Inside Golden State Politics

The Half-Time Show

• Nancy Boyarsky

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We examine the still-unfinished California primary election.  We look at the attacks by the Trump administration on the news magazine "60 Minutes" and the rest of the mainstream news media.

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Welcome to another episode of Inside Golden State Politics. I'm Bill Boyarsky, former city editor and columnist for The Los Angeles Times, and with me is our producer director, Nancy Boyarsky

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And I'm Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst and self-styled media maven, coming to you from a trip down memory lane, revisiting how New Jersey voters cast their ballots when I a Jersey voter ago. usually knew the election results weeks before day. In fact, the greatest cultural shock I faced when I moved from Jersey to California was not knowing well in advance who was going to win the next election. All you had to do toggle a single lever the voting booth, and you could instantly vote a straight party line. Here's what that called county line ballot design work. Now, county party-endorsed candidates from president on down, way down, like dog catcher down, were placed in the same row or column of the ballot. Unendorsed candidates often found themselves in what was called ballot Now, what's important to remember is that these ballot placements often determined the election outcome, giving the party leaders and the pols, if you will, enormous sway because of their endorsements, helped political bosses cement their power in New Jersey politics. Why did I drag you on this shallow dive into Jersey electoral politics? I am tired of TV anchors and talking heads bemoaning why the world's fourth-largest economy, California, can't count votes efficiently. We can, we do, and we won't be thrown under the bus by Trump and his acolytes are trying to jumpstart their next attack on, quote, "election fraud," end quote. Over to you, Bill

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Sherry, having covered many a California election I do think it takes too long to count those votes, and I know there's a lot of explanations, which we will discuss as the year goes on, why this happens and how it can be improved. And there are some election reformers who say the process can be improved, but that's neither here nor there today.

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it's here. It's there or

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Because

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believe me

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today we're engaged in that peculiar California process of waiting for the final returns. Now the interesting one we can talk about, because we do know there's a result, is for mayor of Los Angeles. Karen Bass has earned a place as one of the top two finishers, and she will be in the runoff against

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Somebody.

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pro- possibly Pratt. Who knows? But she will be in the runoff. How did she come out of this? She came out of this a weakened candidate. Everything bad happened to her during this campaign. She was weakened by the Palisades fire, the loss of life and the huge loss, of homes. She was weakened by her slow confused response to that. She was just not on top of it. And now the question is, now, what's she gonna do? She's got three or four months to improve her position so she is elected to another term. And I think there's some things she's gonna have to do. She's gonna have to have a do-over of her administration. She's gotta start from the beginning. Clean house, get new people, get new programs, new ideas,

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In four months?

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New ideas. Seize better control of the bureaucracy which had run away from her.

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What do you mean? What do you mean ran away?

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and these are all things she

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Bill.

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she's gotta, she's gotta... no,

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I'm confused. I'm confu-

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No, you don't mean to interrupt me. I know you don't. I know you don't mean to.

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Because

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I know you were gonna let me finish my

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No, no, no,

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piddling little thought. So I will finish my piddling little thought. So in other words, she's going to have to start over, new start new beginnings work like hell and she's only got till November to do it

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Yeah, that's the point. Not a whole hell of a lot can get done November. One of the reasons being she's got to get out there and talk to people and be seen and be seen as getting things done. But first of all, what needs to be done between now and November will depend on is in the second slot in the runoff, whether it's Pratt or Raman. She's gonna... pratt is way to her right, is way to her left. Where does she go? Does she stay down the middle? Does she reach out to one side and possibly alienate the other side? We really do have to know what the two look like, who they are. And the reality of it is, quite frankly, if she has not done what she needs to do by now, it's gonna be very difficult to recreate new Paul by

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What was very interesting and important was the coalition she put together by election day, and it's quite a coalition. She had the police union, she had the Downtown Business Association, which was financed by a big contribution from Airbnb. She had civil rights groups, she had immigrant rights groups, she had the Democratic Party. She put them all together and she weathered the strong anti-incumbent tide to to get in there for the runoff.

