In March, the California Democratic Party launched the California Voter Opinion, Trend, & Engagement Research (VOTER) Index, a large-sample statewide polling project, to provide a consistent snapshot of the California Governor’s race ahead of the Primary Election. On March 24, the baseline poll was released with tracking surveys following on a regular basis.

Today, CADEM released the fifth and final edition of the California VOTER Index. The 1,200-sample survey of likely June 2026 voters was conducted May 14–16 online and via phone by EVITARUS — the only Black- and Latina-led full service public opinion research firm in California.

The surveys included each candidate’s official ballot designation and party affiliation. In addition, oversamples were completed for Latino, Black and Asian-American voters to avoid small sample sizes and ensure clarity in data results.

Results show voters are highly engaged with 37% saying they have already voted, and of those who have not yet voted, nearly all have a plan to do so.

The survey shows Republican Steve Hilton garners 22% support (and continues to outpace Chad Bianco’s 10% support), and Democrat Xavier Becerra holds 21% of the vote and continues to consolidate support of both Democrats and Independents.

Becerra also currently maintains the broadest coalition of any candidate for Governor with 35% of Democrats — a 6-point increase from May 4th — and 19% of Independents.

You can view the topline poll results and crosstabs by clicking here.

Thank you,

RCDP

It’s a ploy as old as politics itself: make a clearly false statement, all the while acting as if it’s an accepted fact. For added effect, nod and look around while stating it, as if everyone in the room agrees with you.

Here’s an example from the current crop of Republicans campaigning in our primary election: “California is a failed state,” they declare repeatedly, nodding authoritatively.

Excuse me?

They act so sure of themselves when they say it, but they are, to put it politely, sorely mistaken. In the first place, they don’t even know what a “failed state” is. If they did, they wouldn’t be so foolish as to try to pull that one over on us.

A failed state is a nation whose government cannot provide even basic services or security to its citizens. Somalia, for example, is generally considered a failed state. Other nations that have recently been considered “failed states” include Afghanistan, Haiti, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a precarious shell of a government is now struggling with a deadly ebola virus outbreak. That’s what a failed state looks like.

Here in California, our government is fully functional. Our laws are enforced, and we provide more services to our residents by far than most other U.S. states. Outgoing term-limited Governor Gavin Newsom just presented his final budget to the legislature: a balanced budget that not only would eliminate the deficit through 2028, but build reserves for the future, all while making “transformative investments” in child care, education, public safety, healthcare, housing, clean energy, businesses, and natural resources.

Even the DMV runs smoothly and efficiently.

Not only are we far from failure, but the Golden State has grown to become the world’s 4th largest economy, recently surpassing Japan.

Not coincidentally, our state is controlled by Democrats, in both houses of the legislature, the governor’s office, the secretary of state and attorney general. It’s been that way in the legislature for 30 years, although we did have a Republican governator for a few years.

In fact, the closest thing to a threat to the stability of our state government has been Republican-generated recall attempts: one in 2003, which replaced Gov. Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and another in 2021, in which voters reaffirmed our support for duly re-elected Governor Gavin Newsom. And both of those recall elections were done by the book.

All those facts make it difficult for the opposition party. They have to insist that we need change, desperately, and that they are just the change we need.

I’m not saying that California has no problems. We do, but that doesn’t make us unique, let alone a failure. Life is expensive here. We don’t have enough affordable housing, or enough doctors. Our overdependence on the automobile leaves us particularly vulnerable when gas prices spike, as they have since our President attacked Iran without consulting either Congress, military experts, or even a map that would have shown him the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz. California has environmental problems: prolonged drought and climate change have left us vulnerable to devastating wildfires, along with water shortages and eroding beaches. And eventually we’re going to have to do something about the shrinking Salton Sea. But we’re at least working on finding solutions to all of those, plus the new problems piled on us by the antagonistic Trump administration.

What solutions are Republicans offering? The same old tired tricks: cutting taxes for the wealthy, and rolling back regulations. That’s all they ever offer, along with hateful divisiveness to nudge their voters to the polls. And dividing our diverse California culture into “Us” and “Them” doesn’t work as well here as it might in, say, Alabama. Besides, tax breaks for the rich and deregulation will only make those problems worse.

The “failed state” fallacy might be merely a spelling error. “F-a-i-l-e-d” should be spelled “d-o-n-o-r.” We are a perennial donor state, which means we contribute far more to the Federal government than we receive. The states most likely to call us a “failed state” are also those most dependent upon those contributions. Go figure.

Even though we give more than we get, we are woefully underrepresented in Washington. We only get two senators to represent all 40 million of us. Wyoming, with under 600,000 residents, also gets two.

Occasionally, someone suggests that California could address that inequity by splitting into two states. Those campaigns, 220 of them in Golden State history, never get very far. One of them even suggested dividing us into six states. If any of those proposals ever succeeded, we might indeed have more senators, but the power of the world’s 4th largest economy would be severely diluted.

Then there are those who argue that California should secede from the union, and become an independent republic, as it was for 25 days in 1846. But we are big fans of the concept of e pluribus unum, (out of many, one) rather than the other way around. Besides, you know who would really love that? Vladimir Putin, among others.

