California Senate debate doesn’t swing the race

Californians have three more weeks to vote for the next U.S. senator — and it doesn’t appear the candidates’ second televised debate Monday night dramatically changed the dynamics of the campaign.    

The hour-long debate, hosted by KRON in San Francisco and aired by Nexstar Media Group stations across California, covered a lot of the same ground as the first debate Jan. 22 between the same four candidates.

As CalMatters politics reporter Yue Stella Yu recounts, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, in first place in the polls, continued going after Republican Steve Garvey. Asked about crime, Schiff said he was a prosecutor while Garvey was still playing baseball. On homelessness, Schiff blasted Garvey for refusing to support anything beyond “poverty wages.”

Garvey, apparently fighting for the second slot with Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, called his competitors “career politicians” who have “failed the people.” He also accused Democrats and reporters of “badgering” him for pressing whether he plans to vote for former President Donald Trump.   

Porter plugged her 10-point plan to tackle the state’s housing crisis, vowed to fight special interests and bragged again about not accepting corporate PAC contributions, though as Stella detailed, it isn’t that straightforward. 

• Porter: “Washington isn’t listening to Californians. They’re not focused on our biggest problems. They’re focused on doing favors for their Wall Street donors.”

But it took more than halfway through the debate for Porter to directly go after Schiff, saying it was hypocritical for him to oppose age limits for elected officials but to support them for U.S. Supreme Court justices. Schiff replied that Porter misunderstood the issue, saying he supports term limits — not age limits — for the high court justices, who have lifetime appointments.  

Rep. Barbara Lee needed a breakout moment, as she is struggling to gain traction in the polls. An obvious one didn’t happen. Asked whether the $50 an hour minimum wage she supports is sustainable for small businesses, Lee talked about living costs but didn’t directly answer the question. 

In her closing statement, she talked about the many hurdles she overcame during her life and political career, which the Los Angeles Times also wrote about Monday. That message, however, has been difficult to convey given the lack of campaign cash.

• Ludovic Blain, executive director of the progressive California Donor Table, to the Times: “She and those of us who support her haven’t been able to pull together the funds needed to educate voters about her, especially younger voters.” 

For more on the debate, read Stella’s recap.

Time to vote: Find out more about Lee, and the other major Senate candidates in their pages in our comprehensive Voter Guide. It can help you decide how to vote on almost everything on your March 5 primary ballot and answers many questions on how to vote.

The Friday deadline for state lawmakers to introduce bills is fast approaching, and according to longtime lobbyist Chris Micheli, 675 bills have been proposed as of Monday. That number is expected to increase a lot by the end of the week (in fact, Micheli anticipates 1,500 more bills by then), though even legislators themselves know not all the bills they introduce are meant to become law. 

A few new interesting proposals:

• Autonomous trucks: Assemblymembers from both parties and Teamsters leaders rallied near the state Capitol Monday to promote a bill to require self-driving trucks to have a backup “human safety operator.” If that sounds familiar, that’s because lawmakers pushed a similar measure last year, which Gov. Gavin Newsom ultimately vetoed. But since his veto, Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, a Democrat from Davis and the bill’s author, has been promoted to Assembly majority leader. And an accident involving a Cruise robotaxi has halted the expansion of autonomous vehicle fleets in California. Legislators and Teamsters hope that the reignited public safety concerns (and perhaps the negative public sentiment) will help drive Assembly Bill 2286 past the finish line. 

• Indigenous rights: Monday marked the start of the two-day Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Summit in Sacramento, where state officials and tribal leaders gathered to advocate for two measures: AB 2138, which would grant certain tribal police officers the legal status of California peace officers; and AB 2108 to establish additional notification procedures for social workers and probation officers when a child in the foster care system goes missing (a measure similar to one the governor vetoed last year.) Democratic Assemblymember Esmerelda Soria of Merced also introduced a proposal last week to grant tribal judges some of the same privacy and safety protections as state and federal judges. 

• Black maternal mortality: Following a state Department of Justice investigation that found that California hospitals are largely ignoring a 2019 law that requires them to train perinatal care providers on racial disparities in maternal deaths, Attorney General Rob Bonta and members of the California Legislative Black Caucus unveiled a proposal Monday to bring more hospitals under compliance. AB 2319 would, among other things, clarify what employee positions need anti-bias training; set deadlines for completing training; and establish penalties for facilities that don’t comply.

From CalMatters tech reporter Khari Johnson:

An AI-generated voice that sounded like President Biden and tried to discourage voters from taking part in last month’s New Hampshire primary is proof that artificial intelligence is a threat to public trust and can discourage voter participation, Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat, told CalMatters. That’s why she will soon propose a bill to ban “materially deceptive” election-related deepfakes 120 days before election day and 60 days after.

• Pellerin: “We have to stay ahead of the deepfakes and bad actors that are out there trying to wreak chaos with our elections.” 

It’s one of five bills getting introduced in the Legislature this week designed to protect democratic discourse, voters, candidates and election officials from deceptive content.

The other four bills would: 

• Require generative AI companies to embed digital provenance data within the digital media they create;
• Require social media platforms to identify and label images, audio and video generated by AI;
• Require generative AI companies to supply tools to verify whether a photo is real or fake;
• Encourage identity verification of social media accounts meeting certain follower thresholds so users know whether a person or an automated bot is behind the account.

The bills are cosponsored by the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, a multidisciplinary nonprofit group formed in 2023 to protect elections from harmful or malicious forms of AI. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission made robocalls with AI-generated voices illegal.

An October UC Berkeley poll found that seven out of 10 registered voters in California want lawmakers to protect the public from technology in the upcoming election. 

Dozens of bills have been introduced in the Legislature this year to regulate AI. Procurement policy that determines what kind of contracts state agencies can sign with private companies and proofs of concepts ordered by a Newsom executive order are also underway.

Many Californians are getting sticker shock from their energy bills, with more rate hikes likely to come. But the higher prices are hitting especially hard for small businesses in small towns, reports Justo Robles of CalMatters’ California Divide team. Find out where Justo went to tell this story.