The Brief

Vote centers are open in the recall election of Santa Ana City Councilmember Jessie Lopez, but it's unclear whether the election is legal.

That's because the Orange County registrar of voters recently concluded the city was using the wrong district boundaries and the wrong population data to calculate how many signatures were needed to trigger the recall and who should get to vote.

As a result, nearly 1,200 voters who, according to O.C. Registrar Bob Page's recent calculations, should be able to vote in the Nov. 14 election did not get ballots.

Using the correct district boundaries, Page also calculated that the initial recall petition actually fell short of the number required to hold an election by 230 signatures. Last week, Page rescinded his initial verification that recall petitioners had met the signature threshold.

On Friday, Guadalupe Ocampo, one of Lopez's constituents, filed a legal challenge asking a judge to immediately stop the election. Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig Griffin was set to hear the case Tuesday morning. (Read the complaint.)

Here's the story behind the recall snafu and what election experts say could happen now.

Why was Lopez targeted for recall in the first place?

Recall backers, primarily the Santa Ana Police Officers Association and several real estate groups, want Lopez off the council because of her support for policies they say have pushed up housing costs, and reduced support for police.

Santa Ana Councilmember Jessie Lopez was elected in 2020 to represent the city district called Ward 3.

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LAist reached out to the police officers association and to Tim Rush, a real estate executive who chairs the recall campaign, but has not gotten a response.

In a February op-ed in the Orange County Register, Rush cited Lopez and fellow councilmember Thai Viet Phan's "palpable hostility to law enforcement," including voting to reduce the police force budget and voting to end a ban on street cruising, as reasons for the recall.

Rush also cited their votes to enact what he called "the most radical city rent control measure in California." (The campaign failed to turn in enough signatures to trigger a recall election for Phan.)

Santa Ana is the only city in Orange County where elected officials have passed a rent control ordinance. Its policy restricts rent increases to 2.54% through the end of August 2024. A handful of cities in L.A. County cap rent increases under 3%. For example, West Hollywood’s cap is 2.5% through the end of August 2024 and rent controlled housing in the city of L.A. is currently under a rent freeze that prohibits rent increases in most cases.

Lopez's supporters say her actions on the city council have led to more police oversight and helped low-income residents fight unjust evictions and steep rent hikes.

"It really is about losing the gains that the community has made if this recall were to be successful," said Hairo Cortes, executive director of the Latinx youth advocacy group Chispa.

Experts say California election law is confusing

LAist spoke with six outside election experts to get their opinions on the Santa Ana recall snafu, two of them county registrars of voters.

They told us:

• Page, the O.C. registrar of voters, is right — there is a fundamental error in the Lopez recall election. The wrong district boundaries were used to calculate the number of signatures needed to trigger the recall and to determine who gets to vote.  
• Nevertheless, California election law isn't exactly straightforward on the subject. 

"I can certainly understand how mistakes are made because the law is not at all clear," said Douglas Johnson, president of National Demographics Corporation, a company that assists local governments with redistricting.

The experts consulted by LAist agreed that California law and court precedent have established that elected officers are to represent the population that initially voted them into office — and that the same population should get to decide whether to remove their representative from office.

That means, in the case of Santa Ana, that the district as it existed when Lopez was elected in 2020 should get to vote on whether to recall her. But recall proponents would need a thorough understanding of California election law to catch this nuance, experts said.

"The fact that the answer is clear doesn't mean that the question comes up often enough for it to be on the top of everybody's mind," said Fredric Woocher, a Los Angeles-based election lawyer.

First off, redistricting only happens every 10 years after the Census.

Second, questions about how many signatures are needed to trigger a recall and who gets to vote only matter if the official subject to recall was elected to represent a specific geographic district rather than at-large. A little less than half of all cities in California vote by district, according to Johnson.

And third, the window for recalling an elected official after redistricting is pretty small. After the 2020 Census, most jurisdictions in California didn't finalize their new district maps until late 2021 or early-to-mid 2022. Santa Ana officially adopted its new districts, which it calls wards, in April 2022. That doesn't leave much time to mount a recall campaign and bring it to voters before elected officials' terms are up.

According to the website Ballotpedia, just two recalls made it to the ballot in California in 2023: the Lopez recall and the recall of former Councilmember Catherine Alvarez in Downey. Alvarez was ousted by voters in February and ballots for a special election to choose her replacement are due Tuesday.

