Politics
Opposition concedes that Newsom likely to eke out a win on Proposition 1 in California
Gov. Gavin Newsom brimmed with confidence about Proposition 1 in January as he sat in a Costa Mesa Motel 6 room that was converted into housing for homeless veterans.
“I think it’s going to win overwhelmingly,” the governor said in an interview with The Times. “Period. Full stop.”
Nearly two months later, Newsom’s cockiness appears misplaced.
Despite millions spent by his campaign, Newsom’s ballot proposal to increase care for drug addiction and fund more treatment beds has held only a narrow lead since the March 5 primary. Still too close to officially call more than a week after the election, preliminary tallies from the California secretary of state showed Proposition 1 ahead by less than a percentage point.
Even with that uncertainty, the meagerly funded opposition campaign conceded Tuesday morning that the measure was “almost certain” to pass.
“We almost took down the bear, but it looks like we will fall short,” the Californians Against Prop 1 campaign said in a statement.
Newsom’s campaign said it was “optimistic” about the outcome, but there are still ballots to be tallied. More than 1.5 million ballots remain uncounted statewide in an election expected to exceed 7.5 million votes in all, which could be one of the lowest turnouts in state history.
The Associated Press, which member news organizations rely on to read results and call elections, said in a statement that “the race could flip if ‘No’ does just 1.5 percentage points better among the outstanding votes.”
“AP has determined that is too much uncertainty to make a call at this time as results across the state are uneven.”
Pollsters say Proposition 1 — and most Democratic candidates — underperformed on election day because of lower than expected voter turnout that inflated the Republican share of the electorate. Election returns showed inland counties and parts of Southern California opposed the measure, while a majority of voters in Los Angeles and the Bay Area backed the plan.
“It was the angry versus the apathetic,” said Jim DeBoo, a consultant for Proposition 1. “Republicans are angry and they showed up.”
Though Newsom’s proposal received rare bipartisan support from Central Valley Republicans and San Francisco Democrats in the state Legislature, that political harmony didn’t extend to voters. The measure was criticized by civil rights groups on the left who were concerned about the repercussions of funding secure mental health facilities and his GOP opponents on the right who scoffed at the estimated $14-billion price tag amid a massive state budget deficit.
Proposition 1 would approve a new $6.4-billion bond to support 10,000 treatment and housing beds and reconfigure a 20-year-old tax for mental health services to also fund services for drug addiction. The plan is essential to Newsom’s strategy to address California’s homelesness crisis, a persistent obstacle for the state and political vulnerability for the Democratic governor.
Under mounting pressure to clean up encampments and get people into treatment, the governor has adopted a series of policy positions that depart from the liberal model of voluntary treatment to a more moderate approach of compelling people with severe mental illness and substance disorders into care.
Newsom signed a law last year to expand conservatorship to allow courts to appoint someone to make decisions for people struggling with severe substance use disorders. Counties began implementing his CARE Court program, which gives families an opportunity to request that courts require treatment for a loved one, last year.
The lack of treatment beds and places to house an influx of patients has been the primary argument against Newsom’s strategy. In her state of the city address days after the election, San Francisco Mayor London Breed touted that the passage of Proposition 1 would provide “a real opportunity to add hundreds more” treatment beds.
“So when the state opens the pipeline for new beds, San Francisco is ready and first in line,” Breed said.
Civil rights organizations and advocates for the disabled community opposed the measure and raised alarm bells in 2023 over a last-minute change to Proposition 1 that allows counties to use the bond money for “locked facilities,” where patients cannot voluntarily leave.
American Civil Liberties Unions in California and League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization.
“I think the governor and mayors often just want the encampments to disappear by any means necessary,” said Katherine Wolf, a doctoral student in society and environment at UC Berkeley, who said she voted against Proposition 1.
Wolf said she believes that community programs that provide stability to some mentally ill Californians will lose funding if money shifts to involuntary treatment. Similar to the ACLU and League of Women Voters, she also opposes forcing people into care.
“For them to sneak it in at the last minute after promising all summer that the bond would only be used for community-based voluntary unlocked treatment, I think is really underhanded and I think they did it specifically to avoid objections from the groups and people who they knew would object,” Wolf said.
Newsom cast the measure as an opportunity to get more people off the streets and into treatment. The measure, he argued in an interview with The Times, addressed the most important issues to voters — crime, homelessness, substance abuse and mental health — and “90% of the boxes that unite the vast overwhelming majority of Californians.”
