Politics
L.A. was forged by global commerce. Can the metropolis we know survive the Trump trade wars?
When Fang Chen was growing up in the wealthy city of San Marino in the 1980s, it was still a majority white community, one where locals occasionally exploded into ugly moments of racism at the arrival of new Asian residents.
Today, the community is nearly 70% Asian, with nearly half of all residents born outside the country, according to the U.S. census. And Chen, a stay-at-home mom who travels frequently to China to visit relatives, said that for years she has urged friends and family there (assuming they have the means) to consider purchasing a stately mansion on one of San Marino’s graceful tree-lined streets.
But President Trump’s sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs have caused her to reconsider.
“I’m not sure I can make that case anymore,” she said last week, relaxing under a tree in the manicured green expanse of Lacey Park, where she had retreated, she said, to try to decompress from all the unsettling economic news. “There’s a lot of anxiety among my neighbors, because so many of us have friends and relatives in the countries affected by the tariffs.”
Like few other places in the U.S., the economy and culture of Los Angeles and its sprawling suburbs have been forged by globalization. The L.A. metro area has more foreign-born residents than any city but New York, many of whom go back and forth to their ancestral countries with some regularity. Its massive port complex, sprawling across San Pedro and Long Beach, is the largest in the Western Hemisphere. There are more languages spoken here —185, according to the census — than in any city but New York. Local businesses, from toy sellers to restaurants to small family day-care operations, rely on goods imported from elsewhere. It is a place whose distinctive culture arises from its sense of being connected to communities across the globe.
“A place you can travel around the world by going from neighborhood to neighborhood,” said former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, now a candidate for governor. “A global city.”
1
2
1. Fasika Abraham arrived in L.A. in the mid-1990s after fleeing political violence in Ethiopia. “If you’re unhappy in this country,” he says of the U.S., “you’ll be unhappy in heaven.” (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) 2. Merkato Ethiopian Restaurant and Market is a draw in L.A.’s Little Ethiopia. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
A global metropolis that, last week, was left shaken and on edge by Trump’s threats to upend and rework global trade. From the multinational residents of million-dollar homes in the suburbs to cramped apartments in the dense urban core, to the tens of thousands of warehouse owners, retailers and food merchants who rely on imports, people across the region expressed profound uncertainty over what a looming trade war — even the threat of one — could do to Los Angeles’ economy.
At the start of the month, Trump announced that the U.S. would begin applying a baseline tariff of 10% on imported goods from all foreign countries. Several dozen nations were to face additional tariffs based on what his administration described as an unfair trade imbalance, with Vietnam facing a 46% tax on its goods, Thailand a 36% tariff, India 26%, South Korea 25%, Japan 24% — and on it went.
But midweek, with U.S. stock markets in turmoil as the tariffs took effect, Trump abruptly changed course. He said the universal 10% tariff on most nations would be paused for 90 days, and the higher rates targeting countries with a trade imbalance lowered to 10%. At the same time, he escalated his standoff with China, raising duties on imports to 145%. Trump’s tariff on foreign automobiles, set at 25%, remains in place.
On Friday, China retaliated by raising its tariffs on American goods to 125%, even as the European Union suspended its plans for a 25% tariff on American goods while waiting out Trump’s next moves.
Taken together, it’s a trade war roller coaster that has business owners around the region scrambling to comprehend the effects on their profit margins and plot a viable path forward.
In the San Fernando Valley, Justin Pichetrungsi is the chef at Anajak Thai, the restaurant that his immigrant parents started and that he took over in 2019 and turned into a food-world darling, written up in the Michelin Guide and celebrated as the Los Angeles Times’ top restaurant in 2022. Part of what helped propel Anajak’s glittering star was its Thai Taco Tuesday, which started as a staff meal for his Mexican-born cooks and turned into a fusion phenom.
“We use so much fish sauce it’s crazy,” said Pichetrungsi, noting that “really good high-quality fish sauce, it’s gonna come from Thailand or Vietnam.” Already he said last week, it is becoming more scarce and prices are rising. And what would tariffs do to his Michelin-lauded wine list, which leans heavily on imported natural wines?
