The Brief

Despite being a political junkie and longtime fan of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, Shasta College senior Raymond Randolph hesitated to speak up about politics on campus. But Kirk’s assassination during a Turning Point USA event at a Utah university in September 2025 changed that.

“God was calling me up to the plate,” said Randolph.

The day after Kirk’s death, Randolph reached out to Turning Point, which Kirk had founded, to start a chapter at his college in Redding. As the chapter’s president, he said he’s not alone in feeling mobilized after Kirk’s assassination.

“It drove a lot of people like me to get up and do something,” he said.

While conservative students say they’ve felt hesitant to speak aloud in the past, they now say emerging Turning Point chapters have helped them break out of their shells in California, with one student even describing them as a “safe space.”

As of March this year, Turning Point USA told CalMatters it has 1,462 active college chapters nationally. Over 70% of those were founded after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Turning Point’s presence has nearly tripled on California campuses as of March, with 78 of the state’s 119 active college chapters founded after Kirk’s death.

But conservative views continue to be overshadowed by more liberal voices on California campuses as tensions persist both in and outside classrooms, students and professors say.

“Most of [the liberal students] think we’re racist, most of them think we’re fascists … especially in California,” Randolph said.

Kameron Tessier, president of the statewide California College Democrats organization, said Turning Point’s rhetoric is “disgusting and very bigoted” and must be investigated on campuses.

“I’m a firm believer in the First Amendment, but also the First Amendment has its consequences,” said Tessier, a senior at UC Santa Cruz. “If they are pushing actively dangerous rhetoric on campuses, then I think it’s worth it for administrations to look into that.”

Turning Point founder Kirk was a highly controversial political figure. His organization is notorious for its Professor Watchlist, an online database identifying “radical” professors. The watchlist has been called inaccurate, and has led to threats and harassment against faculty members across the country. It was also the reason why Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego denied a third attempt by students to establish a school-affiliated Turning Point USA chapter last November.

Some of Kirk’s most controversial comments include calling the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake,” spreading COVID-19 misinformation and saying some gun deaths each year were worth it to protect the Second Amendment.

In California, Generation Z, or those under the age of 29, is 1.5 times as likely to identify as liberal compared to their grandparents’ generation, according to a 2022 statewide survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California.

This lack of conservatism among young people spills onto campuses. Only three California institutions are featured on a list published last fall by college-ranking website Niche of the 100 most conservative colleges in the country. The list is based on student reviews of the political leanings of their campus communities. All three California institutions are private universities: Biola, California Baptist and National.

Creating red spaces in blue places

Students founded a Turning Point chapter at Claremont McKenna last spring. After Kirk’s death in the fall, college security supervised each of the chapter’s events. Several students heckled a vigil they held after Kirk’s assassination in September. And at a February campus Turning Point tabling event, dozens of partially nude bikers rode by in protest of the national organization’s viewpoints.

Bike protest organizer Luca Davis called Turning Point’s values “un-American,” and said the national organization’s harmful rhetoric should not be tolerated on campuses. A junior at Pitzer College, which is part of the Claremont consortium, Davis said he hoped that having dozens of students laughing and blasting music as they biked by the tabling event would act as a visible “foil” to Turning Point’s values.

“We’re living our beliefs and values while they’re working to tear them down,” he said. “It’s an active expression of everything they’re trying to destroy.”

Despite the pushback, a Turning Point student leader said that membership has grown substantially since Kirk’s death, and most members are underclassmen.

A die-hard Floridian, 19-year-old Gabriel Khuly said he became disillusioned by Democratic politics after he moved to California to attend Claremont McKenna for college.

“You really only get to see how stupid and bad Democrat policies are once you get to [really] see them,” he said, citing the high concentration of homelessness on Skid Row and high food prices.

The self-described “gadfly” and well-known conservative on campus said he noticed his right-leaning peers often don’t feel fully comfortable sharing their views, both in and out of the classroom.

