California voters have rejected a move to unseat their governor in a recall election, a rarely used provision of direct democracy in some 20 U.S. states. Mike O'Sullivan reports that Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, faced down 46 challengers in an election where Donald Trump became an unseen player. 

Camera: Roy Kim  
 

California voters have rejected a move to unseat their governor in a recall election, a rarely used provision of direct democracy in some 20 U.S. states.

As the ballot count continued Wednesday, nearly two-thirds of voters had rejected the recall effort, and Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, turned back 46 challengers in an election where former President Donald Trump was an unseen player.

Democrats urged a “No” vote on the recall, but Newsom said Tuesday night at a victory celebration that the result was an affirmation of his and his party’s values.

“We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic,” he said.

Newsom’s leading challenger, conservative radio host Larry Elder, a Republican, said COVID-19 precautions such as masks and vaccines should be voluntary and not mandated by politicians. That view disturbed voter Alice Frankston.

“COVID is quite real, and we’re not done with it yet, and we need to keep with the fight,” she told VOA after voting “No” on the recall.

As early voting was under way Monday, President Joe Biden campaigned in California against the recall and Elder.

“He’s the clone of Donald Trump,” Biden said of Elder at a Newsom rally in Long Beach. “Can you imagine him being the governor of this state?” The partisan crowd yelled, “No.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said that for Democrats, dislike of Trump became a powerful motivator in voting down the recall.

'Still toxic'

“I think what the California result proves is that Donald Trump is still toxic to Democrats, and using Trump as a campaign issue will produce lots of Democratic votes,” he said.

But Democrats were worried, as Republicans rallied around Elder over dozens of rival candidates, said analyst Shannon Bow O’Brien.

“They brought big-named national Democrats out to rally the troops. I think that betrayed that they considered this a serious threat,” said O’Brien, an associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to showcasing Biden, Democrats aired anti-recall ads from leading party figures, including U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Some ongoing issues hurt Newsom, including California’s high crime rate and rising homelessness, prompting voters like Roger Neal to support the recall.

“I’ve been living in Southern California for 40 years … and I just think that we need new leadership,” he said.

Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco and a former lieutenant governor, will face voters again next year in a regular election for a second four-year term. Elder, as he conceded defeat Tuesday, told supporters and reporters that the fight was not over.

“We recognize that we lost the battle, but we are certainly going to win the war,” he said.

It will be an uphill fight. Nearly half of California voters are registered as Democrats, while fewer than one-quarter are registered as Republicans.

And California’s Republican Party is moving away from moderate voters, said Sabato.

“What we’re seeing here is a party that has moved to Trump and to the right so far that they can’t win statewide elections in California,” he said.

Khrystyna Shevchenko of VOA's Ukrainian Service contributed to this report.
 

The White House on Wednesday defended the top U.S. military commander, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, against calls for his resignation following disclosures in a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.  

According to the book, titled "Peril," Milley told senior military officials that any attack orders coming from former President Donald Trump in the waning days of his presidency must be cleared with him. The book also disclosed that Milley twice called China to assure Beijing that no U.S. attack was imminent. 

Under U.S. law, the president is the commander in chief and there is a tradition of civilian control of military leaders.  

But Milley, believing that Trump had suffered a mental decline after losing his reelection bid last November, summoned his senior military leaders in early January to make sure they conferred with him before carrying out any overseas attack orders from Trump, according to the book. Milley has not challenged the assertions. 

After the outreach to Beijing was disclosed Tuesday, senior officials said Milley had coordinated the calls with the knowledge of the office of the secretary of defense, the Pentagon's civilian leadership. 

Trump issued no such attack orders in January as he prepared to leave Washington and turn the presidency over to Democrat Joe Biden, though he persists to this day in unfounded claims that he was cheated out another four-year term by fraudulent vote counts. 

