The Brief

When politicians and planners think about climate adaptation, they’re often considering the hard edges of infrastructure and economics. Will we divert flooding? Should we restore shorelines? Can we fireproof homes? Folklorist Maida Owens believes such questions don’t capture the full picture. When climate disaster comes for the diverse Cajun and Creole fishing communities of Louisiana’s islands and bayous, it has the potential to tear their cultural fabric apart.

“There’s more to community resilience than the physical protection of properties,” Owens, who works with Louisiana’s state folklife program, told Grist.

Radical change is already occurring. Louisiana’s coast is slowly being swallowed by the sea; the Southwest is drying out; Appalachia’s transition from coal has been no less disruptive than a recent battery of floods and storms. These crises, which are unfolding nationwide, interrupt not only infrastructure, but the rituals and remembrances that make up daily life.

The study of those rituals and remembrances may seem like an esoteric discipline, one relegated to exploring quaint superstitions of the past or documenting old men in overalls playing homemade instruments. It’s true that those who study and preserve folklore don’t concern themselves with high art — that is, the sort of thing supported by networks of patronage and philanthropy and gallery exhibitions. Their mission is to record the culture of ordinary people: us. Our jokes, our songs, our spiritual practices, our celebrations, our recipes. Such things are the glue that holds society together, and as the climate changes our ways of life, Owens and her peers say, it’s important to pay attention to how culture adjusts.

Doing that goes beyond the practical question of how people will carry their heritage into a world reshaped by climate change. It requires looking to tradition-bearers — the people within a community who are preserving its customs, songs, and stories and passing them on — for clues to how best to navigate this tumultuous time without losing generations of knowledge. In that way, folklorists across the country increasingly strive to help communities adapt to a new reality, understand how tradition shifts in times of crisis, and even inform climate policy. Folklore doesn’t seem like it would teach us how to adapt to a warming world, but even as it looks over our collective shoulder at the past, it can prepare us for a future that is in many ways already here.

In the coal towns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, Emily Hilliard has written extensively on this idea, which she calls visionary folklore. She looks for ways to sustain culture as those who practice it experience incredible change so that they might “send traditions on to the future.” As climate disaster threatens to wipe away entire towns and ways of life — both literally, in the case of the communities lost to the floods that ravaged Kentucky in 2022, and figuratively through the loss of archives and museums to those inundations — she considers this continuity an essential part of retaining a sense of place and identity, two intangible feelings that help give life meaning.

A Perry County school bus, along with other debris, sits in a creek near Jackson, Kentucky, on July 31, 2022.

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“Folklorists can help communities pass on these traditions,” she said.

Hilliard is a former West Virginia state folklorist who has, among other things, collected oral histories, songs, artwork, and legends for the West Virginia Folklife Program. It’s impossible to talk about climate in Appalachia without talking about coal, and the communities she has documented have a gnarled and thorny relationship with that industry, which has both sustained them and helped create the climate impacts they’re left to grapple with.

People, Hilliard said, face a grave risk in “the way that climate disaster breaks up communities, so that communities may no longer be able to share food and music traditions.” Visionary folklore is, in part, about trying to restore, replace, and sustain these things, while finding ways to bulwark and adapt traditions for an uncertain future.

Climate change, like the coal industry that fostered it, threatens to rewrite some of the region’s cultural memory. Hilliard recalls members of the Scotts Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, a place where town elders regularly play music, tell stories, and share meals, talking of rising floodwaters threatening their community gathering spaces. She sees collaboration with communities to preserve these important community resources as part of her life’s work.

As she strives to help communities sustain old traditions, Hilliard sees new ones emerging as coping strategies for a world in which foundations are shifting. As floods have repeatedly swept through Appalachia, she has seen communities come together to repair and replace family quilts, musical instruments, and other heirlooms and keepsakes, some of which were painstakingly crafted by hand and many of which have been handed down through generations. Community members in Scotts Run established “repair cafes” where people with various skills helped neighbors recover. Coal company towns’ often hardscrabble existence made such expertise necessary, and in an era of looming environmental destruction, those knowledge pathways allow people to simultaneously come together to grieve and to begin to rebuild their community. Such things are not limited to Appalachia, of course.

“There may exist beneficial practices and adaptations to crises within our historical and current practices,” said Kimi Eisele, a folklorist with the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona. Eisele, who is beginning a folklife project focused on climate change, manages Borderlore, a journal operated by the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It recently received a $150,000 grant to collect oral histories that amplify the environmental history and future of the Southwest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other historically excluded people.

