The issue is especially prominent this election cycle, led by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who has put $213 million of his own money into his campaign for governor. But the broader trend extends far beyond the governor’s race. More than 200 California candidates have collectively contributed about $250 million of their personal wealth to their campaigns this year, according to a CalMatters analysis of campaign finance records.

That total is roughly eight times higher than the amount self-funded by candidates during the last gubernatorial election in 2022. It also marks the highest level of candidate self-financing since California began keeping digital campaign finance records in 1999.

The last California candidate to approach Steyer’s level of personal spending was Republican Meg Whitman, who contributed more than $140 million to her unsuccessful 2010 campaign for governor, a record at the time.

Other statewide candidates have spent heavily on themselves in past elections, though at far lower levels. Steve Poizner put $14 million into his 2006 campaign for insurance commissioner. Eleni Kounalakis spent more than $8 million in her 2018 bid for lieutenant governor. Yvonne Yiu contributed nearly $6 million to her 2022 campaign for controller.

The surge is also showing up in races farther down the ballot. Candidates for state Senate have put nearly $4 million of their own money into campaigns this cycle, the highest total recorded for the chamber and more than double the $1.7 million candidates contributed 20 years ago. Congressional candidates in California have contributed more than $29 million to their own campaigns, the most in any cycle over the last two decades.

Some of the largest self-funded congressional campaigns in state history are taking place this year. Two of the five California congressional candidates who have spent the most of their own money in the past 20 years are on the ballot this cycle.

In the race to replace Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco-based district, Democrat Saikat Chakrabarti has contributed nearly $9 million to his campaign, the most ever by a congressional primary candidate in California. In the North Bay, Eric Jones has put more than $5 million of his own money into his campaign against fellow Democrat Mike Thompson.

Chakrabarti has argued that his personal spending is a response to the large sums being spent against him. He said using his own resources allows him to avoid spending his campaign seeking money from major donors and later owing them political favors.

Jeremy Mack, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Phoenix Project, said the increase in self-funding reflects a campaign finance system that has become more expensive since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which loosened restrictions on outside political spending by corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

The result, Mack said, is that large-scale spending by outside groups often pressures candidates to raise or spend even more to remain competitive. In California, he said, business interests, real estate groups and law enforcement unions have frequently aligned behind similar candidates.

Some voters see self-funding as a preferable alternative to corporate-backed campaigns. Maria Colon, a Sacramento voter who attended a Steyer rally last week, said she is wary of corporate contributions and believes campaign fundraising should be limited. While large personal spending can raise questions, she said, corporate donors generally expect something in return.

Campaign cash remains a major factor in whether a candidate can be taken seriously, said Wesley Hussey, a political science professor at Sacramento State University. A candidate with enough personal money to launch a campaign, he said, can quickly become viable.

Andrew Coolidge, a Republican running for Assembly District 3 in Northern California, has contributed more to his campaign than any other donor. He said voters should question candidates who have the ability to invest in their own campaigns but choose not to. A candidate who puts personal money into a race, he said, shows commitment and may be freer to make decisions based on conscience.

Others see both sides of the issue. Chris Anderson, a Lodi City Council candidate who has self-funded part of his campaign and attended the Steyer rally, said personal spending can make a candidate less dependent on special interests. At the same time, he said, voters should still ask what forces and relationships helped wealthy candidates gain their fortunes.

Political experts say voters are likely to weigh a candidate’s background, record and public involvement alongside spending. Hussey said wealthy contenders may draw more suspicion if they appear suddenly without a history of civic or political engagement.

That distinction has been raised in comparisons between Steyer and Whitman. Whitman had been involved in Republican presidential politics, including Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s 2008 campaigns, before running for governor. Steyer has spent more than a decade involved in environmental advocacy and Democratic politics.

Steyer has rejected the argument that his personal spending amounts to an effort to buy office. At a recent rally, he said voters should consider the money being spent against him and argued that he is the only candidate in the race not compromised by corporate donations.

His opponents disagree. At a recent event at Stanford University, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter said wealth does not make a candidate immune to influence. She compared Steyer’s argument to one made by Donald Trump — that personal wealth makes a politician less beholden to special interests — and said she finds that claim troubling in a democracy.

Original source: CalMatters

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SARAH HOFMANN | Contributed

Mail-in ballots for the March 5 election have started to arrive and in Riverside County are causing some confusion. Some residents are having trouble seeing the ovals, or bubbles, printed next to candidates’ names, and said they aren’t sure how to mark their choices.

Palm Springs resident Jeannette Dreisbach said that, when she opened her ballot this week, she didn’t see any ovals. Dreisbach called the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, where she said an employee told her to look at the ballot again — under a bright light. The ovals were there, Dreisbach said, but hard to see.

Her family’s ballots looked the same, she said. “I said, ‘Well, most people are not going to take it up to a bright light’,” she said Thursday, Feb. 8, voicing concern about whether voters would be able to complete ballots accurately. “You’d think there’d be a heavy emphasis on that outline,” she said Friday, Feb. 9, likening the situation to a basketball player who can’t see the hoop.

Riverside County voting officials said no ballots are missing the ovals, but they may be harder to see than usual. As of midday Friday, the registrar’s office had received about 33 calls and emails about the issue, spokesperson Elizabeth Florer said. Voters who can’t see the ovals can request that the office print a new ballot, on which the ovals’ lines will be thicker, she said.

The office “will provide the ballot in the most convenient way” for the voter. The registrar has received about 7,000 completed vote-by-mail ballots as of about 5 p.m. Friday, Florer said. In San Bernardino County, the Registrar of Voters “has not received any complaints” about ballot ovals, spokesperson Melissa Eickman said in a Friday email. As in Riverside County, San Bernardino County’s ballots have ovals “printed with light red ink,” which Eickman said has been used since the March 3, 2020, election.

Dreisbach said she hopes the Riverside County registrar’s office will have some kind of response. “People make mistakes, but the mistakes can be interpreted as fraud,” she said, referring to national concerns about voter fraud. Some have expressed worry about voting systems in recent years, though many officials have said there’s no evidence that voting machines have lost or changed votes.

An Associated Press investigation found fewer than 475 cases of fraud among the six states called into question during the 2020 presidential election, for example. Similarly, an investigation of Riverside County’s 2020 election process found no signs of fraud, though some are still unconvinced. Riverside County has seen election issues in recent years.

