A year ago, thousands of workers went on strike across California, and what became known as “hot labor summer” was reflected in mandatory wage increases and other state policy wins remarkable even for a Democratic-controlled Legislature sympathetic to union concerns.

But as the latest legislative session came to an end Saturday, labor unions that have long had formidable influence in Sacramento felt a chill in the state Capitol compared with last year.

A bill seeking to give striking workers unemployment benefits fizzled before it ever made it to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Legislation supported by journalist unions to require Google to pay news outlets for content was shelved in lieu of a watered-down deal. Labor-backed proposals to support grocery jobs over self-check-out machines, expand protections for workers who join picket lines and limit government agencies’ use of temporary contracts to replace union jobs also failed.

Meanwhile, legislation that delays a deadline for hospitals to meet earthquake safety standards passed both houses despite strong opposition from a list of unions including Service Employees International Union California, which said they were “deeply disappointed” with lawmakers and urged Newsom to veto it.

“Workers are still suffering, and we have had opportunities to improve the economy and create good careers and make sure that our most vulnerable populations are first in line for these careers, and we blew it,” said Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), chair of the Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee.

As the state struggles with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, Smallwood-Cuevas, who was a longtime labor organizer before joining the Legislature, is frustrated that Newsom has warned against spending in some cases but not others.

She pointed to a package of 10 bills Newsom signed last month that cracks down on retail theft and requires state funding, and questioned why his Department of Finance opposed a bill she wrote that would strengthen the enforcement of anti-discrimination employment laws because of fiscal concerns. The legislation cleared both houses and awaits the governor’s consideration.

“It’s not that labor is not still fighting for opportunities or that this Legislature has sort of taken a cool-down period,” Smallwood-Cuevas said. “The question is: What are our priorities?”

Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San José) called his own legislative record on union-friendly proposals this year “a blood bath.” His bill to study raising the state minimum wage, including for incarcerated workers, was held back last month.

“We’ve done so much the last couple of years, at some point you just allow those items to be implemented and let those fights continue at the bargaining table and in the community,” he said. “Not everything has to be done at the Capitol.”

A lot was done for labor in the Capitol last year. Newsom signed first-in-the-nation bills into law that boosted wages for workers in the fast-food and healthcare industries, mandated more sick days for all Californians and banned employers from asking employees whether they smoke marijuana.

As Democrats lament the state’s budget problem for quashing momentum to support workers, Republicans celebrated what they view as a slight reprieve from the state’s most powerful lobbying industries. Unions such as SEIU and the California Teachers Assn. are consistently among the highest-spending donors to independent expenditures that help elect labor-friendly Democrats.

Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) called California’s labor unions “the fourth branch of government” because of their influence in the state Capitol.

Assemblymember Heath Flora (R-Ripon), vice chair of the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment, opposed several labor-backed bills in part because of concerns that new regulations could pass costs onto consumers or tank struggling businesses.

He said Democrats are too quick to concede to labor demands before details are hashed out, pointing to the new healthcare minimum wage that was set to kick in this summer but was delayed by Newsom amid cost concerns.

“They got a lot of things last year, and some of the things they asked for this year were pretty aggressive. I’m glad that we took some pause,” Flora said. “We should definitely pump the brakes.”

Still, California remains home to some of the country’s strongest worker protections. Labor-sponsored bills passed by the Legislature this year include legislation to prohibit companies from forcing workers to attend some meetings and new workplace protections for court reporters and nursing assistants.

Unions also won hard-fought reforms of a law known as the Private Attorneys General Act, which allows workers to sue employers for wage theft and other alleged workplace abuses.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation, said that the so-called hot labor summer is “endless” and that unions have accomplished many of their priorities but there is more work to do.

“We’re going to take some losses, and in a bad budget year we expect a little bit more than normal. So we will prioritize as we move along,” she said. “We are always going to have one of the most aggressive agendas in the United States.”

The real power is not in the Capitol, she said, but from everyday workers and union members across different industries.

“What we’ve been seeing on the streets does not stop,” she said.

The 2024 Election season is reaching its crescendo.

Labor Day traditionally marks the final stretch ahead of a presidential election, and there are just nine weeks of campaigning left until Election Day on Nov. 5.

In a slew of states, however, the election actually gets underway this month. In swing state North Carolina, mail-in voting begins on Sept. 6. Early voting begins on Sept. 16 in Pennsylvania and Sept. 26 in Michigan, two other crucial electoral battlegrounds.

With the clock ticking, former President Donald Trump says he has the momentum.

BIDEN TEAMS UP WITH HARRIS FOR FIRST TIME SINCE DROPPING OUT OF 2024 RACE

“We’re leading in the polls now,” the former president said in an interview Friday with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas.

Minutes later, at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump touted that “our poll numbers are starting to skyrocket.”

NEW FOX NEWS POLL NUMBERS IN 4 KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES

Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is urging her supporters to “not pay too much attention to the polls because we are running as the underdog.”

Harris, at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, late last week, pointed to her showdown with Trump and said, “We have some hard work ahead of us.”