In southern Arizona, where Eisele lives and works, triple-digit temperatures, aridity, and groundwater depletion present a dire threat to agriculture and even long-term human settlement. Many of the interviews Eisele and others have collected focus on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous traditions and how those traditions are changing. The Tohono O’odham, whose ancestral land is divided by the border with Mexico, have for example long relied on willow for basket-weaving, but as farms and groundwater diversion have lowered the water table, willows have dried up and died. Basket-weavers now use the hardier yucca plant. Climate change is also causing traditional adobe homes to crack and decay; Native architects are working to shore them up and explore how modern technology can preserve them, even as the structures provide a model for building cooler, more energy-efficient homes.

The interviews describe adaptations made over millennia that still work – mind-boggling, perhaps, to a society that has managed to nearly deplete its resources in just a few hundred years. The Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Diné, and other peoples have weathered climate fluctuations, droughts, floods, and famine in the tens of thousands of years they’ve lived in the Southwest. Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who raises corn, believes that heritage provides essential tools for adapting to the climate crisis. He is working to ensure others learn to use them.

Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson relies on the annual monsoon to water his cornfields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. He believes traditional farming methods will become increasingly vital as the climate changes.

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“As Hopis, we adjust to these environmental fluctuations,” Johnson told Eisele in an interview for the Climate Lore oral history series. “It’s part of our faith.” Even if this period of climate crisis is unprecedented and unpredictable, Johnson says, he feels prepared to bear it out.

Johnson is a dryland farmer, meaning he uses traditional farming methods that don’t require irrigation. He relies on the annual monsoon to water his fields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. In 2018, for example, he realized early on that a drought was intensifying because “biological indicators that usually appear in April weren’t there,” he told Eisele. “Plants weren’t greening up, so we knew the soil moisture wasn’t going to be there.” In response, he and other Hopi farmers planted only a quarter of their usual crop to avoid depleting the soil. What he describes as “bumper” years can take communities through leaner times — if everyone is careful and pays attention.

“We’ve had a system in place to handle a lot of it. We plant enough to last three to five years,” Johnson told Eisele. “When you have everybody doing that, then you have to have a good supply to get through climatic changes.”

He hopes other farmers, particularly Native farmers, collaborate in practicing regenerative agriculture rather than relying on destructive groundwater withdrawal to maintain crops the desert simply can’t support. Eisele finds stories like Johnson’s invaluable in helping people everywhere adapt. “We are really looking at folklife as a tool for liberation,” she said.

Dr. Michael White and Company lead a jazz funeral procession during a wreath-laying event to remember the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans Katrina Memorial.

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Along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Maida Owens, takes such work a step farther, trying to use folklore to shape public policy and make the world more welcoming toward those displaced by the climate crisis.

The Bayou State has been losing up to 35 square miles of coastland each year for the better part of a century. As erosion and rising seas have remade the state, entire communities have had to move. Climate migration, new to some parts of the world, is as much a fact of life for Louisianans as the changing of the tides.

Even as Louisiana has focused on reclaiming lost land and restoring coastal wetland, Owens has urged special attention to adaptation, teaching people in harms’ way how to adjust their ways of life without losing what’s most important to them. She works with the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which brings together tradition bearers from impacted communities to talk “about the human dimension of coastal land loss” so residents, and their elected leaders, can better plan for the migration already afoot. Research has shown that when people make the difficult decision to pack up and leave, most of them go only a few miles.

“People from all over the coast are starting to leave and move inland,” Owens said. In the parlance of her field, the places they leave behind are “sending communities”; where they’re headed, “receiving communities” await them. Owens has begun to convene meetings online and in receiving communities to discuss cultural sensitivity to help people prepare for their new neighbors, knowing that migration can exacerbate class and racial tension.

In the Louisiana folklife program’s ongoing “Sense of Place – And Loss” workshop series, Owens hosts discussions about the future of bayou traditions to collectively imagine what the near future might look like as the Gulf Coast changes. Artists, other tradition bearers, and community leaders are invited to envision how they might make their towns and counties more welcoming for climate migrants, and Owens assists them in developing concrete action plans. Such an effort includes having receiving communities inventory their cultural and economic resources to see what they can offer newcomers, invest in trauma-informed care for disaster survivors, and consider what they might need to make themselves ready to integrate newcomers.