Downey city clerk Maria Alicia Duarte told LAist there was no question that the recall would be up to voters in the district that originally elected Duarte in 2020. The city has made clear that the new boundaries for the district formerly represented by Alvarez won't go into effect until the November 2024 general election.

What state election law says, and doesn't say

When Santa Ana adopted its new district boundaries, the city council passed an ordinance stating the new boundaries would go into effect starting with the November 2022 general election "and subsequent elections thereafter."

But that seems to contradict state law. California election code states that new city council districts will take effect at the first election following adoption of the new boundaries, "excluding a special election to fill a vacancy or a recall election."

Johnson noted that the "excluding" subclause is key but easily ignored.

"It's only a couple of throwaway words, but they have huge impact," he said.

The California Secretary of State's 2023 recall procedures guide says nothing specifically about how to handle a recall election after redistricting.

Johnson and Woocher said court precedent is much more decisive on the matter. Woocher noted a 2021 opinion from the California attorney general regarding a special election held after a San Luis Obispo County supervisor died during his term in office. The state attorney general determined that the district boundaries in place when the supervisor was elected, in 2020, should apply to the special election to fill his seat.

In a letter to Santa Ana's City Clerk advising her of the mistaken boundaries in Lopez's recall election, Page cited a different attorney general opinion from 2014. That opinion suggested that a city council member was unlawfully appointed to serve out the term of his predecessor who resigned because the new member didn't reside within the city council district boundaries that existed when the incumbent was elected.

Whose fault is the mistake in Santa Ana?

Page told LAist he recognized there was a problem with the Lopez recall when a fellow registrar, Lupe Villa in the Central Valley's Kings County, emailed his counterparts on Oct. 25 to ask for advice on a school board recall. There, a group is seeking to recall all five board members of the Reef-Sunset Unified School District, three of whom were elected in 2020 before redistricting and two of whom were elected in 2022 after redistricting.

The question caused Page to re-examine how his office reviewed the recall petition for Lopez and is administering the recall election, Page told LAst in an email. He realized the city had incorrectly used post-redistricting population numbers to calculate the number of voter signatures needed to trigger the recall — 26,370 voters instead of the correct number, 27,158.

Using the correct, pre-redistricting boundaries and population, Page found that signature gatherers actually fell short of the amount needed to trigger an election — by 230 signatures. He contacted Hall, the city clerk, on Oct. 26 to tell her and ask how the city wanted to proceed.

Hall did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.

The Orange County Registrar of Voters administers elections at the request of cities. But city clerks are officially in charge of municipal elections. "The city tells the county what they want to have done," said Woocher, the election lawyer.

So who's fault is the Santa Ana mistake? Woocher said "everybody has the responsibility to provide correct information."

Johnson added that this responsibility starts with the recall proponents. "California election law is very clear that it is the people who are circulating the petitions' responsibility to get the rules right," he said. "Even if someone tells them the wrong information, that's not an excuse."

What's less clear, Johnson reiterated, is what election law says about how to handle snafus like the one in Santa Ana.

"Running an elections office is so complicated," he said. "In defense of the county registrar and the Santa Ana folks, the only way anyone learns this stuff is by running into it, unfortunately."

What happens with the election?

At a special meeting last week, the Santa Ana City Council deadlocked 3-3 on whether to take action to cancel the election or let it proceed. (Lopez recused herself from the vote.) That means it is continuing as planned, according to city officials and Page, the registrar. The last day of voting is scheduled for Nov. 14.

For voters, this means unless the recall ends up in court and a judge intervenes, votes will be counted later this month.

In a Facebook post following the vote, Santa Ana Councilmember David Peñaloza said he was rescinding his endorsement of the recall campaign given the unresolved legal questions. He said a judge should decide whether the election can lawfully go forward.

"The integrity of our elections is way too important and sacred for politicians to be the ones who decide whether an election currently taking place gets canceled or not, especially after many Santa Ana residents have already cast their votes," he wrote.

Lopez advised supporters, in a recent fundraising email, that she plans on "taking this corrupt recall to court." LAist reached out to Lopez via phone and email, but did not receive a response.

Woocher said Lopez isn't the only one who could challenge the election — the registrar has identified more than 1,000 voters who lived in Lopez's district when she was elected and therefore should be able to vote in her recall, but weren't mailed ballots.

"If you are one of the people who should be able to vote, you would certainly have standing to complain about it," he said.