Vice President Kamala Harris points to supporters as she arrives at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, on Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Most of the latest national surveys show Harris with a slight single-digit edge over Trump, but the presidential election is not a national popular vote contest. It is a battle for the individual states and their electoral votes.

The latest surveys in the seven battleground states that decided the 2020 election between Trump and President Biden – and will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 showdown – indicate a margin-of-error race. Among those polls are a batch from Fox News that made headlines last week.

It is a big change from earlier this summer when Biden was still running.

Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume of existing doubts from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race.

National and battleground state polls conducted in July indicated Trump had opened up a small but significant lead over Biden.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)

The president dropped his re-election bid on July 21 and endorsed his vice president, and Democrats immediately coalesced around Harris, who quickly enjoyed a boost in her poll numbers and in fundraising.

Still, pollsters and political analysts stress that the Harris-Trump contest remains a coin-flip at this point.

While Trump touts his standing, the vice president predicts that “this is going to be a tight race until the very end.” 

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Over the six weeks since Kamala Harris succeeded President Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump has charged relentlessly that she’s a radical whose views are out of step with voters.

“She’s a Marxist. She’s a fascist,” the former president declared last week, weirdly combining labels that normally contradict each other.

Trump claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Vice President Harris, whom he has dubbed “Comrade Kamala,” “wants this country to go communist.”

Trump has openly explained his strategy to reporters: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist.”

But his wild punches aren’t landing.

A barrage of public opinion polls shows that Harris has risen steadily in voters’ eyes and holds a narrow lead in the national popular vote. A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found that the vice president is viewed positively by 49% of voters, a gain of 14% since July.

The same poll found that 59% of voters consider Trump “too extreme” to be president, but only 46% consider Harris too extreme. (That number, 46%, roughly matches already committed Trump voters’ share of the electorate.)

So why is Trump’s free-swinging rhetoric failing?

For one thing, Harris isn’t — and never has been — a Marxist, and most voters appear to recognize that.

In her abortive presidential campaign in 2019, she cast herself as a progressive — but she was still closer to the center than candidates like independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who (unlike Harris) describes himself as a democratic socialist.

To be doubly certain, I consulted a leading historian of American Marxism, Paul Buhle, a retired lecturer at Brown University. He said he had looked into Harris’ history and found no evidence of Marxist leanings. “It’s a slur,” he wrote in an email.

For another thing, Harris has moved quickly and effectively to define her positions as squarely within the mainstream of current Democratic thinking: liberal, but a long way from anything resembling Marxism, which calls for government ownership of major industries.

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, and in her interview with CNN last week, Harris made it clear that she has abandoned several of the progressive policies she briefly adopted in the heat of her campaign in 2019.

Her convention-speech promise that she would work with “small business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs” was pro-capitalist enough to draw mild yelps from a few progressive critics.

She has made some arguably progressive campaign proposals, including a federal ban on “price-gouging” by grocery stores; Trump denounced the idea as “Soviet-style price controls.” But it turned out to be broadly popular: An Economist-YouGov poll last month found that 60% of voters like the idea, including about half of Republicans.

Campaign strategists from both parties say Trump’s attacks on Harris suffer from another flaw: They’re scattershot and unfocused. In addition to calling her both a communist and fascist, Trump has argued both that Harris is more liberal than Biden and that she would continue the president’s policies.

“He hasn’t settled on what his argument is,” said Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who helped President Clinton win reelection in 1996. “I think he’s tried out about eight different arguments.”

Several Republican strategists say they think Trump is aiming at the wrong target — firing up enthusiasm among voters who already support him, but offering little to undecided voters.

“Name-calling is great for turning out your base, but it isn’t going to work for voters in the middle,” said a GOP strategist who asked not to be identified as he critiqued his party’s nominee. “People already know her record. They want to know how the candidates are going to make the economy grow. … Every time he’s calling her a name, he’s not talking about the economy.”

“Harris is succeeding in casting herself as a change agent,” said Alex Conant, a former advisor to Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “In 2016, one of the reasons Trump won was that he claimed the mantle as the change candidate. He said he would ‘drain the swamp,’ and that appealed to independent voters. But I can’t remember the last time I heard him use that phrase.”

The strategists say Harris still has vulnerabilities that Trump could exploit more consistently than he has.

They said a more effective campaign would tie her more closely to Biden’s economic record, since most voters hold the president responsible for high prices and think Trump could do a better job.

“Trump needs to make the election a referendum on the Biden-Harris record,” Conant said.

And they said some voters have doubts about Harris’ ability to lead in a crisis, a measure on which Trump outscores her in surveys.

Trump’s television commercials, designed by the professionals who run his campaign, already focus on those themes. Instead of white-hot charges like “Marxist,” they use a more traditional — and more accurate — label: “San Francisco liberal.”

But in public appearances, Trump has been unable to stick to that more disciplined message.

While Harris continues improving her image among undecided voters who may choose the next president, Trump’s rally speeches are exercises in self-indulgence.

The name-calling and wild punches aren’t helping him win more votes. But Trump wants to be Trump, free from the discipline his aides have sought vainly to impose. He just keeps swinging away.