Louisiana’s combination of rising waters and sinking land give it one of the highest rates of relative sea level rise in the nation.

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The Louisiana state coastal protection and restoration authority has identified some towns that might have the capacity, and need, for more people; many of these places have the space but lack the social infrastructure to support the continuation of rural peoples’ foodways and artistic traditions. Though receiving communities may not be far away, those most vulnerable to displacement are often Indigenous, French-speaking, or otherwise culturally distinct, and moving even a short distance can expose them to unfamiliar circumstances. In her workshops, Owens is proposing ideas lifted in part from the adaptation strategies immigrants often rely upon, like cultural festivals and an emphasis on cultural exchange and language education. In a recent project, several coastal parishes (what Louisianans call counties) near Terrebonne created a collaborative quilt at a regional community festival as a way to draw attention to the beauty and ancestral importance of their wetlands and deepen their connections with one another.

That’s where Owens hopes folklorists can affect policy change, too. Owens is keeping a close eye on the state’s Coastal Master Plan, providing feedback with an eye towards supporting the culturally rich, and vanishing, coastal parishes. The Louisiana Folklore Society has urged the state to conduct its planning with respect to the desires and needs of the people who live on the coast, prioritizing engagement before any major mitigation project, and saving habitat not merely for its inherent value but also for its importance to the coastal tribes it sustains.

Though climate disasters have already thrown towns along the Louisiana coast and beyond into disarray and prompted seismic changes in how residents live, this is just the beginning. As floods and fires, droughts and erosion, and the myriad other impacts of a warming world wreak greater havoc, some of the answers to the crisis won’t be found in engineering or science, but in the cultural fabric that binds us together.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/as-climate-change-fractures-communities-folklorists-help-stitch-them-back-together/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Tech giants Meta, Google, and TikTok are suing to block a landmark California law meant to protect kids’ mental health on social media platforms.

The law, one of a slate of bills signed by Gov. Newsom this year to protect kids online, would block social media companies from offering “addictive” features to teens under 16.

Set to go into effect in January, the law defines addictive features as design choices like infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendations. Those features are blamed in part for a teen mental health crisis, which the law seeks to curb.

The three suits, filed in multiple federal courts in California this week, argue that the law would infringe on the companies’ First Amendment rights. The Meta suit, for example, says that the law undermines the “fundamental principle” of free speech by making the state “the editor, curator, and controller of online speech.”

Google, which owns YouTube, similarly argues in its lawsuit that the law would “frustrate YouTube’s efforts to provide under-16 users with safe, responsible, and enriching experiences on the platform.”

The companies want the courts to block the law before it takes effect.

When the measure was before the California Legislature, some groups, like digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued the law would amount to a full ban on social media for teenagers because it was so broad and the features it regulated so fundamental to the platforms. Teens would then miss out on precious online resources, the groups said.

NetChoice, a tech industry-aligned group, also criticized the law. It released a statement supporting the lawsuits, saying “the state cannot restrict minors' access to protected expression simply because it thinks the expression is bad for them.”

A supporter of the law, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in response to the lawsuits that courts have already been “rejecting the industry’s claims that the First Amendment shields them from accountability.”

The bill’s passage was just one in a recent series of damaging moments for the tech industry, which has faced intense scrutiny over its impact on teens’ mental health. Meta agreed in August to pay as much as $17 billion as part of a settlement with 47 states that argued the company had engineered its products to be addictive to children.

A TikTok spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the suits. A Meta spokesperson declined to attach their name to a statement and CalMatters declined to publish it.

“We believe parents are best positioned to make the right decisions for their families, which is why we offer a range of protections and tools that put parents in control,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said in an email. “Overly broad laws like this actually break the systems we’ve built to help kids find high-quality, age-appropriate videos.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Three stories about climate change are playing out like popular movie genres as United Nations climate negotiations begin in Antalya, Turkey.

There’s the horror story. Many scientists believe global warming is accelerating. Two months ago, the U.N. readjusted its decade-old goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) because the world is blowing past that threshold. The fallout from rising temperatures is felt globally, with Europe’s deadly summer heat waves and Nepal’s devastating flooding as stark examples.

There’s the love triangle. For more than a century, the world has been powered by coal, oil and gas. This love affair spurred economic development, as well as the emissions warming the planet. But renewable energy is capturing some of the world’s attention because it’s cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels. Instead of switching from one to the other, the world is using both to meet demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence and ever-growing economic development. This isn’t helping curb climate change.

