California Political Geography

Many posts have discussed California.

PPIC:

California’s political geography reflects both growing national polarization and enduring regional differences. Using survey data and sophisticated modeling to estimate public opinion across 46 areas of the state, this report shows that while partisan alignment increasingly shapes views on major issues, Californians broadly agree on several policy topics. At the same time, a persistent coastal-inland divide—and the distinct political and economic position of the Bay Area—continues to structure differences in attitudes and lived experiences across the state.

• A strong coastal-inland divide defines California politics. Coastal regions are far more Democratic and liberal, while inland areas anchor Republican support. The modern center of California conservatism is the far north of the state. These broad partisan tendencies shape the geography of a wide range of issues, from immigration to the size of government to climate change and perspectives on the economy. →
• Independents are numerous but typically partisan in practice. Most lean toward a party and vote consistently that way. Democratic-leaning independents are concentrated along the coast, while Republican-leaning independents are more evenly distributed. →
• Most Californians agree on several key issues. Though the exact level of support varies, majorities across the state support abortion access, view immigrants as a benefit, and favor state action on climate change. Opposition is mostly limited to very conservative areas in the far north of the state. A broad geographic range of Californians also want a smaller state government, despite the state’s overall liberalism. →
• The affordability crisis is spreading inland. Residents on the coast are the most likely to say housing is a big problem in their part of the state, but concern about housing has grown the most in the interior over the last few years. Likewise, Bay Area residents have the most negative economic outlook, though those in inland California worry the most about paying their bills, including housing costs. →
• The Bay Area is distinct politically and economically. It is the most liberal and Democratic region, showing the strongest consistent support for progressive policies. Despite high housing prices in the region, Bay Area residents are also less likely to share the affordability concerns of the rest of the state.

"Victim" Group Is a Front for Utility Companies

A number of posts have discussed Astroturf, i.e., artificial grassroots lobbying.  Interest groups create front groups to disguise their true aims.

Melody Petersen at LAT:

A group claiming to represent California fire survivors began sending mailers and paying for social media ads this spring, calling on lawmakers to take action to reduce the rising cost of wildfires.

“Contact your legislator and tell them we need to fix our wildfire problem to make California more affordable,” said a mailer sent this month by the group called Wildfire Victims First.

“Stand with wildfire victims,” the group’s website states, urging people to join its cause.

The group was created with money from California’s three biggest for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — which government investigators found ignited at least six of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires.

The corporate campaign has angered wildfire survivors, including some of the thousands of families in Altadena who lost their homes in last year’s Eaton fire. The blaze, which killed 19 people, remains under investigation. Edison has said its century-old transmission line is the likely cause.

The utility-funded group is lobbying in Sacramento for proposals in a study that Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered to guide lawmakers in writing wildfire-related bills. The study largely ignored utilities’ responsibility for igniting fires.

Among its dozens of proposals is limiting amounts victims can get for pain and suffering, capping fees for attorneys representing survivors and requiring property insurers to bear more of the cost of utility-sparked fires.

”Each proposal would shift more of the cost of catastrophic fires away from the corporations responsible and onto survivors, policyholders, taxpayers, and the public,” wrote Joy Chen of Every Fire Survivor’s Network in a letter to Newsom this week.

Chen wrote that the industry-funded Wildfire Victims First campaign “created the appearance that wildfire survivors supported” the findings of the study. “We do not.”

Nonbelievers on Capitol Hill

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Mark Z. Barabak at LAT:

[California Democratic House Member Jared] Huffman is the rare American — one of only about 10% or so — who flatly state they do not believe in God, or any higher power for that matter. What makes him rarer still is his place in Congress. Huffman, who represents a sprawling slice of Northern California, reaching from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is one of just four members (out of more than 500) who are openly agnostic or religiously unaffiliated.

He is, by far, the most outspoken.

Huffman, who publicly revealed his nonreligious status in 2017, helped form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which consists of about three dozen members of various religious stripe, each dedicated to the proposition that church and state should be distinct. He’s written a book, due out next month, raising an alarm and summoning Americans to fight the rising tide of Christian nationalism roiling our divided land.

An overwhelming favorite to win an eighth congressional term in November, Huffman, a Democrat, calls himself a humanist and described it this way:

“To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around.

