Democrats needed to snap up just four seats in 2024 to gain control of the House of Representatives. But today it became clear Republicans would retain control of the House. The results complete a dismal year for Democrats: The House results nail in a Republican trifecta and ensure President-elect Donald Trump will be able to implement his agenda with limited resistance. 

Republicans saw opportunities in two blue states: New York and California—home to 10 of this year’s toss-ups. Republicans made significant inroads in each state in 2020 and 2022, leading Democrats to prioritize flipping some of those seats back this cycle. Money flowed to the battles. This year, according to OpenSecrets, the two states had five of the top 10 most expensive House races in the country.

In New York, Democrats gained back four seats. But their chances fell in California. Across the country—and perhaps to the surprise of Democrats—many communities of color broadly shifted to the right, often saying the economy was not working for them. As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, two California seats, both largely Latino in the southern part of Central Valley, were drags on the opportunity for Dems to take the House. A district with a significant Asian American population in Orange and Los Angeles counties, as I reported, saw a similar dynamic.

“We’re going to raise an America First banner above this place,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Capitol Hill, declaring victory on November 12 before more than a dozen seats were decided. 

Johnson mentioned policies of a “common sense” America First agenda, including secure borders, lower costs, and the end to wokeness and gender ideology. 

We’ve published a ton of stories on what might happen—an attack on immigration, a crackdown on transgender rights, a reversal of many Democratic environmental policies, and a rethink on education and college affordability. 

Another element to look out for: tax breaks. Through reconciliation, which allows budget-based bills to pass the Senate and avoid the filibuster with a simple 51-vote majority, Republicans will have the ability to propose and pass policies like tax cuts: Many tax cuts.

Breaks enacted during Trump’s first term will expire at the end of 2025. While the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent permanently, most tax cuts for households and individuals were short-term. 

According to the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan policy research and advocacy institute, extending Trump’s tax breaks would contribute $400 billion per year to the national debt. Trump has also made other promises such as ending taxation on overtime income, social security benefits, and tips, as well as lowering the corporate tax rate even more, to 15 percent. (The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated some of the additional costs here.)

Despite outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the filibuster will stand the day after Election Day, Trump had repeatedly called for its end in his first term. Republicans could weaken or kill the process and be able to pass any legislation with a simple majority rather than requiring a two-thirds majority to nullify a Democratic filibuster. This would theoretically grant Republican lawmakers the capacity to do whatever they want, creating a sweeping partisan playbook for at least the next two years. It looks less likely after the selection of Sen. John Thune as majority leader.

A Republican majority in both chambers of Congress also prevents Democrats from having any real authority to hold investigations. For the House, committee chairs hold unilateral subpoena power. This would strip Democrats of the ability to conduct inquiries on figures like Trump and those involved in coordinating the storming of the US Capitol. 

With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, among the first set of decisions will be how to overhaul much of the Biden administration’s policies in place of Trump’s agenda. 

While Republican lawmakers elect their House and Senate leaders, House Democrats will have to take time to rethink the next steps of their party. 

“The American people have spoken,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CBS Mornings on November 12. “We’ve got to, as Democrats, work with the incoming administration whenever and wherever possible, and strongly disagree when necessary, and that’s going to be the approach that we take.”

As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.

Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.

Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes. 

In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers. 

Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.” 

NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis. 

“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.

For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened. 

“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.” 

To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues. 

Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.” 

In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits. 

For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.” 

Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes. 

The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos. 

Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.” 

It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979. 

Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.” 

Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register. 

Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. 

Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.

“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.

Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says. 

While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis. 

For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes. 

For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.

“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”

This year, the road to take back the House of Representatives runs through California and New York, two states often skipped over when discussing the balance of power in an election year.

In 2022, the GOP showed surprising strength in the two blue stalwarts. They won upsets in each, earning Republicans the majority in the House. This time, Republicans are defending nine competitive races; as of November 1, the Cook Political Report labels these contests either “lean” or a “toss up.” According to the nonpartisan US election analyzer, two New York Republican incumbents are at particular risk: Anthony D’Esposito in NY-04 and Brandon Williams in NY-22.

Both major parties know the states are key. According to a Politico review of Federal Election Commission data, about one-third of independent expenditures in House races have been spent in California and New York—a significant jump from one-fifth in 2022. 

Mother Jones has picked five races, two in New York and three in California, that you should follow on Election Day.

NY-04: A scandalous rematch

Anthony D’Esposito (R) vs. Laura Gillen (D)

In wealthy sections of Nassau County on Long Island, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito faces off once again with Laura Gillen. The district is a historic Republican stronghold that has increasingly turned blue over the last 30 years. Alongside CA-22, it is the most Democratic-leaning congressional district represented by a Republican, with a 2022 Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+5 (meaning it voted five points more Democratic in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections than the national average). 

Turnout is a major issue. At a campaign event for Gillen in October, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attributed the 2022 loss to voter turnout. According to data from the New York State Board of Elections and the New York Times, only 52 percent of registered Democrats voted for Gillen while roughly 83 percent of registered Republicans backed D’Esposito.