Then there’s the war movie. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered a European energy shock. This year the United States and Israel bombed Iran. The conflict closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent fossil fuel prices skyrocketing, forcing nations to rethink their energy systems.

These stories are colliding as the 31st Conference of Parties, or COP31, starts Monday with speeches from world leaders and will later dig into how to follow through on past climate pledges.

A key issue this year is the implementation of promises to transition away from fossil fuels. Co-host Turkey is also pushing a separate plan that would help do that by shifting more global energy use — including transportation — to electricity generated from solar and wind power. Negotiators also will hash out how to provide promised funds to poor countries to switch to renewables, adapt to a warmer world and recover from climate-induced damage.

“It’s really the moment that we place a magnifying lens on what’s happening in the world on climate change, both good and bad,” David Waskow, international climate chief at the World Resources Institute, said.

While the U.S. is the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, it skipped last year’s COP and isn’t expected to participate this year.

“There’s always two topics in the climate negotiations that are relevant and difficult,” said Niklas Höhne, co-founder of Germany’s NewClimate Institute. “The first one is who produces emissions (and) how much. That is difficult enough. But what is even more complicated is the other issue, and that is who pays. And on this one, we are particularly in a difficult situation because the U.S., as the largest contributor, has dropped out. And there’s no other player who can jump in.”

Global climate efforts are off track

Eleven years ago, the world was on track to hit 4 C (7.2 F) of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. In 2015, nations set the goal of keeping warming to below 2 C (3.6 F), but with a preferred limit of 1.5 C (2.7 F), as measured over a multi-year period.

Now, the world is at 1.4 C (2.5 F) of warming and is hurtling toward 2.6 C (4.7 F), the U.N. found.

October 2026 was the hottest October on record, and 2026 is virtually certain to end up as the second year to exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius level, behind 2024, the European climate agency Copernicus announced Friday.

“We have failed so far,” said Johan Rockström, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Rockström said Earth will likely experience more extreme weather, such as floods, droughts and storms, and may soon reach “tipping points,” such as ocean currents changing and the Amazon rainforest collapsing.

It comes down to fossil fuels

Even though burning fossil fuels is the main cause of warming, it has rarely been targeted in final documents agreed upon at the conference, mostly because those decisions require consensus.

“The reason we are seeing the breach of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is because we avoided the absolutely fundamental question of how climate change happened and what’s responsible, the source of the problem and that’s fossil fuels,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. “Unless and until we resolve the issue of fossil fuel phase out, we will not be able to deal with the problem.”

Brazil, which hosted COP30 last year, this month released a detailed voluntary roadmap for how countries could transition away from fossil fuels.

The roadmap is meant to turn the “big problem” of reducing fossil fuels into “smaller actionable solutions,” Ana Toni, who served as CEO of last year’s climate talks, said. One key thing nations must do is stop subsidizing fossil fuels, she said. The U.N. estimates fossil fuel subsidies globally hit $1.1 trillion this year.

“What’s standing in the way is not so much technology as governments and incumbent industries,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. “One cannot underestimate the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in slowing down action.”

Climate talks bring hope and frustration

Barbados youth activist Ashley Lashley’s first COP was five years ago. She was frustrated by the lack of progress then, but hopeful because there was urgency to keep the 1.5-degree goal alive.

Lashley still attends negotiations with some hope, but she is more frustrated than ever. She said “the science has become more alarming, but yet politically we seem to be negotiating how much failure we are prepared to tolerate.”

Qiyun Woo, a Singaporean youth environmentalist, said her generation is tired of “seeing their present and futures blanketed in wildfire smoke, in devastating floods (and) landslides.”

What gives most experts hope is how cheap solar and wind energy are, along with electric car growth, strengthening the economic argument for transitioning away from fossil fuels.

“It has never been as easy to reduce emissions as it is today because, again, this year, renewable energy has been developing faster than before,” Höhne said.

Hope for progress on the sidelines

Much of the work at climate negotiations happens on the sidelines, where not everyone has to agree and some nations do more than others.

One important sideline initiative this year is Turkey’s goal of increasing electricity’s share of global energy use from 21% to 35% by 2035, preferably by using renewable power.

Mohamed Adow, a veteran COP observer and director of Power Shift Africa, said the conference is taking place at a time when the world is deeply fragmented.

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has intensified economic and energy security pressures,” he said. “We don’t expect this particular conference to be able to sufficiently respond to the present day challenge ... that is affecting livelihoods and economies.”