-
Share via
Listen as residents share the positive and negative effects of globalization in their lives.
Fifty miles south, in Fountain Valley, Danny Tran, who with his wife, Albee, runs Son Fish Sauce, sat down to write a message to his employees and customers. “One thing is for sure,” he wrote, “the road ahead is going to be bumpy as hell.”
Albee Tran, who was born and raised in Vietnam, is the fourth generation in her family to produce fish sauce. She met Danny, who is Vietnamese American, when he decamped to Saigon during the Great Recession for a three-week vacation that turned into a three-year stay. Together they created a company, moved back to California, and started selling high-end fish sauce to U.S. outlets including Whole Foods and Bristol Farms.
On L.A.’s Westside, Ivan Vasquez, 43, emigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, when he was 16. He learned English at University High School in Westwood and began working in restaurants, rising from a dishwasher at Carl’s Jr. to a district operator overseeing 15 outposts for Baja Fresh.
Still, he dreamed of opening his own restaurant. He wanted to serve Oaxacan food, incorporating his mother’s recipes and the region’s distinctive drink, mezcal.
“The salesperson for this mezcal is not from Mexico,” Ivan Vasquez says of the product he sells at his Madre restaurants. “He lives here. He’s American.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
His first restaurant, Madre, debuted in Palms in 2013, and he since has opened locations in Torrance, Fairfax and Santa Clarita.
The pandemic hit his restaurants hard, but he survived. But now, he said, the tariffs, if enacted, would hit just about everything that passes through his business. There is the mezcal itself, all 55 brands he sells, many of which are imported from Mexico by American companies. And there are the napkins, straws, produce, kitchenware, even the light fixtures, many of which are imported from China.
Vasquez grabbed a bottle of mezcal and raised it up dramatically: “The salesperson for this mezcal is not from Mexico,” Vasquez said. “He lives here. He’s American. He’s got a job to do here. He has a family to support.”
Though it may be tough to imagine for people who know the region only as it is today, Los Angeles was not always a global center — or even a particularly cosmopolitan one.
The city was founded in 1781 and grew up on railroads and oil, at one time accounting for as much as 25% of the world’s oil output. In the early 20th century, the twin engines of its growth were Hollywood movies, which made the city famous, and manufacturing, which actually drove the economy.
Bolstered by the nation’s huge defense buildup during World War II, the region emerged as a manufacturing center in the 1950s and ‘60s. While movie stars lived in the Hollywood Hills and coastal bluffs, neighborhood after neighborhood of modest ranch homes began to rise across the flatlands, housing for the tens of thousands of workers who kept the factories rolling, taking home decent wages that raised the standard of living across the region.
“It felt like a new factory opened up every few years, and there were jobs for everyone,” recalled Mack Johnson, 70, who grew up in South Los Angeles.
That began to shift in the 1970s, as the first great wave of globalization hit the city. Companies started opening factories overseas in search of cheaper materials and labor, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. The plant closures tore up communities, vaporizing what had been stable union jobs. The shuttered factories hulked over degrading neighborhoods like cavernous empty shells.
Former state Sen. Martha Escutia, 68, recalled that her grandfather worked at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Bell but lost his job in the first wave of plant closures. He eventually got another job, in Pacoima, with a lower wage and a much longer commute.
But globalization was coming for Pacoima, too. Former Democratic state Sen. Richard Alarcon was a member of the L.A. City Council in the 1990s, when the Price Pfister factory in Pacoima moved operations to Mexicali.
The era brought the rise of maquiladoras, factories operated by U.S. companies just over the Mexican border, where they could produce goods at far cheaper costs and export them back to U.S. consumers at lower prices. The trend was a natural outgrowth of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994, which lowered tariffs between the U.S., Mexico and Canada and prioritized economic cooperation among the nations.
Maquiladoras brought jobs to Mexico and thriftier price points for cost-conscious consumers. But in Pacoima, Alarcon said, workers lost their jobs, and the jobs that replaced them often offered far lower wages.