But there may be hope for Democrats this cycle as D’Esposito is embroiled in scandal. In September, the New York Times reported that he gave taxpayer-funded jobs to his lover and his fiancée’s daughter, possibly violating House ethics rules against corruption and nepotism. 

The race’s thin margins have pushed both D’Esposito and Gillen to the center. Gillen has advocated for the Biden administration to strengthen the border given New York City’s struggle to shelter thousands of migrants, even appearing in a campaign ad to promise to “work with anyone from any party to secure our southern border, lock up criminals pushing fentanyl, and stop the migrant crisis.” Meanwhile, D’Esposito has toned down Republican language on reproductive rights, promising in a campaign video that he would never vote for a national abortion ban.

NY-19: The New York race that is about the southern border

Marc Molinaro (R) vs. Josh Riley (D)

Upstate New York sees another rematch—one where Riley lost by only about 4,500 votes in 2022. Like NY-04, the two prominent issues seem to be abortion and immigration. According to CBS News, Riley vows to sponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act, which forms a new legal protection for the right to provide and access abortion care post-Dobbs. Molinaro says that he will support IVF and birth control and will never back an abortion ban. 

Still, according to the New York Times, Rep. Molinaro, once a moderate Republican, has drifted further right—especially on immigration. One of Molinaro’s campaign ads pays special mention to the August arrest of Gianfranco Torres-Navarro, a Peruvian gang leader, in upstate New York, and claims Riley helped write Joe Biden’s border policies that let Torres-Navarro into the country. The Republican congressman wants to close the southern border and deport “illegals with criminal records immediately.” He has also spread conspiracy theories, including that Haitian immigrants had “carved up” Springfield, Ohio, residents’ pets to eat them. 

Like Gillen, Riley has also shifted to the right on immigration, criticizing President Biden’s administration for being soft on law enforcement. He also blamed Molinaro for opposing a bipartisan Senate border security bill proposed earlier in 2024 to limit border crossings. 

CA-13: The test of Democrats’ sway with Latino voters

John Duarte (R) vs. Adam Gray (D)

California’s 13th is a Latino-majority congressional district where both candidates argue that they’re the most moderate. Duarte squeaked by Gray in the 2022 race by 564 votes. But, it could be tougher this year. If the district had existed in 2020 in its current configuration, it would have supported President Biden by 11 percentage points.

My colleague Noah Lanard has a big article on the race, which looks at the potentially massive drop in Latino support for Democrats across California.

In an October debate, Duarte distanced himself from Project 2025 conservatives and pointed out that he’s the lowest-ranking Republican according to Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group that is a sister organization to The Heritage Foundation. While remaining vague on specific policies, he said, “I stand against the extremes of both parties. I want everyone to be who they are and love who they love. I want women to have choice.”

Gray portrayed himself as a team player with Republicans, boasting his bipartisan voting record, while connecting Duarte to Donald Trump and the most conservative House Republicans.  

The two candidates take similar positions on local policies. According to the Sacramento Bee, they both reject increasing the minimum wage from $16 per hour to $18 per hour via Proposition 32, despite California having the third-highest cost of living, according to World Population Review. The state also has the most number of people experiencing homelessness in the nation and the highest rate of unsheltered people. Both candidates oppose cities deciding their own rent control rules via Proposition 33. 

CA-27: The contest involving space stuff

Mike Garcia (R) vs George Whitesides (D)

Based in northern Los Angeles County, California’s 27th is another prominently Latino district, making up almost half of the district.

According to Roll Call, the area is home to a host of aerospace companies, defense contractors, and manufacturing firms. Whitesides—who is new to politics—was the CEO of Virgin Galactic, a Richard Branson-founded space tourism company. He was also the chief of staff for NASA under Barack Obama. Whitesides is pushing a moderate platform of preserving Social Security and Medicare, as well as reproductive rights. He has targeted Garcia for backing Donald Trump and supporting abortion restrictions.

Democrats previously attacked Garcia following a December 2023 report from the Daily Beast, which found that the Republican incumbent sold up to $50,000 of Boeing stock before a congressional committee he served on released an investigation on 737 aircraft crashes. The news outlet said that Garcia did not disclose the sale until after he won reelection. 

Garcia calls Whitesides an “extreme liberal,” and says he is focused on lowering spending and improving safety and security, including the border. He has led raids on illegal, cartel-operated marijuana growers in the district. 

CA-45: The red-baiting brawl

Michelle Steel (R) vs Derek Tran (D)

California’s 45th congressional district stretches across more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. According to Politico, the race was not expected to be a toss-up, given the incumbent, Michelle Steel, has been serving in the US House since 2021 and has years of previous experience in local California politics. But, as one of the country’s few majority-minority districts represented by a Republican, Democrats are hopeful that their challenger, Derek Tran, can win. 

Tran, who is Vietnamese American and the son of refugees, may attract voters in Little Saigon, a neighborhood in Orange County home to the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam itself. As I reported in October, this race has become about Asian American and Pacific Islander identity, as they make up about 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents. This includes a history of colonization, war, and oppression that many Vietnamese immigrants attribute to communist governments in China and Vietnam. 

Red-baiting is thus a significant component of both candidates’ campaigns. 