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Yeah

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That's the coalition

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still only got 35% of the vote. How did that happen? That's not a good sign for an incumbent

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That's why she needs to do a redo of her administration. She came out of this election, this primary election, she came out of it as a weakened candidate

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Define what you mean by weaken. What constitutes

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She's not as strong as she was four years ago when she w- was elected mayor over Caruso. She's not as strong. She admitted her failures most notably her failure on the fire and her unfortunate choice of going to Africa on a diplomatic mission. She admitted her mistakes. She knows she's in trouble.

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Of course

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She's not gonna have an easy run no matter whether it's Pratt no matter who it is It's gonna be tough for her

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Yeah, and for good reason, if you think about it. Poll after poll, interview after interview with Los Angeles voters seems to indicate that they're not happy for a whole lot of reasons, some of which you have already listed. It ain't over it's over, and I'm not about

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As Lee and I and Yogi Berra perceptively put it a couple of weeks ago, it ain't over till it's over, right?

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But how it ends will obviously have a rather large impact on where Angeles goes. you made another interesting point. The mayor is the mayor, but there is also the city council. And there seems to be by and large, an acceptance of incumbents, some of whom are democratic socialists, have the backing of DSA. It's gonna be interesting to see the relationship between the mayor and a city council that sort of looks like it's moving to the left, whomever the le- the mayor turns out to be. There may be an absolute deadlock, and I don't think whoever is mayor is gonna have an easy road with the council

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No, not at all. Nor most important, will not have an easy road with the electorate because if it's Bass, it'll be a much m- narrower victory than it was four years ago. A sign of people saying, they've had it, they want something new, and if this is the best we have, I'll vote for her, but I don't really like it. You're gonna get a lot of that feeling and a lot of people who are being polled will give you that answer, too. Governor, that's too bad we don't have enough results to at this date to talk about it. Xavier Becerra, former congressman, former secretary of of health, education and welfare is right up there and he is gonna have to fight for a number one or two spots, don't you think?

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Who? Becerra? No, I think Becerra is in the runoff. and it looks to me... again, we don't know. There are hundreds of thousands of votes in California yet to be counted, so it's impossible to determine whether Styer, who is currently in third place, or Hilton, who is in second place and is closer to Becerra in numbers than Styer is to Hilton. We don't know the, what the card is gonna be going in to November. But we do know at this point, and again, it's at this point, and there are still hundreds of thousands of votes to be counted, Becerra is at roughly 35%, and Hilton 30%, and Styer, for his record-breaking personal expenditure of nearly quarter of a billion do- dollars, is at a much lower third place. So it's gonna be a runoff, obviously, at this point in time, it looks like it's gonna be Javier Becerra the Democrat, versus Steve Hilton, the Republican. Democrats are no longer sweating the possibility of a double Republican runoff. Democrats are, I think, getting settled that there will not be a double Democratic runoff

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Do you think that the fact that Xavier Becerra is a Latino, a longtime Latino leader and longtime Latino candidate is going to help him in an electorate that is strongly Latino? Although there's always a question of turnout when it comes to Latino

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That's right.

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voting.

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right

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Always, always-- There's always that question

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Every election comes down turnout. large it is, whose voters turn out. So you can't answer that question. And you have to remember that Latinos don't vote in however, let's not forget that as the governor's race goes Steve Hilton perceived to be a conservative Republican. I think he is a conservative Republican. I think this election, as well as perhaps the mayor's race, is going to have that secret sauce of how much Californians hate Donald Trump. And I don't think it's gonna help the Republican candidate in either race. But, again, it looks like the turnout isn't as significantly high as it ought to be for Democrats to breathe easily. Yeah. The issues are what is going to determine the voter's choice

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Yes. The issues and the ICE raids on immigrant communities which really went through the city and caused incredible hard feelings and which really set the stage for even worse action by ICE in in the Midwest in, in Minnesota. Those ICE raids are going to have an impact, I think. I,

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Yeah,

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I,

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And should have an impact

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not gonna forget that.