Globalization was buffeting the region with other big changes.
Successive waves of immigration redefined Los Angeles. Between 1980 and 2010, millions of people found their way here, some fleeing persecution, others drawn by opportunity.
South Los Angeles, which once had a largely Black population, is now more than 60% Latino. The southeast cities, including South Gate, Bell and Bell Gardens, once mostly white, are now about 90% Latino. Huge numbers of Asian immigrants have settled throughout the San Gabriel Valley.
1
2
3
1. An undated historic photo of a Los Angeles tortilla factory. (John Malmin / Los Angeles Times) 2. A 1930 photo of assembly line workers at a Ford plant in Long Beach. (Los Angeles Times) 3. An undated photo of workers packing noodles at a Nissin Food Products plant in Gardena. (Bruce H. Cox / Los Angeles Times)
And even as factories closed, L.A. was able to take advantage of another offshoot of globalization. International trade spawned the use of giant cargo ships ferrying goods across the oceans in massive containers. The city’s harbor boasted deep channels that could accommodate bigger ships, as well as acres of vacant land near the docks where containers could be offloaded. The adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were booming.
“By luck and good work, we were perfectly situated,” said City Councilman Tim McOsker, whose family has deep roots in San Pedro. “We could adjust to the new world of bigger ships and big containers. We became the shipping capital.”
These days, about 40% of all goods entering the U.S. come in through the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. “One in 9 jobs in L.A. County are directly related to the port,” McOsker said. “Think about that. That’s amazing.”
And, he added, in a time of trade wars: ”It’s terrifying.”
These colliding forces recast the region into what it is today: dizzyingly diverse and deeply intertwined — economically and culturally — with places around the globe.
Take Koreatown, one of L.A’s most densely populated neighborhoods. It is home to longtime Korean immigrants and their offspring, but also more recently acclimated Bangladeshis, Central Americans and Oaxacans. Hipsters, drawn to newly rehabbed condos, have moved in. The sidewalks are packed with vendors, and merchants advertise in a host of languages, including Spanish, English and Korean.
On Vermont Avenue, shoppers can pick up a box of doughnuts, consult with a Salvadoran attorney, seek respite at a Korean day spa, pick up meat at a carniceria, or dine out at a Korean barbecue.
Jackson Yang, now 80, was 39 when he came to L.A. County from Taiwan. He and his wife were seeking a better education for their children, and he hoped to build a successful trading business.
He started out selling toys, mugs and ceramics at a swap meet in Cerritos.
“From there I learned about what people are looking to buy,” he said last week. “I started from zero, and now we have revenue of almost $400 million a year between our two companies.”
Yang has a home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and 11 grandchildren to visit him. He has stepped back from leading Seville Classics, the Torrance-based company that he built into an international force, with offices on multiple continents. In 2000, his son, Frank, founded the successful Torrance-based housewares company simplehuman.
Yang said across-the-board tariffs would stifle his business, but even tariffs limited to China will hurt.
“We’ve been thinking about Mr. Trump wanting to bring manufacturing into the U.S., but some items we bring in today cannot be built in the U.S.,” Yang explained. “We’ve been encouraging some of the factories to maybe move to the U.S., but it’s too expensive when you’re talking about a $10 item with a lot of labor involved. It’s not really possible for the U.S. to manufacture that.”
Smadar Gubani, 60, who emigrated from Israel in 1987, is not directly involved in international trade — but her day-care business exists as a result of it. She launched it in 1997, after struggling to find affordable day care for her daughter Hannah, who is named after Gubani’s Moroccan grandmother and her husband’s missing older sister, one of thousands of Yemenite children who disappeared after their families were evacuated to Israel between 1949 and 1950.
“No one can predict what Trump’s gonna do, what China’s gonna say,” Asher Gamzo of Gamzo & Co., a luxury jeweler in downtown L.A., says of the looming trade wars.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The trade wars set off by President Trump’s tariff threats have upended sales in the globalized jewelry market.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Gubani is Orthodox, as are most of the toddlers who cavort through her wonderland of sun-bleached playhouses. But they represent the global diversity of L.A.’s half-million Jews, melding the Hebrew and English spoken at day care with the Persian or Yiddish learned at home.