Early polls seemed to suggest Newsom was right. A survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California in November, for example, suggested that two-thirds of likely voters approved of Proposition 1, 30% opposed and a mere 2% remained undecided.
But despite the governor’s bullish stance publicly, behind the scenes his campaign predicted the final result would end up tighter than polls showed and sought to lower expectations in the months and weeks before the election.
Support dropped to 59% among likely voters in a second PPIC poll conducted in February.
By the end of the month, the measure teetered with only 50% support in a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. More than one-third of voters were opposed and 16% remained undecided. A large majority of Republican voters who responded to the Berkeley poll opposed the measure, raising concerns about how Proposition 1 would fare in an election with higher GOP turnout.
In a memo sent days before the election, David Binder, a pollster hired by Newsom’s campaign, suggested the PPIC polling was optimistic given low turnout and underperformance among Democrats.
“It is likely that even as yes-on-Proposition 1 may have polled in the low 60s when first introduced in 2023 that the yes vote could end up in the low 50s, given the history of erosion in support for bond and tax measures and the specifics regarding low turnout and disproportionate Republican turnout that California is experiencing for the March 5th election,” Binder wrote.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll, said that despite the bipartisan support at the state Capitol, it should come as no surprise that Republican voters didn’t rally behind Proposition 1.
Republicans tend to oppose big-ticket ballot measures. Voters of all political affiliations who remain undecided in the final days before an election also often end up voting against a measure if their mind isn’t made up, he said. Complicated measures, such as Proposition 1, can easily confuse voters as well.
“One other difference that probably worked against it in this election was that the turnout was so low that you basically have three times as many older voters, who tend to be more conservative than younger voters,” DiCamillo said.
Newsom’s campaign said the governor intentionally chose to place the measure on the March ballot because they believed it could “withstand a more conservative electorate and still pass on election day” and due to the urgency of the issue.
Anthony York, a spokesperson for the campaign, said — and pollsters agreed — that the measure would have performed better if placed on the November ballot where Democratic turnout is projected to be higher.
But Democrats in Sacramento are also eyeing several other bond measures on housing, schools and climate to put before voters in November that could total tens of billions of dollars. With the state struggling to offset a budget deficit of at least $37.9 billion, bonds act as a method of sorts for government to take out loans paid back over time to fund big-ticket policies.
Voting on Proposition 1 in March instead of November was a strategic decision that allowed Newsom to avoid a crowded ballot in the fall, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.
“Voters do, if you accumulate ballot measures that have spending, start to kind of collectively go ‘no’ on them,” Mitchell said.
Times staff writer Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama is facing backlash after saying that creating life is “the least” of what a woman’s reproductive system does.
On the latest episode of the podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson,” the former first lady and her brother were joined by OB/GYN Dr. Sharon Malone, whose husband, Eric Holder, served as Attorney General under former President Barack Obama. During the discussion, the former first lady lamented that women’s reproductive health “has been reduced to the question of choice.”
“I attempted to make the argument on the campaign trail this past election was that there’s just so much more at stake and because so many men have no idea about what women go through,” Obama said. She went on to claim that the lack of research on women’s health shapes male leaders’ perceptions of the issue of abortion.
Dr. Sharon Malone joins the podcast “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson.” The episode was released on May 28, 2025. (“IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson”/YouTube)
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“Women’s reproductive health is about our life. It’s about this whole complicated reproductive system that the least of what it does is produce life,” Obama added, “It’s a very important thing that it does, but you only produce life if the machine that’s producing it — if you want to whittle us down to a machine — is functioning in a healthy, streamlined kind of way.”
In the same episode, the former first lady seemed to scold Republican men by saying that the men who “sit on their hands” over abortion are choosing to “trade out women’s health for a tax break or whatever it is.” Obama also criticized Republican women, suggesting they voted for President Donald Trump because of their husbands.
“There are a lot of men who have big chairs at their tables, there are a lot of women who vote the way their man is going to vote, it happened in this election.”
Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks during an episode of her podcast, “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson” on May 28, 2025. (“IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson”/YouTube)
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The “Becoming” author’s remarks drew criticism from pro-life activists, including Danielle D’Souza Gill, the wife of Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas. The couple announced the birth of their second child earlier in May.
“Motherhood is the most beautiful and powerful gift God gave women. Creating life isn’t a side effect, it’s a miracle. Don’t let the Left cheapen it,” D’Souza Gill wrote in a post on X.
Isabel Brown, a content creator and author, also slammed the former first lady as a “supposed feminist icon.”