So call us what you will, Republicans. Sticks and stones, and all that. We’re an indisputable success under Democratic leadership, and I hope we will be for decades to come.

And a note to my fellow Democrats: if you haven’t voted already, don’t delay. Our continued success depends on it.

Janet Dagley is a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party.

Please note: Political violence is never appropriate. I condemn not only such violence, but threats of, and calls for any kind of violence.

The U.S. Justice Department has charged that four digits — 8647 — in themselves constitute a death threat, and they have charged the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with threatening to kill the President for posting a photo of those numbers spelled out in seashells and rocks on a beach.

The number 86, prosecutors charged, meant “kill.” And they claimed “47” meant Donald Trump. The President himself later stated that “86” was a Mob term that meant “kill.” Never having been in the Mob myself, I wouldn’t know. To many, 86 simply means “throw out,” as one would toss spoiled food in a restaurant kitchen.

In the wake of yet another unsuccessful assassination attempt on the President of the United States (but strangely, without reference to the *successful* assassinations of a Minnesota legislator, her husband and even the killings of their dogs, or the arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion), pundits decades my junior are declaring that we are in an unprecedented era of political violence.

Unprecedented?

When a shaken reporter covering the incident at the White House Correspondents Association dinner made that claim, my husband yelled at the TV: “When were you born?”

To the Justice Department as well as political pontificators, I offer two more numbers, numbers associated with violent turning points in my childhood, not to mention the history of our nation: 63 and 68.

63:

I was a 10-year-old sixth-grader when one afternoon in November, 1963, our class was studying our nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. We were working our way through time to April, 1865. One of our classmates, Lila, was attending school from home, since she was bedridden in a full body cast. The school district had set up a closed-circuit speaker system, with one end on her bedside table, and the other on our teacher’s desk. At the time, it was state-of-the-art communications technology.

Suddenly Lila interrupted the lesson, shouting, “The President’s been shot!” At first, we thought she and our teacher were performing a re-enactment of the Lincoln assassination. But our teacher’s shocked reaction showed us instantly that it was not.

Lila had a transistor radio, as most of us kids did then, and her mother placed it on the nightstand facing the speaker, volume up to the max. The class listened for more than an hour as the news of President John Kennedy’s assassination unfolded, and soon other classes, teachers, and even the principal crowded into our classroom to listen, too. Eventually school was dismissed, and students wandered home.

My contemporaries and I have remembered, all this time, exactly where we were when Kennedy was shot. (Even dementia patients remember the distant past better than what happened yesterday.) Even though we knew there had been other presidential assassinations in our history, we were stunned.

Two days later, as we watched the nonstop TV coverage of the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, the nation saw its first live televised murder, as accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot at point blank range while being transferred from one jail to another. My generation grew up with the image of his face, contorted in agony, burned into our brains.

The schools adjusted their curriculum to include recent events. “Assassination” became one of our spelling words. We learned about the assassinations not only of Lincoln, but of Presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley. We learned the song “White House Blues,” about the McKinley killing, in which Mrs. McKinley allegedly said,

“Look here, you rascal, see what you’ve done

You shot my husband and I’ve got your gun

I’m carrying you back to Washington…”

(It was only after McKinley’s death in 1901 that the U.S. Secret Service was ordered to provide protection for the President).

We learned about the legendary “Curse of Tippecanoe,” associated with Presidents elected in years divisible by 20, beginning with 1840’s William Henry Harrison, who died barely a month into his presidency, allegedly from an illness he caught by not wearing a hat at his chilly inauguration.

President Warren G. Harding (elected in 1920), died in office of a heart attack. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (elected in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944) died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And President Kennedy (elected in 1960) was shot to death.

68

Five years after the Kennedy assassination, I was in high school when the news broke one April evening that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had been gunned down by an assassin in Memphis. Again, the nation was shocked and fearful of what might happen next.

It didn’t take long for us to find out what was next. Weeks later, I was on summer break, visiting my aunt and uncle on their farm, where there was no TV or phone. We were already in bed that night when a neighbor came running down the lane, shouting, “Robert Kennedy’s been shot!” We woke up in disbelief: Another Kennedy shot? How could it have happened again?

Those too young to recall 1963 or 1968 may remember September, 1975, when, days apart, two female would-be assassins took aim at President Gerald Ford. Secret Service agents wrested the gun away from the first attacker before she could fire. The second attacker managed two shots that went wild as a bystander grabbed her arm. Ford was uninjured, but he began wearing a bulletproof coat at later events.

Or they might remember March 30, 1981, when, outside the same Washington Hilton Hotel where the most recent incident occurred, President Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously wounded. “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” he joked before being put under for surgery. Reagan’s survival and full recovery was said to have broken the 140-year-old Curse of Tippecanoe.

For years I studied the JFK assassination, trying to solve an insoluble mystery. During my research I learned that in the days before he was shot, posters with his photo and the words “Wanted for Treason” were being distributed in Ft. Worth and Dallas. Kennedy knew that, and he went anyway, despite warnings from, among others, the Rev. Billy Graham, who told him not to go because “something bad” might happen.