Vietnamese-language ads accuse Tran of being a communist, bringing up that he has support from “socialists like Bernie Sanders” and has “thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency linked to China.” The Tran campaign ran a Vietnamese Facebook ad in September and October that says Steel’s husband “brought Chinese spies into American politics in exchange for money,” referring to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his working-man’s clothes—aviators, jeans, and a trucker hat—starred in a video where he carted people’s possessions out of a homeless encampment near a Los Angeles highway.

On any given night in 2023, more than 650,000 people in the US experienced homelessness, with almost 400,000 unsheltered—though that figure may be an underestimate. Research by the federal Government Accountability Office found that every $100 rise in median monthly rent brings about a 9 percent increase in homelessness—notable as rent costs have climbed by 25 percent nationally since 2020, according to CNBC.

Newsom’s photo op followed his July order calling for the clearing of encampments on public property, and came alongside a threat to withhold state funding from cities and counties that failed to meet his requirements, much to the ire of local officials like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On July 25, the day of the order, the governor posted on X: “No more excuses. We’ve provided the time. We’ve provided the funds. Now it’s time for locals to do their job.”

Earlier this month, Newsom approved more than $130 million in funding for 18 cities, including over $12 million to Riverside, to “sweep” encampments. According to the governor, the goal is to support “efforts to get people out of encampments and connected with care and housing across the state.”

A statewide audit released in April tracked investment during Newsom’s first five years as governor, from 2019 to 2023, and found that California spent roughly $24 billion in that span to address housing and homelessness. At his inaugural address in January 2019, Newsom vowed to “launch a Marshall Plan for affordable housing and lift up the fight against homelessness,” promising to push for the development of 3.5 million housing units across the state by 2025. 

According to CalMatters, his administration has since backtracked numerous times, calling in 2022 for cities to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. The state still has about one-third of the country’s unhoused people, more than half of whom, in many cities—like San Francisco—are without any kind of shelter.

In Orange County, many homeless advocates denounced Newsom’s strategy as criminalizing life without shelter rather than driving the construction of affordable homes. 

“All things like this do is just shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” said David Gillanders, the executive director of Pathways of Hope, an Orange County organization that provides shelters and other support with housing. “If you uproot a person who’s living in an encampment, they’re just going to find another place to go if you’re not offering them an appropriate sort of accommodation.” 

Gillanders cites California first responders who moved to—and started commuting from—Idaho, or even further afield. Kyle Conforti, an Orange County firefighter who lives in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, told the Guardian that the rise in cost of living “outpaces my raises and income. So we finally just ran the numbers and figured out it would be cheaper to live out of state and have me commute back.”

According to a 2024 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, California has the highest housing costs in the nation. At an average of some $2,500 a month, it takes an hourly wage of almost $50 to afford a two-bedroom residence without being “cost-burdened,” or spending more than 30 percent of income. Another study released this year by the California Housing Partnership found even higher average rents in Orange County: just under $2,800, meaning renters would need to earn about $54 per hour. 

“We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”

But not everyone in California is opposed to Newsom’s focus on encampments. San Francisco is among the largest cities to double down on a confrontational policy of eliminating encampments through police enforcement. In August, the city’s mayor, London Breed, strengthened one of its three separate programs to push unhoused people out of the city by offering one-way bus tickets before shelter or other services.

Responding to Newsom’s order in July, Breed said, “We have offered people shelter and space, and many people are declining…But we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”

Other city councils have similarly prioritized police raids of encampments. From 2006 to 2019, the National Homelessness Law Center found, the number of city-wide bans on camping and loitering doubled—and bans on living in vehicles tripled. Newport Beach, another wealthy Orange County municipality, unanimously voted to intensify anti-camping law enforcement by recruiting more officers for its police “Quality of Life” teams, which issue citations for camping and related violations, withdrew funding for a mobile mental health response team, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, is considering the hire of a full-time city attorney dedicated strictly to prosecuting anti-camping laws.

In early October, the city’s ordinance banning camping on public property went into effect, and within hours, all encampments were cleared by public works crews and police. The ordinance does not require Newport Beach to offer services to those who have been forced out.

But the most recent arguments over homelessness began in the lead-up to a June Supreme Court ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that overturned a 2018 lower court decision banning local laws against camping on public property if cities didn’t also provide adequate temporary shelter.

In that case, amicus briefs from various parties—including Newsom—were filed to the Supreme Court. One included petitions from 10 California cities, and Orange County, about the consequences of Martin v. Boise, the lower court’s ruling. Orange County called it “financially unsustainable,” citing a 2019 settlement payment of more than $2 million and a potentially “impractical” requirement to provide one shelter bed per person unhoused. The county’s budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year was $8.8 billion.

Garden Grove, another of Orange County’s largest cities, wrote, “The further impacts of Martin include an increase in homeless individuals by 49% since 2017, an increase in petty crime and theft, and an increase in overdose calls from Fentanyl and other deadly narcotics.” 

