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California has become the latest battleground over voter identification requirements, a longtime conservative priority newly propelled in recent years by election fraud complaints from President-elect Donald Trump.

Under a state law that takes effect on Jan. 1, local governments across California will be prohibited from compelling voters to present identification to cast a ballot in an election.

Dave Min, an Irvine Democrat just elected to Congress, took up the ban this year as a state senator after Huntington Beach voters in March adopted a charter amendment allowing the city to require ID in its municipal elections. That measure — which takes effect in 2026, and also grants the city authority to add more in-person voting locations and monitor ballot drop-boxes — was part of a broader push by local leaders to make Huntington Beach a bulwark of resistance against California’s liberal governance.

Supporters believe that mandatory voter identification, a popular policy in Republican states, can address growing public concerns about election integrity following Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But other than when new voters register, Democrats in California have resisted ID requirements, which they argue disenfranchise young, low-income, disabled and nonwhite voters without providing any real benefit because there is not widespread election fraud.

State officials contend that requiring voter ID is already illegal in California because of a provision in the election code that prohibits “mass, indiscriminate, and groundless challenging of voters solely for the purpose of preventing voters from voting.” Lawmakers passed the ban this summer anyway — which Min said would clarify any potential ambiguities around elections where only local issues are on the ballot — part of a string of bills to crack down on local conservative rebellions.

The issue is already in court. Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber sued Huntington Beach in April, seeking to invalidate its newly approved charter amendment for interfering with state protections of voting rights. Huntington Beach officials counter that, as a charter city, they have broad discretion to set their own rules for municipal governance, including election management.

An Orange County judge dismissed that lawsuit in November, without addressing the merits of the policy, concluding that because the charter amendment is discretionary and the city has yet to implement it, it “currently presents no conflict with state elections law.”

But Bonta and Weber, who called Huntington Beach’s voter ID requirement “a solution in search of a problem,” plan to appeal. Meanwhile, a legal challenge against the new ban may be coming soon from the city.

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California’s card rooms lost a costly legislative fight this year as they sought to kill a bill that would allow their competitors, tribal casinos, to sue them.

But that didn’t stop the gambling halls from punishing a handful of lawmakers for their votes after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the gambling bill into law.

In an extraordinary display of political retribution, California’s card room industry spent more than $3 million in the lead up to the November election to oppose four lawmakers who played key roles in the bill’s passage. Three of the candidates targeted by the card rooms ended up losing, including the rare defeat of an incumbent Democratic senator.

“We really don’t want to be the sort of, you know, the Rodney Dangerfield of industries. We want to be respected,” said Keith Sharp, a lawyer for the Hawaiian Gardens Casino, a card room in Los Angeles County. “We (will) work hard to continue to gain respect and protect our employees, protect our cities, protect our businesses.”

To the card rooms, the three defeats were a sign their money was well spent, even if the cash went to purely punitive purposes. Case in point: Two of the lawmakers who lost their races were vacating their Assembly seats and were running in non-legislative races. Had they won, it’s unlikely they’d deal very often with card room related issues. 

Tribes have long outspent card rooms in state politics. Tribes have given candidates for state office more than $23.5 million since 2014. That’s more than double what oil companies have given the state’s politicians during the same years. Card rooms have spent only a fraction as much. 

More recently, tribes have contributed $6.3 million to candidates since January 2023 while card rooms have donated at least $1.3 million. Those funds don’t include the $3 million the card rooms spent targeting the four candidates this fall.

The cash the card rooms poured into the four races sends a message to lawmakers that they’re also capable of spending big, including on political vengeance, said former Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gatto.

“Any time you have a group essentially announcing to the world that they are going to do vengeance spending, it does cause lawmakers to pay attention,” he said. 

Card rooms vs tribal casinos explained

The bill Newsom signed, Senate Bill 549, gives tribes the ability to ask a judge to decide whether card rooms are allowed to operate table games such as black jack and pai gow poker. The tribes, which will be able to sue beginning Jan. 1, say California voters gave them exclusive rights to host those games, but they’ve been unable to sue the state’s 80 or so card rooms because tribes are sovereign governments.

The stakes are high since some cities receive nearly half of their budgets from taxes on card rooms, meaning a tribal victory in court could jeopardize money for police, firefighters and other local services. The card rooms insist their games are legal, but they also worry the cost of court fights could force them out of business.

Facing what they saw as an existential threat, card rooms responded to the bill’s introduction last year with a massive lobbying blitz. Hawaiian Gardens Casino alone spent $9.1 million on lobbying, the second highest amount reported to state regulators last year. Only the international oil giant, Chevron Corp., spent more.

Despite losing the legislative battle, card rooms spent more than $3 million on attack ads, text messages, mailers and other outreach to voters targeting the four candidates. The card rooms also bought ads supporting candidates running against them. 