Kennedy did not call for those who distributed those hateful messages to be criminally charged. Nor did he sic the Justice Department on those who placed a full-page ad criticizing him in the local newspapers there. As it turned out, those notices were never connected to the assassination. Ironically, the Kennedys, along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Mrs. Johnson, Texas Governor John Connally and Mrs. Connally, were enjoying a warm welcome from the local crowds just before the fatal shots were fired.

Threats of violence, and calls for it, are also not unprecedented. What *is* unprecedented are the many such threats and calls made by President Donald Trump, during his campaigns and presidencies. Over the years he has made various calls for those who disagree with him to be beaten, shot, locked up, hanged, or otherwise executed.

A few examples:

1989: Trump took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the executions of the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five after DNA proved they were not guilty.

2015: (Re: protestors) “Just knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK, knock the hell. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”

2016: “I would bring back waterboarding. And I’d bring back a helluva lot worse than waterboarding.”

“I’d like to punch him in the face.”

2017: To New York police officers: “Please don’t be too nice.”

2018: “Any guy who can do a body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”

2019: He recommended a trench filled with snakes and alligators to catch migrants, and suggested “shooting them in the legs.”

2020: “Can’t you just shoot them?” about those protesting the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

2024: “If you had one really violent day…one rough hour, and I mean really rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately.”

Over the years he has also called those who disagree with him sick, evil, enemies, thugs, traitors, and more.

I’m old enough to remember the phrase “the loyal opposition.” Those words have never come from Trump’s mouth, or his social-media spewing fingers.

As I noted at the beginning, political violence is never appropriate. I condemn all violence, as well as threats of, and calls for violence. That includes such calls — unprecedented — from the President of the United States.

And the numbers 8647 are not a call to violence.

It’s no surprise that I’m not a fan of Riverside County Sheriff and Trump sycophant Chad Bianco. But right now, my heart goes out to him. ¡Pobrecito!

For years, Bianco has tried to position himself as Donald Trump’s Number One Fan. Whatever position Mr. MAGA took, Bianco contorted himself to match it. Even when Trump was convicted in New York of 34 felonies in 2024, our county’s top law-enforcement official not only didn’t blink, he doubled down, famously releasing a video in which he suggested, “It’s time to put a felon in the White House.” Suddenly the brash lawman was shamelessly in favor of crime.

After Trump’s victory, instead of focusing on the job he already had, Bianco dreamed of something bigger. (Actually, he had likely been dreaming of it long before that.) Vast as it is, Riverside County wasn’t big enough for him. He wanted to rule the entire state. (Maybe that way people would stop blaming him for all those pesky deaths in the county jail!) So in February 2025, Bianco became the first Republican candidate in the current gubernatorial race. He campaigned first wearing his sheriff’s uniform and badge, then clad in a close facsimile after he was sued by opponent Stephen Cloobeck for violating California Code Section 3206. (That code states that “No officer or employee of a local agency shall participate in political activities of any kind while in uniform.” Cloobeck has since dropped out.)

After more than a year in the race, Bianco has never polled as high as 20 percent. But even with such a small slice of the electoral pie, under California’s top-two “jungle” primary system, he stood a chance to help shut Democratic candidates out entirely in the June primary, leaving one of the nation’s bluest states with only red-hatted candidates to choose from. That would have been more likely if Trump had stayed mum on the contest, or at least acknowledged that he had a hard time choosing between the two Republicans.

More recently, Bianco made headlines for himself with a flamboyant bit of political theater, seizing ballots from last November’s Proposition 50 congressional redistricting election (which wasn’t even close!) and attempting an unprecedented recount months after the issue had been decided and upheld in court. After the state Supreme Court forced him to put a hold on the stunt, Bianco admitted there was no fraud in that election. Days ago, still desperately clinging to Trump’s election-denying coattails, Bianco suggested instead that the voting machines and system might have been “flawed,” claiming that “We have former poll workers saying there is massive fraud going on — but nobody is looking into it.” State election officials strongly disputed that claim, and charitably suggested that Bianco might not understand how the system worked.

Bianco might have expected a reward from his hero for his devoted blind loyalty and election-denying mimicry. He probably didn’t expect to be swatted down instead.

But after an Easter weekend debate between Bianco and fellow MAGA follower Steve Hilton, Trump ignored the sheriff and officially planted both feet onto the Hilton bandwagon.

There wasn’t a smidgen of ambiguity, and he even put it in ALL CAPS: “STEVE HILTON HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.” He didn’t even mention Bianco at all.

Put musically, Trump snubbed the sheriff. But he did not snub his former deputy.

Hilton, a former Trump advisor and Fox News commentator, promptly responded to thank Trump in his clipped British accent.

Yep, Mr. “America First” chose a candidate who is only half American — London-born Hilton holds dual British and American citizenship — over the all-American sheriff. Even shocked local Republicans pointed out that Hilton has only been an American citizen for a few years.

Caught by surprise, and still in uniform, Bianco stammered that the endorsement was “a little shocking, a little bit disappointing,” in his first TV interview after the story broke. But he bravely rallied, insisting that the endorsement didn’t matter because “it’s the people of California who matter most.”

Right. The people of California — you know, those people whose election he tried to undo months after it happened.

