The Brief

In November, Californians will vote for “the second-hardest job in the state behind the governor.”

That’s according to someone who has held the job twice: John Garamendi, who was the state’s first elected insurance commissioner in the 1990s and served again in the early 2000s. Garamendi, now a U.S. congressman, said the commissioner job is “complex, hard, detailed work.”

“There is no other task in any office in the state of California, except the governor, that has such significant power and the necessity to use the power to regulate the industry,” Garamendi said.

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is nearing the end of his second four-year term. In the past seven years, California experienced the biggest and most destructive wildfires in its history, which were a factor in insurance companies canceling homeowner policies or refusing to write new ones. With the insurance market out of whack, Lara last year put in place new regulations that include provisions insurers have long sought. Availability in the state is beginning to improve, though the commissioner said recently that he expects the recovery to take a few years.

The next insurance commissioner will have to balance availability with affordability. Premiums are rising. Many survivors of last year’s Los Angeles County fires are struggling to rebuild; they have sued insurance companies; and they have called for Lara to step down because they don’t think he has done enough to hold insurers accountable for delaying or denying their claims. Some insurers are still canceling policies. Many homeowners are continuing to turn to the last-resort FAIR Plan, which has seen a 146% increase in the number of policies since 2022.

“Affordability is only one piece of the very complicated puzzle,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. She said the insurance business is more complicated today partly because of new technology and participants in the market, such as third-party administrators for insurers and non-admitted carriers, which among other things are not subject to rate reviews by the Insurance Department.

If all that doesn’t sound like enough responsibility, California’s insurance commissioner also regulates auto, health, pet, ride-hailing and life insurance, as well as workers’ compensation.

Among the candidates who have thrown their hats into the ring are state Sen. Ben Allen and former state Sen. Steven Bradford, former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Jane Kim and Patrick Wolff, a financial analyst with experience in the insurance industry.

New rules and fire aftermath 

Lara recently told the state Assembly Insurance Committee that the new regulations he put in place last year are showing signs of working — that insurers are writing policies in California again.

Those regulations include speeding up reviews and approvals of insurers’ requests to raise rates, and allowing them to factor in reinsurance costs and catastrophe models when setting rates in exchange for writing a certain percentage of policies in areas with high wildfire risk. Insurance companies including Mercury, CSAA and USAA have requested higher rates under the new rules and have received them, Lara told the committee.

He credited the rules with the availability improvements the department has seen so far, despite the deadly, multibillion-dollar disasters that were the L.A.-area fires.

“The market stabilized at a moment when it could have collapsed,” he told the committee last month, referring to the fires as the “event that reshaped everything.”

Lara told the committee that he expects his so-called sustainable insurance strategy — and the recovery from the fires — to take three to five years, and that California is already a year into that timeline.

Policyholders have also complained about delays and denials of claims with their insurers, prompting the insurance department to investigate market leader State Farm, as well as the FAIR Plan, over their handling of claims. Lara has backed new legislation and policies to address some of the problems fire survivors have experienced, including lack of smoke-damage standards and underinsurance.

So the next commissioner will have to handle the continuing aftermath of the fires, and either work with or modify the regulations Lara put into place.

‘Brutal’ balancing act

That will require engaging with competing interests: insurance companies, lawmakers, consumers and consumer groups.

Early in his tenure, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Lara accepted donations from the insurance industry despite promising not to; he apologized and returned those donations. Since then, he has been accused of continued coziness with the industry and criticized for his overseas travel.

Former insurance commissioner Dave Jones, a Lara critic, said the next insurance commissioner needs to have “integrity” and “a seriousness of purpose.” Both Jones and Garamendi told CalMatters the commissioner must protect consumers while ensuring a viable insurance market, which almost everybody needs – whether they’re current homeowners, renters, business owners or property owners, as well as those who need insurance to buy a property.

Lara has often defended himself by saying he needs to communicate with the insurance industry that he regulates, and has criticized his predecessors as “armchair insurance commissioners.” He was not available for an interview, according to department spokesperson Gabriel Sanchez, who did not want to respond to the commissioner’s critics for this story.

Joel Laucher worked for the insurance department for more than three decades, focusing on insurers’ conduct — including briefly under Lara. He said the incoming commissioner will have to be diplomatic but firm with the industry.

“Even if you’ve had a nice conversation with them, that shouldn’t hold you back from enforcing consumer protection laws, including levying fines or taking them to hearings,” said Laucher, who is now a program specialist at United Policyholders.