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Hardly.

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yeah. So

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fact, it's i- it's ironic, Bill, because I've been thinking about that, and I actually thought that the criticisms that followed Karen Bass the fires would mute somewhat because she s- stood strongly against Donald Trump and the ICE raids. that s- doesn't seem to have been enough to erase the problems. Her work after the fires began to follow her. Yeah. Wow, those fires... And again, how could they not so vivid for the citizens of Los Angeles, even though Bass was probably, in her approach to ICE and the raids, strong against the Trump administration. It's not enough to erase the criticism of her behavior during and after Palisades fires

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that will be the issue, the two issues as we go on in the next few months talking about the mayor's election. Her performance after the fire her demeanor after the fire her kind of deer in the headlights appearances television at a loss, comparing that to the way she turned her motorcade around, headed right out to MacArthur Park and confronted the Trump administration's ICE raid of of MacArthur Park in the strongest possible terms. Those are gonna be the two issues. And I do think that just common sense, I'm not using any polls, common sense tells me that her behavior, her strong stand on ICE is going to overcome her failure on the fire. That's just my thought. I don't have any evidence to prove that except my instinct

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They will be important issues, but again, I think that what will m- behavior more powerfully are issues like the cost of housing, the in... the lack of affordable housing, homelessness. The issues that face Los Angeles now, I think, will influence the voter's decision. they should. And they should. LA is a very difficult place to survive in if you really look at it, to live in. And I think will have great impact, and it always does. Remember, it's the economy, stupid, and that, that maintains for offices from city council on up to the President of the United States

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w- as I said, we're gonna go into this as the weeks go on. And I'm critical of the slow count, and I think it could be done faster, and I've always thought that. W- what do you think about that?

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What do you mean what do I think

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The slow count.

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that?

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Why does it take so long to get the

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Partially

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results from

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the law

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California? Why is, why are we a national joke?

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Because people hate California. That's part of it. Anything that looks like we're not making it, everybody else likes to giggle about. The reality is we are a significantly larger electorate, one. Two, the process is a matter of state law, and there... And whether or not each candidate... i'm sorry, each county can count the vote with any kind of both speed and accuracy. I... we're just so into instant gratification. It's always been slow, and we've never had the criticism that we are having now, and I think part of that is because of what's coming from the Trump administration and from Washington, DC. I can recall one election... the ballots go are about, 40 minutes from downtown LA, and in one election, there was so much fog that the helicopters which delivered the ballots to Downey couldn't, could take off, and they had to transfer the ballots to cars and drive down, and that slowed the counting of the ballots. I, for the life of me, think it's a fake issue. Sorry. I'm willing to wait if it's gonna be an accurate count, if it's gonna be trusted, and I'm... and if indeed it, there are reasons beyond that we don't even know about that preclude instant total. I kinda like the fact that I don't know how this election's gonna end six weeks before it's even held. So you're not gonna get me to criticize slowness by which the count is done. Humongous amounts of candidates, humongous amounts of voters regulations that require a deliberative count of the ballot. Nah. We're just... no, we are just into instant gratification in everything, I don't think voting is one of those dynamics that can be done very quickly without being inaccurate. It just happens. It... That's what happens. Sorry.

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Then we just have to we will just have to accept it. I think it'll be interesting to explore some of the ideas that are being bandied about ways that the count can be speeded up a bit. But we'll talk about that later. Something that's overshadowed, the election in some ways it's the fate of a television show, 60 Minutes.

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Yeah

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60 Minutes has been on for decades, and it originated the idea of the magazine investigative show broken up into s- deeply reported segments. And it's been so well done that it's become a force in American life. S- a f- a force so powerful im- so strong that it's attracted the attention of President Trump, who made it number one in his list of press hatreds, and is doing everything he can to get it off the air to wreck 60 Minutes to hope that it's never seen again, to replace its ownership, its cast, its directors. It's a bad thing. And I

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it's a

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think it...