The ads came from independent expenditure committees funded by the card rooms. Under state and federal election rules, organizations not affiliated with a candidate can spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates through advertisements and other tactics as long as the actions are not coordinated with the candidate’s campaign.

Card rooms blast candidates with attack ads

Only one candidate, Laurie Davies, a Republican from Oceanside, won her race for reelection despite the card room’s cash onslaught.  And just barely. Only 3,870 out of 230,546 total votes separated her from her Democratic challenger, Chris Duncan.

The card rooms spent at least $1.3 million on outreach boosting Duncan and slamming Davies, according to state campaign finance reports. One mailer said she was aligned with “anti-choice radicals,” “MAGA extremists” and “Big Oil.”

Davies infuriated card rooms when she cast a vote that let the gambling bill advance out of a committee this summer, despite having a cardroom in her district.

Outgoing Democratic Assemblymember Evan Low of Cupertino faced similar attacks in his failed congressional bid. Low sat on the same Assembly committee as Davies and voted this summer for the gambling bill. Low also had a major cardroom in his Assembly district. Low’s campaign didn’t return a message seeking comment. 

The card rooms spent at least $500,000 on ads attacking Low, according to the card rooms.

The card rooms also went after termed-out Democratic Assemblymember Brian Maienschein in his failed bid for San Diego city attorney. The card rooms spent at least $443,000 opposing Maienschein. 

He got on the card rooms’ bad side when he cast a key vote that let the bill advance from the Assembly Judiciary Committee, which Maienschein chaired. Sharp, the lawyer for Hawaiian Gardens, said Maienschein also refused to meet with him and other card room representatives before the vote. Maienschein didn’t return messages.

A TV ad from the card rooms attacked Maienschein for his voting record before he switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 2019.

Fullerton Democratic Sen. Josh Newman, the lead author of the gambling bill, wasn’t spared even though he represented a competitive district that was important to the Democratic Party. 

The card rooms spent at least $900,000 in that race that paid for ads and mailers opposing Newman and supporting his Republican opponent, Steven Choi, according to the card rooms and campaign finance reports.

Newman, the state’s most vulnerable senator who’d been recalled from office once before, ended up losing to Choi by 6,075 votes out of the 458,615 cast in the race. It was the first time since 1980 that a Republican flipped a Democratic senate seat in a presidential election. Newman had a $6 million fundraising advantage over Choi. Choi raised just $856,000.

In one card-room funded TV ad, Newman was portrayed as being soft on crime, and it attacked him for voting to give benefits to “illegal immigrants” 

In an interview with CalMatters, Newman said he didn’t think the card room ads made as much of an impact on the race as another independent expenditure committee that opposed him with more than $1 million from a prominent public employee union. 

But Newman acknowledged the card rooms probably did send at least some voters to Choi. 

“The margins probably matter in a race as close as mine,” Newman said.

Still, Newman told CalMatters he has no regrets about introducing the bill despite the blowback and the possible impact the card rooms had in his senate race. Newman said he believes the tribes deserve their day in court.  

But he said he doesn’t see the logic in the card rooms spending so much money on races after they already lost their fight in the Legislature.

“The question really is: If you shut the barn door after the horse is out, who are you really punishing?” he said.

CalMatters data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to this story. 

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No Republican presidential candidate has won California since George H.W. Bush made it five in a row for the GOP in 1988. So it’s no big surprise that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris easily won California’s 54 electoral votes this November. 

But while the vice president defeated Donald Trump 58.5% to 38%, she did much worse in her home Golden State than Joe Biden did in 2020: She lost vote share in all but one of the state’s 58 counties (including several with sizable Latino populations), and she lost at least 10 percentage points of the vote in 43 counties.

Statewide, Harris won more than 1.8 million fewer votes than Biden’s 11.1 million — a main reason why Trump is headed toward winning the national popular vote. 

Harris got more votes — 3 — than Biden in a single county: Alpine, the state’s least populous county, with only about 1,500 residents. Trump lost one vote in that county.

With the statewide count virtually complete before today’s deadline for counties to certify their results, the returns show that more voters didn’t vote at all: Nearly 90% of counties reported fewer total votes for president in last month’s election compared to four years ago.

Trump had a more mixed performance across the state in 2024 compared to 2020. While he received about 74,000 more votes statewide this time, he got fewer votes in 29 counties. 

For example, Trump did better in the state’s most populous county, Los Angeles, where he got roughly 44,000 more votes compared to 2020 out of more than 3.7 million ballots. Harris got more than 600,000 fewer votes than Biden in 2020 and lost more than 20 percentage points of vote share as a result.