The climate talks are hindered by the continued absence of the U.S., Adow said, adding that it wasn’t fair to nations like Nepal, which have to face catastrophic destruction alone while the world’s wealthiest country and biggest polluter sits on the fence.

“A time will come when we will have to hold the U.S. accountable for the climate harms that it’s caused,” he said.

___

Borenstein reported from Washington, Delgado from Bangkok and Arasu from Bengaluru, India.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This is the Nov. 6 issue of Make It Make Sense, LAist's elections newsletter breaking down the results of the 2026 general election. You can sign up here to receive issues in your inbox through the end of November.

Good morning! We’re beginning to feel the drag of Election Month. Cue the 🎶 Jeopardy music 🎶. We’re still waiting for an outcome on a lot of our statewide propositions, but we’ve got some juicy tax updates (if you can call them that) and another key race call.

First, now that Nithya Raman will be L.A.’s next mayor, what happens to her current council seat that stretches from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains?

LAist asked L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s office: “We look forward to working with Mayor-elect Raman and will discuss with her an appointment who best serves the residents of the Fourth District,” Martin Schlageter, a senior adviser to Harris-Dawson, said in a statement.

That indicates the district could avoid a special election, but who could be appointed is still very much up in the air.

Meanwhile, Raman will have to work closely with a City Council that didn’t back her bid for mayor. LAist asked the 12 members who will be working alongside her about how they plan to work with her — read what they said here.

🌴 L.A. city attorney: Marissa Roy takes the win with a commanding lead

• What happened: Marissa Roy will be the next L.A. city attorney. Her opponent, John McKinney, conceded the race, saying in a statement, “While the results are not what we hoped for, I accept the outcome and congratulate Marissa Roy on her victory. I wish her well as she prepares to serve as Los Angeles City Attorney. Her success in protecting our residents and serving the public interest will be important to the future of our city.”
• How we got here: Roy held onto a strong lead over McKinney ever since polls closed, and currently has more than twice as many votes. Roy will be a fresh face in the role after incumbent city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto was ousted in the June primary in a rare defeat of an elected city official.
• What the candidates had to say:
  
  • Roy said on social media Wednesday that election night was “a really good night for the people who believe that we should take care of one another, that we can stand up for our rights — even in what feels like an increasingly lawless world — and that we will achieve justice when we fight for it.”
  • McKinney added that he is deeply grateful for everyone who supported his campaign, including voters, volunteers and supporters.
• What’s at stake: The city attorney runs an office of more than 550 lawyers representing L.A. in all legal matters, including filing lawsuits and defending against them. Roy, backed by powerful progressives like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, has vowed to take on the Trump administration in court.

💸 L.A. and O.C. voters are saying yes to dozens of tax measures

• What happened: By LAist’s count, more than 30 cities or districts in L.A. and Orange counties asked voters to approve tax measures this election. They include sales taxes — like Measure FD in the city of Los Angeles — hotel taxes, business taxes and utility taxes. So far, all but six seem likely to pass.
• 🌴Measure FD is passing: L.A. city voters are steadily approving (53.68%) another half-cent sales tax, this time to bolster L.A. Fire Department resources. The sales tax will go up to 10.75%, although residents likely won’t start paying the higher rate until spring. And it still won’t be the highest in the county — Palmdale and Lancaster pay 11.75%, and San Gabriel's newly passed Measure PS brings its combined rate to 12%.
• 🌴 South Gate utility users tax is failing: The L.A. County city is asking residents to approve an 8% tax that would be added to bills for utilities such as electricity, water, cable and phone services. Voters are resoundingly rejecting Measure SG, with nearly 70% saying “no.”
• 🌴🍊 Transient occupancy taxes: Nearly a dozen of these proposals, which tax overnight hotel guests or short-term rentals, are passing in cities from Burbank in L.A. County to Los Alamitos in O.C. You can see more details in our roundup here.
  

Check out the vote count charts for these too-close-to-call races

🌴 L.A. City Council District 3

• What’s happening: This San Fernando Valley race to replace Bob Blumenfield is getting spicy as more results roll in. Tim Gaspar, an entrepreneur who has said the city needs someone coming from the outside, is losing his early lead. He’s fallen 875 votes behind Barri Worth Girvan, a Valley community advocate with experience in various government offices.
  