Robert Herrell worked at the insurance department for several years. He is now executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, another nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

His group and others have asked Lara to withdraw regulations that make it harder for intervenors — any members of the public who under California law can challenge insurers’ requests to raise premiums — to have an impact on the insurance department’s rate reviews. The commissioner has said the new rules, which the industry supports, are meant to improve efficiency and speed up rate reviews; the consumer groups say the rules are “designed to impede effective consumer participation.”

“It’s exactly the opposite direction of the way you ought to be going,” Herrell said.

Bach, of United Policyholders, signed onto those joint comments submitted in November by consumer groups, unions and others. But she said some of Lara’s critics are a bit too tough on him.

She said the commissioner has to be the “bad guy” on rate increases; hold insurers accountable while encouraging them to keep writing policies in the state; and communicate to consumers that the insurance department can be helpful but doesn’t have the capacity to give them individualized legal aid.

“We’ve never seen a market like this,” Bach said. “The balancing act is so brutal.”

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

Billionaire Leon Black on Wednesday filed a federal defamation lawsuit against California Rep. Robert Garcia for public comments the Democratic congressman made tying him to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The court filing comes less than two months after the House approved a resolution holding Black in contempt of Congress for defying the Oversight Committee’s subpoenas in its investigation into Epstein.

In June, Black appeared for a voluntary interview at the committee during which he denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking network.

Weeks later, Garcia said during a TV interview that “Leon Black is at the center of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” and that Black “was one of the last people to actually interact” with Epstein before he committed suicide in prison.

In addition, Garcia said that he had “talked to survivors that have credibly named Leon Black as someone that was involved in direct abuse of women and was directly involved” with Epstein.

Those statements were false and were made maliciously, Black asserts through his lawyers. The defamation lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York seeks a jury trial and $7.25 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

“Congressman Garcia’s knowing lies have caused real and significant ongoing harm to Mr. Black. His physical safety has been threatened, he has received a barrage of hateful calls, emails, and social media posts, and his business and philanthropic endeavors have suffered,” the filing states.

Garcia’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

In September, Garcia called the contempt resolution against Black “an important step toward justice and accountability.”

Black had refused to respond to subpoenas asking him to appear and to turn over any potential nondisclosure agreements involving the investigation into Epstein.

Black’s lawyers have repeatedly denounced the Oversight Committee’s pursuit of the former head of a private equity firm as an abuse of congressional power. They have maintained he had no knowledge of any of Epstein’s criminal conduct.

Black was among several prominent figures, including Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, who had been asked to appear as part of the Oversight Committee’s long-running probe of Epstein. Survivors of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse have told personal stories of being young women in a trafficking enterprise organized by Epstein and his colleague Ghislaine Maxwell.

Black co-founded the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and stepped down in 2021 during the fallout over his ties to Epstein.

Lawmakers have alleged that Black paid Epstein $180 million during their yearslong relationship.

A 2021 review commissioned by Apollo found that Black paid Epstein $158 million from 2012 to 2017, after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. The review said the payments were for “bona fide tax, estate planning and other related services.”

Chemical manufacturer 3M will pay up to $7.35 billion to settle lawsuits by people who say they were sickened by groundwater contamination from compounds used in firefighting foam and other consumer products.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based company announced the settlement Tuesday. It will pay the money over nine years to as many as 120,000 people who say they were harmed by exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS. The chemicals contaminated groundwater near military bases, airports and other locations where the foam was used to extinguish fires.

3M did not admit liability for the contamination under the agreement.

Called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to health problems including liver and immune system damage and some cancers. The chemicals are also used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products, including clothing and cookware.

3M chairman William Brown called the settlement a “significant milestone” that substantially reduces uncertainty from the litigation. The company previously reached settlements in other PFAS-related lawsuits, including a $450 million agreement with the state of New Jersey to settle claims of natural resource contamination and a deal to pay more than $10 billion to many U.S. public drinking water systems.

Other manufacturers, including DuPont de Nemours Inc. and spinoffs Chemours Co. and Corteva Inc., have agreed to settlements totaling more than $1 billion to resolve PFAS claims.

Fred Thompson, an attorney with the Motley Rice law firm that helped negotiate the 3M settlement for the plaintiffs, called it welcome news for “the thousands of victims who have sought answers and accountability for nearly a decade.”

