responded by declaring L.A. Unified a sanctuary district — both for immigrants and for the LGBTQ+ community, which also has been a target of some conservative groups.
Carvalho’s central focus on improving test scores has led to increased tutoring, repeated diagnostic measures and phonics training. In addition, the district put a successful school bond on the ballot to continue renovations, worked to lower student absenteeism and emphasized greener campuses.
The board majority consists of candidates elected with the endorsement of the powerful teachers union — United Teachers Los Angeles. This election will not change that balance because five seats are held by union-friendly incumbents. But the outcome will determine whether UTLA can further strengthen its hand or whether other constituencies will gain a measure of power at that union’s expense.
The material below was assembled through reporting and a survey provided to Gonez. Some responses are paraphrased for clarity or condensed for brevity.
Representative Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who leads the Appropriations Committee and is a longtime party political strategist, observed on Wednesday that congressional majorities are typically lost either through overreach or dysfunction.
Congressional Republicans seem to be opting for the latter.
“Right now we don’t look as functional as we need to look,” Mr. Cole acknowledged as the House and Senate strained to get some of their most basic work done in the face of bitter internal divisions and increased finger-pointing among Republicans.
With midterm elections approaching and control of both chambers at real risk, Republicans are struggling to pass essential legislation, let alone the political messaging bills typical of the months running up to Election Day.
The House floor was frozen on Tuesday and ground to a standstill for several hours on Wednesday as Republican leaders pleaded for votes and cut side deals. Two of those hours were spent laboring to win a preliminary vote to begin debate on a series of bills — what used to be considered a routine step until the current Republican majority assumed power and rank-and-file lawmakers, noting their party’s vanishingly slim margin of control, latched on to such moments as leverage.
Now the routine step has become an extraordinary travail for Speaker Mike Johnson, who is constantly toiling to please various Republican factions, cognizant that a misstep, or any reliance on Democratic votes to pass bills, could draw a challenge that could cost him his job.
“We live in a period where leaders are afraid of their members, and members are afraid of their voters,” said Mr. Cole.
On Wednesday, heated discussions were prevalent on the Republican side of the aisle. Lawmakers shouted at each other across the House floor. Mr. Johnson huddled with holdouts and defectors, beseeching them to get in line. Deals were cut, then reneged on and renegotiated, and even the G.O.P. budget plan — normally a unifying measure — stalled for more than five hours as unrelated disputes were hashed out behind closed doors.
“Guys, this is why they say lawmaking is like watching sausage be made,” a beleaguered Mr. Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday evening.
Some Republicans even accused their colleagues of being in the pocket of the pesticide industry — the sort of pointed critique usually aimed at members of the opposing party if made at all, since lawmakers do not like to remind voters about the influence of political contributions.
Other Republicans shrugged off the escalating political combat as the way business is done these days.
“It should be a fist fight on everything,” said Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee. “It shouldn’t be easy.”
But the congressional temperature was rising high enough that one former Republican House member from Texas, Mayra Flores, urged her ex-colleagues to take it behind closed doors.
“There is no reason to turn every issue into a public spectacle online,” Ms. Flores wrote on X, saying she was “honestly embarrassed” by the conduct of some of her former colleagues. “The country is facing real challenges, and constant public infighting only makes the work harder.”
Republican leaders, trying to break a logjam that threatened to derail their entire immediate agenda, relented on Wednesday and agreed to rework a major farm policy measure that is historically one of the more popular bills before Congress. But its path remained unclear because of a dispute over ethanol tax credits and opposition from a handful of Republican lawmakers who opposed a liability shield for pesticide producers that has outraged the Make America Healthy Again movement.
“This is causing cancer and it is making people sick,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, said as she urged reporters to investigate members of the Agriculture Committee and the donations they get from pesticide producers.
After sundown, Republicans got stuck on the budget resolution providing the framework for $70 billion in funding for President Trump’s immigration crackdown as they tried to quell protests over Mr. Johnson’s handling of the farm bill. The budget outline finally passed on a party-line vote, but it was a mark of the G.O.P. difficulties that a surge of money for tough immigration enforcement embraced by nearly all Republicans was almost sidelined by the farm bill furor.
The House voted to extend a surveillance law that the intelligence community says is critical to identifying potential terrorist attacks, but the Senate almost immediately said the House bill was unacceptable and that it would be sending back an alternative with barely 24 hours left before the statute was set to lapse.
What lawmakers were not talking about was how to break loose bipartisan legislation, passed in the Senate but stalled in the House, that would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security after a more than 70-day shutdown, as the administration warned that funding for paying workers was again about to run out.
Top House Republicans blamed Senate Republican leaders for mishandling the legislation and then trying to jam it down the throat of the House. They said the fact that the measure explicitly says that “zero” dollars should be expended for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol is untenable for some Republicans, who fear they could be attacked for defunding the police.
Mr. Cole said the House wants changes, which could again slow the bill in the Senate.
“All of this is created by bad management in the Senate and by not being open and transparent with us in the House,” he said.
But Senate Republicans believe they had a deal with Mr. Johnson to pass the spending bill weeks ago, when he publicly endorsed it.