Milley has continued to lead the U.S. military during Biden's first eight months in office. But some Republican lawmakers have called for his resignation over the incidents described in the book, which is set for release next week. 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected any contention that Milley had violated the principle of civilian control of the military. She said Biden has "complete confidence in his leadership, his patriotism and his fidelity to the Constitution." 

The incidents occurred at a time when the former president "fomented unrest leading to insurrection and an attack on our nation's Capitol," she said. Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building on January 6 to try to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden's victory. 

Psaki called the rioting at the Capitol "one of the darkest days in our nation's history." 

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a frequent Biden critic, called for Milley's resignation, saying that Milley "worked to actively undermine the sitting commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces" and that his actions amounted to treason. 

"Gen. Milley has attempted to rationalize his reckless behavior by arguing that what he perceived as the military's judgment was more stable than its civilian commander," Rubio wrote to Biden. 

"It is a dangerous precedent that could be asserted at any point in the future by Gen. Milley or others," Rubio said. "It threatens to tear apart our nation's longstanding principle of civilian control of the military." 

Another Republican, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, called the book's revelations "deeply concerning." 

"Our Constitution embeds civilian control of the military, and if the chairman of the joint chiefs was actively undermining the commander in chief and pledging to our enemies to defy his own commander, that is completely inconsistent with his responsibilities," Cruz said. 

But Milley's spokesman, Colonel David Butler, said the chief of staff's reported actions were within normal bounds, noting he regularly consults with defense chiefs across the world, including those in China and Russia. 

"General Milley continues to act and advise within his authority in the lawful tradition of civilian control of the military and his oath to the Constitution," Butler said in a press release. 
 

A preliminary runoff election in the northeastern U.S. city of Boston has narrowed the field of mayoral candidates to two women of color, ensuring the city's next elected mayor will be someone other than a white man for the first time in about 200 years. 

Two city councilors, Michelle Wu, who is of Taiwanese descent, and Annissa Essaibi George, a self-described Arab Polish American, won Tuesday's runoff, defeating three other candidates that included acting Mayor Kim Janey. Wu and Essaibi George will face off in November.  

Janey was the first woman and Black city resident to hold the position of acting mayor. She was appointed after Mayor Marty Walsh's U.S. Senate confirmation as labor secretary in March. 

All five runoff candidates are people of color, an indication of the rapidly changing demographics in the city, where the latest U.S. census figures show that Boston residents who identify as white make up only 44.6% of the population. The figures also show that 19.1% of the city's residents are Black, 18.7% are Latino and 11.2% are of Asian descent. 

Whichever woman wins the November election will govern a city with a history of racial strife. 

Violence erupted in the mid-1970s, when the city sought to racially integrate its public schools to comply with federal law. At that time, mobs of white adults and teens threw rocks at buses transporting Black students to all-white schools in South Boston.  

Simmering racial tensions in Boston escalated again in the late 1980s, when Charles Stuart, a white man, falsely accused a Black man of killing his wife. 

Some information in this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters. 
 

The U.S. Justice Department has filed an emergency motion with a federal judge asking him to block the southwestern state of Texas from enforcing a new law that bans nearly all abortions in the state.   

In a 45-page motion filed late Tuesday with a federal district court, the Justice Department argued that the new law, commonly known as Senate Bill 8, was drafted “to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights” to obtain an abortion.  

The emergency motion is the second legal action the Biden administration has taken against Texas over the new law, after filing a lawsuit last week citing the same legal grounds.   

The new law, which took effect on September 1, outlaws abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy — which opponents say is well before most women are even aware they are pregnant — with no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.    

Texas is among a dozen mostly Republican-led states that have enacted so-called “heartbeat” abortion bans, which prohibits the procedure once a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, often at six weeks, and sometimes before a woman realizes she is pregnant. 

Courts in the past have blocked such bans, ruling they did not conform to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision giving women in the U.S. the constitutional right to an abortion without excessive government interference.      

The Texas anti-abortion law is also unusual in that it gives private citizens the power to enforce it by allowing them to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks. Those winning such lawsuits would be entitled to at least $10,000.    

