SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce critic of former President Donald Trump, on Thursday called for lawmakers to convene a special session later this year to safeguard the state’s progressive policies on climate change, reproductive rights and immigration ahead of another Trump presidency.
The move — a day after the former president resoundingly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race — effectively reignited California's resistance campaign against conservative policies that state Democratic leaders started during the first Trump administration.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom, who reportedly has ambitions on the national stage, said in a statement. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond. We are prepared to fight in the courts, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive.”
Newsom’s office told The Associated Press that the governor and lawmakers are ready to “Trump-proof” California’s state laws. His announcement Thursday called on the Legislature to give the attorney general’s office more funding to fight federal challenges when they meet in December.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office spent the past year reviewing more than 120 lawsuits the state filed during Trump’s first term in preparation for new federal actions. Bonta said the governor has called the special session to line up the resources that will be needed for the state to fight any Trump encroachments on its policies without giving more details on exactly what the plans would entail.
He said his office has been working with Democratic attorney generals across the nation in anticipation of Trump winning. “We reject him. We reject his values. We reject his agenda,” Bonta said, speaking about California.
California's move is part of a growing discussion among Democratic state officials across the country seeking to protect policies that face threats under Trump's leadership. Other blue states are moving quickly to prepare game plans and expect a more robust battle this time around with a Republican-dominated Senate and possibly House.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she, Attorney General Letitia James and their senior staffers plan to meet regularly to discuss legal strategies to protect “key areas that are most likely to face threats from the Trump administration” such as “reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, labor rights, LGBTQ rights and and our environmental justice.”
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who as state attorney general filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump during his first term, said they will “have to see if he makes good on what he promised and ran on in terms of Project 2025 or other things.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said she and other attorneys general are “absolutely clear-eyed that president-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as president.”
In Chicago, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced similar preparations.
"Chaos, retribution and disarray radiated from the White House the last time Donald Trump occupied it,” Pritzker said at a Thursday news conference. “Perhaps this time may be different. But if it isn’t, Illinois will remain a place of stability and competent governance.”
In some states, including Connecticut, officials are hoping to codify progressive policies into law, "but there are limits to what our ability is to do that,” Connecticut Comptroller Sean Scanlon said.
California Republican lawmakers called Newsom’s announcement a “political stunt.”
“The only ‘problem’ it will solve is Gavin Newsom’s insecurity that not enough people are paying attention to him,” Republican leader of the state Assembly James Gallagher said in a statement about the special session.
Trump's campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
After Trump's win, Newsom vowed to work with the president-elect but added, “Let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”
Trump often depicts California as representing all he sees wrong in America. Democrats, which hold every statewide office in California and have commanding margins in the Legislature and congressional delegation, outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 statewide and Harris easily carried the state in her losing presidential bid.
Trump called the Democratic governor “New-scum” during a campaign stop in Southern California last month and has relentlessly lambasted the Democratic stronghold and nation’s most populous state over its large number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, its homeless population and its thicket of regulations.
Trump also waded into a water rights battle over the endangered delta smelt that has pitted environmentalists against farmers and threatened to withhold federal aid to a state increasingly under threat from wildfires.
In a speech Wednesday morning, Trump vowed to follow through with his campaign promise of carrying out the mass deportation of immigrants without legal status and prosecuting his political enemies.
Speaking Thursday, California’s attorney general reassured the state's immigrant population, the nation’s largest.
“I can promise to the undocumented immigrant community in California that I and my team have been thinking about you for months, and the harm that might come from the Trump administration 2.0. We’ll do everything in our power and use the full authority of our office to defend you, to protect you,” Bonta said.
Newsom has called California a sanctuary for people in other states seeking abortions. The state has passed dozens of laws to protect abortion access, including setting aside $20 million in taxpayer money to help pay for patients in other states to travel to California to get an abortion. Newsom also leads a coalition of 20 Democratic governors launched in 2023 to strengthen abortion access.
The state was also the first to mandate that all new cars, pickup trucks and SUVs sold in California be electric, hydrogen-powered or plug-in hybrids by 2035 and give state regulators the power to penalize oil companies for making too much money. California also extends state-funded health care to all low-income residents regardless of their immigration status.
“We learned a lot about former President Trump in his first term — he’s petty, vindictive, and will do what it takes to get his way no matter how dangerous the policy may be,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire said in a statement. “California has come too far and accomplished too much to simply surrender and accept his dystopian vision for America.”
Associated Press writers Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York; Steve LeBlanc in Boston; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to the report.
FILE - California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks during a press conference Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Minh Connors, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump talks with then California Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, left, during a visit to a neighborhood impacted by the wildfires in Paradise, Calif., Nov. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden's name wasn't on the ballot, but history will likely remember Kamala Harris' resounding defeat as his loss too.
As Democrats pick up the pieces after President-elect Donald Trump's decisive victory, some of the vice president's backers are expressing frustration that Biden's decision to seek reelection until this summer — despite long-standing voter concerns about his age and unease about post-pandemic inflation as well as the U.S.-Mexico border — all but sealed his party's surrender of the White House.
“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden in 2020 for the Democratic nomination and endorsed Harris’ unsuccessful run. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”
Biden will leave office after leading the United States out of the worst pandemic in a century, galvanizing international support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and passing a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that will affect communities for years to come.