Her day care provides kosher food, serving recipes learned from her mother and collected in a 2013 cookbook. She buys whatever produce is on sale, but most kosher meat is now imported from Mexico and South America. Her youngest students snack on Bamba, the Israeli peanut butter puffs given to teething babies. Tariffs could hit her in lots of ways.
“What can I do?” Gubani asked, rocking the son of a former student in her lap. “Sometimes I just block my eyes and I put the stuff that I need [in my cart]. If I look at the prices, I will not buy nothing.”
Rising food prices — both the recent surges tied to inflation and the prospect of what tariffs would mean for imported goods — are a serious concern in communities across the region.
Every night, Maria Allana, 52, and other Central American immigrants set up food stands at South Bonnie Brae and 6th streets in Westlake for what is known as the Guatemalan Night Market.
Here, immigrants yell out their menus and sweet-talk potential customers as they stroll by. They sell grilled meats, aguas frescas and dishes from their native lands in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. On a typical night, crowds huddle around the vendors, and even homeless people drop by to get discounted meals.
But the crowds have thinned out since the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. And inflation has cut into profits, making it harder to send money to their families back home.
“Everything is getting expensive,” Allana said.
The 50 pounds of dough she buys to make her tortillas jumped from $17 to $35. Refilling the gas tank also went up.
“With all this happening here, I’m sometimes considering whether it’s best to just head back home,” she said.
Back in San Marino, real estate agent Brent Chang, 54, who has been selling houses in the area since 2008, has a clear understanding of how much his business is tied to the global economy. For decades now, the city’s housing market has been lifted by whichever Asian economy was thriving at the time.
Japanese people in the 1980s, then Taiwanese in the ‘90s, and Chinese in the 2000s — so much so that when the rest of the housing market crashed in 2008, San Marino was untouched.
The influx has sent home prices soaring; the median home value in the city is $2.7 million, placing it in the realm of ultraluxe Westside enclaves such as Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. Chang said deep-pocketed Asian buyers have helped grow the city’s school district into one of the best in the state, and newcomers are often quick to invest in the city, including a Taiwanese homebuyer who’s planning to fund a new data software service for the San Marino Police Department.
“In the 1970s, I was the only Asian kid around. Look at it now,” Chang said. “You can’t go backwards and try to make the world small again.”
Times staff writer Anthony Solarzano contributed to this report.
NEW YORK — U.S. and Israeli officials are privately casting doubt on projections from the Trump administration that the war with Iran could end within a matter of weeks — instead warning that a months-long campaign may be required to destroy the country’s ballistic missile capabilities and install a pliant government, multiple sources told The Times.
The prospect of extended combat creates political risks and uncertainties for President Trump, whose penchant for dramatic, short-term military operations has suddenly given way to a full-scale assault on the Islamic Republic, shocking a MAGA base that for years supported his calls to end forever wars in the Middle East.
One Israeli official told The Times — despite internal guidance among Israeli officials to adhere to the U.S. president’s stated time frame — that the war “definitely could be longer” than the four-week window that Trump repeatedly offered to reporters.
A U.S. official said that in private conversations, top administration officials presume the campaign will require a longer runway now that remnants of Iran’s government have chosen to resist rather than acquiesce to Washington.
Protracted war was always a possibility. Trump was presented with U.S. intelligence assessments gaming out the potential conflict that emphasized how highly unpredictable the results of an attack would be — an analysis the intelligence community believes has borne out on the ground in the chaotic early days of the conflict.
A longer conflict could create diplomatic space between Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has advocated for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic for over 30 years.
The Israeli leader has succeeded in convincing Trump to take military actions in Iran that American presidents have rejected for decades, from bombing its nuclear facilities to assassinating its leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an opening strike over the weekend.