“You gotta say, it’s gotta hurt,” said NBC Palm Springs news personality Fred Roggin, cutting to the chase.

Did Bianco expect loyalty from the man to whom he had been so true? Aww. Bless his badge-emblazoned heart. He clearly didn’t know Trump as well as he thought he did.

However sorry we Democrats may feel for the sheriff-who-would-be-governor, this is not the time to indulge in sympathy. We have our own problem in the gubernatorial race: too many Democrats. Deflated and humiliated as he is, Bianco, with Hilton, could still shut out all eight Democrats in the top-two primary, unless we consolidate our support around one, or at least fewer, candidates.

It’s to our advantage that Democratic voters far outnumber Republicans in the Golden State. But when our candidates outnumber theirs, and none of them gains enough traction to make the top two, it’s definitely a disadvantage. Thanks to, of all people, Donald Trump, California Democrats now have a better chance of making it past the primary. Let’s not squander that chance.

Janet Dagley is a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party.

Dear California Democrats,

What if you received a ballot with only Republican candidates to choose from?

It happened in my state senate district more than a decade ago, and this year, with so much hanging in the balance, it might happen again in the race to succeed term-limited Governor Gavin Newsom.

That’s because since 2012, California has used a so-called jungle primary system in which the top two vote-getters in a primary make it onto the general election ballot, regardless of which party they belong to. It’s also, and more correctly, known as a top-two primary.

So far the race for governor is crowded, with nine Democratic candidates and two Republicans, one of the latter known all too well here in Riverside County: flamboyant MAGA Sheriff Chad Bianco. I’ve been saying for months now that Bianco didn’t stand a chance, since the highest he’d polled was a paltry 18 percent. But now it appears that Bianco might make it onto the fall ballot after all with even less support than that. In the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll, he’s currently running second (at 12 percent) to British-American politician Steve Hilton (with 14 percent), who served as an advisor to the UK’s conservative Prime Minister David Cameron before hopping the pond to become a Fox News host. The two are not only in a contest to become governor of the Golden State, but to outdo each other in their support for Donald Trump. Either would be a Democrat’s nightmare in Sacramento.

Meanwhile, we have nine, count em, nine Democratic gubernatorial candidates. As a committed Yellow Dog Democrat, I would vote for any of them in November. But the way things are going, I may not get the chance. I don’t even want to imagine a guy in a red hat taking command of our deep blue state: but that could happen if something doesn’t change, and fast.

The top Democrat in the polls is former Congresswoman Katie Porter, at 13 percent, followed by Congressman Eric Swalwell at 11 percent, and billionaire Tom Steyer, whose ad campaign you’ve almost certainly seen, at 10 percent. Tied with Steyer at 10 percent is “Don’t Know,” while the other six Democrats are polling so low that they are lumped together for a total of 30 percent, along with “Something Else,” giving each of the seven Democratic choices an average of less than 5 percent. One of those, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who entered the race just over a month ago, is said to have Silicon Valley money behind him, but its effect has yet to show up in the polls.

My fellow Democrats, we have to pull this together, and fast. The California Secretary of State is scheduled to release the list of certified candidates on March 26. That’s this month. Just days after that, the official voter information guide will be posted. We have no time to lose. Someone, maybe half a dozen someones, must be humble and gracious and downright pragmatic enough to admit that this is not their year to become governor. And they need to do it yesterday. Any of them who hesitates needs to look into the mirror and ask themselves if they want to be the one responsible for electing a Republican governor in a Democratic state.

The rest of us need to get behind whomever is left with our wholehearted and enthusiastic support. No one accuses Democrats of moving in lockstep, and it’s clear we are more of a milling crowd than a marching band. But we have to pull together or risk having either a Fox News host or a guy with a toy badge and his feet on the desk in the governor’s office. We’ve already had more than enough of the toy badge guy here in Riverside County. Promoting him to governor is not the way to get him out of that office, and the Fox News talking head is no better choice.

Many argue that one reason Democrats lost the presidency in the 2024 election is that someone didn’t muster the humility to bow out until it was much too late for his successor to gain the necessary traction. If you’re one of those candidates polling somewhere between “Don’t Know” and “Someone Else,” please remember that recent history and put your personal ambitions aside. And don’t just graciously step back to spend more time with your family. Throw your 5 to 10 percent support in with one of the candidates outpolling you, and work to get them into the top two of our jungle primary.

Because I don’t want to have to choose between two Republicans just because there were so many Democrats in contention.

Let’s outnumber Republicans at the polls, not in the race. We’re the majority in this state, and by far. Let’s not be outmaneuvered by the minority party.

Janet Dagley is a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party.

With all the real problems we have in this country, Republicans insist on going after a nonexistent one: the mythological noncitizen voter. That’s the stated reason for their push for new voter ID laws. But the real target of these efforts to make voting more difficult isn’t foreigners, documented or not. It’s women, married women in particular, along with college students, elderly voters, black and Native Americans, and poor people. Coincidentally, all those demographics are more likely to vote for candidates that would help make their lives better: i.e., Democrats.

Earlier this month in Palm Desert, a group who called themselves “patriots” held a dual-purpose rally against Proposition 50 and for Voter ID laws, both big Republican causes, once again peddling the tired old trope that foreigners are flooding across the border to vote in our elections.