But having run four years ago against Trump to “restore the soul of the country,” Biden will make way after just one term for his immediate predecessor, who overcame two impeachments, a felony conviction and an insurrection launched by his supporters. Trump has pledged to radically reshape the federal government and roll back many of Biden's priorities.
“Maybe in 20 or 30 years, history will remember Biden for some of these achievements,” said Thom Reilly, co-director of the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University. “But in the shorter term, I don’t know he escapes the legacy of being the president who beat Donald Trump only to usher in another Donald Trump administration four years later.”
Biden on Thursday avoided directly addressing the electorate's seeming repudiation of his presidency. Instead, he noted that Americans will feel the effects of the administration's signature legislative efforts for years to come.
“Don’t forget all that we accomplished,” Biden said in a brief Rose Garden address attended by Cabinet members and top aides but not by Harris. “It’s been a historic presidency — not because I am president but because of what we’ve done. What you’ve done.”
He issued a statement shortly after Harris delivered her concession speech Wednesday, praising her for running an “historic campaign” under “extraordinary circumstances.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Democrats got caught up in a wave of anti-incumbency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that upturned governments in democracies around the globe irrespective of ideology. She did not directly respond to questions about criticism that Biden waited too long to bow out.
“He believed he made the right decision,” Jean-Pierre said at her daily briefing.
Only about 4 in 10 voters in the 2024 presidential election approved of how Biden handled his job as president, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Roughly 6 in 10 disapproved, and Donald Trump won a strong majority of those voters who were dissatisfied with Biden.
Some high-ranking Democrats, including three advisers to the Harris campaign, expressed deep frustration with Biden for failing to recognize earlier in the election cycle that he was not up to the challenge. The advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
Biden, 81, ended his reelection campaign in July, weeks after an abysmal debate performance sent his party into a spiral and raised questions about whether he still had the mental acuity and stamina to serve as a credible nominee.
But polling long beforehand showed that many Americans worried about his age. Some 77% of Americans said in August 2023 that Biden was too old to be effective for four more years, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
The president bowed out on July 21 after getting not-so-subtle nudges from Democratic Party powers, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. Biden endorsed Harris and handed over his campaign operation to her.
Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, one of several Democratic lawmakers who publicly pressed Biden to step aside this summer, said Thursday on CNN that the Democratic Party “would have been much better off" if Biden had left the race earlier.
Yang argued that Democratic Party leaders also deserve blame for taking too long to push out Biden. With few exceptions, most notably Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, Democrats shied away talking publicly about Biden's age.
“Why was this not coming from any Democratic leaders?" Yang said. “It’s a lack of courage and independence and an excess of careerism, if I just keep my mouth shut, we’ll just keep on trucking along.”
The campaign was also saddled by anger among some Arab American and young voters over its approach to Israel's conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an ally of Biden and Harris, said in a statement that Democrats lost the thread on working-class Americans' concerns.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” the Vermont independent said. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?”
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison took to social media Thursday to push back on Sanders' critique, saying that Biden was “the most-pro worker President of my lifetime.”
Harris managed to spur far greater enthusiasm than Biden was generating from the party's base. But she struggled to distinguish how her administration would differ from Biden's.
Appearing on ABC’s “The View” in September, Harris was not able to identify a decision where she would have separated herself from Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, giving the Trump campaign a sound bite it replayed through Election Day.
The strategists advising the Harris campaign said the compressed campaign timetable made it even more difficult for Harris to differentiate herself from the president.
Had Biden stepped aside early in the year, they said, it would have given Democrats enough time to hold a primary. Going through the paces of an intraparty contest would have forced Harris or another eventual nominee to more aggressively stake out differences with Biden.
The strategists acknowledged that overcoming broad dissatisfaction about rising costs in the aftermath of the pandemic and broad concerns about the U.S. immigration system weighed heavy on the minds of voters in key states.
Still, they said that Biden had left Democrats in an untenable place.
Harris senior adviser David Plouffe in a posting on X called it a “devastating loss.” Plouffe did not assign blame and said the Harris campaign “dug out of a deep hole but not enough.” The post was later deleted.
At the vice president's concession speech on Wednesday, some Harris supporters said they wished the vice president had had more time to make her pitch to American voters.
“I think that would have made a huge difference," said Jerushatalla Pallay, a Howard University student who attended the speech at the center of her campus.
Republicans are poised to control the White House and Senate. Control of the House has yet to be determined.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president at the Democratic-aligned group Third Way, said this moment was the most devastating the party has faced in his lifetime.
"Harris was dealt a really bad hand. Some of it was Biden’s making and some maybe not," said Bennett, who served as an aide to Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration. “Would Democrats fare better if Biden had stepped back earlier? I don't know if we can say for certain, but it's a question we'll be asking ourselves for some time.”
Associated Press writers Matt Brown, Chris Megerian, Zeke Miller and Linley Sanders contributed to this report.
President Joe Biden departs after speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Joe Biden departs after speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Joe Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden walks out of the Oval Office to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden arrives to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
President Joe Biden speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden walks to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Joe Biden after speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Joe Biden, right, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, left, participate in a presidential debate hosted by CNN, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris hugs President Biden during the Democratic National Convention Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
FILE - Vice President Kamala Harris listens as President Joe Biden speaks about distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, in the East Room of the White House, May 17, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