...

Ignoring the counsel of family, friends and political advisors who, to a person, warned against it, Huffman revealed his religious disbelief in a series of statements and interviews in November 2017. At the time, the only member of Congress to ever publicly come out as an atheist was Rep. Pete Stark, who announced his sentiments in 2007; though the Fremont Democrat was reelected twice, he was eventually defeated by a Democratic rival who turned his lack of faith against him.

That rival was Eric Swalwell; make of it what you will.

Huffman braced for political blowback. There was none, though he’s gotten death threats and plenty of admonishments he’s bound for Hell.

(Meantime, the congressional ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have grown to include Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington and Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona.)

Gallup January 26, 2024:

Take these numbers with some skepticism.  In the poll, 70% said they would not vote for a convicted felon, but on Election Day, nearly half of voters did so. 

The Streets of Los Angeles

Many posts have discussed failures of governance in California.

Constance Sommer at LA Reported:

Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.

Housing and Homelessness in LA

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

Andrew Khouri and Doug Smith at LAT:

A 2025 poll from Politico and the UC Berkeley Citrin Center found 61% of California voters supported or somewhat agreed with arresting homeless individuals if they refused offers of shelter.

Benjamin Henwood, director of USC’s Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research, said many in the public believe drug addiction and mental health problems to be the main causes of homelessness, because those issues are highly visible on city streets. But he said research consistently shows that while those issues play a role, the main driver is the high cost of housing.

After all, people struggle with addiction and mental health in lots of cities, but those places don’t have the high rates of homelessness seen in Los Angeles.

A recent study by the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco found that about 37% of homeless people were using illicit drugs regularly, and 25% said they had never used drugs. Just over 65% reported having regularly used at some point in their lives, and 27% had started after becoming homeless.

Social Media Influencers in the CA Governor Race

Many posts have discussed social media. 

An unusually large number of social media posts support billionaire CA gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer.  Ben Wieder at LAT:

The posts include direct-to-the-camera appeals, with personal details interwoven into messages of support for Steyer. An influencer goes for a stroll as onscreen text touts Steyer’s policies. Some seek to convey authenticity, if occasionally ham-fistedly; one influencer mispronounces Steyer’s last name.

What they do not include is a disclosure that their creators were paid by the Steyer campaign to produce the videos, according to a complaint filed this week with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission and a Times review of the posts.

The complaint alleges that the Steyer campaign failed to notify the influencers it hired of their obligation to inform their audience when their posts have been sponsored by the campaign.

California passed a law in 2023 requiring that influencers disclose if they have been paid to create promotional content for or against a candidate or ballot measure, one of the few jurisdictions in the country with such a requirement. There is no such requirement at the federal level.

...

Steyer’s campaign appears to have relied on paid influencers more than any candidate for governor, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

That spending represents only a small fraction of the massive campaign war chest Steyer has seeded with nearly $180 million of his own money. But the complaint highlights the growing degree to which political candidates have come to seek out the authenticity that social media influencers seem to offer.

...

While many of the new Steyer influencers have few followers, Steyer’s campaign disclosed in its most recent campaign finance report that it had paid thousands of dollars to numerous social media influencers with massive audiences, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Several of the videos produced by these popular social media personalities also failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign, according to the complaint and The Times’ review of the content.

But even accounts with few followers can still have a big impact if they are producing a steady stream of content supporting Steyer, said veteran California political strategist Mike Madrid.

“What they’re trying to do is trip the algorithm,” he said. “It looks like it has a bigger audience than it really does. It’s taking the concept of astroturfing into the digital age.”

Foreign Influence and a Mayor

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

Brittny Mejia and Rebecca Ellis at LAT:

Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city leader facing charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigned Monday after reaching an agreement to resolve the federal case.

Wang, who served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb, entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges that she acted under the control of the People’s Republic of China to promote propaganda in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022, according to court filings.

Wang, who was previously elected to the City Council in November 2022, stepped down as mayor on Monday hours after the plea agreement was unsealed. Arcadia officials and Wang’s attorneys said the conduct described by federal authorities occurred before Wang was elected.

...

From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with Yaoning “Mike” Sun, her former fiance, to run a website called U.S. News Center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans, according to the plea agreement unsealed Monday. Both Wang and Sun “executed directives” from Chinese government officials, posting requested articles and reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, the agreement says.