“There is still a sort of desire… to at least partially conceal those views,” he said.

Khuly has received a lot of flak for voicing his conservative political opinions on campus, particularly on the anonymous, campus-based social app Fizz. In late September last year, Khuly wore his MAGA cap and, alongside his friends, debated students on abortion and climate change at a table outside the campus dining hall. Later, a post on the campus app called him “the most insufferable, weird, and unf*ckable guy on the planet,” receiving over 1,500 upvotes.

Khuly said “he could not care less” about the retaliation.

“These sorts of people, they don’t exist in the real world,” he said. “They exist online, they exist on college campuses, they exist at bougie millennial coffee shops … they’ll block up the streets for traffic for some protest or whatever, but outside of that, they don’t exist.”

Up north in Shasta County, voters aged 18 to 20 are more likely to register Republican than those aged 21 to 29. But Shasta College itself, according to Randolph, is still a liberal hotspot, where speaking against liberal viewpoints wasn’t really allowed — until his Turning Point chapter came along.

“People have said that they’ve gotten a lot of relief now that they know we’re on campus.”

In some instances, tensions have boiled over, like at Turning Point’s final tour stop at UC Berkeley in November. Fights broke out, with one man hospitalized after he was struck in the head. Police in riot gear arrested several people. In March, a heated exchange occurred at Cerritos College between Democratic congressional candidate Shonique Williams and Republican students and activists.

Political conflict in the classroom

Scott Waller is the chair of the Political Science Department at Biola University in La Mirada, which Niche calls the most conservative college in California — and the 24th most conservative in the nation.

During both of Trump’s administrations, Waller said he has noticed an increased “anxiousness” in the classroom.

“If a student expresses his or her displeasure with the current Trump administration, they will know that there are students similarly animated in a very virulent way to defend the Trump administration,” he said. “That creates some tension in class.”

Yet, some educators relish in-classroom conflict. Stephanie Muravchik and other scholars across the Claremont Colleges analyzed millions of college syllabuses last year to see how professors teach about some of the most contentious subjects in academia, including the ethics of abortion and the Israel-Hamas war. They argued that only a small fraction of professors teach the full range of controversy in the classroom.

Professors must build “more contention” into the classroom in order to encourage healthy intellectual debate, the Claremont professors wrote in an October online magazine op-ed.

So, in sections of her “Introduction to American Politics” class, Muravchik runs simulations with students taking on characters across the political aisle on topics such as social media regulation and constitutional ratification.

She builds the simulations to include prominent conservative characters such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and FBI Director Kash Patel. While all of her students have fun taking on these roles, she noted that her “quietly conservative students” can choose them and feel like they have “equal play in the political conversation.”

“They have fun fighting,” she said. “They get to argue in a civil way.”

Freshman Ava Khansari was in Muravchik’s American Politics class last fall. She said she enjoyed the simulations, and found them eye-opening. In one simulation, as she took on the role of TikTok CEO Shou Chew in a debate on deregulating social media, Khansari said she realized her true viewpoints “went the opposite direction” to her character’s views.

“The games were a lot of fun,” Khansari said. “I really did change my viewpoints on certain topics.”

In a separate course on “American Jews and Liberal Democracy,” Muravchik allows a few tense class sessions where, in class discussions, students debate more right-wing perspectives as well as other views.

“A number of students had some sort of revolution in their political thinking in all kinds of directions,” Muravchik said. After some particularly exciting debate, one student even “came out as conservative.”

Claremont McKenna student Khuly was part of a course titled “Liberalism and Conservatism” at the college last fall, which explored political opinions over multiple centuries, and was, for the first time, co-taught by a left- and a right-wing professor.

“I think that it allows the space for genuine, real study of politics,” he said. “You don’t get many spaces for that.”

Despite these benefits, there is one thing Khuly would change.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, [but] I wish we read more [work by] liberals.”

Kahani Malhotra is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk. (The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized).

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.