In 2020, duplicate ballots were mailed to about 42,000 Riverside County residents. Similarly, in San Bernardino County, 27,000 duplicate ballots were sent that year. And, in 2021, about 11,000 Riverside County special election ballots were mailed to voters too late to be counted. About a week ago, on Friday, Feb. 2, the county tested its voting system, which reassured some who observed the process. Days ago, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors considered, but then withdrew, a plan Tuesday, Feb. 6, that was intended to improve voter confidence in part by manually inspecting 2% of ballots instead of the current 1%. As for the ovals’ different appearance, Riverside County officials said it was caused by a vendor.

Riverside County’s vote-by-mail ballots were printed by ProVoteSolutions, which is based in Tulare County. The company’s website states that it “produces approximately 35 million ballots for 42 counties in multiple states.” Its president, Paul Mantey, sent a statement to Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco on Friday.

The company found that the ballot artwork from the voting system vendor, which was used for the printed ballots, had thinner ovals than have previously been on ballots, Mantey said, which resulted in the lighter appearance. The same change occurred on all of Riverside County’s vote-by-mail ballots, which were mailed to the county’s 1.3 million registered voters earlier this month — though some will vote in person on Election Day. Ballots at the polls will have clearer ovals, Florer said.

The bubble’s color isn’t new. “We always print (the ovals) in red,” though they may appear pink to some, Florer said. “The ballot scanner is unable to read red ink,” she wrote on Friday, “therefore, it will only pick up what the voter intended using blue or black ink.” The use of red ink helps ensure voting integrity and accuracy, she said, and the color provides a contrast across different-colored ballots.

Information: Riverside County Registrar of Voters, 951-486-7200.

More ballot and election information is available by clicking on voteinfo.net.

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BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) — Just blocks from the shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant, the Hispanic Center Lehigh Valley was bustling on a recent day with scores of older people eating lunch. Downstairs, out of sight, a constant stream of visitors was shopping in its massive food pantry.

Over the past seven months, the number visitors to the pantry has risen by more than a third. The center’s executive director, Raymond Santiago, sees that as a stark sign of something he has felt over the past couple years: Many in the area’s Latino community are struggling to meet their basic needs.

Northampton County, which includes Bethlehem, is a traditional bellwether for Pennsylvania, one of the most important presidential swing states, and Latinos are a key part of the coalition that President Joe Biden is trying rebuild as he embarks on his campaign for a second term. In doing so, the Democrat might have challenges selling a crucial part of his reelection strategy.

One of the messages he has delivered in previous visits to Pennsylvania is that former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, is a danger to American democracy. Biden is hoping that message energizes the same voters who turned out four years ago, when Northampton County narrowly flipped to him after supporting Trump by a thin margin in 2016.

Based on his interactions with visitors to the Hispanic center, Santiago isn’t so sure. It’s the price of groceries and lack of affordable housing that dominate conversations there.

“I think so many people are already immune to that messaging, it won’t land as cleanly this election as it did in 2020,” he said. “If he keeps pushing that message, it might turn voters away.”

Biden chose a location near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with its deep symbolism for the country’s struggle for freedom, for his initial campaign event for 2024, portraying Trump as a grave threat to America and describing the general election as “all about” whether democracy can survive. It was a message similar to one he gave before the 2022 midterm elections at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the nation’s founding documents were created. Biden warned that Trump and his followers threatened “the very foundation of our republic.”

Biden has continued the theme during the early primary season, telling supporters winning a second term is essential for maintaining the country’s democratic traditions.

Over the course of several days, The Associated Press interviewed a cross section of voters in Northampton County to ask whether Biden’s messaging around the fate of democracy was resonating. These voters represented parts of the very coalition Biden will need to win Pennsylvania again — Black voters, Latinos, independents and moderates from both parties.

Their overarching response: The president’s warning that a second Trump presidency will shred constitutional norms and destroy democratic institutions is not one that, alone, will motivate them and get them out to vote.

Like people across much of the rest of the country, most of those interviewed would prefer avoiding a rematch of the 2020 contest, and several suggested they would seriously consider a serious third-party candidate with a strong message and a chance of winning.

Evelyn Fermin, 74, who regularly visits the Lehigh Hispanic center, has lived in the county for two years after spending most of her life in New Jersey. Her opinion about Trump has been set since Jan. 6, 2021, when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent bid to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. But she doesn’t think reminders of that day will be sufficient to persuade voters in November.

For the daughter of parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic, her concerns are border security and spending abroad.

“Rather than sending it out to foreign countries, I think we should use it for our people,” she said.

As a divorced mother who supported her son as he worked his way through school to become a lawyer, she also doesn’t support Biden’s attempt to waive student loan debt: “If I was able to to do it, I feel that they should.”

Curt Balch, 44, worked in the health care industry and is now a stay-at-home dad. He was weathering a two-hour school delay with his 5-year-old daughter in his home in Hellertown, in a more rural part of the county. He registered Republican so he could vote in primaries, but describes himself as more libertarian.

Balch said the messaging by both sides is “pretty toxic” when they warn that the other is “a threat or a danger to the fundamentals of the country moving forward.”

He supported Trump in the past two elections but is open to considering other candidates this year, especially if he thinks there is an appealing third-party or independent candidate. Balch believes the dire warnings about a potential second Trump term are overblown. Balch notes that even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump let states decide for themselves how to handle it.

“I understand the rhetoric, ‘Oh, he’s going to be a fascist dictator,’” Balch said. “I don’t think it’s a message that’s getting people to the polls. I don’t think people are legitimately thinking that they need to be afraid of Donald Trump.”

Christian Miller was a lifelong Democrat but became an independent in 2022 out of frustration with political gridlock and a sense that as he got older, he was growing more conservative.

He said he might one day consider switching to the Republican Party, but not as long as Trump is leading it. That’s not out of any worry that Trump would become a dictator if he wins a second term.

“I don’t know that I fear it as much as it’s being made out to be in the media from either side,” said Miller, a 53-year-old bank executive who lives in Nazareth. “I feel that the institutions are safe and and are strong enough to withstand the challenges.”

Miller cited the dozens of failed court challenges seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential results by Trump and his allies as an example of the institutions holding firm.