Despite what Republicans and Fox News claim, voting by noncitizens happens so rarely that it could not possibly affect the outcome of an American election. Even the right-wing Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation acknowledge that fact. Even the authors of a disputed 2008 study on the subject insist that Fox and others who cite their work are exaggerating. If there is any argument among experts who have studied the subject, it’s whether the extremely rare cases of noncitizens voting is closer to zero or one-half of one percent. A widely cited 2016 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, for example, found only 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting, out of a total of 23.5 million, in 42 jurisdictions, or an estimated 0.0001 percent.

On the high side, a 2024 audit in Georgia found 20 suspected noncitizen voters, only 9 of whom appeared to have voted, out of 8.2 million registered voters, or a rate of 0.00024 percent: IF all 20 had actually voted. Other studies in other jurisdictions found similar rates. As the nonpartisan League of Women Voters points out, “a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to commit voter fraud.”

But what if someone pretends to be you at the polls? Such incidents are even more rare: according to the Brennan Center, the voter impersonation rate is 0.00004 percent of all ballots cast.

Yet just before the 2024 election, Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of Donald, sent out an email blast claiming that as many as 2.7 million “illegals” might vote in that contest. The president himself has claimed, without evidence, that “3 to 5 million” noncitizens voted in 2020. And at a press conference in May 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson put it this way: “We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.” At the same time, Johnson also claimed, also without evidence, that 16 million illegal immigrants had come into the country during the first three years of the Biden administration. Here in Riverside County, less than 100 miles from the border, you’d think we would have noticed such an influx, on our streets or in our stores. (For perspective, my own hometown in Tennessee had an influx of 75,000 people from other parts of the U.S. during World War 2 for the Manhattan Project, which created a regional shortage of food and other supplies. Just imagine the shortages here if that 16 million number were anywhere close to real.)

Voting by noncitizens is already prohibited by law, and there are severe penalties, including incarceration and deportation, for violators.

Undocumented immigrants historically tend to avoid any contact with the government out of fear: not only do they not attempt to vote, but they avoid reporting to police when they are victims of crimes.

Today’s Republicans may be pulling numbers out of the air, but they didn’t invent the “illegals are voting” trope. That one dates back to the late 1800s, when waves of “swarthy” non-blond immigrants arrived from southern Europe. Before that, few paid any attention to whether voters were citizens. And going back to Colonial America and the early years of the United States, noncitizens were not only allowed but encouraged to vote, since Americans were fiercely opposed to taxation without representation. Of course, in those days, the only people allowed to vote in any case were wealthy white male landowners, citizens or not.

Why do Voter ID laws disproportionately affect the groups I mentioned?

Let’s start with married women. According to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of women in opposite-sex marriages take their husband’s last name when they marry. Another 5 percent add his name to theirs with a hyphen. That means in order to prove they were born in the United States, 86 percent of married women have to produce not one document, but at least two, since their name doesn’t match their birth certificate. And that’s if they only marry once. But two-thirds of divorced people marry again, also according to Pew research. Obviously — or as Mike Johnson might say, “intuitively” — the older a woman is, the more likely she is to have married more than once, as some may become widowed, and even failed marriages take time. So women with multiple marriages who took their spouse’s name each time would have to produce a chain of documents.

Those who insist that all voters should be required to show a photo ID seem to assume everybody has one. Not so. That same 2023 League of Women Voters report found that 18 percent of U.S. citizens over age 65, 16 percent of Latino voters, 25 percent of black voters, and 15 percent of low-income Americans have no photo ID. Rural and Native Americans born at home or on reservations may not have the necessary paperwork to acquire such an ID. College students are likely to have a student ID, but that doesn’t qualify under most voter ID laws.

According to Ballotopedia, voter ID laws in 36 states — 24 of which require a photo ID — have already disenfranchised millions. In Texas alone, more than 600,000 voters were kicked off the rolls in just the first year after its voter ID law went into effect. And that’s just one example.

All that makes Voter ID laws just a 21st Century form of Jim Crow: state and local laws in the late 19th and 20th centuries that reinforced white dominance and racial segregation. The landmark 1964 Voting Rights Act was intended to stop that discrimination, but recent court rulings have diluted its power, and could weaken it further when the Supreme Court rules on the Louisiana case it heard this month.

Keep all this in mind the next time a Republican tells you that if you have to show a photo ID to buy alcohol, you should have to do the same to vote. Voting is a civic right; buying a drink is not. And despite what Trump said in 2018, and again in 2019 and 2023, nobody needs to show a photo ID to buy groceries.

By Janet Dagley, a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party

What’s a wallet biopsy? It’s when a sick or injured person shows up at the emergency room and the first examination isn’t of their body: it’s a check of their wallet. Before Reagan signed the bill that banned it, emergency rooms routinely checked patients’ wallets to find out if they had adequate health insurance. If they didn’t, they either didn’t get treated, or received just enough care to stabilize them before they were shown the door.