The Justice Department called this provision “an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court.” 

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block Texas from implementing the new anti-abortion law in a 5-to-4 decision earlier this month that enraged supporters of Roe v. Wade, including President Joe Biden, who warned that  “complete strangers will now be empowered to inject themselves in the most private and personal health decisions faced by women.”   

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.  

Voters in the western U.S. state of California have rejected an effort to remove Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom from office.   

Nearly 70% of voters overwhelmingly voted “no” in ending Newsom’s tenure early, with just more than 30% voting “yes,” according to figures released shortly after polls closed in the large state late Tuesday night.   

The Associated Press, CNN and NBC News are all projecting the recall effort has failed. 

Speaking to reporters early Wednesday morning as the results showed him prevailing, Newsom said he was humbled and grateful to the millions and millions of Californians that exercised their fundamental right to vote.” 

WATCH: California election 

The recall was launched by Republicans angered over Newsom’s strict COVID-19 rules throughout the pandemic, including school closures and restrictions on small businesses such as bars and restaurants.  Organizers secured enough signatures of registered voters to force the recall on the ballot. 

Voter opinion surveys in the days leading up to Tuesday’s vote showed Larry Elder, a staunch conservative radio talk show host, was the leading candidate among more than 40 would-be successors to serve out the remainder of Newsom’s term in office, which ends next year. 

Newsom equated the recall effort, and especially Elder’s presence on the ballot, to former President Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular figure among Democrats.  “We defeated Donald Trump, we didn’t defeat Trumpism. Trumpism is still alive, all across this country,” the governor said.   

“I want to focus on what we said ‘yes' to as a state: We said yes to science, we said yes to vaccines, we said yes to ending this pandemic,” he said earlier in his remarks.   

Newsom is a prominent figure among national Democrats, having previously served as mayor of the city of San Francisco and California lieutenant governor before he was elected governor in 2018.  He enlisted the help of several Democratic luminaries in his effort to fight off the recall, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, a fellow Californian, and former President Barack Obama.   

A potential defeat in a state dominated by Democrats could signal major problems for Biden and congressional Democrats heading into next year’s midterm legislative elections. 

He is the second California governor to face a recall vote. The first one in 2003 removed Democrat Gray Davis and installed popular Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters and the Associated Press.  

U.S. President Joe Biden says extreme weather caused by climate change is putting America in a “code red” situation. He’s pushing two massive bills in Congress, totaling in the trillions of dollars, to reverse the damage. From Washington, VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell looks at what’s at stake.  

Produced by: Jesusemen Oni 

President Joe Biden tried to advance his domestic spending plans in Colorado on Tuesday by warning about the dangers of climate change while highlighting how his clean-energy proposals would also create well-paying jobs.

The trip to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Flatirons Campus outside Denver capped the president's two-day swing to the West, and it offered Biden the chance to continue linking the need to pass his spending package to the urgent threat posed by climate change.

"Here's the good news: Something that is caused by humans can be solved by humans," Biden said. He deemed the need for a clean-energy future an "economic imperative and a national security imperative" and said that there was no time to waste as the impact of climate change seems to grow more severe by the year.

Biden said that extreme weather events will cost more than $100 billion in damages this year, and he underscored his goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 while using solely carbon pollution-free power by 2035.

"We can do that. We can do all of this in a way that creates good jobs, lowers costs to consumers and businesses, and makes us global leaders," the president said.

Biden spoke about "more jobs for the economy" on an earlier tour as he checked out a giant windmill blade on the ground outside the lab and got a demonstration of wind turbine technology.

And, keenly aware of the delicate work under way back in Washington to craft details of his infrastructure-plus spending package, he gestured at Democratic legislators along for the tour and said, "They're the ones getting it all through Congress."

'A crisis with … opportunity'

Biden had spent Monday in Boise, Idaho, and Sacramento, California, receiving briefings on the devastating wildfire season and viewing the damage by the Caldor Fire to communities around Lake Tahoe.