Surveys indicate concern about the state of democracy, but it’s not clear how that will translate in November’s election. A Biden campaign spokesperson said the democracy message is central to the campaign but it is not the only one the campaign will use to reach voters. Protecting abortion rights and fighting for higher wages will be among the issues essential to the president’s pitch.

Northampton County, especially Bethlehem, has been slowly emerging from the economic shock that followed the collapse of the local steel industry. The plant produced the steel that built the Golden Gate Bridge during the Great Depression and a decade later, during World War II, became the country’s largest shipbuilder.

The blast furnaces, which fell silent nearly 30 years ago, are still visible for miles as they sit alongside the Lehigh River. But Bethlehem has been enjoying a revival in recent years as it has evolved into a hub for health care and technology companies. New shops, an art center, museum, performing arts stage and a casino, among other developments, have added vibrancy to a picturesque city dotted with historical structures dating to the 18th century.

Northampton also is a historical bellwether. As the county has gone in the presidential election, so has the state, said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg University in Allentown. The last time they split was 1948, when the county voted for Democrat Harry Truman but the state went for Republican Thomas Dewey.

“It’s about as great a benchmark county as you’ll ever find,” Borick said.

Biden narrowly carried the county in 2020, four years after Trump had narrowly prevailed in his victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Anna Kodama, 69, is the type of voter who traditionally has swung back and forth between the parties.

She grew up in a Republican household in Ohio but switched parties during college. She recalls voting across party lines frequently since she moved to the Lehigh Valley in 1977 — until 2016 when Trump was making his first run for the presidency and she voted a straight ticket for Democrats.

The people Kodama encounters are not listening to Biden’s messages about a dark future under Trump. Instead, she would like him to speak more about what he is doing to improve the economy and forge stronger ties with Europe. She paid attention to a Biden visit earlier this year to a nearby town, Emmaus, where he stopped at local stores to discuss the importance of supporting small businesses.

She said Biden seems to connect better with people when he promotes a positive message, rather than a negative one that she believes will not motivate people in the fall.

“That’s where I find it compelling — look what we can do together,” said the artist and former teacher who was sipping coffee at Café the Lodge in Bethlehem. “That message resonates with me and with people I know.”

For Esther Lee, the 90-year-old president of the local NAACP, the threat-to-democracy message is not generating much concern among the people she contacts. She already plans to vote, but not because she is fearful of another Trump presidency.

“We already know who he is,” she said.

Getting Black voters engaged is going to take more from Biden, she believes, because so far his campaign messages have not resonated. She questions whether the Black community in Northampton County is the target audience: “I’m not seeing evidence of it,” she said.

Lee said the issue she hears about most in her circle is homelessness: “It’s No. 1,” she said, adding that the resources don’t seem to be sufficient to address the local problem. The companion to that, she said, is affordable housing.

“With Biden’s campaign, they need to reach down further,” with the messaging, she said.

At the Lehigh center, Guillermo Lopez Jr., 69, recalls his deep ties to the area and the many members of his extended family who worked at Bethlehem Steel. He worked at the plant for 27 years, following a father who worked there for 36.

He is now on the center’s board of directors and a local leader in the Latino community. A Democrat who said he leans independent, he plans to vote for Biden in part because of how he thought Trump’s rhetoric, beginning with is campaign announcement in 2015, made targets of Latinos and other minorities.

“It just speaks to me that there’s so much misguided hatred toward people like me,” he said.

But Lopez thinks messages of fear and Trump imperiling American democracy are essentially meaningless for many of the county’s working class voters. Their concern, he said, is finding steady work with good pay.

“I actually think that harms the vote,” he said of the democracy warnings. The average person who “just puts their nose to the grindstone and goes to work, I don’t think that motivates them. I think it scares them and freezes them.”

___

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — To hear Donald Trump tell it, President Joe Biden is so senile that he doesn’t know where he’s speaking and feeble enough that others are making decisions for him.

Yet Trump has made notable flubs of his own. The former president mixed up the city and state where he was campaigning last weekend and had to be corrected by a local official. He recently called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the leader of Turkey and has repeatedly mispronounced the militant group Hamas as “hummus.”

Biden is now 80 and Trump is 77. Trump was the oldest person elected to a first term — until Biden was. Today, the age factor is shaping up as an important issue in a possible rematch in 2024 of their first race, in 2020.

Yet polls consistently show that Americans view the Democratic president’s age as more of a liability, even as some of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination are stepping up efforts to use the issue against him.

An August poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 77% of U.S. adults, including 69% of Democrats, viewed Biden as too old to be effective for four more years. The same poll found that 51% of adults — and just 28% of Republicans — said Trump is too old.

“Looking at videos of Biden and really reading into it, I just — he mentally just can’t handle, I think, an election at all,” said Skylar Swan, 23, who attended a recent Trump rally in Summerville, South Carolina. As for Trump, she said, “When you look at him, yeah, he says things that are crazy, and he’s a little hardcore. But it’s also like, that’s the type of guy I wouldn’t want to mess with.”

Melody Crowder-Meyer, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who studies the characteristics of elected leaders, including their age, said such perceptions are tied to different expectations for each man.

“For Joe Biden, there is some expectation of normal governance,” she said. “Your concern is more, ‘Does this person have the capacity to accomplish my policy aims, accomplish the things that they’ve said they’re going to accomplish?’”

By contrast, “so much of Trump’s base of support has been willing to overlook much more significant flaws than simply age,” Crowder-Meyer said, including four indictments totaling 91 criminal counts and persistent lies about widespread fraud costing him reelection in 2020.

Trump can often give the impression of a younger politician while campaigning. In Iowa over the summer, he doled out Blizzard ice cream treats to customers at a Dairy Queen and hung out at a fraternity house while tossing footballs into the crowd.

Biden has attended just one campaign rally since launching his reelection bid in April. But he has traveled extensively, in the United State and abroad, for official events and attended dozens of fundraisers.

Cecelia S. Curtis, a Democrat who lives in Summerville, plans to vote for Biden in 2024 but said she worries about his health based on her own experiences.

“I’m 75 myself, and I’m almost falling over my own feet, you know?” Curtis said.

Another notable difference is the length of time that Biden and Trump speak.

Biden often keeps most of his official speeches — and even looser remarks at fundraisers, where he often is more candid about policy and biting in his criticism of Trump — to around 30 minutes or less. Trump frequently talks for more than 90 minutes, a freewheeling style that can backfire.