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thing. It's a terrible thing because it... i'm not so sure it overshadows where we go as a result of the election, but it certainly it's of equal importance. Because what happened was that Scott Pelley, who had, he's a... I hate to use the word icon, but that's what he is in terms of journalism. He joined CBS in 1989, and he's been on 60 Minutes for 20 years. he was fired because he criticized management that was given the direction to come in and tilt 60 Minutes a little bit more to the center. What has been attacked, not surprisingly, this has been attacked before by the Trump administration, is the First Amendment, is freedom of the press. That is a foundation of America, of our society. and it's like it's the Stephen Colbert of the newsroom. S- everything that's, that CBS has been doing lately leaves you with the perception that they're kowtowing to Trump and the FCC and the administration Washington. It's wrong. To me, it's appalling. It's disgusting, if you would like it.

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You know what it does is it it handicaps the journalists. There are, there were,

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Of

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Were the stars of 60 Minutes three, four who've been fired. The staff has been cut down to nothing. There's the impact, a direct impact on CBS and the network and the news operation, the newsroom. But it spreads around the whole industry, the whole journalism business.

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It's there.

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And,

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there

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And it spreads to all kinds of news operations. If you're a reporter, especially if you're an investigative reporter, you're going to think twice before you take on the Trump administration. And I'd say take on Trump. I don't like the word administration. It makes it too anonymous. I There's one person here to blame, and that's the president, President Donald Trump

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argue that too, because it, as was the case with Karen Bass and her trucking off to Ghana, where was the staff in indicating, "You can't do that. No, you gotta stay. There's a warning of a fire." It's the same thing. There is no one in the Trump administration who could argue Donald Trump out of doing what he did, I gather. And that's, that's some of the blame always

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I think that,

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with-

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he's hired a staff, he's surrounded himself with people who agree with him. It's not like

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made it on purpose. Sure

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it's not like there's a dissenting voice. It's that anyone who is a journalist is the enemy and subject to

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the enemy of the

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really vicious public attacks,

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yeah. But that, there's nobody there in the White House, I guess anywhere, certainly not in the cabinet, if you've ever watched the I Love You Donald Trump segment of cabinet meetings, that will say, "Back off. This is foundational. This is existential. This is the First Amendment. This is the Constitution." And that's the way he wants it. That's the way he shaped his administration. Let's not... The blame lies with a lot of people. Obviously, it's the principal, the president, who in the end is responsible for the actions of his administration

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I think he's, wants to be responsible. He glories in it. He wants to stop the networks. He wants to stop local news.

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And once you save

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he wants a Stalin, Putin-like control over, the news media. And he attacks the journalists in a very personal way in public. And the journalists are I think at a loss in how to deal with that at this point. Nobody's gonna say, "Oh, shut up, sir."

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You don't have to say, "Oh, shut up, sir," but You should be able, and you should want to tell the principal in the office as the downside of whatever decision he is thinking about or she is thinking about making. But that's not,

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I've been thinking about what is the harm to the general public to the viewing audience? 60 Minutes was very popular one of the most popular news shows on the air.

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The most popular

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well produced had a lot of impact. What is the impact on the public on the family settling down to their television set on Sunday afternoons, Sunday evenings, and watching CBS's 60 Minutes? What are they going to lose? And what are they going to lose by this whole anti media drive by President Trump? Is it gonna affect the kind of news they're gonna be getting about their

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Oh yeah

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cities, their counties their state? And then once they don't have that news, will it affect their voting patterns? This could be the first step in the in the destruction of democracy

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It's not the first step. We're well into it, my dear. It's part of what's going on, and we're moving very strongly, I think, to basically, shall I say, ignoring, not we, but those in power ignoring the constitutional framework of our democracy. That-- It's as clear as day to me

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It's gonna be a sad but stimulating pursuit that we'll be embarking on in the next several months including the f- the fate of the media in our agenda. Sherry, good talking to you

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Yeah. All right, everybody. Cheers. See you next week

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See you next week.

squadcaster-10ec_3_06-04-2026_103532

Bye-bye

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Bye-bye