Now Republicans want to require emergency room arrivals to prove their U.S. citizenship or be turned away, no matter how dire their conditions. If they succeed, then all Americans will need bigger wallets because we’ll have to carry our passports with us at all times. I would wager that most of the people making that demand have never even had a passport, since they’ve probably never even left the country.

I’m going to give you just a few examples of why reviving that cruel notion is a bad idea for all concerned.

Example 1: circa 2013. A jogger in Palm Desert was hit by an out-of-control truck. The driver had died at the wheel, and though she tried to get out of the way, the truck hit her. She was dressed only in her jogging clothes, and carried no identification. Few of us do in that situation. When the ambulance brought her to Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, she was treated immediately even though the hospital had no idea who she was or whether she was insured. Thanks to the excellent care she received, the woman recovered completely from her injuries. And the hospital learned her identity and insurance information in plenty of time.

Example 2: Circa 1971. A young newlywed college student whose new health insurance had not yet taken effect suffered a miscarriage and was taken to the emergency room. After a routine wallet biopsy, the staff checked her vital signs, advised her to see her personal physician, and sent her away. Fortunately she survived and had no complications. A classmate in the same situation at about the same time, also uninsured, was not so fortunate: she was sent home, where she suffered a hemorrhage and did not survive.

Example 3: circa 1994. I was teaching English in a foreign country when I felt debilitating abdominal pains. My neighbor took me to the hospital. My application for a residency permit was still being processed, and I had no insurance. I was treated anyway, and my neighbors and the hospital worked together to get me insured immediately, with no waiting period for pre-existing conditions — no one in that country had even heard of such a thing. The surgery doctors performed there saved my life, and it cost me a total of about $20 for the insurance.

Example 4: Circa 2010, just before the Affordable Care Act took effect. A friend who had her own business couldn’t buy health insurance at any price, since she wasn’t eligible for group policies. When she became desperately ill, a friend who was a social worker advised her that if she went to the emergency room, she could not be turned away. She did just that, and was not only treated but admitted. Since she was a citizen, she was eligible for Medicaid and other assistance that ensured her hospitalization was paid for. If she had been an undocumented immigrant, that wouldn’t have been the case, then or now, since (despite what Republicans claim), no federal funds can be used for anything more than emergency, stabilizing care for undocumented immigrants. My friend’s story did not have a happy ending. If she had become ill after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, she might have received preventive care or an earlier diagnosis that could have saved her life. Instead, by the time she arrived at the emergency room, cancer had spread so far through her body that she died a few months later.

Wallet biopsies, whether for passports or insurance cards, are simply a callous, cruel, bad idea. Even Ronald Reagan knew that. But today’s Republican party has moved so far to the right that even the Reagan they revere would seem like a bleeding-heart liberal to them now.

– Janet Dagley is a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party

Unlike the ballots for most elections, this one doesn’t include long lists of candidates for various offices and issues. This time we’re voting on just a single issue: Proposition 50, which authorizes temporary changes to our state’s congressional districts in 2026. This is in direct response to the unprecedented Trump-directed redistricting by the Texas legislature that gerrymanders the Lone Star State to carve out five more likely Republican districts. Proposition 50 would create five additional likely Democratic districts in California, but only temporarily until the next census in 2030, when the state would revert to districts drawn by a nonpartisan commission.

Historically, midterm elections tend to favor the party that is out of power. That’s why Trump is so intent on meddling and demanding rare mid-cycle redistricting. If that trend holds, Trump fears that he won’t be able to keep ramming through his ham-handed radical changes to our government, our society, and our nation’s place in the world, changes that only a small minority of Americans want. It’s no wonder he wants to make voting more difficult, and keeps talking about not even having elections.

We’ve all seen the billionaire-sponsored anti-Prop-50 ads, in our mailboxes and on our televisions, arguing that California should let people instead of politicians decide. What the ad sponsors don’t realize is that the core of their argument can be used just as easily, if not more effectively, to support Proposition 50.

In Texas, for example, politicians, not voters, did the redistricting. Texas voters were never asked. Instead, the politicians there simply did what Donald Trump told them to. The people didn’t get to decide there.

In Missouri, which followed in Texas’s footsteps, the legislature, not the voters, once again followed Trump’s marching orders and gerrymandered their districts to favor Republicans. The politicians in the Show-Me State never bothered to ask the voters what they wanted.

Congressional districts are traditionally redrawn only once a decade, using the latest numbers from the Constitutionally-mandated U.S. Census. As states gain or lose population, they also gain or lose Congressional districts, since the number of representatives in the House has been capped for more than a century. The only exception was in 1959, when the newly admitted states of Alaska and Hawaii each got a single representative, raising the fixed total from 433 to 435.

From the time the Constitution took effect in 1789 until the Census in 1910, the number of Congressional seats grew steadily. But after the 1920 Census, Congress couldn’t agree on how many seats to add, and they argued about it for most of that decade. Instead, they eventually passed the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act, which meant no more seats would ever be added to the 48 states that then made up the nation. Instead, the number of people represented by a single Congressperson rose from about 210,000 in 1920 to about 760,000 in 2020. Compare that to 1790, when the members of the first House of Representatives each represented about 35,000 people. Even that is more people per district than the 30,000 that the Constitution had originally specified. The founders’ original intention was that while senators would represent entire states, House districts would be small enough for representatives to stay in close touch with their constituents. Did they even dream that those 13 original states, with a population of under 4 million, would eventually grow to our current 50 states and nearly 350 million?