Ocampo, the voter who is asking the court to stop the election, had another request in her court filing. If the judge won't stop the election, she asked that he allow voters in Lopez's district as it was when she was elected to cast ballots.

The U.S. has lost its status as a country where measles is eliminated, a public health triumph secured a quarter century ago.

Researchers with direct knowledge of the deliberations on the country's status told KFF Health News that the Pan American Health Organization reached the conclusion this week: Measles has reestablished regular transmission in the country.

PAHO had planned a public announcement on Nov. 17.

In public health parlance, measles elimination depends on a country's sporadic outbreaks ending within a year. That's no longer happening in the United States.

"It's a very sad moment," said Anne Schuchat, an epidemiologist and a former deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved in PAHO's decision.

"Measles causes so much unnecessary suffering, everything from a high fever and missed work and school to long-term complications like progressive degenerative nerve disease and death," Schuchat said.

Measles outbreaks are entirely preventable: Two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine prevent about 97% of infections, so when almost everyone in a community is fully vaccinated, the virus can't spread.

In the past two years, over 830 people have been hospitalized with measles in the U.S. More than 8,000 people have been sickened in outbreaks that have cost roughly $125 million in medical care, public health response and productivity losses, Johns Hopkins University researchers estimate.

States have reported 13 measles-associated deaths, including a 7-month-old in New York and infants in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in recent months. Babies typically aren't vaccinated before they're a year old.

PAHO, an international group that oversees health in the Americas and works with the World Health Organization, based its assessment on two analyses: one by the CDC and another by an independent group of measles experts.

Researchers anticipated this conclusion after an outbreak in Utah surpassed the one-year mark in June.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Emily Hilliard, attributed the resurgence of measles to vaccination gaps that opened years before this administration. Indeed, rates of childhood vaccination have steadily declined since the COVID pandemic started.

But many scientists also blame the Trump administration for spreading vaccine misinformation and stifling a swift, strong response to outbreaks.

For example, the administration cut millions of dollars from children's immunization programs run by state health departments and terminated funds for research on vaccine hesitancy.

After Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sacked CDC director Susan Monarez in August 2025, she told Congress she was fired because she would not preapprove changes to vaccine recommendations "without reviewing the evidence."

Monarez added that "we already have seen the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years" and that, "if vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return."

Spokespeople for HHS and the White House defended the administration, and Kennedy, who led a prominent anti-vaccine organization before he took the helm at HHS. "The President and the Secretary have repeatedly encouraged measles vaccination, coordinated with states, and facilitated the deployment of vaccine doses across the country," White House spokesperson Allison Schuster wrote in an email.

Past administrations sounded alarms

For more than three decades, the federal government treated measles as a preventable tragedy, with sizable outbreaks triggering national efforts to boost vaccination and stop the virus from spreading.

That's no longer the case, said Patsy Stinchfield, executive director of the Measles Collaborative, a new initiative that educates the public about vaccines and assists health workers responding to outbreaks.

Stinchfield was a pediatric nurse at a children's hospital in Minnesota during the nation's last surge of measles before elimination, from 1989 to 1991. She recalled an entire ward devoted to children with measles and the enormous effort required to prevent the virus from spreading to kids with cancer and weakened immune systems.

Two children at the hospital died of measles. "That changed my career forever," she said.

Back then, she said, the federal government "saw the urgency." Officials held press conferences, spoke on the news about vaccines, issued clinical guidelines, and published reports in the CDC's flagship journal — the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or MMWR — that drove policies.

When data suggested that some children weren't mounting a strong response to a single dose of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, a CDC advisory committee recommended two doses of the shot.

When CDC analyses found that many children with measles hadn't been vaccinated due to cost, the government launched the Vaccines for Children program to make immunizations available free of charge to underinsured families.

Cases plummeted. By 2000, the CDC and PAHO determined that measles was no longer a national threat — measles transmission had been eliminated.

"Elimination" allows for occasional outbreaks, because measles is not eradicated worldwide and a small fraction of people, such as young infants, can't be protected by vaccines.

People infected abroad sparked occasional outbreaks after U.S. elimination, but — until now — those fizzled out because of herd immunity, when 95% of people within a community are immunized. In those situations, outbreaks peter out and vulnerable people are protected.

It would be 14 years before another significant outbreak in the U.S. Then in 2015, the virus took off among unvaccinated children at Disney parks in California, giving rise to outbreaks elsewhere. Congress saw some 125 cases as an emergency and summoned the CDC's Schuchat to testify on the situation.