"We can't ignore the reality that these wildfires are being supercharged by climate change," Biden said, noting that catastrophic weather doesn't strike based on partisan ideology. "It isn't about red or blue states. It's about fires. Just fires."

Throughout his trip, Biden held out the wildfires across the region as an argument for his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and additional $3.5 trillion package of spending. The president said every dollar spent on "resilience" would save $6 in future costs. And he made the case that the rebuilding must go beyond simply restoring damaged systems and instead ensure communities can withstand such crises.

"In the end, it's not about red states or blue states. A drought or a fire doesn't see a property line," Biden said. "It doesn't care, give a damn for what party you belong to. … Yes, we face a crisis, but we face a crisis with unprecedented opportunity."

The climate provisions in Biden's plans include tax incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles, investments to transition the economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and creation of a civilian climate corps.

Biden has set a goal of eliminating pollution from fossil fuel in the power sector by 2035 and from the U.S. economy overall by 2050.

'We have to think big'

The president's two-day Western swing comes at a critical juncture for a central plank of his legislative agenda. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working to assemble details of the infrastructure-plus plan — and how to pay for it, a concern not just for Republicans.

With unified Republican opposition in Congress, Biden needs to overcome the skepticism of two key centrist Democrats in the closely divided Senate. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have expressed concerns about the size of the $3.5 trillion spending package.

In California, Biden appeared to respond to those concerned about the plan's size, saying the cost "may be" as much as $3.5 trillion and would be spread out over 10 years, a period during which the economy is expected to grow. He also insisted that when it comes to addressing climate change, "we have to think big."

"Thinking small is a prescription for disaster," he said.

The 100-member Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Given solid GOP opposition, Biden's plan cannot pass the Senate without Manchin's or Sinema's support. The legislative push comes at a crucial time for Biden, who had seen his poll numbers tumble after the United States' tumultuous exit from Afghanistan and a rise in COVID-19 cases due to the highly contagious delta variant. 

The top U.S. military leader, fearful that former President Donald Trump could "go rogue" in the final weeks of his White House tenure, acted unilaterally to assure China that the U.S. would not launch an attack during Trump's last days in office, according to a new book.  

In two secret phone calls, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his counterpart, Chinese General Li Zuocheng of the People's Liberation Army, that the United States would not attack, according to the account in "Peril," a book about the last days of Trump's presidency, by longtime Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward and one of the newspaper's veteran political reporters, Robert Costa. 

The book is scheduled for release next week, but the Post, CNN and other news outlets excerpted details on Tuesday. 

The book says Milley made one of the calls on October 30, 2020, four days before Trump lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden. The other came on January 8, 2021, two days after hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed effort to thwart lawmakers from certifying Biden's election victory.  

With Trump making belligerent comments about China, Milley told the authors he was prompted to assure Li that the U.S. was not preparing to attack. 

"General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable, and everything is going to be okay," Milley told him, according to the book. "We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you." 

In the second call, Milley told Li, "We are 100 percent steady. Everything's fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes." 

According to the book, Milley made the second call because he believed Trump, enraged at his loss, had suffered a mental decline after the November 3 outcome — a view Milley shared with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an opposition Democratic leader and longtime Trump critic. 

The authors obtained a transcript of a call between Pelosi and Milley in which Pelosi told the general, "He's crazy. You know he's crazy," referring to Trump. 

After the rioting at the Capitol, in which more than 600 people have been charged so far, Milley worried that Trump could "go rogue," the authors recounted. 

"You never know what a president's trigger point is," Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.  

Milley summoned senior military officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons. Milley said that only the president, as commander in chief, could give the order for a nuclear attack, but that he, Milley, also had to be involved. 

According to the book, Milley asked each of the high-ranking officials to affirm that they understood his role, in what he considered an "oath." 

Woodward and Costa wrote that others in the U.S. government also shared Milley's concern about Trump's demeanor upon losing the election. 

Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel reportedly told Milley, "We are on the way to a right-wing coup." 

In the end, Trump left Washington without attending Biden's inauguration and did not launch any last-minute overseas attacks. But to this day, he regularly asserts falsely that he was cheated out of reelection by voter fraud in numerous states.  

Trump said he is considering campaigning for another White House term in the 2024 election. 

The book also recounts how former Vice President Mike Pence struggled with Trump's demand that Pence refuse to affirm the election outcome during the January 6 certification at the Capitol.

The authors wrote that Pence talked with former Vice President Dan Quayle, who oversaw the certification of the 1992 election when he was on the losing ticket. But Quayle assured Pence he had no choice but to certify Biden's victory, since the outcome had been confirmed in key political battleground states after numerous recounts and unsuccessful court challenges. 

Trump and Biden declined to be interviewed for the book. There was no immediate reaction from Trump about the accounts of his actions in the final weeks of his presidency as related in the book. 
 

Voters in California are casting ballots in a referendum to decide whether the state's governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, should be replaced. VOA's Mike O’Sullivan in Los Angeles has details.

Camera: Roy Kim   Produced by: Mary Cieslak 
 

Voters in the western U.S. state of California are heading to the polls Tuesday to decide whether to remove Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in a recall election.
 
Newsom was joined by U.S. President Joe Biden late Monday in a final campaign rally in the southern city of Long Beach to urge Democrats to turn out in the polls and reject the recall.    
 
“The eyes of the nation are on California,” President Biden told the crowd, “because the decision you’re going to make isn’t just going to have a huge impact on California, it’s going to reverberate around the nation, and quite frankly, not a joke, around the world.”
 
The recall was launched by Republicans angered over Newsom’s strict COVID-19 rules throughout the pandemic, including school closures and restrictions on small businesses such as bars and restaurants.  Organizers secured enough signatures of registered voters to force the recall on the ballot.

Californians are being asked to vote either yes or no to remove Newsom from office.  If enough voters select “yes,” a candidate who receives a simple majority of the vote will replace Newsom.  Voter opinion surveys show Larry Elder, a staunch conservative radio talk show host, is the leading candidate among more than 40 would-be successors to serve out the remainder of Newsom’s term in office, which ends next year.
 
Newsom is a prominent figure among national Democrats, having previously served as mayor of the city of San Francisco and California lieutenant governor before he was elected governor in 2018.  His defeat in a state dominated by Democrats could signal major problems for Biden and congressional Democrats heading into next year’s midterm legislative elections. But recent surveys show Newsom with a solid lead in the campaign.
 
He is the second California governor to face a recall vote. The first one in 2003 removed Democrat Gray Davis and installed popular Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  

Democrats are running. YouTube creator Kevin Paffrath is the most well-known of nine Democrats on the ballot.
 

President Joe Biden on Monday used his first Western swing since taking office to hold out the wildfires burning across the region as an argument for his $3.5 trillion rebuilding plans, calling year-round fires and other extreme weather a climate change reality the nation can no longer ignore. 

"Even some of my less believing friends are all of a sudden having an altar call," Biden said of those who have sought to minimize the risks posed by climate change. "They're seeing the Lord."  

With stops in Idaho and California, Biden sought to boost support for his big rebuilding plans, saying every dollar spent on "resilience" would save $6 in future costs. And he said the rebuilding must go beyond simply restoring damaged systems and instead ensure communities can withstand catastrophic weather, which doesn't strike based on partisan ideology. 

"It's not a Democrat thing. It's not a Republican thing. It's a weather thing," he said in Boise, Idaho. "It's a reality. It's serious and we can do this." 

The president's two-day Western swing comes at a critical juncture for a central plank of his legislative agenda. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working to assemble details of the infrastructure-plus plan — and to figure out how to pay for it, a concern not just for Republicans. A key Democratic senator said Sunday that he will not vote for a package so large. 