  • Worth Girvan said in a social media post Thursday that she is encouraged by the trend so far. “While many ballots remain to be counted and results will continue to shift, we expect this trend to continue as more mail-in ballots are tallied, and we remain cautiously optimistic that when all the votes are counted, we will prevail.”

🌴 L.A. City Council District 9

• What’s happening: The race to succeed Curren Price has been narrowing each day. Jose Ugarte had more than a 14-point lead over Estuardo Mazariegos when polls closed, but it has since shrunk to about four. Ugarte, a community outreach director, is endorsed by Price and a few other members of the City Council. Mazariegos leans more to the left and is supported by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia.
  
  • Ugarte said on social media Thursday that while ballots are still being counted, “we remain optimistic.”

🍊 O.C. Supervisors District 4
In the race for the Fourth District, Democrat and Buena Park mayor Connor Traut is leading with 50.80% of the vote over Republican Tim Shaw, a member of the O.C. Board of Education.

🍊 O.C. Supervisors District 5
Democratic incumbent Katrina Foley is still on track to keep her Fifth District seat against Republican Assemblymember Diane Dixon, with a gap that’s widened to 7,600 votes. If either Republican wins, it will change the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors.

What else got called

• 🥑 State superintendent: Republican Sonja Shaw is conceding the race to Democrat Richard Barrera, who is more than a million votes ahead. In a social media post Wednesday, Shaw wrote, “Last night, voters made their choice. I would be lying if I said my heart wasn’t heavy.” Barrera is a labor leader and union organizer in San Diego, and has served on the board of San Diego Unified for nearly two decades.
• 🌴 L.A. County Superior Court judge: Office No. 87 is settled. Attorney David DeJute has conceded the race to Anthony "A.J." Bayne, a deputy public defender with over 30 years of courtroom experience. Bayne ran without a long roster of Democratic endorsements, which were a common fixture this cycle for judicial candidates. He was rated “well qualified” by the L.A. County Bar Association.

👀 We’re still watching 👀

• 🥑 Insurance commissioner: We’re still holding our breath on the race to lead the nation’s largest property and casualty insurance market. Two Democrats are trying to take on the role: State Sen. Ben Allen and attorney Jane Kim. Allen (47.3%) has been steadily trailing Kim (52.7%), who slightly bumped up her lead in the last few days.
• 🥑 The remaining props:
  
  • Prop 4: This proposal would lift the ban that keeps California and many local governments from using tax dollars to fund political campaigns. It could reshape how elections are funded, but so far, it’s failing by a few percentage points.
  • Prop 5: Should California change how it replaces elected state officials being recalled? The Legislature put it on the ballot, and it’s succeeding by 2 percentage points. If it holds on to the lead, voters would no longer vote on a recall and a replacement in the same election, instead punting a successor to a separate ballot.
  • Prop 38: This proposition is passing by a decently wide margin (55.1%). It would pave the way for the state to borrow $8.4 billion in bonds for immunology research. Supporters argued that the research could lead to treatments that help people living with cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's, but opponents say half the funds would go to just one research group.
  • Props 40, 41, 42: This is the billionaire’s tax and the two countermeasures designed to kill it. So far, it’s looking like Prop 40, the wealth tax, is failing (54.5% “no”), as well as Prop 41 (53.4% “no”), which would prohibit new tax revenue from being excluded from the state spending limit. The other, Prop 42, may pass (53.3% “yes”), which would ban new wealth taxes on personal property.
  • Prop 43: Speaking of taxes … this would make it harder to pass and raise some local taxes by bumping up the threshold of votes to a two-thirds majority. It would specifically apply to special tax measures put up by voters. It’s currently failing by about a million votes.
  • Prop 45: This is designed to limit environmental reviews for certain projects, such as housing and infrastructure, by cutting the time it takes to go through the state’s evaluation process. It’s opposed by groups like the National Wildlife Federation, and it's failing by about a 10-point margin.
• 🌴 L.A. County’s judicial seats: The races for offices 64 and 65 are still up in the air, but there are clear leaders. Maria Ghobadi, a deputy district attorney running for seat 64, has nearly 53% of the vote, while Justin Allen Clayton, a deputy public defender running in 65, has 56%. Neither of their competitors has conceded yet. Meanwhile, the fight for Office No. 131 between two public defenders is narrowing. David Ross trails Donna Tryfman, but he picked up more votes in this morning’s drop.

😰 Is it over yet? 😰

These results are based on about 8.9 million votes counted so far statewide — more than 2.5 million in L.A. County and nearly 892,000 in Orange County.

