Category: Election

by Nadia Lathan / Cal-Matters / August 31, 2026

Facing a shrinking budget, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria made few commitments during his annual address to the city in January.

One of them was to win approval for a controversial plan to build a billionaire-backed professional sports stadium and a housing project in a long-vacant arena parking lot.

“Let me be crystal clear,” Gloria, a Democrat, said. “The redevelopment of the sports arena will move forward. We will get this done.”

He may finally fulfill that promise for California’s second-largest city, despite the 165 foot-tall structure vastly exceeding the neighborhood’s 30-foot building height cap.

In the final days of the legislative session, lawmakers Sunday approved a last-minute deal to fast-track construction for Midway Rising, a project to construct a 25-story professional arena, 4,250 housing units and nearly 15 acres of public parks. If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the new law would immediately shield the planned development from potential environmental lawsuits.

It’s a break for San Diego officials whose ambitions for the city’s Midway District have been fraught with legal challenges for years, namely because of the California Environmental Quality Act.

by Ernie McCray

I’m definitely one of those folks
suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,
as I’ve got TDS
to the bone
and it really showed
one day when I was sitting at home
and turned the TV on
just as congressman, Hakeem Jeffries, was asked
“Would you consider seeking an impeachment
for the president?”
and I sat waiting for a reply
such as
“Hell, yeah, can’t wait”
and got, instead,
“We haven’t
ruled anything in
and we haven’t
ruled anything out”
and I couldn’t help but wonder,
as I held back a scream,
“What the hell was that all about”?

The San Diego Community Coalition publishes this email bulletin to keep our members and the general public informed about important Council hearings and other city public meetings.

Monday, August 31: City Council, 2:00 p.m.

Agenda:

Item 200: Amend Sole Source Contract For OpenGov to Extend for One-Year Period with One-Year Option Renewal

Why it matters: On July 13, after the Independent Budget Analyst harshly criticized city staff for lack of due diligence in seeking competitive bids, the Council ordered staff to try again. This follow-up item should make for an interesting discussion.

By Jamelle Bouie   / RSN – New York Times / August 30, 2026

So far, the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

By Mat Wahlstrom

It’s astonishing, the extent to which political norms and the rule of law have been perverted by an elected official who imagines himself a king and has a cabal of cronies and an entire political party enabling his madness.

There’s no level of government or public policy where he won’t intrude for personal gain, no grievance too petty to express, no punishment too harsh for those who oppose him. Any engagement with him that is less than fawning is met with insult (if not also litigious and/or paramilitary measures).

No one is allowed to tell him “No.”

But while a majority of Americans disapprove of the current federal regime for these reasons, what is interesting is how long it has taken people in San Diego to recognize a variant of this
same derangement in our “strong-arm mayor” form of government and his neoliberal party machine.

While I am certain that there are those at this point thinking this comparison is hyperbole, I contend that any difference in lawlessness is one of degree not of kind.

The rumblings were abundant in 2024. Todd Gloria’s ‘irrational exuberance’ in going on a hiring spree to fund a redundant layer of YIMBY-identifying city staffers as his personal enforcers finally ran into the iceberg of budget reality. Middle-manager positions swelled from 70 in 2011 to 393 today; and the personal cost of city services to individual San Diegans increased by 29% -or $346 more per year.

OB Rag Staff Report

When the San Diego City Council returned from a month’s hiatus on August 24, Council President Joe La Cava quickly laid down the law about what he would and would not allow public commenters to discuss.

But those commenters quickly taught him a lesson about why elected officials who run meetings need to do their homework.

The afternoon’s second agenda item was a formality, a vote to remove Measure C from the municipal code. The initiative would have let the Midway Rising project exceed the city’s 30-foot coastal height limit. But it was struck down in court on environmental impact issues, so the Council vote was procedural.

Midway Rising has sparked a furious battle between elected officials who are hell-bent on pushing it through, and community activists who are hell-bent on stopping it. Mayor Todd Gloria, who has staked everything on this project, flew to Sacramento to lobby for special legislation that will green light it.

So, it was no surprise when public commenters addressed the environmental risks of Midway Rising, including flooding from rising sea levels and soil liquefaction.

But the Council President wasn’t having it. He interrupted several speakers and chastised them because they didn’t strictly limit their remarks to the defunct Measure C.

“I’m going to ask you to speak on Measure C,” La Cava told Angela Vedder, “to talk about whether or not we should repeal Measure C.”

Lori Saldana noted the irony of repealing Measure C while pushing state bills to negate existing height limits.

By Marc Snelling / Special to the OB Rag

California’s winery casualties continue to mount as the Trump Trade War escalates.  The near blockade of the Strait of Your Booze has resulted in layoffs and closures amongst California wineries, Kentucky distilleries, and other industries with Canadian export markets. The senseless damage to cross-border businesses grows along with White House rhetoric.  The trade war against Canada started with a MAGA regime lie about fentanyl streaming across the Northern border, is now a year and half old.

This week the Canadian negotiating team walked away from US talks in what media are calling an escalation to an all-out trade war.  Canadian’s views remain largely unchanged by recent events.  Any so-called “negotiations” with the White House have long been seen as extortion through sovereignty threats.  Canadians questioned not only if a deal was possible, but if a deal with the current White House would be the worth the paper it was written on.  After all the deal on paper now is not being followed and it has the current president’s sharpie on it.