"Vaccination wasn't a partisan issue," she recalled. "This was about problem-solving: What can we do about this?"

National television aired a video of then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy talking with Sesame Street's Elmo about vaccination. HHS officials worked with vaccine experts on strategies to boost public confidence in vaccines. California and Vermont tightened vaccine requirements.

In 2019, House and Senate committees met again about measles, as a large outbreak took hold in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey took hold. Congress asked HHS leaders how the administration planned to curb the rise of vaccine misinformation online.

"Internet fraudsters who claim that vaccines are not safe are preying on the unfounded fears and daily struggles of parents, and they are creating a public health hazard that is entirely preventable," Lamar Alexander, then a Republican senator from Tennessee, said at the time.

Alex Azar, health secretary during the first Trump administration, and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield held a press conference stressing the "importance of on-time vaccination."

And during the 2014, 2015, and 2019 outbreaks, the CDC's MMWR published detailed articles within weeks of data collection. Timing matters since the reports guide emergency response. "The MMWR is the voice of the CDC," Schuchat said, "alerting the nation, the media, clinicians, and public health experts to events that require action."

'The dog didn't bark'

Just after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, a measles outbreak exploded in West Texas. Within seven months, it surpassed the size of any in the U.S. since 1992, spread to Mexico and at least three other states, sickened more than 4,500 people in the two countries, and killed at least 16.

Instead of broadcasting clear, repeated messages on the importance of measles vaccines, Kennedy falsely claimed on Fox News that they lead to "deaths every year."

Congress didn't call a hearing, and HHS didn't send funds until after the emergency in West Texas had subsided. Besides an annual measles update, the MMWR didn't publish a single report on the outbreaks that year.

"A lot of this is the dog didn't bark," said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy researcher at the University of California Law San Francisco. "Something that normally happens isn't happening."

Political appointees have delayed or blocked several MMWR articles, according to multiple CDC officials whom KFF Health News agreed not to identify because they feared retaliation for speaking with the press. "There's a deliberate effort to downplay vaccine-preventable diseases by the administration," one official said.

"Measles reports from West Texas and New Mexico were intentionally shelved," another scientist at the agency said. In April, The Washington Post reported that Jay Bhattacharya, who temporarily led the CDC this year and remains head of the National Institutes of Health, had blocked the publication of a study in the MMWR finding that COVID vaccines halved the likelihood of emergency department visits.

"The suggestion that HHS is deliberately suppressing information about measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases is false," Hilliard, the HHS spokesperson, said in an email to KFF Health News.

Hilliard said Kennedy and the CDC have provided approximately $100 million in additional funding to respond to outbreaks. The timing of MMWR reports, she added, varies due to factors such as data analysis and scientific review.

More than a year after data was collected from Texas, a few reports came out in the CDC's journal. One study on 60 people hospitalized for measles in West Texas revealed that two required intubation and mechanical ventilation and that a baby born to a mother with measles experienced dangerous brain swelling due to the virus.

The MMWR still hasn't published detailed reports on massive outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah and Pennsylvania. The CDC's national measles update hasn't appeared in the MMWR this year either. Instead, the journal has featured less urgent articles on scientific techniques that may help characterize future outbreaks.

CDC scientists told KFF Health News that they continue to analyze data but no longer expect to publish their findings in the MMWR because the process has become slow, opaque, and unpredictable. An urgent CDC report on the risks of measles to pregnant women was withheld, The Washington Post reported recently.

"We have two CDCs now," an official at the agency said. "One is staffed by CDC scientists and civil servants who are committed to public health, and the other is political appointees who go in and change the website."

The CDC's measles dashboard counts four fewer measles deaths than state health departments have reported this year. Kennedy has disputed some deaths and made unsubstantiated claims that Pennsylvania health officials misrepresented data.

Kennedy personally instructed the CDC to alter language on a webpage that said vaccines do not cause autism, he told The New York Times last year.

The page now suggests a potential link between the two and no longer lists a slew of peer-reviewed studies that rigorously searched for an association and found none. These have been replaced with speculation about a correlation and unsubstantiated accusations that the scientific establishment has buried a potential link in order "to prevent vaccine hesitancy."

The Trump administration has muddied the message on vaccines in other ways, Reiss said. Trump incorrectly said in August that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could be "quite lethal," and he repeated the debunked idea that vaccines may cause autism.