As elections data expert Rob Pyers has detailed, Trump flipped 10 counties, but not necessarily because more people voted for him than four years ago. Instead, Harris did significantly worse.  

For instance, Trump flipped Lake County, but he only got 38 more votes in the rural county compared to 2020. Harris, on the other hand, underperformed Biden by about 2,150 votes, and candidates from other parties won 804.

Lake is one of eight counties where the percentage difference between Harris and Trump was smaller than the share won by minor party candidates, the largest of which was Orange County where Harris won 49.7% to 47.1%, but other candidates received a combined 3.2%.

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Today, a newly-elected class of state lawmakers was sworn into office — before their election results are certified. And in one competitive Assembly district, a leading candidate took office even though her race is still not called.

This is the reality under California’s notoriously slow ballot counting process — a process that one state lawmaker is vowing to change.

Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Palo Alto Democrat who led the Assembly Elections Committee from 2017 to 2021, is introducing legislation to help counties speed up the ballot counting process. He was also the author of the law that made vote-by-mail permanent in California.

The details of the bill are unclear, as Berman told CalMatters he plans to speak with county election officials about changes they wish to see and also explore the possibility of increased funding for ballot counting. 

“It’s a bit of a statement of intent right now,” Berman said of his bill in an interview. “We want them to count accurately, but we want them to count as quickly as possible.”

As of this afternoon, election officials statewide still had more than 27,000 ballots to count and more than 91,000 to potentially “cure” — a process to verify voters’ signatures after their ballots had been rejected for missing or mismatched signatures — according to the state Secretary of State’s office. 

But the long wait is almost over: Under state law, counties have until Thursday to certify their results.

In the 58th Assembly District, Republican Leticia Castillo was sworn in, though the Associated Press hasn’t declared her the winner over Democrat Clarissa Cervantes. 

The lengthy process has created whiplash for some candidates and given rise to conspiracy theories about election fraud. GOP Assemblymember Joe Patterson slammed the process as “dumb” for swearing in winners before election results are final. 

In 2022, Christy Holstege, a civil rights attorney who ran for state Assembly, attended the Assembly’s orientation for newly elected members while ballots were being tallied. The vote count later revealed that she had actually lost to her GOP opponent, Assemblymember Greg Wallis of Rancho Mirage. 

And this year, conservatives have spread unfounded claims that the state’s 45th Congressional District was “stolen” when Democrat Derek Tran took the lead over GOP Rep. Michelle Steel after trailing her for days.

The slow process is partly due to the nature of California’s sizable voting population — 22 million registered voters — and the widespread use of vote-by-mail, experts have said. Independent redistricting efforts and the state’s top-two primaries have also produced more competitive districts, making it harder to call races with just a portion of the ballots. 

But county clerks could benefit from more resources, including high-speed tabulators and funding for more staff, and policy changes that would allow voters who would rather vote in person to opt out of voting by mail, said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

CalMatters Digital Democracy reporter Sameea Kamal contributed to this story.

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The Republican caucus in California’s Legislature is growing more diverse as Latino and Asian American candidates apparently flipped three Democrat-held seats, including unseating an incumbent Democrat senator for the first time in a presidential election since 1980.

When new legislators are sworn in next week, Democrats will still control a supermajority in the Legislature. But the three flipped seats have Republicans hopeful that California’s reputation as a liberal enclave state may be shifting. They point to Latino and Black voters helping send Donald Trump to the White House for a second term. 

“As Californians grow increasingly frustrated with the failures of Democrat leadership, they are shifting toward Republican solutions,” Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones said in a statement. “Senate Republicans are not only growing in numbers but also diversity.” 

The Republican caucus is on pace to have at least 50% nonwhite members for the first time, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. As it stands, based on unofficial results, 13 of the 27 legislative Republicans are not white. The caucus could become more than half nonwhite, depending on the outcome of two pending special elections in solidly Republican districts. Two Asian American Republicans, Sen. Janet Nguyen and Assemblymember Vince Fong, won election for other offices earlier this month, leaving their seats vacant.

Jones’ statement noted that six of the Senate’s 10 Republicans are women and three of the women are Latino.

Jones sent out his statement Monday, the same day Orange County Democrat Sen. Josh Newman conceded his seat to Republican Steven Choi, a Korean-American former Assemblymember. It was the first time since 1980 that Republicans ousted an incumbent Democratic senator in a presidential election.

The other two flipped seats were in the Assembly. In California’s Latino-majority Imperial and Coachella valleys, Republican Jeff Gonzalez beat a Democrat to win in the 35th Assembly District where Democrats had a 14-point registration advantage and the population is 70% Latino. 

And in the state’s closest legislative race, Republican Leticia Castillo had a 600-vote lead on Tuesday over Clarissa Cervantes for an Inland Empire seat vacated by Cervantes’ sister, Sabrina Cervantes, a fellow Democrat who won a state Senate seat. The Associated Press has not officially called the race, but Castillo declared victory Tuesday night.