“I am SO sick [and] tired of celebrities [and] elitists attempting to convince you that your miraculous superpower ability to GROW LIFE from nothing is somehow demeaning [and] ‘lesser than’ for women,” Brown wrote.
Former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama attends Opening Night celebrating ’50 years of equal pay’ during Day One of the 2023 US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on August 28, 2023.(Photo by Jean Catuffe/GC Images) (Jean Catuffe/GC Images)
At the time of this writing, Obama’s podcast is ranked 51 on Apple Podcasts and doesn’t appear on the list of the top 100 podcasts on Spotify. However, it is ranked 91 on the list of 100 trending podcasts on Spotify. The entire episode with Malone is available on YouTube, where it currently has just under 41,150 views so far.
On a recent morning inside San Quentin prison, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and more than a dozen other prosecutors crowded into a high-ceilinged meeting hall surrounded by killers, rapists and other serious offenders.
Name the crime, one of these guys has probably done it.
“It’s not every day that you’re in a room of 100 people, most of whom have committed murder, extremely violent crimes, and been convicted of it,” Hochman later said.
Many of these men, in their casual blue uniforms, were serving long sentences with little chance of getting out, like Marlon Arturo Melendez, an L.A. native who is now in for murder.
Melendez sat in a “sharing circle,” close enough to Hochman that their knees could touch, no bars between them. They chatted about the decrease in gang violence in the decades since Melendez was first incarcerated more than 20 years ago, and Melendez said he found Hochman “interesting.”
Inside San Quentin, this kind of interaction between inmates and guests isn’t unusual. For decades, the prison by the Bay has been doing incarceration differently, cobbling together a system that focuses on accountability and rehabilitation.
Like the other men in the room, Melendez takes responsibility for the harm he caused, and every day works to be a better man. When he introduces himself, he names his victims — an acknowledgment that what he did can’t be undone but also an acknowledgment that he doesn’t have to remain the same man who pulled the trigger.
Whether or not Melendez or any of these men ever walk free, what was once California’s most notorious lockup is now a place that offers them the chance to change and provides the most elusive of emotions for prisoners — hope.
Creating that culture is a theory and practice of imprisonment that Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to make the standard across the state.
He’s dubbed it the California Model, but as I’ve written about before, it’s common practice in other countries (and even in a few places in the United States). It’s based on a simple truth about incarceration: Most people who go into prison come out again. Public safety demands that they behave differently when they do.
“We are either paying to keep them here or we are paying if they come back out and harm somebody,” said Brooke Jenkins, the district attorney of San Francisco, who has visited San Quentin regularly for years.
Jenkins was the organizer of this unusual day that brought district attorneys from around the state inside of San Quentin to gain a better understanding of how the California Model works, and why even tough-on-crime district attorneys should support transforming our prisons.
As California does an about-face away from a decade of progressive criminal justice advances with new crackdowns such as those promised by the recently passed Proposition 36 (which is expected to increase the state inmate population), it is also continuing to move ahead with the controversial plan to remake prison culture, both for inmates and guards, by centering on rehabilitation over punishment.
Despite a tough economic year that is requiring the state to slash spending, Newsom has kept intact more than $200 million from the prior budget to revamp San Quentin so that its outdated facilities can support more than just locking up folks in cells.
Some of that construction, already happening on the grounds, is expected to be completed next year. It will make San Quentin the most visible example of the California Model. But changes in how inmates and guards interact and what rehabilitation opportunities are available are already underway at prisons across the state.
It is an overdue and profound transformation that has the potential to not only improve public safety and save money in the long run, but to fundamentally reshape what incarceration means across the country.
Jenkins’ push to help more prosecutors understand and value this metamorphosis might be crucial to helping the public support it as well — especially for those D.A.s whose constituents are just fine with a system that locks up men to suffer for their (often atrocious) crimes. Or even those Californians, such as many in San Francisco and Los Angeles, who are just fed up with the perception that California is soft on criminals.
“It’s not about moderate or progressive, but I think all of us that are moderates have to admit that there are reforms that still need to happen,” Jenkins told me as we walked through the prison yard. She took office after the successful recall of her progressive predecessor, Chesa Boudin, and a rightward shift in San Francisco on crime policy.
Still, she is vocal about the need for second chances. For her, prison reform is about more than the California Model, but a broader lens that includes the perspectives of incarcerated people, and their insights on what they need to make rehabilitation work.