We still have a ways to go! The California secretary of state estimates there are 4.8 million ballots left to count overall, which includes 642,000 in L.A. County and 298,270 in O.C.

This election is turning out to be a banner year for voter turnout — we’re on track to far exceed the 2022 midterms. But we won’t know the full picture until after Nov. 10, the deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive. You can check on the status of your ballot via the state’s BallotTrax system.

The next local ballot counts drop this afternoon starting around 4 p.m., but hey, we’re going into the weekend! From here on out, we’ll only be back in your inboxes when there’s major news to share — like a call on the billionaire’s tax — and we’ll focus on understanding what these results mean for your life in Southern California.

📰 Catch up quick

If this is your first day reading Make It Make Sense, you can get caught up on our past issues here:

• Nov. 5: Nithya Raman wins the L.A. mayor’s race
• Nov. 5: All 8 L.A. city measures could pass
• Nov. 4: We’ve got a new governor, plus voter ID fails

Otherwise, you can keep up with the results here:

• L.A. County
• Orange County

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Long before the Trump administration started deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many with school-age children, public schools nationwide faced a massive and accelerating drop in student enrollment caused mostly by shrinking families.

"Birth rates here in Los Angeles County have been declining for decades, which means fewer children enrolled in our schools," said Kelly Gonez, a board member in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest in the country, which lost more than 300,000 students over the last two decades.

L.A. isn't alone. The population of children under age 18 began to fall nationwide after 2010, according to U.S. Census data, dropping by roughly 2.1 million kids through 2025.

With public schools in much of the country facing a demographic cliff, the Trump administration last year began detaining and expelling large numbers of foreign residents. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found as many as 1.9 million people left the U.S. during the first 18 months of Trump's second term.

As part of the crackdown effort, federal officials weakened restrictions that prevented ICE agents from operating near public schools. "Many of our families immediately went into hiding," Gonez said. "We were predicting a 2% drop in enrollment. It was double that."

Researchers who study education and population trends aren't surprised. This is the first time in nearly a century, since the era of the Great Depression, that birth rates and immigration levels are low at the same time. Large-scale deportations mean even bigger and more rapid changes in areas with large immigrant communities.

"The U.S. isn't alone in facing the challenges of demographic decline," said Thomas Dee, an economist who specializes in education policy at Stanford University. "To stop or slow immigration really exacerbates those problems. Communities are now confronting very painful decisions about closing schools."

Special needs teacher Deja Nebula sets up an art installation displaying names and faces of people who have been detained or deported during ICE raids in Southern California, at Olvera Street Plaza in Los Angeles, July 2025.

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Damian Dovarganes

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AP

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The scale of decline is daunting. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of kids in public schools nationwide peaked in 2019 and fell by roughly 1.5 million students as of the 2024 school year.

Based on data gathered before Trump's immigration crackdown began, federal researchers project enrollment will decline by at least another 2 million students by 2030. That would mean a 7% national decline in roughly a decade.

40 states see public school enrollment declines

An empty classroom is seen at Hollywood High School in L.A. The school district has begun a process aimed at closing and consolidating schools.

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Rodin Eckenroth

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It's unclear how large or sustained the impact of Trump-era immigration policies will be on enrollment trends. Dee and other researchers say that depends on how long ICE crackdowns and other restrictions remain in place.

In the short term, the blow to many districts could be severe. When Dee studied public schools in communities hit by ICE raids in California's Central Valley in 2025, he found student daily absences spiked more than 20%.

Texas, meanwhile, saw the number of kids in classrooms plunge statewide last year by more than 76,000 students. The vast majority of that drop came among Hispanic kids and the children of immigrant families, according to a study by the Texas Education Agency.

Florida, home to a large community of Haitian refugees who were stripped of temporary protected status by the Trump administration in July, saw a big drop in enrollment this year. The state's two largest public school districts, Miami-Dade and Broward County, lost roughly 30,000 children combined in a single year.

"It's really the effect of both the exodus of the existing families and stopping the inflow [of foreign migrants and children] that normally would have occurred," Dee said.

A report published in June by two education think tanks, Bellwether and WestEd, warned that public schools have entered an era of "sustained" enrollment declines which are already reshaping districts in 40 states.

The analysis found the "primary overall driver of declining enrollment is a sustained drop in birth rates" followed by a "national slowdown in immigration."