Californians have argued for decades over redistricting, until 2010, when the Citizens Redistricting Commission was established. But the designers of that nonpartisan commission did not anticipate the radical actions of Trump and his followers, actions that threw generations of precedent into the wastebin. Once the Republican-dominated Texas legislature obeyed Trump’s command, nonpartisanship was left without a leg to stand on. Californians now have to decide whether to roll over and let Trump have his way, or stand up and fight. It’s no surprise that even some members of the most recent commission stood with Governor Gavin Newsom as he announced the plan for Proposition 50, and spoke in favor of it.

As soon as Proposition 50 made the November ballot, Republican megadonor Charles Munger Jr. poured $10 million into advertising against it, insisting that — as the ads put it — people, not politicians, should decide. Strangely, he didn’t spend a cent in Texas or Missouri to make the same argument there. In Republican-dominated states, Mr. Munger apparently has no problem letting politicians instead of voters make those decisions. That fact speaks even louder than his money.

As a person, and not a politician, I intend to use the power of my ballot to vote YES on Proposition 50, and I hope you will too. I don’t want Donald Trump, or politicians in Texas, Missouri, or anywhere else to decide who controls our Congress. I want California voters like me to decide how we are represented in Washington. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.

Janet Dagley is a proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party

With apologies to Mom, I’m going to discuss both religion and politics, to make the point that the two must be separate if we are to maintain a free society. If that makes you angry, then Mom’s ghost can taunt me with “I told you so’s.” But we must talk about it before it’s too late.

The separation of church and state, one of the founding principles of our nation, is now under threat as never before from a political movement that calls itself “Christian Nationalism,” a movement whose hold on our society and government is growing stronger by the day.

I put the words in quotes because Christian Nationalists’ versions of both Christianity and patriotism bear little resemblance to either the teachings of Jesus or the principles of our nation’s founding as I learned them at my mother’s knee.

More than a hundred years before the United States declared independence, refugees from state religion in Europe fled to these shores to create a place where religion was an individual choice, not a mandate from the government. At the time, it was a novel concept.

Some (but not all) of America’s founders were Christians, but even they didn’t agree on any particular version of that religion.

They did agree that the newly formed government had no business telling its citizens what to believe or how to practice their chosen faith.

Yet today’s “Christian Nationalists” claim that the United States is a Christian nation, and has been from the start. They insist that we must abandon separation of church and state, and become a theocracy instead.

They are mistaken, to put it politely, or less politely, they are lying, to themselves and to the rest of us.

According to the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Christian Nationalism is defined as “an ideology that desires a close fusion of a particular expression of Christianity with American civic life. It demands our government, at all levels, vigorously defend this ideology as central to our national identity, public policy, and social belonging.”

Those who are trying to reunite religion and government today have no memory of the time when they were one and the same.

Throughout Europe in the 17th Century, church and state were essentially the same institution. If an individual didn’t happen to believe what the government told them to, they had to keep it to themselves or be punished with fines, imprisonment, or even death.

In England, for example, the state religion ricocheted back and forth between Catholic and Anglican so rapidly that no ordinary citizen could keep up with the current monarch’s preferences, and many were persecuted or even executed when they couldn’t or wouldn’t adopt the government’s faith-du-jour.

These Christian Nationalists don’t remember when there was but a single state religion — Anglican — in the American colonies, when everyone had to pay taxes to support that sect’s churches and clergy. They don’t remember that people like my 6th great-grandfather, Baptist minister John Alderson of Virginia, were jailed for conducting wedding ceremonies outside the Anglican Church. Nor do they recall when American Catholics weren’t allowed to have guns, and Jews weren’t allowed, period.

Christian Nationalists haven’t even considered what a gamble they’re taking. Even if their movement were to succeed, their own particular version of Christianity might not end up being the one sect that becomes state-sanctioned. Then — too late — they might see that without freedom of religion, there is no freedom at all.

I am convinced that these so-called Christians are reading from a different Bible than the one I was given as a child. For example, mine says, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Theirs seems to have been edited to say only, “Judge!”

I hadn’t even reached kindergarten when I learned to sing, “Jesus loves you.” Their version is more like, “Jesus hates you,” if you’re not of their preferred demographic.

They depict Jesus as gun-toting, angry, and intolerant. The Jesus I was introduced to as a child not only went through the world unarmed, but succumbed to anger only once, and that was at greedy money-changers desecrating a temple. He associated with the outcasts of society, and treated them with respect. Their Jesus, unlike the biblical figure, looks down at anyone who isn’t a white, male, heterosexual natural-born citizen — preferably a wealthy one. They dream of a world where all the rest of us are kept in our place as lesser beings. And they call that a Christian society.

Ironically, they are in thrall not to a religious figure, but a man who laughs at them as he breaks every single one of their precious commandments, because he promises to give them the power they crave even as he consolidates his own.

