The Brief

State Farm requested massive increases to its California residential insurance rates, which calls its financial stability into doubt amid an ongoing crisis in the state’s insurance market.

The company’s California subsidiary, State Farm General, the state’s largest writer of homeowners insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, submitted a request on Thursday to the California Department of Insurance for the following rate hikes:

• 30% increase in homeowners insurance
• 36% increase in condominium owners insurance
• 52% increase in renters insurance

With California’s property insurance market already facing an availability and affordability crisis, driven largely by rising wildfire risk, the timing could hardly be worse.

Millions potentially affected

“This has the potential to affect millions of California consumers and the integrity of our residential property insurance market,” California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said in a statement provided to KQED.

The department will closely examine State Farm’s financial stability, Lara said.

“Using my authority under Prop. 103, I will investigate State Farm’s financial situation, including a rate hearing on these applications if necessary. My Department’s experts and I have serious questions.”

For the last year, State Farm has not written new policies in California, and it has not renewed tens of thousands of existing policies.

Documents from AM Best, a company that rates insurance companies’ financial solvency, show a troubled situation for State Farm. Its financial strength was downgraded this spring, and its long-term outlook is considered negative.

“Financially speaking, State Farm is very, very much apparently in trouble. And I think that their request for rate increases will be met with a lot of frustration by consumers because the last thing anybody wants is to be paying more money right now,” said Karl Susman, an insurance broker. “And since there’s still not the ability for people to shop around for other options, what are they going to do but pay that higher rate? But I think that it’s probably going to show pretty quickly that it’s necessary to keep State Farm from literally going insolvent.”

What's next for policyholders

Lara sought to reassure State Farm policyholders that nothing would change immediately as a result of these filings. Under California’s regulatory process, rate filings should take two months to be reviewed, although they have dragged on for years in some cases — a process set for a major overhaul by regulators this year.

Lara also said the Department of Insurance had already made tough decisions in approving significant State Farm rate increases recently, including a March hike averaging 20% across the state.

He continued by inviting the public to get involved via the intervenor process, which allows the public to weigh in on changes to their insurance.

Susman predicts the Department of Insurance will have no choice but to approve the requested rate increases.

“Because the alternative is literally — what’s the point of having a carrier with lower rates that can’t pay claims?” he said. “And they are basically at that place right now where if they’re not able to get this rate and they’re already in such a bad place financially, I don’t see how we can expect them to possibly weather the storm.”

For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election.

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost two-to-one, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two.

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair.

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks during an event at the Sutter Club hosted by the Sacramento Press Club on Nov. 17, 2023.

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The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November.

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans.

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule.

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There may be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top.

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November.

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on "things not related to governance," like gender or race.

In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election.

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing may be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa.

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge.

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair.

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries.

"The fact that there are any (same-party general elections) is simply undemocratic," Maviglio said. "People have the choice between only one party, like they're in the Soviet Union?"

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive.

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don't have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting.

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member.

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project helped launch a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It's very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we've seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

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

The labor market is finding its footing.

U.S. employers added jobs for the third month in a row in May, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department. Job gains for March and April were also revised significantly higher.

Restaurants and bars added 48,000 jobs last month as summer approached, while construction companies and local governments were also hiring. Healthcare, which has been a steady source of employment gains, added another 35,000 jobs.

Banks and insurance companies, meanwhile, cut jobs. The financial sector overall cut 22,000 jobs in May.

Overall, the report shows hiring has picked up steam this spring after anemic job growth last year. Over the last three months, employers have added an average of 188,000 jobs each month.

Meanwhile, the workforce grew slightly in May as 83,000 people began working or looking for work, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.

Despite the uptick in hiring, employers are not having to offer big wage increases to attract workers. Average wages in May were up just 3.4% from a year ago. That's likely not enough to keep pace with inflation — with prices for the 12 months ending in April up 3.8%.