On June 10, 2021, the agreement says, Wang received a message from a government official about “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue,” which included a link to a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times from the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. The consul general had been responding to a Times editorial supporting a boycott of products made with cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.

At the time, news reports were highlighting the Chinese government‘s campaign of incarceration, persecution and “reeducation” of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.

“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” read the message from the Chinese government official, according to the plea agreement.

Minutes after receiving the link, Wang posted the article on her website and responded to the Chinese government official with a link to the article on her website, according to the court filing.

“So fast, thank you everyone,” the government official responded, the court records show.

Prosecutors also say Wang edited articles at the request of officials and shared information showing the reach of the posts.

“Thank you leader,” she wrote on Aug. 20, 2021, after being complimented for a post that was viewed more than 15,000 times, according to the plea agreement.

Pink Slime in California

Many posts have dealt with misinformation, disinformation, and partisan pseudo-news sites.

Colin Lecher at CalMatters:

Earlier this year, as the political battle over Congressional redistricting brought California into the national spotlight, Facebook users were shown a curious series of ads.

The ads, from a straightforward-looking news site called the California Courier, often felt a lot like campaign commercials, linking to articles hammering Democrats in the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Few punched in the other direction, toward Republicans. One said “California Democrats just rewrote their gerrymandering plan so voters will see their partisan map on the ballot this November.” Another called Proposition 50, which passed in November, “a scheme critics say is meant to undermine voter-approved protections and entrench one party rule in California.”

A reader who clicked through to the Courier’s website would find stories that largely align with a conservative view of the news, like a video of a child “riding a scooter through San Fran’s drug-ravaged streets,” or an anonymous piece that cites “confidential sources” cautioning against a “left-wing educator” running for a position with an Orange County school district.

What a reader would not find is any disclosure of the Courier’s ownership or funding, including what appear to be ties to a network of conservative organizations in California that, according to one researcher, scaled up a series of right-leaning news sites in three other states just ahead of the 2024 election.

...

One of the named writers describes himself on social media as a “content creator” for the Lincoln Media Foundation, a conservative group, and links to Courier articles. Another shares a name with a Republican strategist based in Orange County, and a third lists a resume with conservative organizations in a short bio.

The Lincoln Media Foundation is tied to the Lincoln Club, a group based in Orange County that bills itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.” The club funnels anonymously-donated money to conservative candidates and causes.

... 

Researchers have taken to calling sites like those operated by Lincoln Media “pink slime” news, a name coined after a meat-industry additive. These sites don’t produce outright false news, like others, but they do not meet basic journalistic standards. That often means low-quality content and failing to disclose associations with outside organizations.

The sites generally aren’t designed to generate revenue, but to sway public opinion. The majority, according to researchers, lean toward a conservative agenda, and if the site’s stories gain traction on social media, they can travel widely.

 

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Flat Fees and California Public Defenders

Many posts have discussed the American legal system.

Anat Rubin at CalMatters:

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.

...

The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.

But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.

In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.

...
Much of the effort to ban flat-fee contracts has focused on the ways in which the model discourages investigations, one of the most critical components of criminal defense.

Defense investigators review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses — work that most attorneys are not trained to do. They often find evidence that challenges the prosecution’s case and affects the outcome of a trial or the terms of a plea deal.

A recent CalMatters investigation found that poor people accused of crimes in California are routinely sent to prison without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

LA Reported

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

At The Wrap, Michael Calderone discusses a new initiative by Claremont McKenna College alumni David Dreier and Scott Woolley:

What has transpired in Los Angeles is part of the national crisis, as large city dailies once flush with advertising dollars have contracted, while many smaller papers and muckraking alt-weeklies have shuttered or shrunk. The number of news deserts, communities lacking reliable and timely information, climbed from 206 to 213 this year, according to Medill’s latest study, and this phenomenon isn’t relegated to large, rural expanses. In Los Angeles, a major metropolis where Hollywood and Big Tech are covered from all angles, there are communities, or news “islands,” as former Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida put it, “without coverage to serve them.”

... 