In California, Biden took an aerial tour of damage from the Caldor Fire after getting a briefing from officials at the state emergency services office. Governor Gavin Newsom, who faces a recall vote Tuesday, joined Biden for the briefing. 

As he amplified Biden's message, Newsom said the emergency center had become his office because fire season has "just kept going." 

"This has been a hard year and a half," Newsom said. 

During an earlier briefing in Boise at the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates the government's wildfire response, Biden noted that wildfires start earlier every year and that this year, they have scorched 5.4 million acres. "That's larger than the entire state of New Jersey," Biden said. 

"The reality is we have a global warming problem, a serious global warming problem, and it's consequential, and what's going to happen is, things are not going to go back," he said.  

Biden, who visits Denver on Tuesday before returning to Washington, aimed to link the increasing frequency of wildfires, drought, floods and other extreme weather events to what he and scientists say is a need to invest billions in combating climate change, along with vastly expanding the nation's social safety net. 

The president argued for spending now to make the future effects of climate change less costly, as he did during recent stops in Louisiana, New York and New Jersey — all states that suffered millions of dollars in flood and other damage and scores of deaths after Hurricane Ida.  

Biden also praised firefighters for the life-threatening risks they take and discussed the administration's recent use of a wartime law to boost supplies of fire hoses from the U.S. Forest Service's primary supplier, an Oklahoma City nonprofit called NewView Oklahoma.  

In deep-red Idaho, several opposing groups leveraged Biden's visit as a way to show resistance to his administration. GOP gubernatorial candidates, an anti-vaccine organization and a far-right group were among those urging people to turn out against the president. 

More than 1,000 protesters did so, gathering in Boise before Biden arrived, to express displeasure with his coronavirus plan, the election and other issues. 

Chris Burns, a 62-year-old from Boise, said, "I'm against everything Biden is for." Burns was especially displeased with a sweeping new vaccine mandate for 100 million people that Biden announced last week. "He's acting like a dictator," Burns said. 

The White House is trying to turn the corner after a difficult month dominated by a chaotic and violent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the surging delta COVID-19 variant that has upended what the president had hoped would mark a summer in which the nation was finally freed from the coronavirus. 

Biden, while acknowledging that his polling numbers had dipped in recent weeks, argued his agenda is "overwhelmingly popular" with the public. He said he expects his Republican opponents to attack him instead of debating him on the merits of his spending plan. 

Besides the Republican opposition in Congress, Biden needs to overcome the skepticism of two key centrist Democrats in the closely divided Senate. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have expressed concerns about the size of the $3.5 trillion spending package. 

Manchin said Sunday, "I cannot support $3.5 trillion," citing in particular his opposition to a proposed increase in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% and vast new social spending envisioned by the president. Manchin also complained about a process he said felt rushed.  

The 100-member Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Given solid GOP opposition, Biden's plan would fail to clear the Senate without Manchin and Sinema's support. 

The climate provisions in Biden's plans include tax incentives for clean energy and electric vehicles, investments to transition the economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and creation of a civilian climate corps. 

The Biden administration in June laid out a strategy to deal with the growing wildfire threat, which included hiring more federal firefighters and implementing new technologies to detect and address fires quickly. Last month, the president approved a disaster declaration for California, providing federal aid for the counties affected by the Dixie and River fires. He issued another disaster declaration for the state just before Monday's visit aimed at areas affected by the Caldor Fire. 
 

The four front-runners in the race for mayor of Boston are all women of color, a remarkable turn of events for a city that has only elected white men to that office since its inception in 1822. 

On Tuesday, voters will choose the top two candidates from a field of eight, but polling indicates that only four candidates stand a chance at advancing — each of whom is a woman of color. The two winners will face off in the official mayoral election on November 2. 

Leading the field with 31% of the vote, according to Suffolk University polling released last week, is Michelle Wu, the first Asian-American woman to serve as a City Councilor. Locked in an extremely tight race for second place are Acting Mayor Kim Janey at 20%, City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George at 19%, and City Councilor Andrea Campbell at 18%. 