Taking the stage in Sioux City, Iowa, over the weekend, Trump gave a hearty welcome to Sioux Falls, city that is more than 80 miles north in South Dakota. Only after he was awkwardly pulled aside on stage and informed that he was in Sioux City did he make a correction.

It was a scene strikingly similar to one of Trump’s long-standing bits about Biden, in which he casts the president as too confused to know in which city he’s speaking.

Trump’s Sioux flub caught the attention of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, which recently released a “Trump Accident Tracker” that resets with each new gaffe.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has known Trump for more than 20 years and is now running for the GOP presidential nomination as one of Trump’s sharpest critics, said he doesn’t blame Trump’s age for the gaffes.

“I don’t think he’s senile. But what I do think is that the pressure that he is under, at his age, is starting to get to him,” Christie said in an interview, pointing to Trump’s mounting legal woes. “And those of us who have known him for a long time know it. And I think that’s what’s affecting him more than anything else.”

Trump’s flubs haven’t stopped him from making fun of Biden, though they risk undermining Trump’s strategy of painting the president as doddering. At rallies, Trump frequently performs a lengthy routine that draws hoots from the audience as he pretends to stumble around, squints and waves in directions where there are no people.

A Trump spokesperson noted that Trump hasn’t criticized Biden directly on age, and Trump has long argued that Biden’s problem isn’t actually his age but his mental state. Trump frequently says he’s known plenty of people who are sharp well into their 80s and 90s.

Biden has taken a different tack, trying to defuse the age issue with humor. For weeks, his campaign privately has pushed the idea that Trump is getting older and slipping mentally. But the campaign says it is not planning to use the age issue to go on the political offensive over the long term.

Still, Biden-Harris HQ, the campaign’s rapid-response account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has been more aggressively highlighting Trump’s miscues. That mirrors the Republican National Committee’s RNC Research account, which notes when Biden trips or when he or leading members of his administration misspeak.

Democratic strategist Josh Schwerin said Trump’s comments about Biden’s age could backfire in moments when Biden looks especially presidential, such as when he delivered an impassioned defense of Israel amid the war in Gaza that began after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

“The reality is when voters see — like they did in the Oval Office speech recently — President Biden being a strong, compelling leader, who can legitimately string sentences together and isn’t the Fox News caricature that Donald Trump would like people to believe, it makes them realize that they’ve been lied to and it makes them open their eyes,” Schwerin said.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and is now a 2024 rival, has suggested that any politician over 75 undergo cognitive testing, something that would apply to both Biden and Trump. Haley is 51.

But at a Trump rally in Derry, New Hampshire last week, Heidi Morin, 63, said she was excited about the prospect of Trump returning to the White House.

“To be totally honest, if there was somebody that was presenting themselves, then I would like somebody younger that would stick around probably a little longer and everything else,” she said. “But at this time, there’s nobody.”

“Trump’s only 70, right? So I think maybe in four years, like somebody younger? Fine,” interjected Kristin Brand, 52, who lives in Bourne, Massachusetts, and was standing next to Morin in line.

But when a reporter noted Trump’s actual age, neither woman saw it as problem.

“Well, he looks 70,” Brand said.

“That’s all we need,” added Morin’s friend, Janine Whitcomb, 69. “We need that one term.”

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Bill Mehlem recalls a time when his politics generally aligned with conservatives, enthusiastically backing Republicans such as John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But the stay-at-home dad has grown dismayed with the tempestuous GOP molded by former President Donald Trump, who is now seeking a return to the White House. And the threat of a Republican-led impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s family finances and the churning U.S. House probes of his son, Hunter Biden, have left Mehlem indignant, angry and remembering why he’s a political independent. “It’s all about revenge politics to keep Trump’s base” engaged for the 2024 elections, Mehlem said. “It’s all about nothing.”

That sentiment reflects the gamble House Republicans are making as they consider moving forward with an impeachment inquiry against Biden. The talk delights some Republicans who are eager for retribution following several indictments of Trump in recent months, including two federal cases that charge him with hoarding classified documents and working to overturn the 2020 election.

But for many of those outside of the die-hard GOP base, the impeachment chatter is a turn off. It’s especially risky for the party in California, where five House Republicans occupy Democratic-leaning districts that Biden won in 2020. Those districts alone could help Democrats retake the House majority next year.

In one crucial battleground — sprawling through suburbs and high desert north of Los Angeles — GOP Rep. Mike Garcia will need to overcome a nearly 13-point Democratic registration advantage to claim a fourth term and remain the sole Republican House member anchored in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County. In suburban Santa Clarita, at the heart of Garcia’s district, Mehlem said he saw no chance he would support Garcia — in part because the congressman joined House Republicans who attempted to reject electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania after the 2020 presidential election.

But in a Congress often stalemated by partisan division, he has his doubts about Democrats, too. Despite its reputation as a Democratic stronghold, a string of California House districts has proved volatile in recent elections, highlighting their importance to both parties as they seek the majority. Democrats seized seven seats from Republicans in 2018, then Republicans reclaimed four from Democrats in 2020. In the 2022 elections, California Republicans gained one seat, from 11 to 12, while Democrats dropped to 40 seats from 42, after California lost a House seat in reapportionment after the 2020 census. Overall, the state dropped to 52 districts from 53.

With the chamber divided 222-212, with one vacancy, only a handful of seats separate the two parties. Also in play: a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act that is expected to lead to new, Democratic-leaning districts in Alabama and possibly elsewhere.

In Santa Clarita, Democrat Bonnie Untaran said the House should be debating skyrocketing rents and home prices and lowering the cost of living, not focusing on the Bidens. “It’s starting to get unrelatable to our daily life,” she said. Untaran said she will consider voting for the Republican Garcia — a former Navy combat pilot and the son of a Mexican immigrant father — providing he talks about local issues.

The importance of pocketbook issues was echoed by former Republican congressman Doug Ose, who said GOP candidates need to stick to what families talk about at kitchen tables. When Republicans carried state swing districts in 2022, “they were not talking about the Hunter Biden investigation or a Joe Biden impeachment.

They were talking about bread-and-butter issues, and that’s where I think the voters are,” said Ose, who represented a Sacramento-area district. “Why would you go talk about something else?” he asked. Indeed, Republican candidates have had success in state swing districts in recent years by making elections a referendum on California itself under progressive Democratic rule, pointing to pervasive homelessness in major cities, vexing crime rates and wallet-sapping taxes.