Goal of a change of government fades
Yet, mere days into the war, White House officials have all but ceased references to a democratic spring that could sweep Iran’s government aside.
A set of four U.S. goals for the mission no longer calls for changing the regime itself. Still, Netanyahu’s government remains keen on replacing the government, and the nation’s longest-serving premier sees the current war as his best opportunity to do so, one official said.
Speaking with reporters Tuesday, Trump rejected reports that the Israelis had convinced him to launch the attack.
“No, I might have forced their hand,” Trump said. “Based on the way the negotiations were going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand, but Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we’ve had a very, very powerful impact because virtually everything they have has been knocked out.”
In a series of interviews this week, Trump said he had been given projections of a four- or five-week war, while noting he is prepared to go longer if necessary.
Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who is Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that projecting a deadline to the conflict at its start would be a strategic mistake for the Trump administration, as it would in effect give Iran’s remaining leadership an end date to wait out the fighting.
“Successive presidents have shown that America has strategic attention deficit disorder,” Rubin said. “If that was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s especially true under Trump. He imposed a ceasefire on Gaza that let Hamas survive to fight another day; they still haven’t disarmed.”
The duration of the war will depend, in part, on Iran’s ability to resist and defend its remaining capabilities — but also on the president’s willingness to accept an outcome that leaves the Islamic Republic in place.
That decision has not yet been made by Trump, who has vacillated between calls for a democratic uprising across Iran — and U.S. military options to support resistance groups inside the country — as opposed to a shorter campaign that cripples Iran’s political leadership and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians, ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding,’” Trump told Axios.
One of Israel’s primary goals is to effectively eliminate the country’s ballistic missile program, and progress on that score is ahead of schedule, another source familiar with the operation said. “Things are going very well at the moment,” the source added. “Great pace.”
An Israeli military source noted to The Times that the stated goal of the mission is to significantly degrade, but not necessarily destroy, Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, a goal the source said could be accomplished within Trump’s preferred time frame.
“Israel was quite unhappy Trump ordered the [June 2025] 12-day war ended when it did,” said Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said he expected the current war would “take time” to comprehensively set back Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, after a series of Israeli missions in 2024 against the missile program failed to set them back by more than a matter of months.
“Some Israelis think before the recent strikes, Iranian production was fully restored,” Clawson said. “So a really comprehensive attack on Iranian missiles is an important Israeli objective.”
The Maduro model
But no one inside the Islamic Republic system has emerged so far to serve in a supplicant role to Trump in the way that Delcy Rodríguez has stepped in as acting president of Venezuela, after U.S. forces captured that country’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, in an audacious overnight raid in January.
Since then, the Stars and Stripes have flown alongside the Venezuelan tricolor at government buildings in Caracas, where senior Trump administration officials have been welcomed to discuss lucrative opportunities in Venezuela’s oil industry.
Trump is now looking for an Iranian counterpart to Rodríguez, he said Tuesday, suggesting he is willing to keep the Islamic Republic in place despite encouraging its citizens to rise up against their government.
“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also…. Pretty soon we’re not gonna know anybody.”
“I mean, Venezuela was so incredible because we did the attack and we kept the government totally intact,” he added.
Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who served in the George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations, expressed doubt that Trump would be willing to proceed with a months-long campaign, regardless of Israel’s aspirational objectives.
“I believe President Trump doesn’t define clear objectives so he can decide to end the war at a time of his choosing, and declare the objective at that point, announcing we have achieved what we sought to do,” said Ross, noting that finding a figurehead in Iran as he did in Venezuela was always “a long shot.”
“Unilaterally, he could declare we made the regime pay a price for killing its citizens, and we have weakened Iran to the point that it is not any longer a threat to its neighbors,” Ross added. “He could then say, if Iran continues the war, we will hit them even harder.”
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Minnesota filed a federal lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, accusing federal health officials of illegally withholding $243 million in Medicaid payments from the state.
Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Minnesota Department of Human Services sued the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), arguing the funding freeze violates federal law.
The state is seeking a temporary restraining order to immediately block the action.