With nearly 10 million people living in Los Angeles County, there will always be stories untold. Even the Times at its most robust, with a newsroom of roughly 1,200 staffers two decades ago, couldn’t comprehensively cover every community at every moment. But the cutbacks at the Times, and elsewhere, have revealed significant gaps in coverage that journalists and civic leaders are hoping to fill through a variety of models, both for-and-non-profit.

 Forbes veteran Scott Woolley is co-founding and editing LA Reported, which launches on Jan. 8, and will utilize Substack as its primary distribution model. “Our plan is to publish a small number of deeply reported stories, written as lively and engaging narratives,” he told TheWrap. Woolley expects the outlet, which will rely on freelance writers, to cover housing, affordability, political malfeasance, transportation and public safety policy, as well as “some lighter pieces that don’t deal with such weighty topics but are just damn fun to read.”

Failed State: Wildfire Recovery

Many posts have discussed disasters.

 David Zahniser at LAT:

It was supposed to be a speech with a clear message of hope for survivors of the Palisades fire.

In her State of the City address in April, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called for a law exempting fire victims from construction permit fees — potentially saving them tens of thousands of dollars as they rebuild their homes.

Eight months later, the City Council is still debating how much permit relief the city can afford. Palisades residents have been left hanging, with some blaming Bass for failing to finalize a deal.
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“This should have been pushed, and it wasn’t pushed,” said electrician Tom Doran, who has submitted plans to rebuild his three-bedroom home. “There was no motor on that boat. It was allowed to drift downstream.”

Since the Jan. 7 fire destroyed thousands of homes, Bass has been announcing recovery strategies with great fanfare, only for them to get bogged down in the details or abandoned altogether.


After two of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken — or not taken — to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.
Read the stories

At one point, she called for the removal of traffic checkpoints around Pacific Palisades, only to reverse course after an outcry over public safety. She pushed tax relief for wildfire victims in Sacramento, only to abruptly pull the plug on her bill. Her relationship with Steve Soboroff, her first and only chief recovery officer, quickly unraveled over pay and other issues. He left after a 90-day stint.

Critics in and outside the Palisades say the mayor’s missteps have undermined public confidence in the rebuilding process. They have also made her more politically vulnerable as she ramps up her campaign for a second term.

AT&T's California Astroturf

A number of posts have discussed Astroturf, i.e., artificial grassroots lobbying.  Sometimes they write the letters that their "supporters" send on their  behalf.

 AT&T is pushing California legislation to end its obligation to provide landline service.   Yue Stella Yu and Malena Carollo report at CalMatters:

On its face, AB 470 had widespread support this year from Californians for a Connected Future, a recently formed coalition of more than 150 disability advocates, chambers of commerce, tribes, community service organizations, local officials and small businesses, including a construction company and a tennis shop. For months, dozens of those groups testified in public hearings and signed identical letters urging lawmakers to pass the bill, arguing it would incentivize modern technologies and ensure more reliable coverage.

The coalition, which describes itself as “grassroots,” also states it is a “project of USTelecom.” Rhonda Johnson, AT&T’s executive vice president of federal regulatory relations, sits on the trade group’s board. USTelecom received $250,000 from AT&T to lobby on its behalf this year, and also spent between $85,200 and $106,000 running ads on Facebook supporting the bill in the coalition’s name, according to a CalMatters tally.

It’s a prevalent practice commonly known as “astroturfing,” when corporations or trade groups enlist seemingly unaffiliated organizations for the appearance of grassroots support, said Jack Pitney, politics professor at Claremont McKenna College.

“If you don’t read the fine print, you’ll assume that … there are a lot of organizations that sincerely support this legislation.”

While the coalition often bragged about the scale and diversity of its membership, more than 80% of member organizations have ties to AT&T, CalMatters found.

Some of those groups have AT&T’s top leaders serving on their board of directors. That includes AT&T president Susan Santana, who sits on the board of the California Chamber of Commerce. Ben Golombek, the chamber’s chief of staff for policy, most recently served as the west region vice president for public affairs for AT&T. Other AT&T executives, mostly directors of external affairs, double as board members of various local chambers, business groups, foundations and voting rights groups.

AT&T also pays to be a member of many local chambers of commerce, many of whom support the bill. Of the 28 chambers in support, AT&T is listed as a corporate member of 26 of them.