In the middle of a California summer, with voters distracted by barbecues and baseball games, it’s unclear how many people are following the day-to-day scrum on Capitol Hill, although Congress is now in recess for the month. Independent voter Hamilton Grier, a father of two, said he intentionally avoids political news so he won’t be distracted from his marketing job. He had “no idea” what the Hunter Biden investigations were about.

Grier worries about inflation, and the world to come for his kids, a 1-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old boy. He expects to shift his attention to politics when the elections get closer. “I’m scared for them,” he said. “I don’t know what the future will be like.” In recent posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, Garcia writes about rising gas prices, inflation, a porous border with Mexico and climbing mortgage rates — without mentioning Hunter Biden.

Veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick said GOP House candidates already are facing two challenges in heavily Democratic California: Trump, if he becomes the nominee, is widely unpopular in the state outside his conservative base, and suburban woman are likely to see an elevated turnout, driven by concern over abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. With the focus on the Bidens, McCarthy “has strategically taken the position that he is going to stoke up the base in a lot of the rural, red-state areas,” Carrick said.

But California isn’t Texas or Utah, where conservative politics tend to dominate. “The current McCarthy strategy doesn’t really account for that,” Carrick said, adding that House control will likely turn on swing districts in states like California and New York. But there is also a risk for Democrats, depending on what the investigations turn up. And voters say Republicans like Garcia can help themselves by focusing on things that matter back home. Democrat Laura Stotler, a retired government employee, said she plans to vote for Garcia, based on his attention to district issues.

She doesn’t always agree with his votes, but she credits him with showing up at events she has attended, and his office responded when she made an inquiry about pending legislation honoring women telephone operators who served during World War I. As for Washington news, she avoids it. She said she doesn’t need the stress. “I can’t keep track of who is getting indicted for what,” she said. “I’m just so tired of it.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The politics of inflation took a sharp turn Wednesday with a report showing consumer prices rose at the slowest pace since the early months of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Republicans have hammered Biden over the cost of groceries, gasoline, utilities and more, saying his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package and push for electric vehicles were responsible for pushing inflation to a four-decade high. The GOP argument has resonated with voters, but the report on consumer prices for June suggests that inflation has eased dramatically without any of the job losses that some economists and Republican leaders said would occur.

Prices have risen just 3% from a year ago, compared with 9.1% in June 2022, and it’s the lowest reading since March 2021.

Unlike a year ago, inflation is mainly coming from a government measure of shelter based on what it would cost to rent a home. This makes the inflation argument somewhat nuanced as data from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the national electorate, shows that the majority of voters last year — 83% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats — own their homes and are largely insulated from higher rental prices.

Biden’s team was quick to seize on the inflation report as proof that its policies are delivering results. Defying expectations that Federal Reserve efforts to combat inflation would cause layoffs, the unemployment rate is healthy at 3.6%.

“Inflation is down by two-thirds over the past year,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “It is particularly notable and highly consistent with Bidenomics to see this steep a decline in the rate of inflation while employment remains so uniquely strong.”

The president was quick to take credit, with the White House issuing a statement from him: “Good jobs and lower costs: That’s Bidenomics in action.”

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said Biden was “delusional” for saying his policies are helping U.S. families.

“We’ve got to get this skyrocketing inflation and reckless spending under control and stop expecting our kids and grandkids to pay the bill,” Scott said. “That’s how we protect the American dream.”

The office of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., issued a statement saying that “Bidenomics continues to cost all Americans” because of higher prices since he took office. It called on the president to “join House Republican efforts to increase American energy production to drive down costs for hardworking families across the country.”

Republicans are tweaking the data they use on inflation, putting a greater emphasis on total price increases over the entire Biden presidency instead of the annual and monthly figures that economists commonly use. The office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., issued a breakdown of price increases over the entirety of Biden’s tenure to say that inflation is still a problem, citing a 39% increase in airfare, 18.8% increase in furniture prices and 52% increase in gas.

The administration wants voters to focus on the downward trend. One key statistic being measured by the White House is how many gallons of gas can be purchased on average for an hour of work. Republican lawmakers and candidates blasted Biden for record prices at the pump last year, a message that helped the GOP secure a House majority in 2022.

But by an internal White House analysis, this argument looks outdated: A single hour of work 12 months ago could only pay for 5.5 gallons of gas, a figure that has since risen to a bit more than 8 gallons. The increase appears to reflect a 27% drop in prices at the pump compared with a year ago, and also average wage gains of about 5%.

Biden has long denied that his $1.9 trillion in COVID-19 relief money helped to spark inflation. Broken supply chains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, were the main culprits. This argument had limited appeal in last year’s elections. AP VoteCast found that 54% of voters blamed Biden’s politics for the higher inflation, while 46% said higher prices were due to factors outside his control.

Biden’s aides largely attribute the decline in inflation to giving the Fed the independence to raise interest rates as needed and the unsnarling of supply chains and other efforts, such as last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, that signaled the government would find ways to lower prices for prescription drugs and promote investments in clean energy and manufacturing.

The White House also feels reasonably positive about the path of inflation because housing is behind much of the current increase in prices. The government’s measure of shelter inflation depends on rents, and a forecast by White House economists suggests home rental prices will ease in the months to come.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, Biden has gone on the offensive about the economy, giving speeches that try to draw a link between his actions and new construction projects and investments by companies. The economy has been a vulnerability for Biden, with just 34% approving of his leadership on the issue in a June AP-NORC poll.

Still, the change in the composition of what is driving inflation could be critical for how voters think about prices and politics.

In 2022, VoteCast found that nearly all voters said inflation was at least a minor factor in their votes. That included 47% who said groceries and food costs were the most important element for them; the majority of these voters backed Republicans.

An additional 16% said gas squeezed them the most, and about two-thirds of this group voted for the GOP. But of the voters who identified housing as their top inflationary burden, two-thirds supported Democrats.

Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters last month that “there’s every reason to think” inflation will be close to the Fed’s 2% target by the November 2024 election.

Still, the progress does not mean inflation rates are automatically going downward and that the economy is guaranteed to escape a recession. White House officials acknowledged on Wednesday that the effort to bring down inflation is incomplete. The Fed is poised to raise rates and keep them high until inflation appears to be headed to the central bank’s target.