The Garden Grove comments came from a declaration by Sergeant Jeffrey Brown, the head of its police department’s “Special Resource Team” on homelessness. Brown referred to 2021 numbers demonstrating that less than one percent of homeless people were accepting referrals to shelter or inpatient mental health facilities, and wrote, “As it relates to encampments, the Martin decision has effectively disabled” local police “from mitigating encampment growth and homeless activity on public streets, sidewalks, and rights of way.” 

“Now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”

Neither the Garden Grove Police Department nor Brown responded to a request for comment. 

Asked why people experiencing homelessness in nearby Newport Beach were turning down shelter bed offers, Natalie Basmaciyan, the city’s homeless services manager, said, “We tend to have a slightly older unhoused population in our region, and they’ve gone through shelters in the ’80s and ’90s and even in the ’00s that were not well-managed. They didn’t have good facilities…You know, here’s a sack lunch. You need to leave for the day. You have to queue up at 5pm and hope you get a bed again.” 

“We don’t do that,” said Basmaciyan. “Once you’re assigned a bed and you’re in our program, you are here until you get housed.” 

Vox found that other reasons many people avoid shelters range from having to give up pets and personal belongings to having to leave a partner at a gender-segregated facility. 

Even adequate shelters present problems absent a system to move people to permanent supportive housing. “We have people that have been in a temporary shelter for three years,” Joe Stapleton, the mayor pro tem of Newport Beach, admitted. 

According to CalMatters, homeless shelters themselves often pose health and safety risks; the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California found raw sewage flowing from porta-potties, broken showers, rodent and maggot infestations, a lack of wintertime heating, and flooding during storms. The ACLU also uncovered accounts of unchecked theft, sexual abuse, and violence. Despite California law requiring shelter inspections and repairs, CalMatters found little to no evidence of accountability, with just four of the state’s 478 cities filing mandatory shelter reports—apparently without consequence.

For those who turn down shelters, Newport Beach’s municipal code provides a list of penalties enforced via civil or criminal citation, which both escalate with repeat offenses and accrue interest and late fees.

According to Stapleton, applying those penalties “is a last resort,” as is calling police. 

“This is where the system has failed, where it’s like, how many times is somebody going to remain on the streets, refusing all the services and everything that we’re providing, to a point where they’re going to continue to sleep in front of a business. I don’t think we have the solution. I don’t think anybody has a solution,” said Stapleton. 

Cesar Covarrubias, executive director of the Kennedy Commission, an Orange County nonprofit that works to increase production of homes for lower-income residents, described the penalty structure as a trap that unhoused people are forced into.

“Individuals who are homeless get citations,” said Covarrubias, and if those go unpaid, “then there’s warrants that are issued against them.” Most people cited “are never going to be able to pay for those,” he said, “and it just continues to be a cycle where now part of their housing solution would be to house them in jails.”

Covarrubias suggested that “more affordable housing needs to happen through regional and local partnerships with cities,” using publicly owned lands and “local, regional, and state funding…to really create more housing that is affordable.” But the focus on clearing encampments, he said—especially following the Grants Pass decision and Newsom’s order— has hindered progress. 

State and local authorities “are really going to stifle this collaboration of addressing housing and homelessness regionally, because there is just no incentive for them to do so,” Covarrubias said. “Now they’re going back to what they traditionally did, which was more enforcement [and] criminalization of homelessness.” 

Cities are also divided on housing construction. According to Covarrubias, many municipalities are failing to satisfy guidelines set by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, a California mandate that decides how much housing each city requires to meet affordability standards. The assessment is a planning tool, he said, that in theory discourages landlords and developers from building only market-rate housing. 

Covarrubias explained the failures—and the vital impact of housing policy—by contrasting housing development in Santa Ana and Anaheim, two cities in northern Orange County, which has relatively higher rates of poverty and residential overcrowding than its southern part. Although Anaheim was producing more homes than required, most construction served “above moderate” income levels, a floor of about $124,000 a year for a two-person household. Conversely, Santa Ana, where an affordable housing opportunity ordinance preserves at least 15 percent of new housing for low-income residents, exceeded state guidelines for “low” and “very low” income levels: for two-person households, that represents annual incomes of $101,000 and $63,100, respectively. 

Police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”

So what to do? Covarrubias cited the Kennedy Commission’s suggestion, a $1 billion county bond to leverage state resources and fund affordable housing. Northern California’s Santa Clara County, home to many of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, suffers one of the worst housing crises in the country. It issued a $950 million affordable housing bond in 2016, partnering with 10 of its cities to fund affordable housing development. By December 2023, the measure had facilitated the construction of 5,127 new affordable apartments and 56 multi-unit housing developments.

That’s where the state and groups like the Kennedy Commission come in, said Covarrubias—monitoring housing commitments and progress on construction for low-income residents. The state’s housing department has the ability to initiate lawsuits, request court orders, and administer penalties to cities for noncompliance in housing plan implementation, including fines of up to $50,000 per month and some loss of authority over building permits or zoning changes. Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County that extended a moratorium on building emergency shelters, recently forfeited state housing and homelessness funding as a consequence, and, according to Newsom, can no longer reject certain affordable housing initiatives. Over the past five years, the city has accepted nearly $29 million to house people experiencing homelessness but has failed to provide a sufficient number of units—just 175 out of 5,034 planned, according to the governor’s office. 