Stephen Miller, now Trump's White House chief of staff, has falsely said doctors "pump your kids full of shots days after birth with no understanding of the long-term consequences." Recommended vaccines and the vaccine schedule have been thoroughly studied.

Kennedy has made such claims for two decades, including as health secretary. "Having top leadership disseminating rumors, disinformation and flat-out falsehoods has been unforgivable," Schuchat said.

When pressed by journalists and Congress, Kennedy and Trump have recommended measles vaccines. But they haven't repeated the message clearly and unprompted on social media or on the podcasts and videos that Kennedy regularly appears in.

Kennedy also replaced vaccine experts on a panel advising the CDC with fringe researchers holding anti-vaccine views. And under his leadership, the CDC has laid off or forced out many vaccine specialists, including all of those in a group that partners with community organizations and pharmacies, the Immunization Services Division partnership branch.

At the same time, Kennedy has devoted resources to searching for potential harms from vaccines, including through an attempted clinical trial considered unnecessary and unethical by medical societies and the WHO.

To regain measles elimination status, the current U.S. outbreaks must end — then, future outbreaks must stop spreading within a year, said Paul Rota, a microbiologist and former CDC official. With outbreaks expanding in several states, he said, that moment isn't on the horizon.

"Bigger fires create more embers, and any one of those embers can seed another fire," he said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Copyright 2026 KFF Health News

Route 66 is celebrating 100 years of being the country's most famous highway, an icon of American culture.

As it passes through eight states — from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif. — its charm is all about driving on the open road, through the plains and prairies, canyons and deserts. Past big cities, cow towns and ghost towns, stopping at roadside motels, retro diners and kitschy tourist traps.

Like every good road trip, Route 66 has a soundtrack — starting with the famous anthem sung by Nat King Cole (and later, his daughter Natalie).

If you ever plan to motor West/ 
travel my way, take the highway that's the best/ 
Get your kicks on Route 66 …

Bobby Troup, then an aspiring songwriter and jazz pianist, wrote that 1946 song during a road trip he took to California. Over the years, many others have recorded their own versions, including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters.

It winds from Chicago to L.A/
More than 2,000 miles all the way/
Get your kicks on Route 66 …

The famous thoroughfare was created in 1926, and three years later, the Depression hit, followed by the Dust Bowl — when drought and dust storms devastated farmland.

A family in Pittsburg County, Okla., is forced to leave their home in June 1938 due to a serious drought in the region.

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"The Dust Bowl drove thousands of families away from their farms in the Midwest and Southwest states," said Jim Ross, who has written nine books about Route 66. He lives on an original section of the highway. "Most of them headed for California, because that's where the jobs were, or so they thought."

For the Farm Security Administration Project, Dorothea Lange photographed displaced families as they traveled West. The migrants drove in covered jalopies, hitchhiked and walked barefoot with their belongings along the highways.

Route 66 expert Michael Wallis says their trek was heartbreaking — "Following the scent of citrus out to California to rebuild their lives, they were hooked into that old dream, the land of milk and honey, which let them down.

Writer John Steinbeck chronicled the migration along Route 66 — which he named "The Mother Road" — in The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck's 1939 novel won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a now-classic film. It starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, an ex-con traveling from Oklahoma with his sharecropper family.

"Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can't eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad," he said in a monologue that would later inspire songwriters Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen.

And legends of Route 66 shifted gears with the times.

After World War II, cars and Route 66 tourism were heavily marketed. Families began taking road trips around the country. And by the early 1960s, their spirit of adventure was captured by rock and rollers Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones.

It goes from St. Louis, Joplin, Missouri/
and Oklahoma City looks so pretty./
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico/
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona/ 
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino… 

Route 66 was also celebrated by a TV series with the same name, with a theme song by composer and arranger Nelson Riddle. It features two young adventurers who hit the trans-American highways in a Corvette convertible.

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in a scene from the 1969 film <em>Easy Rider</em>.

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Route 66 was also the scenic road in the 1969 film Easy Rider. It starred Henry Fonda's son Peter, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson as counterculture wanderers who traveled by motorcycle.

"All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut," Hopper's character says in one scene, referring to some haters.

"Oh no," Nicholson's character responds. "What you represent is Freedom.