Michael Strain, director of economic studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, said he is skeptical that demand in the economy “can weaken to the point that the Fed can credibly claim to have met its inflation target without the economy entering a mild recession and the unemployment rate increasing.”

Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the advocacy group Employ America, said that the odds of a recession have decreased and that lowering inflation has not led automatically to large job losses as many expected. But he cautioned that there are still unknowns.

“When the Fed rapidly hikes, you don’t know what stuff is going to break,” Amarnath said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — After major blows to his agenda by the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden is intent on making sure voters will have the final say.

When the court’s conservative majority effectively killed his plan to cancel or reduce federal student loan debts for millions of people, Biden said, “Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given.” When the justices ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, he said, “This is not a normal court.” When they overturned Roe v. Wade and a national right to abortion last year, the president said, “Voters need to make their voices heard.”

As Biden heads into the 2024 election, he is running not only against the Republicans who control one-half of Congress but also against the conservative bloc that dominates the nation’s highest court. It’s a subtle but significant shift in approach toward the Supreme Court, treating it more like a political entity even as Biden stops short of calling for an overhaul.

That shift is becoming apparent in everything from the White House’s messaging to its legal strategy.

“The president respects the court’s authority, but if its judgments are going to be political and there are members of the court who are saying that, he owes it to voters to make it clear what his positions are and what he’s doing to address it,” said Ron Klain, his former chief of staff.

“Many members of the current court testified that Roe is settled law and still overturned it,” he added, referring to the court’s ruling on abortion. “That has its consequences.”

Biden, who once led the Senate Judiciary Committee, is focusing on the politicization of the court as a way to encourage voters to back him. Yet he has not embraced any effort to make big changes to the court.

Instead, Biden is increasingly vocal about his belief that the court is abandoning mainstream constitutional interpretation. He tells voters they need more Democrats in Congress and a Democrat in the White House to counter the impact of the conservative-leaning court.

Biden has won his share of cases, including on immigration, before a court where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. But the student loan defeat capped a term when justices imposed significant roadblocks.

White House officials say Biden is keen to explore other ways to pursue the same priorities and explain to the American people about the obstacles.

“There’s only upside in running against the court as an institution because the court is doing things that are wildly unpopular and they’re preventing the president from implementing his agenda,” said Chris Kang, chief counsel of the progressive group Demand Justice and a onetime deputy counsel to President Barack Obama.

“I think that it’s important to make clear that the Supreme Court is making it impossible to implement and advance policies that should not have any controversy attached to them,” he added.

Republicans are working to portray Biden as overstepping his legal authority in pursuit of his agenda. They say the high court’s policies are in step with much of the country and they are trying to motivate their own voters by highlighting what the GOP has achieved through court rulings.

Former President Donald Trump, at the recent Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, praised the three justices he had nominated to the Supreme Court. “Exactly one year ago today, those justices were the pivotal votes in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision ending the constitutional atrocity known as Roe v. Wade,” Trump said.

He drew a standing ovation by noting that “conservatives had been trying for 50 years,” to overturn that ruling. “But I got it done and nobody ever thought it was a possibility.”

Other administration officials said the court’s conservative dominance has lowered the political cost to Biden when the justices scuttle some of his legally suspect actions such as on student loans and coronavirus mandates. On the latter, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s attempt to require employees of large companies to get shots but left the requirement in place for health care workers, though by that time the pandemic had started to wane.

Klain insisted that everything Biden has put forward had a solid legal basis and was approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

“There was no sense of taking the legal issues lightly or just ‘do it and take whatever the court says,’’ he said.

Confidence in the Supreme Court fell to its lowest point in at least 50 years after the leaked draft opinion in the abortion case in 2022. Those who view the current court favorably are largely Republican.

According to the Pew Research Center’s September 2022 report, only 28% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents now view the court favorably, down nearly 40 percentage points since 2020. And people in the United States increasingly favor term limits.

Positive views of the court among Republicans and those who lean Republican has increased to 73%. As a result, the partisan gap is larger than at any other point in the 35 years of polling that Pew has done on the court.

Republicans have focused for years on remaking the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. When Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y., was the majority leader, he refused to even meet in 2016 with Obama’s pick for the high court — current Attorney General Merrick Garland, a federal judge at that time. The nomination stalled until a Republican president, Trump, took over.

Establishment GOP operatives backed Trump because of his pledge to name as many judges to the bench as possible. Their gamble worked. Trump ended up with three Supreme Court nominees and 54 federal appeals court judges, reshaping the courts for a generation.

Democrats are now finally understanding the power of judges as a voting tool, and Biden has made judicial nominations a priority, appointing a record number of judges for a president at this point in his first term, including some of the most diverse picks yet to the judiciary. Biden aides plan on highlighting those accomplishments during the reelection campaign, but acknowledge it’s only a small salve to their troubles at the high court.

Biden has taken to warning voters about what else the Supreme Court might do in the future, whether rolling back same-sex marriage rights or access to contraception.

“President Biden is being direct with the American people about the stakes these extreme decisions that jettison decades of longstanding precedent have for their fundamental freedoms and their daily lives,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.

Part of Biden’s unwillingness to go further to reshape the Supreme Court comes from a sense of history. Those pushing social change stood by the court after Brown v. Board of Education, a major civil rights case, and even Roe v. Wade, holding up its autonomy as a way to push forward. Backing away from that, particularly for an establishment Democrat like Biden, is not easy.

As Biden said in an interview with MSNBC, “I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy,”

Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and co-host of “Strict Scrutiny” podcast about the Supreme Court, said that while Biden was unlikely to go that far, “there are a variety of things that Democratic politicians could run on that would actually allow them to more explicitly push back against the court.”

Besides expanding the size of the Supreme Court and or the lower courts, she said, other options include stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over certain cases, setting term limits and implementing ethics changes.

All of them, she said, are things the party could embrace “as part of their recognition that the court has politicized itself.”

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While posturing as a champion of American freedom during his tour of Southern states this past spring, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) left out that part about how his own administration is attempting to force an expensive climate agenda onto a public that really just does not want it.

In fact, news coverage of Newsom’s visits to Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama suggest that he steered clear of energy policy altogether while lecturing his fellow governors about what he describes as the “authoritarian” tendencies of certain other governors who are running for president.

That might be because the average citizens whom Newsom claims to represent reject his climate schemes and the government mandates that go with them, at least when they are asked clear questions.