They value superstition over science, and we see that influence in real time these days as our government abandons decades, even centuries of meticulous research in favor of the opinions of uninformed autocrats. They dismiss the life-saving miracle of vaccines, insist that climate change isn’t happening, and would rather destroy medicines taxpayers have already paid for than give them to people in other lands who desperately need them.

As their influence on our society has ballooned, I’ve often wondered just how far back in time they intend to take us. To the 1970s, when women weren’t allowed to have credit cards? To the 1950s, when black people had to ride in the back of the bus and use separate water fountains? The 1920s, when women weren’t allowed to vote, or the 1850s, when black people were considered property?

Finally I realized that they intend to take us even farther back, beyond the Bible’s New Testament, with its teachings of equality and forgiveness, to the harsh, striated, inflexible society of its Old Testament instead.

Barely a year ago, Democrats nationwide were chanting, “We’re not going back! We’re not going back!” Now look at how far back we’ve already gone, and how much further we are likely to regress if we don’t stand up to them.

What can we do to stop this slide into a hateful past that we worked so hard to rise above?

We can reject their perverted definition of Christianity.

We can remind them, and ourselves, that while they have the right to practice their beliefs, they do not have the right to impose them on others. Not yet, anyway.

We can stop letting them define patriotism, and stop letting them claim our flag and other national icons as their own partisan symbols.

We can exercise our own freedom of speech before they snatch it and our other rights away.

Or we can keep silent, out of fear they might turn their sights on us, and let them continue to take over a nation that has maintained its people’s freedom for 250 years by keeping an all-too-fragile wall between religion and politics.

For more background on the threat of Christian Nationalism, check out the Riverside County Democratic Party’s new podcast, Hot Topics, which takes on that very subject in its premier episode on the new United America Network.

– Janet Dagley, proud American, proud member of the Riverside County Democratic Party.

Imagine your son is booked into jail for a minor offense — maybe it’s a DUI, maybe he got into a bar fight. He’s scared, but it’s supposed to be temporary. You expect to hear from him in a day or two.

Hours later, you’re told he’s dead. The jail says it was suicide, but there’s no video, and no guard reports are released. No disciplinary action. You ask questions. You’re told it’s under review. Then you hear nothing. No one calls back.

Imagine you report domestic violence. A neighbor. A spouse. A person with power in your community. But the sheriff’s office doesn’t investigate. Or if they do, the report gets buried. The suspect is a campaign donor, or someone with the right political affiliation. You press. You’re dismissed.

Imagine your child is in school when you get a visit from ICE. You didn’t know your license plate was scanned. You didn’t know that scan would be shared — illegally — with federal agents. You didn’t know your sheriff was ignoring California sanctuary laws and quietly handing over data that could get you deported.

Now imagine there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Because the man in charge of it all — the sheriff — can investigate or ignore as he pleases. He controls who gets arrested, who gets protected, and who gets heard. And unless the voters kick him out every four years, there’s no one else who can stop him.

This is not just a theory. This is how it works in Riverside County. And the system itself makes it worse. For instance, did you know that in 48 of California’s 58 counties, including Riverside, the sheriff also serves as the coroner? Yes, the very same person who runs the jail is also the person who determines what caused a death inside it. There is no automatic external review, no independent medical examiner. The sheriff’s office literally signs its own death certificates.

This is more than a conflict of interest. It’s a license for impunity.

And under Sheriff Chad Bianco, the results have been devastating. In-custody deaths are up. People have died from preventable medical issues. People have taken their own lives after being held in isolation with no support. One man was murdered because he was wrongly placed in the same unit as a violent offender.

But the person who got to decide whether mistakes were made… was the same person in charge of making them. Seriously. There’s no meaningful oversight, no state commission, no board with real teeth. In Riverside County, the sheriff is the top cop, the jailer, and the coroner — often acting as judge and jury before a case ever reaches court.

And the danger doesn’t stop there. Because Bianco isn’t just defending that system. He’s doubling down on it.

His beliefs align closely with those of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) — a radical group that claims sheriffs are the highest legal authority in their counties, even above the state or federal government. They teach that a sheriff can choose which laws to enforce — that if they believe a law violates the Constitution, they not only can ignore it, they are duty-bound to do so.

Bianco hasn’t formally joined CSPOA. But his actions speak volumes. He’s refused to enforce public health orders during the pandemic, calling them “government overreach”; he’s facilitated data sharing with ICE, skirting state laws designed to protect immigrant communities; he’s stonewalled civil rights investigations, labeling them political attacks; and he’s used his platform to spread dangerous narratives about unrest and lawlessness, painting himself as a lone defender against “chaos.”

This is not the behavior of a law enforcement officer. It’s the behavior of a man who sees himself as the law.

And now, Chad Bianco wants a promotion. He’s running for governor of California — a job that would put him in charge of the state’s law enforcement agencies, the National Guard, emergency services, and more.

What happens when a man who already resists oversight gets even more power? What happens when unchecked authority is scaled up from one county to an entire state?

That’s not just a political question. It’s a moral one. It’s about the kind of state we want to live in — and the kind of leaders we trust to serve it.

Because if Chad Bianco already sees himself as the ultimate authority in Riverside County…what will he do when he doesn’t have to ask anyone’s permission at all?

Michael Temlin

Riverside County Democratic Party Communications Committee