He said in a news release that the plaintiffs urgently need help covering mounting medical bills and other costs.

Under the terms of the settlement, the payouts will begin with $50 million this year, followed by yearly payments of more than $1 billion each year from 2028 to 2033.

3M could make additional payments if enough plaintiffs participate. If too few sign on, 3M has the option to cancel the settlement and continue fighting the lawsuit.

Environmental activists say PFAS manufacturers knew about the chemicals’ health risks long before they became public. They noted that the same attributes that make the chemicals so valuable in many uses — resistance to breakdown — also make them hazardous to people.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set strict limits on PFAS in drinking water from public utilities and requires testing, but those rules do not apply to private wells.

A study that would help federal regulators understand which industries dump the forever chemicals with their wastewater has been stalled for two years, awaiting review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Democrats' big wins in these midterm elections couldn't have happened without some massive voter shifts.

Young voters, Latinos and Asian Americans, urban and suburban voters, men and independents all moved heavily to the left.

One of the sharpest turns in this election was by Latinos. And Democrats had their best performance with white voters in years

In 2024, President Trump won a record share of Latino votes for a Republican presidential candidate. But they took a sharp left turn in this election after Trump's promises of lower prices never came to fruition and his administration's harsh deportation tactics backfired.

Latinos swung 21 points toward Democratic House candidates, compared to two years ago.

Asian Americans also sharply diverged from 2024, also going 21 points more in Democrats' favor, from a 22-point advantage to a whopping 43.

Democrats even tied with white voters. To put that in perspective, Democrats haven't won white voters in a presidential election since 1964. Since then, they came closest in 1992 and 1996 when former President Bill Clinton lost them by 2 points both times and then in the 2006 midterms when Republicans won them by just 4.

By age, it was a sharp boomerang, particularly with voters 18 to 29

Democrats won this group of young voters by 48 points, a 34-point swing from two years ago.

To put in context just how dramatic of a margin that is — it's wider than for former President Barack Obama in 2008 when he won the youngest voters by 34 points. The difference in 2008 is they were 18% of the electorate, compared to 11% in this midterm.

Young voters traditionally have the biggest turnout drop from presidential to midterm elections of any group, so there are likely many Republican-leaning 18- to 29-year-olds who simply stayed home.

Democrats also won by huge margins with urban and suburban voters

Urban voters swung by 25 points in their favor, while voters in the suburbs, who had voted narrowly for Trump in 2024, went for Democrats by 19 points.

But Democrats can't win in red states without minimizing losses in small towns and rural areas. Democrats lost them by 16 points this year, a 16-point shift in their favor, compared with 2024, when they lost them by 32.

Democrats won men for the first time since 2008

Women were the fuel for Democrats' wins in these elections. They broke by 19 points for Democrats, 13 points wider than in 2024 and the best mark for the party since Trump's first midterm.

But the shift with men was notable. Democrats won men by 2 points, a 16-point shift from 2024 and the first time the party has won men since 2008. It's only the third time in 34 years that Democrats have won men.

The other time was in 1992 when Bill Clinton won them by 3 points, and that was with a third-party candidate in the race, Ross Perot, who won 19% of the national popular vote.

Republicans saw their worst performance with independents since at least 1998

The number to watch heading into Tuesday night for Republicans was 46%. That was the mark they needed with independents in order to do well. When they have hit that threshold in the Trump era, they have done well, winning the presidency in 2016 and 2024 and making gains in the House in 2022.

But when they were below it, they didn't do well, losing more than 40 seats in the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.

In these midterms, they didn't even get close. They only won 38% of independents, their worst mark since at least 1998 when independents viewed the impeachment investigation against Clinton as politically motivated and an overreach.

The only other time that comes close was in 2006 when they only won 39% of independents, and Democrats, like this year, won both the House and Senate.

More graphics from the voter poll

Methodology

2026 data comes from a poll of tens of thousands of voters, conducted by the firm SSRS for a number of news outlets, including the Associated Press. The full sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points. Data may shift as votes and exit poll analysis are finalized.

2018-2024 data comes from exit polls conducted by Edison Research (now Edison Research at SSRS) for a number of news outlets. NPR accessed all data via results posted by CNN and ABC News.

2026 data combines results from in-person exit poll responses and a pre-election survey of voters, while 2018-2024 data combines results from in-person exit poll responses and responses from early and absentee voters.
Copyright 2026 NPR

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.