Dozens of coalition members list AT&T as a key funder. The California Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce calls AT&T an “invaluable” partner. Groups such as the Concerned Black Men of Los Angeles, which provides mentorship to Black local residents, list the company as a sponsor.

Others, including tribes, youth service groups and senior advocates, have partnered with the company in its $5 billion effort to “bridge the digital divide” nationwide, distributing free laptops donated by AT&T, hosting “connected learning centers” the company set up across the state to offer free digital access or receiving grants from AT&T to address digital inequity.

The telecom giant has also sponsored events for some coalition members, from golf tournaments for the San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps to the 70th anniversary gala of Society for the Blind.

The financial support can make it hard not to align with AT&T, Pitney said.

“If AT&T has supported you in a material way, you want to make sure that support continues,” he said. “You are likely to look favorably on requests from that organization.”

 

AI and Reporting

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson at NYT:

Ryan Sabalow, a reporter for the newsroom CalMatters, noticed something peculiar when he began covering California lawmakers in 2023. Politicians would often give impassioned speeches against a bill, then refrain from voting entirely.

He began to wonder how often legislators were ducking tough votes — and how that influenced California’s laws....

He and his team turned to an A.I. tool, Digital Democracy, which tracks every word uttered in California legislative sessions, every donation and every vote taken. It led to an article, and an Emmy-winning segment on CBS, that revealed that Democratic lawmakers had killed a popular fentanyl bill by not voting at all.

...

Artificial intelligence is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists around the world gather and disseminate information. Traditional news organizations increasingly use tools from companies like OpenAI and Google to streamline work that used to take hours: sifting through reams of information, tracking down sources and suggesting headlines.

... 

The Associated Press used A.I. tools this year to quickly sort through tens of thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The tools made the documents searchable and summarized them, while also allowing journalists to see which parts of the files had been unredacted for the first time.

Know Your Rights

ACLU: 

You have the right to remain silent. For example, you do not have to answer any questions about where you are going, where you are traveling from, what you are doing, or where you live. If you wish to exercise your right to remain silent, say so out loud. (In some states, you may be required to provide your name if asked to identify yourself, and an officer may arrest you for refusing to do so.)

You do not have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings, but police may pat down your clothing if they suspect a weapon. Note that refusing consent may not stop the officer from carrying out the search against your will, but making a timely objection before or during the search can help preserve your rights in any later legal proceeding.

If you are arrested by police, you have the right to a government-appointed lawyer if you cannot afford one.

You do not have to answer questions about where you were born, whether you are a U.S. citizen, or how you entered the country. (Separate rules apply at international borders and airports as well as for individuals on certain nonimmigrant visas, including tourists and business travelers. For more specific guidance about how to deal with immigration-related questions, see our immigrants’ rights section.)

ACLU of Southern California:

If Immigration Agents come to your door:

Do not open the door.

You are not legally required to let them in unless they have a warrant.

Ask why they are there.

If you don’t speak English, you have the right to an interpreter.

If they want to enter, ask to see a warrant.

There are two kinds of warrants: search and arrest.A search warrant allows police to enter the address listed on the warrant, but officers can only search the areas and for the items listed.

An arrest warrant allows police to enter the home of the person listed on the warrant if they believe the person listed is inside. A warrant of removal/deportation (ICE warrant) does not allow officers to enter a home without consent.

Ask the officer to slip the warrant under the door or hold it up to the window, so you can inspect it.

• They might show administrative forms (I-200 and I-205). But if they don’t have a warrant signed by a judge, you may refuse entry.
• Check for signature by judge.If it's a search warrant, make sure it is for your address; if not, you don’t have to open.
• If it's an arrest warrant, make sure it is for someone who lives at your address; if not, you don’t have to open.
• Even if officers have a warrant and you have to let them in, you have the right to remain silent.

Say: “I plead the Fifth Amendment and choose to remain silent.” If they force their way inside, don’t resist.

Remain calm, but don’t share any information. If you’re arrested, remain silent.

You’re entitled to speak to a lawyer before cooperating and most importantly, keep calm because YOU HAVE RIGHTS, EXERCISE THEM.

If ICE is at your workplace:

Do NOT consent.

State that you do not consent to a search. ICE can enter areas open to the general public (dining area, parking lot, waiting room) of a business without permission. But that does not give ICE the authority to detain, question, or arrest anyone.
Ask if they have a warrant.