Gillanders, of Orange County’s Pathways of Hope, said that more avenues for public housing are needed—beginning with the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, which caps the number of public housing units that the federal government can fund and authorize at 1999 levels. Jared Brey, the housing correspondent for nonprofit news organization Next City, wrote that the Faircloth Amendment was part of a wave of welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration in the ’90s that considered public assistance programs counterproductive to financial self-sufficiency.  

Gillanders also suggested that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be empowered to build affordable housing directly, using federal funds—development Reagan-era budget cuts still severely limit to this day, and which would require fiscal backing from Congress. As housing costs have soared, HUD’s budget and power have not. 

In fact, a bill along those lines just hit Congress: the Homes Act, introduced in late September by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and establish a new federal authority to develop affordable housing with tenant protections. Gillanders calls it a “step in the right direction.”

Covarrubias stressed the need for a human perspective on homelessness: “The reality that we need to understand is that many individuals that are on the streets at some point coped with life normally until something happened”—like a layoff. And as my colleague Julianne McShane writes, many who experience homelessness are survivors of domestic violence and struggle to find safe access to shelter and housing. “In the bigger picture,” Covarrubias said, police ordinances and encampment raids “are not addressing the issue of why individuals are homeless.”

It appears as though Mark Robinson is hellbent on his apparent refusal to take emergency action in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Following the North Carolina lieutenant governor’s role as the sole lawmaker to skip a vote on North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s request to declare a state of emergency before Helene struck late last month, Robinson, also the Republican gubernatorial candidate, was once again the only official to fail to respond to Cooper’s executive order to increase relief efforts. 

According to CBS17, each member of North Carolina’s Council of State had 48 hours to respond to Cooper’s call for action on Saturday. But Robinson did not respond. Robinson’s newly hired chief of staff, Krishna Polite, told the news outlet on Tuesday that Robinson had supported the order, but it went awry because Roy’s formal request was sent to former staff members.

Robinson’s team did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. 

Robinson’s campaign has been inundated with chaos in recent months, with half of his staff quitting following a CNN report connecting to him racist and sexually explicit remarks on a pornographic message board. That included comments declaring himself a “black NAZI!” and referring to Mein Kampf as a “good read.” But Robinson has remained defiant, refusing to bow out of the race in the face of multiple controversies.

That defiance, or at least Robinson’s refusal to accept responsibility, appears to extend to his Helene response. After missing the initial state of emergency vote, Robinson posted on X: “Democrats like Cooper, [North Carolina Attorney General] Josh Stein & Joe Biden want to hide behind bureaucratic resolutions that pass automatically—instead of getting out there and working to help people in dire need. I won’t stand for this.”

Though his recent controversies may have shocked people at the national level, Cooper, a Democrat, may not be so surprised. In July, the North Carolina governor explained at an event for land conservation that he dropped out of the running to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate because he was worried about the damage Robinson could do if he left office. (North Carolina’s state constitution says, “During the absence of the Governor from the State…the Lieutenant Governor shall be Acting Governor.”)  

“This was not the right time for our state or for me,” Cooper said at the time. “We had concerns that he would try to seize the limelight…and that would be a real distraction to the presidential campaign.” 

Cooper’s latest executive order supports recovery from Hurricane Helene by increasing the number of professional health care workers and making emergency medications more readily available.

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” 

Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Miller and others have worked for years to develop a plan—including deploying the National Guard, constructing massive detention camps through executive order, and packing the federal government with their own people. 

In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false. 

As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters. 

Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin. 

Musk also announced yesterday on X that he would attend Trump’s comeback rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the location of an assassination attempt against the former president in July. 

So much for claiming to be politically moderate.

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” 

Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Miller and others have worked for years to develop a plan—including deploying the National Guard, constructing massive detention camps through executive order, and packing the federal government with their own people. 

In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false. 

As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters. 

Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin. 

Musk also announced yesterday on X that he would attend Trump’s comeback rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the location of an assassination attempt against the former president in July. 

So much for claiming to be politically moderate.

“This Jay Chen for American Congress, he’s perfect for China,” one agent told his colleague in a smoke-filled room at the “Chinese Communist Party Intelligence Division.” Chen, the agent said in stereotypically accented English, was “a socialist comrade” who supported Bernie Sanders “for supreme leader.”

“Sanders loves Mao, Chen loves Sanders,” the other spy said, as the pair erupted in maniacal laughter.

The two men were actors in an advertisement for GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in her 2022 reelection fight against Chen in Southern California’s 45th Congressional District. Following a barrage of promotional material in this vein, groups from Asian American and Pacific Islander communities protested the tactics used by Steel, calling them “McCarthyist” and making signs reading “Stop Asian hate” and “Red-baiting is race-baiting.” 

Steel, who is Korean American, won the race, taking 52 percent of the vote and helping Republicans narrowly seize control of the US House.

Politicized battles over Asian American identity have become a recurring feature of campaigns in the 45th—a wrench-shaped swing district that spans more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. It’s one of the country’s few majority-minority congressional districts represented by a Republican, and Democrats see it as one of their top pickup opportunities as they try to retake the House in November. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents—the second highest in the state. Approximately half of the district’s Asian population is Vietnamese.