Into the 21st century

In 1985, Route 66 was officially decommissioned as a federal highway. But its lure endured. Two years later, the English electronic band Depeche Mode made a music video about it.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip?/ 
And you'll you make that California trip/
Get your kicks on Route 66

The documentary Depeche Mode:101 followed a group of fans traveling across the country on a tour bus. It was an inspiration for reality TV shows in the 1990s: The Real World and Road Rules.

Route 66 was also celebrated in Pixar's 2006 animated movie Cars. With John Mayer's version of the old classic as its theme song, Cars was set in a fictional town along Route 66: Radiator Springs. The popularity of the movie and a sequel led to a theme park attraction at Disneyland's California Adventure.

A 2012 handout photo provided by Disney Parks shows the Radiator Springs Racers attraction.

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Author Michael Wallis consulted for the Disney Imagineers and the Pixar filmmakers. And he was the voice of the animated sheriff in the movie — a 1949 Mercury Club Coupe police car.

A vintage postcard-style map traces Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles with landmark illustrations along the border, marking the road's 100th anniversary.

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Wallis co-founded the Route 66 Alliance, and is on the highway's Congressional Centennial Commission. The 81-year-old says the road has stirred his imagination ever since he was a child.

"There's a sense of adventure," he said. "If you've not been in a pie palace or greasy spoon on the Mother Road, you don't know what to expect."

Wallis' bestselling 1990 book The Mother Road is credited with sparking a revival of interest in Route 66.

"It's the path connecting two big cities across two-thirds of the continent," he said. "People renting you a room, selling you a cheeseburger, a peek at the snake pit. A dream. An illusion. That's what it's all about."
Copyright 2026 NPR

A cat walks past a Route 66 signs at the El Rancho Motel, once a major Route 66 landmark, on June 15, 2007 in Barstow, Calif.

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California voters faced big questions about money in this election, and the results sent mixed signals about how the electorate feels about taxation.

They want to tax the rich — but only sometimes. They want the money counters at the Franchise Tax Board to stay far away from personal assets, but are leaving the door open for future taxes or taxes on other people.

On Election Day, voters:

• Rejected Proposition 40, an effort to levy a first-of-its-kind wealth tax on billionaires
• Rejected Proposition 41, a taxation transparency measure 
• Approved Proposition 42, a ban on wealth taxes and retroactive taxes 
• Rejected Proposition 43, an attempt to make it more difficult for local governments to raise taxes
• Approved Proposition 3, a proposal to make permanent a tax on high-income earners

Voters also approved several high-profile local taxes, including two measures to fund the Bay Area’s regional transit systems, including Muni and BART, and a half-cent sales tax to fund firefighting in the city of Los Angeles.

The mixed outcome, experts say, shows that California voters are embracing tax hikes — but only when they can ensure the money is funding tangible services they support.

“Voters are willing to open up their wallet if they believe it’s for a good cause … and that it’s actually going to that place,” said Brandon Castillo, a prominent ballot measure strategist in California.

It also demonstrates voters’ willingness to support taxes that likely won’t affect their own pocketbook, said Mark Baldassare, survey director of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

“We are a very progressive state where voters, particularly today when affordability weighs on them, have a tendency to say somebody else will be paying taxes, not me.”

Still, that “not me” attitude didn’t stretch as far as the state’s contentious billionaire tax, which faced opposition from business interests, Democrats and deep-pocketed Silicon Valley executives alike.

Why did the billionaire tax fail?

The failure of the billionaire tax represents the most stunning defeat of Election Day for progressive Democrats who tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on souring sentiment toward the ultra-wealthy amid high gas prices and worsening inflation for average Californians. How could the most progressive measure in the most progressive state fail during a “blue wave” election?

“California voters are sometimes more conservative on ballot propositions than they are on voting for candidates,” said Christian Grose, a political science and public policy professor at USC.

In recent years, voters through ballot measures got tougher on crime, shot down a minimum wage increase and rejected efforts to make it easier to pass local bonds. In fact, voters upheld the death penalty the last time it appeared on the ballot even though the state has not executed anyone since 2006. In a historic decision, Gov. Gavin Newsom also earlier this month commuted all death row sentences to life without parole.

Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant, said this trend likely holds true because ballot initiatives — including taxation questions — generally ask voters to consider one issue at a time and are presented in a nonpartisan manner. In contrast, voting for a liberal or conservative candidate requires voters to weigh multiple aspects of a person’s record, character or values.

“They just have the policy question, and voters sort it out for themselves,” Stutzman said.