Two free-market advocacy organizations — the American Energy Alliance and the Maryland-based Committee to Unleash Prosperity — released a straightforward survey of 1,000 likely voters last month. It showed that, by a wide margin, respondents favored affordable energy over climate policies that raise energy costs and limit consumer choices.

When voters were asked the open-ended question of what the “most pressing issue” is facing the U.S., climate change barely registered. Most people were chiefly concerned about practical questions, such as inflation and the economy.

The survey also asked voters to indicate if they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements concerning energy policy. Sixty-five percent disagreed with the position that “the federal government should impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions collected at the gas pump and in heating and utility bills.”

Seventy percent disagreed with the statement that they “trust the federal government to decide what kind of cars should be subsidized or mandated.”

And an astounding 82 percent disagreed with the statement that “The state of California should be able to determine what kind of cars can be sold in other states.” Newsom’s position — one long-held by liberals in Washington — is that California can and should leverage its position as the nation’s largest state market, circumventing the federal government and the other 49 states’ democratic processes to do precisely that.

Respondents appeared to be attuned to the real word ramifications of California’s energy policy. The state consistently ranks among the highest in terms of electricity costs, with the average residential electricity rate more than 70 percent higher than the national average. Recent figures from AAA, the national auto club, also show that California average gas price of $4.836 significantly outpaces the national average.

California also has a recent history of power outages that might suggest a course change is in order. Newsom has insisted, unconvincingly and with lots of ad hominem rhetoric, that his pursuit of green energy is not to blame for the blackouts.

The blackouts have already begun to interfere with the state’s aggressive electric vehicle mandate, which bans the sale of non-electric vehicles by 2035. Automakers are already preparing for the financial fallout. Chrysler’s parent outfit, Stellantis, the maker of Jeeps, plans to curtail shipments of gasoline-powered cars to states that adopt California’s emissions rules. California is also leaning on the Biden administration to impose its electric vehicle mandates across the country.

This probably won’t play well politically, as the AEA survey results show that consumers are practical. They want affordable cars and energy. They are skeptical about government climate initiatives that will affect their transportation. This message should help wavering Republican lawmakers resist the easy path of giving in to the demands of environmental extremists.

Asked “who should make decisions about what kind of cars you should be able to buy,” 80 percent of respondents in the AEA survey said that consumers should decide for themselves. Only 8 percent said the federal government should decide for them.

As a follow-up, it would be interesting to learn how the percentages might break down if voters are asked whether Newsom, as a potential presidential candidate, should be permitted to decide what sort of cars, stoves, leaf blowers, air conditioners etc. they should be permitted to buy.

Perhaps Newsom could be asked about this during his next trip to Red State America. After all, wasn’t he saying something about freedom and the dangers of authoritarianism?

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — For a century, the League of Women Voters in Florida formed bonds with marginalized residents by helping them register to vote — and, in recent years, those efforts have extended to the growing Asian American and Asian immigrant communities.

But a state law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May would have forced the group to alter its strategy.

The legislation would have imposed a $50,000 fine on third-party voter registration organizations if the staff or volunteers who handle or collect the forms have been convicted of a felony or are not U.S. citizens.

A federal judge blocked the provision this week. But its passage reflects the effort by DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, and other GOP leaders to crack down on access to the ballot. Florida is one of at least six states, including Georgia and Texas, where Republicans have enacted voting rules since 2021 that created or boosted criminal penalties and fines for individuals and groups that assist voters. Several of those laws are also facing legal challenges.

In the meantime, voting rights advocates are being forced to quickly adapt to the changing environment. Before the ruling in Florida, for instance, the League of Women Voters started using online links and QR codes for outreach. It removed the personal connection between its workers and communities and replaced it with digital tools that are likely to become a technological barrier.

“If there’s not access, in terms of language, we can’t get to as many people, which particularly affects AAPI voters,” Executive Director Leah Nash said, referring to the state’s Asian American and Pacific Island population, which has grown rapidly and where more than 30% of adults have limited English proficiency. “If we just give someone our website or QR code to go register, we don’t know for sure if they’re doing it and we like to get as many people registered to vote as possible.”

In states where penalties are getting tougher, the developments have sowed fear and confusion among groups that provide translators, voter registration help and assistance with mail-in balloting — roles that voting rights advocates say are vital for Asian communities in particular.

In a number of states, language barriers already hamper access to the ballot for a population that has been growing rapidly. Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander populations grew 35% between 2010 and 2020, according to Census data. The new laws in mostly Republican-led states are seen by many voting groups as another form of voter suppression.

“It’s specifically targeting limited English proficiency voters, and that includes AAPI voters,” said Meredyth Yoon, litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta.

Yoon added that record turnout for the 2020 elections in Georgia influenced the Republican-dominated legislature to pass sweeping voter restrictions: “It’s not a coincidence,” she said.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in June that raises the penalty for illegal voting to a felony, upping it from a misdemeanor charge that was part of a sweeping elections law passed two years earlier.

Alice Yi, who is Chinese American, used to help translate in Austin, Texas, but said the new law isn’t clear about whether good faith mistakes will be criminalized and worries that she could get into trouble by offering assistance.

Yi recalls being approached during a 2022 primary election by a man who was Vietnamese American and asked for help because he hadn’t voted before and didn’t speak English. She said she was immediately worried she could face consequences if she helped him.

“This is the fear I’m facing,” she said.

Now, she said, she will help her father vote, but no one else.

But voting rights supporters like Ashley Cheng — also in Austin — remain committed to reaching Asian voters, despite the threat of jail time.

Cheng, the founding president of Asian Texans for Justice, recalls discovering her mother was not listed in the voter rolls when she tried to help her vote in 2018. They never found out why she wasn’t properly registered. Advocates say this highlights flaws in the system and illustrates how volunteers are essential to overcoming them.

The group’s own research has found that roughly two-thirds of Asian voters in Texas were highly motivated to vote in the 2022 midterm elections. Cheng said that desire amplified her enthusiasm to help the community get its votes counted.

“It’s really easy to feel like, ‘Oh, I would love to just like not try anymore,’” she said. “But, I think about people like my mom and so many others in the Asian diaspora who live in Texas who have that experience of wanting to vote but not being able to, for whatever reason, are not feeling like it’s accessible.”

For instance, some 34% of Asian American adults in Texas have limited English proficiency, according to 2022 data from Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIA Vote), a nonpartisan Asian American and Pacific Islander advocacy group.