"At the local level, enrollment decline may permanently reduce available resources and will significantly reshape public education systems for years to come," the study concluded, while predicting a loss of $11 billion a year in public school funding linked to falling enrollment.

Other factors have spurred public school enrollment losses, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift of more students to private and homeschool learning. But the U.S. Department of Education projects private schools, too, will lose more than a million students by the end of this decade.

'We had over 200 students that didn't show up'

Guadalupe Cardona, a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, said kids vanished from her public school after ICE raids surged in 2025.

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Carlos Jaramillo for NPR

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While debates over immigration policy play out in Washington, D.C., teachers, parents and students say ICE crackdowns already mean more empty classrooms and less vibrant neighborhoods around schools.

"This street right here is actually where the ICE standoff happened. It was right before school," said teacher Guadalupe Cardona, who stood recently outside Santee Education Complex, a high school in South Los Angeles as school buses rumbled past.

In October 2025, an ICE agent opened fire here. No children or school employees were injured, but a man from Mexico without legal status and an ICE agent were struck by bullets. Cardona believes fear following that clash and other raids caused enrollment to plummet.

"In my school alone, we had over 200 students that didn't show up on the first day of school," she said.

"We found that a lot of them were just [gone], no longer living where they had put their address down. We lost two teachers at the beginning of the school year because of it. It is something that hurts beyond just, like, putting your job at risk."

Guadalupe Pineda, a parent, works in a shop just down the street from Santee High. She says dread of ICE, combined with fewer students coming and going, have hurt her community. "There's definitely less sales, less traffic, less everything."

Declines in enrollment at Santee Education Complex, a high school in Los Angeles, intensified after immigration raids started in the city last year. Education experts say public schools nationwide are being hit hard by low birth rates and aggressive Trump-era immigration policies.

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Carlos Jaramillo for NPR

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After growing up in LA and attending public school here without legal status, Pineda told NPR she was able to secure U.S. citizenship a few years ago. She said she understands why people are pulling their kids out of school and, in many cases, leaving the U.S. altogether.

"People are still scared, very much scared to go out to do everyday things. I feel like if I didn't have everything set [with my immigration status], I would probably leave. I would be afraid of being separated from my family."

White House celebrates deportation campaign

NPR asked White House officials about the impact on public schools of ICE crackdowns and other federal immigration policies, including the revocation of temporary refugee status for hundreds of thousands of people living in the U.S. legally.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis sent a brief email response saying deportations "make American classrooms less crowded." Bis also pointed to a September post on the social media platform X, where administration officials celebrated the overall drop in the number of legal and undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

"The total foreign-born population declined 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026," the statement said. "The huge recent decline in the foreign-born population indicates that net migration to the United States was negative in the last year and a half for the first time since the 1930s."

Advocacy groups that support sharply reduced immigration view these trends as a necessary correction after years of what they describe as lax border security. Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said he's not troubled by the prospect that many public school districts will have to downsize.

"We don't guarantee the school system X number of kids," Mehlman said. "That is not the job of our immigration system, that you're going to have X number of kids every single year and if you don't, we're going to go find some for you."

But research suggests it's not only foreign-born children disappearing from classrooms. According to Brookings Institution estimates, as many as 4.6 million school-age kids, including many U.S. citizens, live in homes with family members vulnerable to deportation.

Vanessa Salazar was one of them. She was 18 years old, a U.S.-born senior in LAUSD last year, when her mother was detained and deported to Mexico. "It really threw me off balance," she said. "Coming home without my mother there to be my anchor, really affected my performance in school."

Salazar dropped out to cope with what she describes as her family's trauma and now lives in Mexico with her mother. "It's like, why am I going to be in this country that doesn't really want my people, my community or my culture?" she said.

With birth rates hitting another record low last year and ICE now arresting as many as 50,000 people each month, future school district losses could soar.

A study released in August by state officials predicted public schools in California alone could lose another 710,000 students over the next decade "if current trends in fertility and migration hold."

LA school district board member Kelly Gonez said she thinks many of the demographic changes hitting her community are irreversible and will bring big changes, even if the Trump administration's immigration policies ease.

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Carlos Jaramillo for NPR

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With LAUSD now facing a second school year in a row with 4% enrollment declines, the district announced a citywide effort in September aimed at identifying buildings and campuses that will close.

Kelly Gonez, the school board member, told NPR she expects cuts to be deep and painful. "When your district is roughly half the size of student population it was 20 years ago, it's hard to find a sustainable path to keep campuses open," she said.

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