Democrats hope their challenger this time around—Derek Tran—will fare better than Chen. A US Army veteran and the son of refugees, Tran is leaning heavily into his anti-communist bona fides. “Derek’s family fled a murderous communist regime in Vietnam,” his campaign website notes. “He knows firsthand the devastating impact of totalitarian governments and is committed to standing firm against Chinese Communist rule.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Chen expressed optimism that Tran’s biography would be a powerful tool in fighting back against Steel’s “red scare” tactics. “The fact that Derek is Vietnamese American will help him counter a lot of these attacks,” Chen predicted.

Chen—who is Taiwanese American—recalled that, in his own race two years ago, Republicans posted campaign signs reading “China’s Choice Jay Chen” and “made them resemble the Chinese flag.” Similar rhetoric was deployed in Vietnamese and featured the colors of the flag of South Vietnam, the US-backed country that ceased to exist in 1975 after it was defeated by communist forces at the end of the Vietnam War. “The bulk of its focus is on the Vietnamese community, and the symbolism that [Steel] includes—the red and the yellow—are meant to trigger an immigrant population, many of whom were refugees who were very traumatized by communism,” Chen said.

That’s happening again. Steel’s team has installed large signs invoking the South Vietnamese flag around the area’s Little Saigon community—across from a Costco popular with Vietnamese shoppers and at the entrance to a plaza of Vietnamese shops. “Đả Đảo Cộng Sản,” they read: “Down With Communism.”

The signs have caused some controversy. “To us, Steel is misusing the flag for her own political gain—the flag we so revere,” said Christina Dao, a host and commentator for Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon. “We would never put any political slogans or anyone’s names on the flag. Michelle Steel is not really a part of its history.”

In our conversation, Dao pointed to a Wall Street Journal report from 2020 that documented how Steel’s husband, Shawn Steel, who has served as the Republican National Committee member from California since 2008, invited Chinese nationals to a 2017 GOP event where attendees allegedly talked through campaign strategy. (Steel told the Journal that it would be “false, defamatory, and offensive” to suggest he’d helped Chinese government efforts in any way. He did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

All this convinced Dao and other Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon to form an unofficial group, start a petition on Change.org, and organize an online press conference to criticize Michelle Steel. The congresswoman is “abusing” the flag “to satisfy her greed for power,” the petition says.

In 1984, following the GOP’s national convention, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential reelection campaign in Fountain Valley, part of today’s 45th District. “It’s nice to be in Orange County,” Reagan famously remarked, “where the good Republicans go to die.” At the time, the county was about 78 percent white and solidly conservative.

Since then, the region has grown in diversity and has slowly shifted toward the political center. A survey conducted earlier this year by the University of California, Irvine, concluded that the county is now “politically purple…almost evenly split among Republicans (32%), Democrats (33%), and Independents (35%).” Among Asian American respondents, the partisan divide is similar. 

The common narrative is that the influx of immigrant communities made the county more ethnically and economically heterogeneous. This, along with the backlash to Republican support for California’s Proposition 187 in 1994—which ordered health care institutions and school districts to deny services to undocumented people—led to a decades-long political drift away from GOP hegemony. In 2018, bolstered by opposition to Donald Trump, Democrats won a clean sweep of all seven congressional seats in the county.

Viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats.”

But there’s no reason to think these changes are permanent. Republicans—including Steel—recaptured two of those House seats in 2020. And Gustavo Arellano, an author and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, warned this year that viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats,” as the GOP still dominates local politics. Republicans, he noted, “hold every countywide elected position and all the seats on the Orange County Board of Education…A majority of city councils in the county lean GOP.” 

In 2018, Arellano credited the Republican Party as the “pioneer in diversifying O.C.’s politics,” listing notable Latino politicians who arrived in the region in the ’80s, including Tom Fuentes, a Mexican American who worked on Richard Nixon’s California gubernatorial campaign and later became the long-standing chair of the county GOP. 

Now that Asian American Republicans have become a force in Orange County politics, Arellano argued, the GOP was constructing “a new racial cold war” through appeals to immigrants across the country who “come with skills and ambitions and don’t want government handouts.” In his view, the Republican Party was now drawing on anti-Latino feelings among other immigrant groups, resulting in support for policies like stronger borders. 

“The countywide power held by [Republicans] reflects strong local mobilization efforts by the party,” said UC Irvine professor Long Bui, an expert on the politics of Vietnamese refugees, in an email interview. “Saying Orange County is increasingly Democratic due to a rise in immigrants overlooks nuances, especially when party affiliations among Vietnamese Americans split along generational, class, and educational lines.”

Survey data published last year shows that a narrow majority of Vietnamese Americans nationwide lean toward the Republican Party, a sharp contrast to other AAPI communities, which tend to heavily favor Democrats. According to Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, the political divides within the Vietnamese American community partly reflect several distinct groups of immigrants: refugees who left Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975; boat people who fled starting in the late ’70s; and later humanitarian and family reunification efforts. 