Farha Ahmed, an attorney in Texas, said the increased liability in helping these marginalized communities access the ballot box forced her to decide against continuing as an election judge, a position that administers voting procedures and settles disputes concerning election laws.

“There’s not a lot of resources and there’s not a lot of protection,” said Ahmed, who lives in Sugarland, just outside Houston. “Election judges want to help make it easy for people to vote, but with these new laws in place, they’re very unsure of where is their liability when they’re really just trying to do their best to help.”

Before Florida and Texas, Georgia lawmakers overhauled that state’s election laws.

A section of Georgia’s 2021 election bill made it a misdemeanor to offer a voter any money or gifts at polling places, a provision that included passing out water and snacks for those waiting in lines. Attempts to get a court to toss out the ban on snacks and water have so far been unsuccessful.

James Woo, the communications director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said he won’t even get his parents a drink of water while helping them with their ballots.

“It’s simple things like that, which would have been like a conversation starter or just like helping them throughout the process, might be viewed as like something illegal I’m doing,” he said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is eager to take full political ownership of the U.S. economy — a reflection of the White House belief that inflation is fading, job growth is solid and voters need to know about it.

But polling has consistently shown the economy to be a weak spot for Biden’s reelection hopes. Just 33% approve of his leadership on the issue, according to a May survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs.

For much of his presidency, Biden has blamed high gasoline prices, painfully rising food costs and other cost-of-living expenses on the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. He said those two factors were beyond his control as inflation hit a 40-year high last summer and crushed the his approval ratings.

In a Chicago speech on Wednesday, Biden will begin a new effort to actively convince a worried public that the U.S. economy is not heading for recession but actually thriving because of his leadership. For him, there’s a happy confluence of the coming 2024 reelection campaign and a favorable turn in recent economic data, leading the White House to believe that public messaging about “Bidenomics” will help to rally Democratic voters going into next year.

The message is not a new one, though the White House believes it bears repeating so that it soaks in. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Monday’s news briefing that the president’s upcoming remarks would be a “cornerstone” speech and part of a larger administration-wide effort.

“It’s a vision about growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up — you hear us say that over and over again, because we believe that trickle-down economics does not work,” Jean-Pierre said. “We have the data to prove it.”

Indeed, the rate of inflation has fallen over the past year while the job market has remained solid, a combination that seemed unlikely to many economic analysts who expected efforts to bring down inflation would cause layoffs and a recession. Goldman Sachs has put the odds of a recession in the next 12 months at 25%, down from its previous estimate of 35%.

Consumer prices rose at an annual pace of 4% in May, down from 9.1% last June. That’s still higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, indicating that inflation remains a challenge. But employers added a robust 339,000 jobs last month in a sign that the economy appears poised to keep growing. And the inflation-adjusted annual increase in what people earn each hour turned positive in May, one of the main indicators that White House officials had been looking at for proof the economy was helping workers.

Biden’s GOP rivals have said that the president has broken the U.S. economy. They’ve tip-toed around the healthy 3.7% unemployment rate and focused instead on prices at the gas pump, grocery bills, the debt tied to Biden’s $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief and the administration’s focus on shifting away from fossil fuels in order to combat climate change.

“I will stop Joe Biden’s inflation nightmare, save the U.S. economy,” said former President Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, in a speech to evangelical Christians last weekend.

“You would think that with these economic problems with inflation, you may want to tap into more domestic energy,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in an Iowa speech. “But no, Biden is deliberately trying to kneecap our energy production and he’s trying to force Americans into electric vehicles, which will make us more reliant on China, who provides most of the materials for the batteries.”

Part of Biden’s challenge is that confidence in his economic leadership has waned. In March 2021 just after his round of pandemic relief became law, 60% of U.S. adults approved of how the president was handling the economy, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll. Since then, that figure has essentially halved.

Still, there are signs that people’s views of the economy are improving. The University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment showed that Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters generally feel better about the current state of the economy than they did a year ago. But confidence among Democrats is still weaker than it was during Biden’s first year.

The administration released a memo ahead of Biden’s Wednesday speech that made the point that his policy ideas are broadly supported in polls, leaving unsaid that those proposals generally fare better than the president himself does.

Biden aides see ‘Bidenomics’ as an expansive framing to a host of the president’s policies for easy public consumption, tying together a diverse set of initiatives meant to boost the nation’s global competitiveness with programs meant to strengthen the middle class at home.

The president is betting that targeted government investments can catapult the economy forward and help workers. During his first two years when Democrats controlled the House, Biden followed up on his pandemic relief by pushing through a bipartisan infrastructure building bill, funding for computer chip plants and tax breaks to encourage the use of renewable energy.

This approach goes back to Biden’s own blue collar identity that surfaces in his speeches: the Scranton, Pennsylvania kid whose family at times just eked by financially.

But it can take several years to replace bridges and tunnels, to build new factories, to lay broadband cable for the internet and to make drivers comfortable with buying electric vehicles. Administration officials have privately acknowledged that there is a lag between the economy that the president is promising and what voters will likely see by the 2024 elections.

Biden in remarks in July 2021 had initially dismissed higher inflation as “transitory,” saying he was confident that the bout coming out of the pandemic was temporary. Those remarks became a point of attack among Republican lawmakers and some economists as inflation worsened after his statement.

Yet Biden has stressed that he provides an alternative to GOP policies that try to boost the economy mostly through tax cuts. He said Monday in announcing more than $40 billion to ensure high-speed internet for the entire country that his ideas are similar to the New Deal-era playbook used to combat the Great Depression nearly a century ago.

“What we are doing, as I said, is not unlike what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he brought electricity to nearly every American home and farm,” Biden said.

The question is whether voters think that Biden can deliver just as FDR did and whether elections work the same as they did back in 1936, when the Rural Electrification Act became law. Later that November, Roosevelt won more than 60% of the popular vote as he won a second term.

In today’s polarized era, Biden is unlikely to secure anywhere near that margin. But his message on Wednesday will likely be that his presidency has already begun to reshape the world’s largest economy for the better and voters should judge him on that record.

He previewed the takeaway he wants voters to hear at a fundraiser last week in California, even as polls indicate that much of the public still feels pessimistic about the direction of the U.S.

“We unleashed, I think,” he said, “a sense of expectation in America that we can do anything.”

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