The end result of US bluster and tariffs is a sharp drop in Canadian trust of US government. A drop so steep that for the first time ever, Pew Research Center polling shows the average Canadian now views China (44%) as a more reliable trading partner than the USA (33%).  The result is hard to fathom considering the centuries-long US-Canada alliance and that views of China were near historic lows during the COVID pandemic.

By Erwin Chemerinsky / LA Times Commentary  / August 26, 2026

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday allowing President Trump’s executive order on mail voting to go forward is stunningly insensitive to the context: Trump is trying to exercise control over elections when he has absolutely no authority to do so. In one sense, the justices decided nothing, simply saying it was too soon for federal courts to get involved. But in a more important way, the court could have and should have put an emphatic end to the president’s efforts to try to regulate voting operations that are legally the domain of state governments.

The context for the Supreme Court’s ruling is Trump’s repeated assertion that noncitizens are illegally voting in the United States. However, many studies done on this topic have come to the same conclusion: Instances of noncitizens voting are extremely rare.

One study from 2017, by the Brennan Center for Justice, looked at 42 jurisdictions across which more than 23.5 million votes were cast, and found only 30 instances in which there were investigations into noncitizens voting — or 0.0001% of ballots cast.

By Vanessa Romo / NPR / August 26, 2026

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recorded 49,571 arrests in July, setting the highest monthly arrest total in President Trump’s second term, according to recently released government data provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The total surge averages out to 1,599 apprehensions a day, and tops June’s record-breaking number of 43,021 arrests by 15%.

Since taking over in March, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pivoted from the confrontational style of immigration enforcement of his predecessor, Kristi Noem. The former head of DHS often accompanied ICE officers on high profile raids, including Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which left two American citizens dead at the hands of federal agents. Instead Mullin pledged to fulfill the Trump administration’s deportation goals while keeping the department out of the headlines. The latest data is reflective of a strategy that is working.

Graeme Blair, co-director of the Deportation Data Project says the uptick is due to Mullin’s change in tactics.

“What we’re seeing is an expansion in all of the different ways that ICE is detaining people,” Blair told NPR. “They’re arresting people at airports, at ICE check-ins, at immigration courthouses and this is the result of that.”

By Lu Rehling

What does the “Community” in “Community Planning Group” (CPG) mean when corporate interests govern? And why is the Midway-Pacific Highway Community Planning Group (“the Group”) so invested in the current plan for Midway Rising, despite urgent environmental and infrastructure concerns that have been raised by the CPGs that are the Group’s geographical neighbors?

The answer is that while those other CPGs, like most in our city, have primarily residents on their boards, the Group’s board members are almost entirely owners and representatives of businesses and business-use properties. And the Group operates in ways that suggest it intends to keep things that way, at least well past the time for major Midway Rising decisions.

In fact, right now the Group is gearing up to fill the 5 vacant seats on its 15-member board with mostly reps of business and non-resident property owners, even though there already are more of those kinds of members and way fewer of residents than its city-approved operating procedures require. (In fact, there’s only one single resident board member now!)

How can the Midway District planning group get away with that? By loving a loophole: the Group’s city-approved operating procedures allow it to fill, by appointment, resident board seats for the completion of full 3-year terms with other types of members. Conveniently, the Group reports having only one potential resident candidate on deck for its consideration, along with multiple non-residents.

And since the Group has committed to filling its empty member seats quickly, it’s reasonable to guess that the non-resident majority on the board will look favorably upon their own kind and appoint accordingly.

Notably, those same operating procedures also require that the Midway planners first make “diligent efforts” to recruit resident members, but that ain’t been happening.

San Diego City Council unanimously repealed Measure C, but state affordable housing law could still allow the 48-acre Midway Rising project to bypass coastal height limits.

By Allison Ash / 7SanDiego / August 24, 2026 

The San Diego City Council unanimously voted to repeal Measure C, eliminating the voter-approved law that allowed the massive Midway Rising project to circumvent the city’s 30-foot coastal height limit.

The repeal adds another wrinkle for Midway Rising, a proposed 48-acre redevelopment of the Sports Arena area that would include a new 16,000-seat venue, restaurants, shopping and more than 4,000 homes. Nearly half of the homes would be designated for low-income residents.

Measure C was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2022, allowing developers to move forward without being bound by the coastal height limit. Courts have since ruled that the measure may violate California’s environmental impact rules.

City Council President Joe La Cava said the council had an obligation to remove the Measure C language from the city’s municipal code.

By Jacob Knutson, Jim Saksa / Democracy Docket / August 24, 2026

In a victory for the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting to go forward, bolstering his long-running effort to restrict voting access ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The Court Monday granted emergency appeals filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and a dozen Republican-led states against a lower court’s order blocking the implementation of the president’s March executive order, which sought to increase federal control over mail voting.*

The decision brings the Trump administration one step closer to implementing the order ahead of November’s midterm elections. However, the Court only stayed one of the two court orders restricting the government from effectuating Trump’s decree, a permanent injunction applying to 23 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. A separate, nationwide injunction remains in place.

The Court’s three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that the Court’s decision could wreak havoc on the upcoming elections, which are less than three months away.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” she wrote.