Those centrist tendencies helped push Prop. 42, one of two measures put on the ballot by billionaires trying to protect their wealth, across the finish line. That measure bans taxes on personal property, business interests and financial investments. The Associated Press confirmed its passage by 51.3% Friday.

Anti-tax and union supporters touted it as a way to protect retirement savings and pensions potentially targeted by the billionaire tax, though billionaire tax proponents countered that their measure never targeted ordinary retirement accounts in the first place.

Experts say voter confusion and a $378 million opposition warchest donated primarily by Silicon Valley tech billionaires doomed the billionaire tax.

Props. 41 and 42 were designed specifically to kill Prop. 40 if it had passed, creating a chaotic array of choices. The billionaire tax also amassed a coalition of diverse and vocal opponents, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Planned Parenthood, medical clinics and the state’s largest teachers union, despite the California Democratic Party and California Labor Federation supporting it.

Polling showed support for the measure dropped 6 points in the last two months before the election, taking it from a narrow lead to a crushing defeat.

“The campaign against the billionaire tax was a success,” Grose said.

Other taxes succeeded

But few view the results on Prop. 40 as a referendum on the state’s progressive tax system. Instead, many analysts said it was simply bad policy that splintered California’s Democratic base.

Prop. 40 aimed to focus almost all the revenue in healthcare while cutting out other areas of state spending, which would lose funding if billionaires left the state and stopped paying income taxes, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego. That, he said, was “an unforced error.”

“It made it a David and Goliath fight, but it didn’t need to be,” he said. “You don’t pass a landmark progressive tax increase that is sort of a change to how America has historically done anything by dividing up the progressive coalition.”

At the same time, Prop. 42’s anti-taxation sentiment was also somewhat tempered by the defeat of Prop. 43, which would have made increasing taxes for local public services more difficult, and the success of Prop. 3, which sticks a higher tax bracket on high-income earners to help fund schools.

Prop. 43 would have required a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax dedicated to specific services. Kousser said voters are concerned the measure would allow for “minority rule,” where just a third of voters would be able to block essential funding for local services.

“Voters don’t like to put in place these rules that seem to be tilted in one direction,” he said.

David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, said Prop. 3’s passage sent a “resounding message of support for taxing the wealthy.” That measure passed with nearly 59% of the vote and sets a higher tax bracket on individually earned income above $360,000.

People in that income bracket have been paying that extra tax since 2012 as a temporary state budget fix; Prop. 3 made it permanent.

Why could voters distinguish between the income tax Prop. 3 and the wealth tax in Prop. 40? Partly because Prop. 3 had no opposition among Democrats, Kousser noted. It also extended an existing tax, whereas Prop. 40 opponents ran ads claiming that state lawmakers could come after average Californians’ personal savings.

Ballot box tempting for revenue seekers

Dustin Corcoran, chief executive of the California Medical Association, which opposed the billionaire tax, said he also does not view its defeat “as an endorsement of wealth inequality or the status quo.”

The state still needs to find a way to securely finance healthcare, education and other core services, Corcoran said, and the medical association is exploring future ballot initiative options to generate revenue.

Not even Prop. 40’s supporters view its defeat as a reason to stop trying to tax the ultra-wealthy in California. Dave Regan, president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the primary proponents of the billionaire tax, vowed to come back in 2028 with another billionaire tax initiative.

Regan also pushed back on the notion that Democrats were divided on wealth taxes, arguing that polling showed between 60% to 70% of Democrats supported the measure and only Democratic leaders such as Newsom and Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra opposed it.

“At the very highest levels of state officials there’s actually, you know, a different point of view, but that’s out of step with where regular people are at,” Regan said.

Still, fiscal conservatives, the state’s non-partisan budget analyst, and even some moderate Democrats say taxation cannot be the only solution to California’s budget woes. The state has faced four consecutive deficit years and spending that outpaces revenue despite the budget as a whole growing. The current state budget calls for $351.7 billion in total spending — a 64% increase over the $214.8 billion Newsom signed in his first year as governor seven years ago.

“California’s budget is structurally overextended despite booming and near-record revenues,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in a new budget assessment. “This overextended budget reflects a higher ongoing spending base; diminished reserves; an already accumulated wall of debt; and annual, out-year operating deficits of $8 billion to $10 billion.”

Updated November 14, 2026 at 13:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON— Friday's nationwide ground stop started when a contractor updated old Federal Aviation Administration telecommunication lines, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.

Tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S. are still stranded Saturday after the rare ground stop. Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator who joined Duffy at Saturday's media briefing, said schedule problems should be resolved by Sunday evening.

Nearly 25,000 flights were delayed, and over 9,000 were cancelled on Friday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. The disruption seeped into Saturday morning with more than 4,000 cancellations recorded, which is 18% of flights departing the U.S., according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

L3Harris, a long time contractor for the FAA, was doing routine maintenance in at least one remote location changing copper wire to fiber optics, Duffy said. "When I tell you that we're using old equipment, we're using old equipment," he said.

He said the FAA is still investigating the exact error that started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, and if L3Harris was at all responsible.

"It's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?"

L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

These updates have been happening in American institutions for decades, Duffy said.

"Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital," Duffy said. "Just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made, but this is not complicated."

Bedford said there was no evidence of anything nefarious happening or any AI-related issues.

Since his time in office, Duffy said he's been asking Congress for money to make more upgrades. In July 2025, Congress approved $12.5 billion to modernize the nation's aging air traffic control system.

With that money, 70% of copper communications have been replaced to high-speed fiber, Bedford said. Duffy called the innovations and the need for more a "bipartisan moment."

"This is the moment, if we don't start to switch out our systems, when, how long are we going to wait, America, and Congress?" Duffy asked.

Thousands of passengers miss flights

Passengers wait at boarding gates at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC on November 13, 2026.

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Zina Desmazes

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AFP via Getty Images

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For about four hours on Friday, thousands of flights at U.S. airports were grounded in one of the biggest disruptions of the nation's air travel system since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The aviation system is back online and slowly returning to normal Saturday morning, but delays and cancellations will continue, Duffy said. Bedford said all passengers will be put on new flights or they'll get a full refund, but that people should reach out to their airlines directly.

Flight boards at airports across the country Saturday morning continued to be riddled with red cancelled marks. At Tampa International Airport in Florida, people in the main terminal area before security curled up in chairs to grab a wink of sleep.

On Friday night, a flight board at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. showed dozens of flights delayed into the early morning hours or cancelled.

Passengers Erin and Jake Britt spent half the day at the airport in D.C. on Friday. Their plane to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. boarded at 3 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., they were getting off the plane — but they were still in D.C.

"Overall, our plane was definitely annoyed, but reasonable," Erin Britt said, as the couple left the airport at 8 p.m. "People being upset and asking like, 'Well, how are you not prepared for this?' And it was like, 'Well, no one was prepared.'"

She said neither the pilot nor flight attendants had any more information than passengers."They seem just as in the dark," she said.

The pair decided to cancel their weekend trip, but the night didn't end there. They spent over nine hours overnight waiting on the JetBlue customer service call line to be reimbursed. "I was setting alarms in 20 minute intervals in case I fell asleep," Erin Britt said.

For people who had events or plans over the weekend – the delay added an extra layer of stress. Joe Romano and Maddie Cabana had a cruise leaving Orlando, Fla. Saturday afternoon.

"It was a big eye roll. I mean, I travel a lot for work already, so I'm constantly dealing with flight delays," Romano said. "When this happened, I was just like, 'Of course, it always happens to me.'"

"Just rather inconvenient and frustrating," Cabana added, as the pair contemplated checking their bags or going home. They even thought about driving to Florida. "Hopefully, everything will be fine. It'll all work out. It always does."

And it did— eventually. After their JetBlue flight was ultimately cancelled, they quickly booked another one on Southwest Airlines and made it early Saturday morning.

Others, like Suze DiPietro decided flying wasn't worth it anymore. Her husband drove about four hours down from Ocean City, New Jersey to pick her up in D.C. Luckily, they had friends in the area where they spent the night.

"My husband, my hero, is driving down from New Jersey to come get me," DiPietro said.

Other alternatives included people switching to Amtrak trains as they struggled to get to their destination. Although, even Amtrak's system had a brief outage Friday night.

This was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The U.S. last issued a ground stop of this scale in 2023, when all U.S. airports were shut down due to an outage in the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and airports of real-time hazards.

That outage prompted fears of a cyberattack, but the FAA later determined the issue was caused when contract workers inadvertently deleted critical files.

The FAA has recently begun rolling out an AI-enhanced software tool known as the SMART system as part of its ambitious overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. But Air Space Intelligence, the company that makes the tool, quickly dismissed speculation that its product could be connected to the flight disruptions.

"The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC," the company said on social media.

Ava Pukatch contributed to reporting.

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