While Nguyen-Vo stresses that many differences exist among individual voters, in general, those who immigrated in 1975—in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon—were mostly middle- and upper-class urban dwellers and tended to be more liberal than groups who arrived later. They opposed the communist regime, but they didn’t necessarily see anti-communism as incompatible with Democratic policies like progressive income tax rates and a more generous social safety net.

Vietnamese boat people and other groups who fled after 1975 are more “staunchly anti-communist and pro-American,” according to Nguyen-Vo. Before leaving Vietnam, she notes, these families lived through “extreme economic hardship, partly due to the American embargo and socialist reorganization…and outright repression including incarceration in prisons and reeducation camps.”

“Many died or disappeared due to boat wrecks, lack of fuel, food and water, and encounters with pirates,” explains Nguyen-Vo. “These folks languished in refugee camps for long years awaiting countries to grant asylum.” Once in the US, boat people often had a tougher time financially than earlier Vietnamese immigrants and may support policies like lowering taxes and restricting immigration, believing they will help them reach economic stability or advancement. “However, they tend to favor social programs like health care and social assistance, as many had depended on these programs at some point,” Nguyen-Vo suggested. “They may equate being anti-communist and conservative with the GOP and vote red, but they would still want their GOP representatives to support social programs.” 

Culture war issues have become a particular flashpoint. Lance Trover, a spokesperson for Steel, cited the Republican lawmaker’s work in introducing the Helping Applications Receive Valid and Reasonable Decisions (HARVARD) Act to “stop racial discrimination in university admissions that has been proven to specifically target Asian Americans”—the subject of last year’s Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action policies. 

Trover also noted Steel’s efforts to highlight “Vietnamese communist human rights abuses.” In a July 2024 interview with VietFaceTV, a Vietnamese-language television station based in the district, Steel voiced her concerns with the Vietnamese government’s treatment of prisoners of conscience. She also noted her support for a bipartisan bill that would prevent Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States prior to 1995 from being deported.

Both candidates have leaned heavily on their families’ immigration experiences. “To forge the American Dream in California,” Tran said over email, “I know that what this community wants more than anything is someone who will protect individual freedom, fight for economic opportunity, and address the affordability crisis that is hurting families.” In May, Tran sparked his own controversy when he told Punchbowl News that although Steel presents herself as a Korean refugee who fled communism, she actually moved to the US for “economic gain.”

“That’s not the same as losing one’s country after the fall of Saigon in ’75 and having no home,” he said.

“There are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity.”

Dozens of AAPI organizations and community leaders came to Steel’s defense, insisting that Tran apologize for his statement. “Mr. Tran, starting a new life and working to attain a better economic state is the American Dream that so many of us or our parents have done,” they wrote. “It’s why we are here, and why we love representing the diverse groups in our communities.”

Of course, Tran isn’t the only candidate trying to draw distinctions between different groups of immigrants. “You regularly see [Steel] and Young Kim [a Korean American Republican representing a neighboring congressional district] talking about how, Oh, I came here legally to pursue the American Dream. But it’s the undocumented who are making it worse for everyone,” said Chen.

Hao Phan, the Southeast Asia curator at Northern Illinois University, thinks that such rhetoric could resonate with voters. “Vietnamese Americans are concerned about the issue of illegal immigration,” he says. “Although Vietnamese are immigrants, they tend to see themselves as good immigrants in contrast to the bad immigrants.”

Some voters are growing frustrated with the increasingly bitter identity politics. “This new political dimension has created a painful rift within the community, which used to be united around the identity of a community of refugees…against the communist regime in Vietnam,” says Phan.

Jeanie Le, a board member with the Orange County Young Democrats, says she appreciates the importance of ethnic background and the history of AAPI identity. But, she adds, “there are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity…People who are here are worried about if their kid is going to school and how they’re going to pay rent.” She called out Steel’s red-baiting in particular: “A lot of Vietnamese people are really tired of it because it makes the community seem monolithic.”

Le sees the battles over AAPI identity as misguided distractions from the more immediate concrete problems facing the district, including the soaring cost of living. She praised Kim B. Nguyen-Penaloza—a Garden Grove City Council member who lost the March primary to Tran by a couple hundred votes—for her work leading the city’s mobile mental health program for the unhoused. She also highlighted Thai Viet Phan, a council member from nearby Santa Ana, for her support of a local law that limits rent increases to 3 percent per year.

“There’s so much happening in our community, and I just really want to make sure that when people write about this community, they reflect that,” Le told me. “It’s a lot more complex than a lot of people try to make it out to be.”

Update, October 4: This story previously noted that Le told Mother Jones that the OC Young Democrats weren’t fully backing a candidate in the California 45th congressional race. After that interview, but before this story was published, the group endorsed Tran.

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.”

In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote in federal or state elections). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.)

In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect.

As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.”

Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.”

Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!

Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024

But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship. 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.”

As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power. 

Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November. 

The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security. 

She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.” 

So, all of it was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.”

In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.)

In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect.

As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.”

Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.”

Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!

Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024

But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship. 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.”

As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power. 

Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November. 

The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security. 

She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.” 