Janey took office in March when former mayor Martin Walsh left to become U.S. secretary of labor. Janey and Campbell are both Black women. George is the daughter of a Tunisian-Arab father and a Polish mother, and identifies as a woman of color. There are four other candidates on the ballot, only three of whom remain active, but none was polling above 3% last week. 

History will be made 

"History will not be made on November 2, the day of the final election," said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. "History will technically be made next Tuesday, because both candidates will be persons of color." 

While in some ways remarkable, the candidates vying for mayor are actually a reflection of a city that has undergone significant change in its racial makeup over the past decades. Long a majority-white city, Boston is now a majority-minority city, with Black and Hispanic residents representing 19% of the population and Asians representing 11%. While still the largest single group, Whites now represent only 45% of the city's residents. 

A signal of coming political change arrived in 2018 when Ayanna Pressley, a Black woman and a member of the City Council, unseated 10-term Congressman Mike Capuano as representative of Massachusetts' Seventh Congressional District. 

Troubled racial history 

Boston, the 24th-largest city in the U.S., has a complex and sometimes troubled racial history. In the years prior to the Civil War, the city was a hotbed of the Abolitionist movement, which demanded an end to slavery. And during the war, the famed all-Black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was raised there. 

But the city hasn't always lived up to its history. In the 1970s and 1980s, efforts to integrate schools that were sharply divided by race were met with violent protests from White Bostonians who objected to having Black children bused into their neighborhoods for school. 

One of the candidates, Acting Mayor Janey, experienced those riots as a child. At an event last week, she recalled being bused through rock-throwing mobs as a child. She said her presence as acting mayor and as a mayoral candidate are both "a testament to how far this city has come." 

Candidates' biographies 

Janey, who became acting mayor when Walsh joined the Biden administration, has already made history in that role as the first woman and first person of color to run City Hall. A native of Boston, she raised her daughter as a single mother in high school, and ultimately worked her way through Smith College.  

Wu is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School. She has served on the City Council since 2013 when, at age 28, she became the first Asian American elected to that body. The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Wu speaks fluent Mandarin and Spanish. 

George is a native Bostonian who attended Boston University and earned a master's degree in Education from the University of Massachusetts Boston. A high school teacher since 2001, George was elected to the City Council in 2015. 

Campbell, also a Boston native, has served on the City Council since 2015 and became the first Black woman to serve as Council president, a position she held for two years beginning in January 2018. She worked for a time as deputy legal counsel to Deval Patrick, the first Black person to serve as governor of Massachusetts. 

Slow to elect women 

The election of Pressley, and now the expected election of a woman of color as mayor, mark significant strides for a city that has not welcomed women to seats of power, said Erin O'Brien, an associate professor of Political Science and the University of Massachusetts Boston. 

"Boston has been very slow to elect candidates of color, and women," she said. "And even today, we're barely middle of the pack when it comes to electing women, amongst the 50 states. So you've got a very liberal state, but you don't have a state where the elected leaders are as diverse as the populace." 

One thing that won't be unique about the outcome of the election on Tuesday is the political party of the victor. All four of the leading candidates are members of the Democratic Party. Boston has not elected a Republican mayor since 1925. 

Whoever prevails on Tuesday, said Suffolk's Paleologos, the result "is going to rewrite history, and in terms of the election, in November, of a person of color, that's a big story." 

U.S. Capitol Police said they arrested a California man early Monday near the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington and that multiple knives, a bayonet and a machete were in his truck. 

Officers on patrol said that around midnight Sunday they noticed the truck, with a swastika and other white supremacist symbols painted on it. Instead of a license plate, police said the truck had a picture of an American flag. 

It is illegal to carry a bayonet and machete in Washington. The arrested man, Donald Craighead, 44, of Oceanside, California, said he was “on patrol,” police said. Craighead was charged with possession of prohibited weapons. 