“It really grounds you in your obligation to make sure that the culture in the [district attorney’s] office is fair,” she said.
For Hochman, a former federal prosecutor and defense lawyer who resoundingly ousted progressive George Gascón last year, rehabilitation makes sense. He likes to paraphrase a Fyodor Dostoevsky quote, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”
“In my perfect world, the education system, the family system, the community, would have done all this work on the front end such that these people wouldn’t have been in position to commit crimes in the first place,” he said. But when that fails, it’s up to the criminal justice system to help people fix themselves.
Despite being perceived as a tough-on-crime D.A. (he prefers “fair on crime”) he’s so committed to that goal of rehabilitation that he is determined to push for a new Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles County — an expensive (billions) and unpopular idea that he says is long overdue but critical to public safety.
“Los Angeles County is absolutely failing because our prisons and jails are woefully inadequate,” he said.
He’s quick to add that rehabilitation isn’t for everyone. Some just aren’t ready for it. Some don’t care. The inmates of San Quentin agree with him. They are often fiercely vocal about who gets transferred to the prison, knowing that its success relies on having incarcerated people who want to change — one rogue inmate at San Quentin could ruin it for all of them.
“It has to be a choice. You have to understand that for yourself,” Oscar Acosta told me. Now 32, he’s a “CDC baby,” as he puts it — referring to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — and has been behind bars since he was 18. He credits San Quentin with helping him accept responsibility for his crimes and see a path forward.
When the California Model works, as the district attorneys saw, it’s obvious what its value is. Men who once were nothing but dangerous have the option to live different lives, with different values. Even if they remain incarcerated.
“After having been considered the worst of the worst, today I am a new man,” Melendez told me. “I hope (the district attorneys) were able to see real change in those who sat with them and be persuaded that rehabilitation over punishment is more fruitful and that justice seasoned with restoration is better for all.”
Melendez and the other incarcerated men at San Quentin aspire for us to see them as more than their worst actions. And they take heart that even prosecutors like Jenkins and Hochman, who put them behind bars, sometimes with triple-digit sentences, do see that the past does not always determine the future, and that investing in their change is an investment in safer communities.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) saved over $5 million a year after discovering several agencies paid for far more software than they were actually using.
For example, the IRS was paying for 3,000 licenses for software but only used 25. Once DOGE discovered the waste, it cut the remaining 99% of the licenses.
“Agencies often have more software licenses than employees, and the licenses are often idle (i.e. paid for, but not installed on any computer),” DOGE wrote in a post on X. “These audits have been continuously run since first posted in February.”
The Department of Labor slashed 68% of unused “project planning” software licenses, DOGE noted, and the Securities and Exchange Commission cut 78% of the remote desktop software programs it was paying for after finding the commission was only using 22% of the programs.
TOP 5 MOST OUTRAGEOUS WAYS THE GOVERNMENT HAS WASTED YOUR TAXES, AS UNCOVERED BY ELON MUSK’S DOGE
According to DOGE, the three changes saved over $5 million a year.
DOGE raised a red flag in February that agencies were paying for more software licenses than employees when it shared a post about the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).
With 13,000 employees, GSA was paying for 37,000 licenses for WinZip, a program used to archive and compress files.
DOGE’S GREATEST HITS: LOOK BACK AT THE DEPARTMENT’S MOST HIGH-PROFILE CUTS DURING TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS
White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn with President Donald Trump March 9, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
The agency also pays for 19,000 training software subscriptions, 7,500 project management software seats for a division with only 5,500 employees and three different ticketing systems.
The most recent post comes as billionaire Elon Musk steps down as the face of DOGE.
While DOGE was tasked with cutting $2 trillion from the budget, its efforts led to roughly $175 billion in savings due to asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud payment cuts and other ways to eliminate costs, according to an update on DOGE’s website.
MUSK SAYS DOGE SET TO TOP $150B IN FRAUD SAVINGS IN FY 2026
President Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk with heading the Department of Government Efficiency and finding ways to slash $2 trillion from the budget. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The savings translate to about $1,087 in per taxpayer, the website notes.
Musk told reporters in the Oval Office Friday the savings will continue to build, and he is confident total cuts will amount to $1 trillion in the coming years.
“The DOGE influence will only grow stronger,” Musk said. “I liken it to a sort of person of Buddhism. It’s like a way of life, so it is permeating throughout the government. And I’m confident that, over time, we’ll see $1 trillion of savings, and a reduction in $1 trillion of waste, fraud reduction.”
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
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