The standoff has tested the patience of the usually even-tempered Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, who reacted testily this week when Mr. Johnson suggested that his chamber wanted unspecified modifications.
“You’d have to figure out what they were doing and whether or not it materially affects in any way the bill that we passed not once, but twice, by unanimous consent,” Mr. Thune said, noting that he and Mr. Johnson jointly announced an agreement to pass the funding legislation on April 1, and that it still had not reached the House floor.
Should it get there, it would likely attract sufficient Democratic support to offset any Republican defections. But that is one of the reasons Mr. Johnson has been reluctant to move forward, since turning to Democrats to help pass legislation can upset his right wing and lead to a challenge to his leadership.
As he assessed the situation, Mr. Cole said that splintered Republicans had a clear choice: put aside their differences and move ahead, or face the consequences.
“You can either be part of a functional majority and get almost everything you want,” he said, “or you can hold out and get nothing and be in the minority next time.”
Megan Mineiro and Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Politics
House Republicans unlock reconciliation process to fund ICE and Border Patrol without Democrats
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The House of Representatives approved a budget blueprint funding immigration enforcement for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term over Democrats’ fierce objections on Wednesday.
Lawmakers voted 215-211 along party lines to take a critical step toward ending the record-breaking Department of Homeland Security funding lapse that began on Feb. 14.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., who caucuses with Republicans, voted present. House Democrats united in opposition to the immigration enforcement measure while every Republican present voted in support.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., could spare just a handful of defections with Republicans’ slim majority.
REPUBLICANS CAN FUND ICE FOR AN ENTIRE DECADE WITHOUT A SINGLE DEM VOTE: SEN CRUZ
ICE agents depart the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Feb. 4, 2026, in Minneapolis. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The House’s approval of the Senate-passed budget framework unlocks the partisan budget reconciliation process, which Republicans are using to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection without support from congressional Democrats.
Trump has given Republicans a June 1 deadline to send a budget reconciliation bill to his desk, giving GOP leadership little room for error.
“We have a real sense of urgency about getting this done,” Johnson told Fox News Wednesday.
The successful vote came after more than a dozen GOP lawmakers ranging from conservatives to farm-state and Midwestern Republicans withheld their votes over concerns unrelated to the budget framework.
Republican leadership held the vote open for more than five hours to win over the numerous holdouts and six GOP lawmakers who voted “no” before flipping to “yes.”
Those lawmakers included Reps. Max Miller, R-Ohio, Andy Harris, R-Md., Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., and Michael Cloud, R-Texas.
“This is why they say lawmaking is like watching sausage be made,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “That’s what this is, but we’ll get it done.”
The budget resolution teeing up funding for Trump’s immigration agenda is just one piece of Republicans’ DHS funding strategy.
SENATE BORDER BUDGET TRIUMPHS AFTER ALL-NIGHT SESSION WHILE TRUMP-BACKED HOUSE BILL LAGS
House GOP leadership has not specified when it plans to take up a Senate-passed measure funding the rest of the department.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., agreed on a two-track approach to fund DHS by steering around Democratic opposition weeks ago. But Johnson has so far declined to put the Senate’s partial DHS bill on the House floor over concerns that it zeroes out funding for immigration enforcement.
Johnson said earlier this week that some “modifications” to the measure may be necessary but has not gone into detail about specific changes.
The White House on Tuesday sent Hill offices an internal memo, obtained by Fox News Digital, urging passage of the Senate’s partial DHS bill, raising the pressure on Johnson to act.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., successfully steered a budget blueprint through the House of Representatives teeing up three years of funding for President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda on Wednesday. (Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg)
Many rank-and-file House Republicans want ICE and the Border Patrol funded before the rest of the department, which could mean a delay for several more weeks.
“I think that there’s a serious problem with the bill in that it zeroes out, ICE and CBP,” Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told Fox News. “It’s one thing to not do the funding, but it’s a whole other thing to put zeros in the bill.”
“I know that the speaker’s working on making sure that we have all the assurances and even maybe the cash in hand in terms of reconciliation being wrapped up, finalized before we take the 95% of the rest of Homeland Security,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said.
Meanwhile, the White House is warning that it will be short on funds to pay the department’s hundreds of thousands of employees beginning in May.
“If this funding is exhausted, the Administration will be unable to pay DHS personnel beginning in May, which will once again unleash havoc on air travel, leave critical law enforcement officers—including our brave Secret Service agents—and the Coast Guard without paychecks, and jeopardize national security,” the White House memo published Tuesday states.
House Republicans’ approval of the Senate blueprint also effectively shuts the door on adding other GOP priorities to the budget package. Some GOP lawmakers had floated adding affordability-focused provisions, defense supplemental funding and the SAVE America Act to the bill.
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said Wednesday that the House of Representatives is unlikely to pass the Senate’s partial DHS bill until more progress is made toward funding immigration enforcement. (Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg)
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GOP leadership had argued for weeks that a larger bill risked derailing the budget reconciliation process.
“We’re focused on funding Homeland Security and stopping the Democrat shutdown and, in particular, using reconciliation to fund ICE and CBP because Democrats refused to fund it,” Arrington said. “Everything else is not germane to this conversation.”
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