Police said they are continuing to investigate the suspect. 

Security alerts remain high near the U.S. Capitol, not far from the Democratic party headquarters, in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol building January 6 by hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump. The incident happened as lawmakers were certifying that he had lost his re-election bid last November to Democrat Joe Biden, who took over as president January 20. 

Those supporting the more than 600 rioters arrested eight months ago are planning a rally, “Justice for J6,” in Washington this Saturday. About 50 people have pleaded guilty to an array of charges, while the rest of the cases are pending, with some suspects remaining jailed, awaiting trials.   

Democratic allies of California Governor Gavin Newsom continued to express confidence Saturday in his chances of beating back a recall but warned his supporters to keep urging people to vote as they seek a decisive win, while Republicans said the contest is far from settled.  

"We don't need to just win by a little, we need to win by a lot. We need to send a message: Hands off our democracy, hands off our California," said April Verrett, president of the SEIU Local 2015, as she rallied union members who have been among Newsom's biggest supporters.  

Newsom joined the Oakland rally as his Republican rivals made their cases up and down the state and both major parties sent volunteers out to knock on doors and urge their supporters to vote. The race concludes Tuesday, and more than a third of voters have mailed in their ballots or voted early in person. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, one of the GOP candidates, voted Saturday morning in his home city. 

Poll shows Newsom with edge

A recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California shows Newsom likely to survive, and Democrats are making a stronger showing in early voting. But the GOP is expecting a larger turnout on Election Day, given many Republicans are skeptical of voting by mail. 

"Anyone who is counting the recall out at this point is not really in touch with what's actually going on with this movement," said Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who is running to unseat Newsom and is favored by some of the recall's original supporters. 

The ballot includes two questions: Should Newsom be recalled from office and, if so, who should replace him? If a majority of voters want him gone, he'd be replaced by whoever gets the most votes among the 46 candidates on the replacement ballot.  

More than 7.7 million people have voted, according to ballot tracking data compiled by Political Data Inc., a data firm that works with Democrats.  

Newsom called the numbers encouraging and attributed it to more Democrats becoming aware of the recall as it winds to a close. Still, he said he's taking nothing for granted. He'll spend the next few days campaigning in Southern California, and on Monday he'll be joined by Democratic President Joe Biden.  

He stuck to his closing message that the race could have profound consequences beyond California, calling it a contest of "outsize consequences." He and other Democrats have likened it to former President Donald Trump's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and have charged Republicans with pursuing a recall because they can't win a normal election. Californians haven't elected a Republican statewide since 2006.  

"The recall is about catching you while you're sleeping," he said. "This recall is about getting us in an off year, in an off month, while no one else is paying attention." 

The recall made the ballot through a process that's been in the California Constitution for more than a century. Originally the recall was likely to be held in October or November, but Democrats in the state Legislature sped up the process to allow for an earlier election.  

GOP objections

Republicans angry with Newsom's policies on immigration, crime and a host of other issues sparked the recall drive, but it took off during the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers got more than 1.7 million signatures to place it on the ballot. That's less than a tenth of registered voters.  

"Gavin Newsom has failed Californians. From surging crime to a broken unemployment department and raging wildfires, our state deserves better than this governor's serial incompetence," California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement. She was out Saturday knocking on doors in Los Angeles County. 

Meanwhile, the union leaders who rallied alongside Newsom pointed to his pandemic policies as lifesaving measures for home health care and other essential workers. They also applauded him for increasing providers' pay, which was cut under former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the winner of the 2003 recall.  

The Service Employees International Union has donated more than $2.5 million to Newsom's campaign, and unions collectively are his biggest financial backers. 

Beyond campaigning, several candidates marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Larry Elder, who is considered the Republican front-runner, attended 9/11 commemorations and a lunch with homeless and disabled veterans, and John Cox and Kiley also attended anniversary events. Before his campaign stop, Newsom visited the Wall of Heroes memorial at the California National Guard's headquarters.