If agents don't have a warrant, calmly ask them to leave. Advise workers that they have the right to remain silent and do not have to answer questions, but do not direct anyone not to answer questions.
If ICE has a SEARCH warrant signed by a judge:

Make sure the warrant has the correct address for your workplace. Review the warrant to see what areas and items ICE is authorized to search. ICE is not authorized to search areas or inspect items that are not described in the warrant.
Stay calm.

Do not run, ICE can use that as a reason to arrest you. Do not encourage anyone to escape or hide.

Know the law.

Under California law, employers cannot turn over employee records or voluntarily allow immigration agents to enter non-public areas of the workplace without a judicial warrant.
Ask to see identification.

Write down the name, contact information, and badge number of officers or agents. If the agent refuses to provide documentation, you should note that as well. Document any violence or abuse. Document the details of the search, and persons or property taken. Call the rapid response hotline in your area.

Rose Research Fall 2025

Watch this clip from The Wire.

It is the best description of research, ever.

The big stuff:

Finding the literature: https://consensus.app/

Great resources at Honnold Library -- which students usually overlook! 

• Nexis Uni: news sources and law journals
• Political science journals
• Dissertation abstracts (search for "California" and "redistricting" in abstracts, and you will see a couple of Rose Institute names)

The Internet Archive -- if there is a broken link to what you need, this site might help you find it. Especially helpful in finding pages that the administration has taken down:

• https://new.nsf.gov/eng/diversity is down but see
• https://web.archive.org/web/20241229201649/https://new.nsf.gov/eng/diversity

California 

• CA.gov
• California ballot measures -- archive going back to 1911
• California bills and laws
• LAO -- Legislative Analyst's Office -- analysis of CA issues
• Public Policy Institute of California -- California surveys and policy analysis
• News sites: CalMatters and Rough & Tumble
• CA elections from the Secretary of State
• California Elections Data Archive -- local elections in CA
• California State Library Digital Collections
• State archives
• California open data

General State Policy and Politics

• NCSL -- National Conference of State Legislatures -- analysis & data on state issues  Partisan composition of legislatures
• Open States -- bill information for all state legislatures
Education
• NCES -- data tables (example)
• Census data

General Public Policy and Finance

• Congress.gov
• CRS
• GAO
• CBO
• Data.gov
• Census

National Elections, Parties, Campaign Finance

• Precinct-level national maps
• 2024 (another map here)
• 2020
• 2016
• Open Secrets -- Center for Responsive Politics site for federal campaign finance information
• FEC -- Federal Election Commission
• FCC Public Inspection Files (ad buys on broadcast stations)
• US Presidential Election Atlas -- just what the title says, great historical data
• US Elections Project -- turnout data

Crime

• Bureau of Justice Statistics
• Crime data explorer
• Prisoner statistics
• Gun Violence Archive
• GW Project on Extremism

Health

• Local data
• HealthData.gov
• Kaiser Family Foundation

California Poverty

A number of posts have dealt with poverty.

The US Census Bureau explains the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), a more accurate metric than the old measure:

The SPM, first released in 2011 and produced in collaboration with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), extends the official poverty measure by accounting for several government programs that are designed to assist low-income families but are not included in official poverty measure calculations. The SPM also accounts for geographic variation in housing expenses when calculating poverty thresholds and includes federal and state taxes, work expenses, and medical expenses.

By this measure, California ties Louisiana for the highest poverty rates among the 50 states: 17.7 percent.

World War G

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.

Laurel Rosenhall at NYT:

California leaders on Thursday approved a sweeping plan to elect more Democrats by redrawing congressional districts, delivering an immediate counterpunch to the gerrymandered map that Republicans in Texas are passing at the request of President Trump.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two redistricting bills that the Democratic-controlled Legislature sent to him earlier Thursday. He also declared a special election on Nov. 4 that will ask voters to grant final approval to the newly drawn congressional districts.

The moves will immediately thrust California into a feverish campaign with national implications as Democrats and Republicans vie for control of the House of Representatives through an extraordinary effort to redraw political maps in the middle of a decade. They will also put Mr. Newsom, a potential presidential candidate, at the forefront of a partisan fight against President Trump heading into the midterm election cycle.