The dispute stems from a January notice in which the Trump administration said it would withhold more than $2 billion annually from Minnesota’s Medicaid program over what it described as “noncompliance” with federal regulations, specifically, alleged failures to “adequately identify, prevent, and address fraud in its Medicaid program.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison speaks during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. (Tom Brenner/AP)
State officials say they have not been told specifically how Minnesota is out of compliance or what changes the administration wants to see.
The lawsuit follows a Feb. 25 announcement from CMS that it was deferring roughly $260 million in quarterly federal Medicaid funding to Minnesota, including about $243 million tied to “unsupported or potentially fraudulent” claims.
CMS said the deferral is part of a broader fraud crackdown and cited unusually high spending and rapid growth in personal care services, home- and community-based services, and other practitioner services.
HEAVILY-REDACTED AUDIT FINDS MINNESOTA MEDICAID HAD WIDESPREAD VULNERABILITIES
Vice President JD Vance looks on as Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz speaks about combating fraud at the White House complex in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2026. (Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images)
“For decades, Medicare fraud has drained billions from American taxpayers — that ends now,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “We are replacing the old ‘pay and chase’ model with a real-time ‘detect and deploy’ strategy, using advanced AI tools to identify fraud instantly and stop improper payments before they go out the door.”
Minnesota officials contend the move improperly uses a funding “deferral” mechanism and amounts to denying the state due process before any formal finding of noncompliance.
WALZ SLAMS TRUMP ADMIN FOR TEMPORARILY HALTING MEDICAID FUNDING TO MINNESOTA: ‘CAMPAIGN OF RETRIBUTION’
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
The threatened cuts represent about 7% of Minnesota’s quarterly Medicaid funding and could force reductions in health care services for low-income residents, according to Ellison’s office.
“Trump’s M.O. is to cut first, no matter what the law says or who gets hurt, and ask questions later, if at all,” the attorney general said. “These cuts are the latest in a long series of efforts to go around the law to punish Minnesotans — but just as we fought back and won when they illegally tried to cut funding for childcare, hungry families, and our schools, we are suing them again today to make them follow the law.”
Related Article
Politics
Fearing GOP win, California’s Democratic leader urges unviable party candidates for governor to drop out
Fearing the prospect of a Republican winning California’s gubernatorial race, state Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks on Tuesday urged his party’s candidates who lack a viable path to victory to drop out.
“It is imperative that every candidate honestly assess the viability of their candidacy and campaign,” Hicks wrote in an open letter to the politicians vying to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. “I recognize my suggestions are hard for many to contemplate and may be even viewed as overly harsh by some.”
Hicks did not name the Democrats he wants out of the race, but such a public admonishment by a party leader is a rarity in California politics.
Even though the odds are relatively low, California cannot risk having a Republican elected as the next governor at a time when President Trump is in the White House, Hicks said.
“[S]o much is at stake in our Nation and so many are counting on the leadership of California Democrats to stand up and speak out at this historic moment,” Hicks wrote. “California’s leadership on the world stage is significantly harder if a Democrat is not elected as our next Governor.”
Hicks urged Democrats languishing at the bottom of the field of candidates to drop out before the Friday deadline to officially file to run for governor — to ensure their names do not appear on the June primary ballot.
Under California’s top-two primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the June primary advance to the November general election, regardless of party.
With nine top Democrats running, the fear is that the candidates will splinter their party’s vote and allow the top two Republicans in the race to finish in first and second place. This is despite Democratic registered voters outnumbering Republicans in the state by almost 2 to 1, and no GOP candidate winning a statewide election since 2006.
Having two Republicans competing in the November election would be devastating to Democratic voter turnout and could hurt party candidates in pivotal down-ballot races.
“The result would present a real risk to winning the congressional seats required and imperil Democrats’ chances to retake the House, cut Donald Trump’s term in half, and spare our Nation from the pain many have endured since January 2025,” Hicks said in his letter. “We simply can’t let that happen.”