Prices have been rising rapidly since the U.S. launched its war with Iran just over three months ago. And now, with signs that the job market is stabilizing, the Federal Reserve, under new chair Kevin Warsh, is likely to focus its attention on getting inflation under control.

That makes it unlikely the central bank will cut interest rates any time soon, despite pressure to do so from President Trump.

The Labor Department is set to report on May inflation next week, providing Fed policymakers with another key data point ahead of its next policy meeting in mid-June.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Young California voters are on track to make up a larger share of the 2026 primary electorate compared to the 2022 primary, according to an analysis of ballots counted so far by Political Data Intelligence.

As of Thursday, voters aged 18–34 accounted for 13% of all ballots counted. That’s a 4 percentage point increase from the 2022 primary at this time.

One factor is that there are nearly 2 million more people in this age group registered than in 2022.

Paul Mitchell, a vice president at PDI, said this is due in part to a change in policy that automatically re-registers California voters when they move from county-to-county.

“Young people have benefited from their registrations staying alive when they are constantly shuffling around the state,” Mitchell said.

Yet, the returns show that while more young people are voting, their turnout rate is still slightly lower than in 2022. (There’s a longstanding trend of young people voting at lower rates than older voters.)

Mitchell said that may change by the time all the ballots are counted.

 ”Those late voters were very heavily young people,” Mitchell said. “That could mean… if this pattern continues, a higher final turnout for young people.”

High school seniors vote for the first time in South L.A.

Among those late voters was a group of students at South L.A.’s Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School. About 40 seniors walked with their teachers Tuesday afternoon to a Washington Park vote center to cast a ballot for the first time. Nearly two dozen additional students signed up as poll workers.

The school’s government and economics teacher, Joel Snyder, has made civic engagement a key part of the curriculum since the school opened in 2006.

“ I think about how to make the pitch to them that democracy is important in their lives and is a public good,” Snyder said.

Here’s what the students said motivated them to vote, edited for length and clarity. LAist is not publishing their last names because some discuss the immigration status of their family members.

Jose, senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Katherine, a senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Natalia, senior Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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Martha, senior at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School.

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A group of students waits for their turn to vote at Washington Park in the Florence Graham neighborhood.

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California is notoriously slow at counting ballots, which means it may take a while before voters have results for some significant races. A big one is the L.A. mayor's race with Nithya Raman gaining some ground on Spencer Pratt in the race for second place.

Here are five other races we're watching.

Complete results for L.A. County and Orange County >>

L.A. City Council, District 9

Jose Ugarte maintains his lead ahead of Estuardo Mazariegos as of Thursday night. The two leave four other Latino candidates far behind in this race.

For the first time since 1963, L.A.'s District 9 will not be represented by a Black councilmember.

L.A. County Sheriff

Incumbent Robert Luna and former sheriff Alex Villanueva are holding on to their places in the two top spots. Luna maintains a significant lead — about 20 percentage points — over Villanueva.

If you're getting déjà vu, that's because the two went head-to-head once before in the 2022 General Election.

L.A. County Measure ER

Voters are still on track to reject L.A. County's attempt to raise sales taxes by half a percent.

The increase was expected to have generated $1 billion to backfill funding gaps left by federal cuts to Medi-Cal.

Orange County Board of Supervisors, District 5

Incumbent Katrina Foley is still falling just short of regaining her top spot from Diane Dixon. Unless Dixon receives more than 50% of the votes, the two will face off in the November election.

U.S. House, District 32

Incumbent Rep. Brad Sherman and Republican Larry Thompson are likely to square off in November for the race to represent District 32 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Sherman maintains a tight lead.

District 32 spans from the western San Fernando Valley to the coastal cities.

Tracking your ballot

You can track the status of your ballot through California's BallotTrax website.

If your mail-in ballot has any problems (like a missing or mismatched signature), your county registrar must contact you to give you a chance to fix it.

Ask us a question