Erika D. Smith

Ballots are still being counted in some of California’s highest-profile primary election races — a process that will continue for several more days, perhaps even weeks, before the winners are announced. But one loser is already clear: Big Tech.

On primary election night in California last week, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra took a moment to gloat, both in English and in Spanish. After trailing in the polls for months and resisting calls from his own party to drop out of the race, he is now advancing to a runoff election in November to succeed Gavin Newsom.

President Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent when it comes to election results he doesn’t like. And so it has been with California: When the Republican running for Los Angeles mayor failed to advance in last week’s primary, Trump doubled down on baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots.

It was a year ago this month that President Donald Trump gave many Americans their first glimpse of his long-promised campaign of mass deportations. He deployed the military and immigration agents to Los Angeles for weeks of violent raids, and polls showed most Americans didn’t like it. They liked it even less when those violent raids moved to Minneapolis earlier this year and immigration agents fatally shot two Americans.

Gavin Newsom has his story and he’s sticking to it. The question is whether others will too.

When President Donald Trump announced in April that he was creating a task force to root out fraud and corruption from social safety net programs, he promised it would recover enough “stolen” federal funding from Democrat-led states to “literally be able to balance our American Budget.”

At a time of widening wealth inequality and rising anger over the influence of billionaires in politics, just how far are voters willing to go with eat-the-rich populism? Will policy be ruled by emotion, or is there still room for pragmatism?

Rebuked more than once by the US Supreme Court this past term, President Donald Trump is hanging onto what he’s calling a “BIG WIN” — the 6-3 decision allowing states to bar transgender students from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

If not for the thousands of Haitians who live there, Springfield, Ohio, may have suffered the same fate as countless small cities and towns: It would’ve fallen into decline. Instead, new businesses are opening and neighborhoods are thriving.

With its ancient sequoias, towering waterfalls and glacier-carved granite cliffs, California’s Yosemite National Park has long been one of the most visited destinations in the national park system, helping to inspire its very creation. The vistas, which span more than 1,100 square miles along the Sierra Nevada mountain range, are inspiring to say the least. Yet the stories out of Yosemite this year — particularly this month, the official start of the busy season for national parks — are anything