A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that five candidates lead the contest — former Rep. Katie Porter, Rep. Eric Swalwell and hedge fund founder Tom Steyer among Democrats and conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, both Republicans. Hilton and Bianco have led all candidates in other polls over the last few months. No other candidate received the support of more than 5% of likely voters.
After Hicks issued his directive, two influential leaders in California Democratic politics said they shared his concerns.
Lorena Gonzalez, the head of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said she worries that Democratic candidates who are drawing low single-digit support in the polls and remain in the race could tilt the election.
“You’re in a situation where a candidate who pulls 2 or 3% could make all the difference whether there’s two Republicans and anti-union folks in the runoff or if there’s not,” she said.
Gonzalez said that while she believes the legislature, where Democrats hold super majorities in both chambers, would be a check if a Republican was elected the state’s leader, that might not be enough protect Californians from Trump’s destructive policies.
“We are seeing with Trump how much damage an executive who wants to ignore normal rules of engagement or the Constitution can do,” she said. “We can’t afford that.”
The federation began its endorsement process last week, and there were difficult conversations with gubernatorial candidates not only about their political beliefs, but also about their viability. The umbrella group of unions is expected to make an announcement about any potential endorsement on March 16.
Jodi Hicks, CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said it was imperative to block the “real possibility” of two Republicans advancing to the general election because of the deep cuts that the Trump administration has made to health care, including access to abortion.
“Given the severity of this moment, we urge candidates to consider how continuing their candidacy may put California’s values and reproductive freedom at risk,” Jodi Hicks said. “The stakes are too high for all of us, but especially for immigrant communities, transgender individuals, the over 15 million patients enrolled in Medi-Cal, and the over 25,000 patients a week who access essential health care at Planned Parenthood health centers.”
Discussions about the need for some Democrats to exit the race took place at last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention.
But a politically thorny issue is that nearly all of the Democrats lagging in the polls are people of color, as former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra noted at a candidate forum Monday evening.
“There are people who are calling for candidates to get out of the race,” he said at the gathering hosted by Equality California and the Los Angeles LGBT Center at the Renberg Theatre in Hollywood. “Isn’t it interesting that the candidates they are asking get out of the race are the candidates of color?”
Rusty Hicks, asked about the effect on minority candidates who have spent years or decades of their lives in public service, did not directly answer the question but lauded the field’s accomplishments.
“We have a number of strong candidates. They have incredible stories, and they are reflective of the diversity of our party. That being said, there are some political realities of where we are at at this particular moment,” he said in an interview. “I’m not calling on any specific candidates to move in one direction or the other. I’m just calling on them to assess their campaign and determine if they have a viable [path] and if they don’t, to not file.”
During Monday evening’s gubernatorial forum, Porter said she is concerned about the prospect of two Republicans making the top two.
“I hear people say to me, it could never happen, but everybody said that about Trump too,” she said at the forum. “And I look at how much harm we’re suffering, and I think about all the political risks that people are facing every day, the risk of an immigrant to leave their home and walk on our streets, the risk of a kid who’s trans to try to play sports even in this state. And I just don’t think we can take any more political risks.”
Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.
Figure data breach exposes nearly 1M accounts
Paramount credit downgraded to ‘junk’ status over debt worries
Todd Meadows, ‘Deadliest Catch’ deckhand, dies at 25
Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed
Israel believes Iran war could last months, testing U.S. resolve
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Hungarian veto proves EU needs less unanimity, says new Dutch PM
Pregnant migrant girls are being sent to a Texas shelter flagged as medically risky
Fraud-plagued Minnesota sues Trump admin for withholding $243M in Medicaid payments
Is Iran expanding attacks to target energy and civilian sites in the Gulf?
Trump claims US stockpiles mean wars can be fought ‘forever’; Kristi Noem testifies before Congress – US politics live
-
World6 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts6 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Denver, CO6 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Louisiana1 week agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Oregon4 days ago2026 OSAA Oregon Wrestling State Championship Results And Brackets – FloWrestling
-
Florida3 days agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Maryland3 days agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Culture1 week agoTry This Quiz on Thrilling Books That Became Popular Movies