World War Gerrymander

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.

Joan Biskupic on the Rucho case:

The brazen partisan redistricting underway in Texas, with Republicans attempting to entrench themselves in office and Democrats weighing a counter-offensive in blue states, was greenlit by the US Supreme Court six years ago.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for a 5-4 court, declared that federal judges could not review extreme partisan gerrymanders to determine if they violated constitutional rights.

Roberts’ opinion reversed cases that would have allowed such districts – drawn to advantage one political party over another irrespective of voters’ interests – to be challenged as violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

The justices split among the familiar ideological lines, with the five conservatives ruling against challenges to partisan gerrymanders and the four liberals dissenting.

“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one,” dissenting justices warned in 2019, “The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”

That decision in Rucho v. Common Cause has generated a new era of partisan rivalry with vast repercussions for American democracy. The decision resonates as profoundly as the Roberts Court’s decision last year in Trump v. United States, which granted presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution (also delivered among partisan lines).

And speaking of Common Cause...

Cameron Joseph at CSM:

The nation’s most prominent anti-gerrymandering organization is in the midst of a tense internal debate over whether to modify its position opposing all partisan redistricting, a remarkable development in response to a gerrymandering war that has broken out across the nation.

It’s a sign that after two decades of hard-won progress against partisan line-drawing, the movement is facing an existential crisis.

Common Cause has fought to bar gerrymandering through laws, referenda, and constitutional amendments for decades, battling both Democrats and Republicans in red and blue states to adopt measures to restrain lawmakers from drawing district lines that advantage their own party.

But on Monday night, after a meeting by the organization’s national governing board, the group’s president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón emailed organization leaders asking them not to make any new statements on gerrymandering until the board issued further guidance, which she said would come later this week. The request to stand down comes as Democrats in California are pushing to temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission to allow them to draw five or more new Democratic-leaning House districts. The move – which would undo anti-gerrymandering reforms that Common Cause helped make law in 2010 – is a response to Republicans’ aggressive mid-decade push to redraw state maps in Texas and elsewhere in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“While IRCs [independent redistricting commissions] remain our gold standard and will continue to be our position, the board is currently considering options as to how we will respond under these highly unusual circumstances,” Ms. Solomón wrote in an email to the group’s leaders that was read to the Monitor by two separate sources who had received it.

“It’s certainly an inflection point for our organization,” one Common Cause staffer told the Monitor.

The Perverse Consequences of Workplace Raids

 Many posts have discussed immigration.

Nigel Duara and Jeanne Kuang at CalMatters:

While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace, the reality is far messier: Studies have found that immigration raids don’t do much to raise wages – and actually deflate them. Even after a raid, employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring.

...

Every new job between 2022-2024 was not, in fact, filled by undocumented immigrants. Studies show actually deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U.S. workers. Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the 1930s and during the Obama administration, has found doing so actually reduces job opportunities for American-born workers.

That’s in part because many American workers, even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries, rely on the services generated by low-wage, undocumented labor — the costs of which would rise with mass deportations.

“Losing some of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of, it shrinks the local economy and there’s a reduction in jobs for Americans,” he said.

There is no evidence, Peri said, that in the face of mass deportations, immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead.

“If there is such a world, it has not been the reality in the U.S. in a long time,” he said.

What does tend to happen, according to a study last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate.

“Actions that target employers – audits, investigations, fines, and criminal charges – have larger effects than raids, which target workers,” the study authors wrote.

 

The Guard in LA

For the first time in sixty years, a president has activated the National Guard without a request from the state's governor -- in this case, over his vocal opposition.

Charlie Savage and Laurel Rosenhall at NYT:

A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.

A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely-triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.

...

Supreme Court precedent “does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the president could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith,” the appeals court wrote.

But, the judges said, the violent actions of some protesters in Los Angeles had hindered immigration enforcement, and that was sufficient for the judiciary to defer to Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke the call-up statute.

The appeals court also rejected the state’s contention that the call-up order was illegal because Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent the directive to a general in charge of the National Guard, even though the statute says any such edict must go “through” the governor. The court said the general was Governor Newsom’s agent, and that was good enough.

“Even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s” order stripping Mr. Trump of control of the guard, the ruling added.