So, all of it was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.

Surprise, surprise. JD Vance’s self-proclaimed seamless journey from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016—who called the former president potentially “America’s Hitler”—to a fervent supporter of the man in 2020 may not be the complete story. 

According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, in February 2020, Vance condemned Trump’s choices during his first term in office in private messages on X. “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote to a source that has remained anonymous due to worries over a vitriolic response. 

In another DM sent in June 2020, Vance predicted that his future running mate would lose to Joe Biden in the presidential election. When Trump was actually defeated, Vance asserted that Democrats stole the election. 

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Post that Vance’s remarks about Trump’s poor execution of his promises for the economy were not targeting the former president but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote.

“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” Martin added.

In other messages, Vance appeared receptive to government-led health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).” 

This brings into question when and why Vance underwent a change of heart on Trump. When asked about this, Martin did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment. 

We previously noted how Vance’s transformation to a champion of the former president may be genuine—he’s clearly studied the influences of the newly-established right with references to Nazi Germany and seizing the administrative state for themselves. But even if Vance makes his reasoning clear, he serves as an example of how elites can justify in their own minds that they can vote for Trump—because when they do so, they tell themselves they helping the working class (or, actually, the white working class), despite all the evidence to the contrary.

As Vance said at the Republican National Convention in July: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”

Or, in other words, it has a shared history and common future for a certain kind of people.

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

Surprise, surprise. JD Vance’s self-proclaimed seamless journey from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016—who called the former president potentially “America’s Hitler”—to a fervent supporter of the man in 2020 may not be the complete story. 

According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, in February 2020, Vance condemned Trump’s choices during his first term in office in private messages on X. “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote to a source that has remained anonymous due to worries over a vitriolic response. 

In another DM sent in June 2020, Vance predicted that his future running mate would lose to Joe Biden in the presidential election. When Trump was actually defeated, Vance asserted that Democrats stole the election. 

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Post that Vance’s remarks about Trump’s poor execution of his promises for the economy were not targeting the former president but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” the VP choice reportedly wrote.

“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” Martin added.

In other messages, Vance appeared receptive to government-led health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).” 

This brings into question when and why Vance underwent a change of heart on Trump. When asked about this, Martin did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment. 

We previously noted how Vance’s transformation to a champion of the former president may be genuine—he’s clearly studied the influences of the newly-established right with references to Nazi Germany and seizing the administrative state for themselves. But even if Vance makes his reasoning clear, he serves as an example of how elites can justify in their own minds that they can vote for Trump—because when they do so, they tell themselves they helping the working class (or, actually, the white working class), despite all the evidence to the contrary.

As Vance said at the Republican National Convention in July: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”

Or, in other words, it has a shared history and common future for a certain kind of people.

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

It’s been quite the week for New York City mayors.

One day after reports said that Mayor Eric Adams was indicted in a federal corruption investigation, former mayor Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington, DC, over his key role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The move marks yet another end for Giuliani, who as Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, was a primary actor in the false conspiracy theories alleging that the election had been stolen from Trump. Several people close to Trump’s inner circle accused Giuliani of pushing the former president to declare victory on Election Night while drunk. 

“This is an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice,” Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision.”

“The people coming after Mayor Giuliani can’t take away the fact that he remains the most effective prosecutor in American history, who did more to improve the lives of others than almost any other American alive today.”

The ruling from the federal appeals court on Thursday stated that Giuliani had not responded when ordered to argue why he shouldn’t be disbarred in Washington after he was stripped of his law license in New York this summer.

Giuliani had been suspended from DC law after a board in May declared that Giuliani should have his license revoked. “We conclude that disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief,” they said.

Of course, legal troubles are far from Giuliani’s only headache these days. The former mayor also filed for bankruptcy last year and is even selling his own coffee to help with cash flow. On Tuesday, he was told that he must pay $300,000 to the accounting firm Global Data Risk for its work on following his money in a bankruptcy court proceeding.

It’s been quite the week for New York City mayors.

One day after reports said that Mayor Eric Adams was indicted in a federal corruption investigation, former mayor Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington, DC, over his key role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The move marks yet another end for Giuliani, who as Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, was a primary actor in the false conspiracy theories alleging that the election had been stolen from Trump. Several people close to Trump’s inner circle accused Giuliani of pushing the former president to declare victory on Election Night while drunk. 

“This is an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice,” Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision.”

“The people coming after Mayor Giuliani can’t take away the fact that he remains the most effective prosecutor in American history, who did more to improve the lives of others than almost any other American alive today.”

The ruling from the federal appeals court on Thursday stated that Giuliani had not responded when ordered to argue why he shouldn’t be disbarred in Washington after he was stripped of his law license in New York this summer.

Giuliani had been suspended from DC law after a board in May declared that Giuliani should have his license revoked. “We conclude that disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief,” they said.

Of course, legal troubles are far from Giuliani’s only headache these days. The former mayor also filed for bankruptcy last year and is even selling his own coffee to help with cash flow. On Tuesday, he was told that he must pay $300,000 to the accounting firm Global Data Risk for its work on following his money in a bankruptcy court proceeding.