If the results hold, it will be an impressive victory for Castillo. Thanks to her sister, Cervantes had substantially more name recognition than Castillo in her sister’s former district. Cervantes also raised more than $1 million for her campaign compared to Castillo’s $78,000.

Democratic leaders, however, say the results are hardly a groundswell or a referendum against their party, which continues to hold every statewide elected office along with the supermajority in the Legislature. They note that aside from Newman, none of the dozens of other Democratic incumbents up for reelection this year lost.

“In a challenging year for Democrats nationwide, our members fought and won some extremely competitive races,” Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said in a statement. “It is clear that Democrats have maintained our supermajority and the caucus has maintained its historic diversity and strength.”

California Democrats also appear to have flipped three Republican-held Congressional seats.

Experts such as election analyst Paul Mitchell said it’s also worth keeping in mind that the party that lost nationally in a presidential election almost always surges back in the midterms. If that happens in 2026, he said Republicans could see the legislative gains they made this election vanish.

Will Republicans regain power in California? 

Nonetheless, experts say Democrats would be wise not to brush off Republican victories as anomalies, and they expect California’s GOP to continue to make inroads with non white voters, even if Republicans have a long way to go to retake political power in California.

“It’s not like (the Legislature is) crossing over to being majority Republican, or even close to it,” Mitchell said. “They’re probably not going to do that in our lifetimes. But if you’re a Latino Republican, and you can capture votes from Latino voters as a complement to a maybe diminishing Republican base … then that’s a powerful combo.”

Part of the change is that Republican-dominated districts are becoming more diverse, reflecting California’s population as a whole. Whites make up just 35% of California’s 39 million residents.

And there are other signs that a shift may be occurring.

Christian Grose, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, said surveys of non white voters in urban areas of California still show they are solidly Democratic. But in rural or suburban areas, he said there’s been a shift toward the Republican Party from nonwhite voters, particularly men and people without college degrees, that could have a noticeable impact on future elections.

“In California, the winning strategy for a Republican in these districts would be to run candidates who are ethnically diverse and represent their communities,” he said. “But the coalition for the Republicans is actually probably a white-voter majority in many of these districts like the Central Valley, plus some Latino voters.”

Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican consultant with expertise in Latino politics, took it further. He has called the election a “five-alarm fire” for Democrats. He sees the election as a sign that the racial-identity politics that defined the previous generation’s political affiliations are fading away. 

“The idea that race and ethnicity are cornerstones of our political beliefs will become an outmoded concept,” Madrid said. “It was definitive for the past generation, and now it will be a relic of the past. … The bigger issue here that the Democratic Party has to understand is there’s a class problem, and that … a multiracial, (multi)ethnic working class is emerging in the country.”

For their part, legislative Republicans say California’s voters – of all races – made a clear statement during the election that they were fed up with Democratic policies. They rejected progressive ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, allow cities to block rent increases and to prohibit unpaid inmate labor. And they resoundingly approved a ballot initiative to impose harsher sentences for crimes, despite Gov. Gavin Newsom and progressive leaders opposing it.  

But fresh off his victory in the Imperial and Coachella valleys, incoming Republican Assemblymember Gonzalez believes his victory mostly came down to the state’s high costs.

He said his district is close enough to the Arizona border that it’s easy for voters to see that gas is cheaper on the other side of the state line. Voters, he said, are smart enough to realize that Democratic policies are what makes California more expensive.

“California has become unaffordable for not only the Latino, but the average person,” Gonzalez said.

Assemblymember Kate Sanchez, a Republican from Rancho Santa Margarita, said the election proved that Latinos like her “feel unseen and unheard by the current majority in the state.”

She said it’s no coincidence that Gov. Newsom has been touring majority Latino counties since the election, touting his economic policies.

“I think he sees the writing on the wall and he realizes, ‘California, this is a new dawn,’ ” she said. “This is a new chapter in California history and California politics, and he’s wanting to get in good graces. However, we’ve all had to deal with the fallout of his administration and the extreme policies, and so I don’t think people are buying it.”

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California has a notoriously slow ballot counting process — one that Kim Alexander describes as “a pig in the python.”

“This giant wad of ballots that all arrive at once, that all have to move through the process, and you can’t speed it up,” said Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “You have to do every single step, otherwise you lose the integrity of the process.”

To help voters understand and trust that process, Alexander’s group launched a tracker this election that is monitoring the vote count in California’s close contests between Election Day and certification of county results.

Dubbed the Close Count Transparency Project, the tracker — which debuted as a pilot program in 2022 — provides daily updates on the results of 11 competitive U.S. House races and seven state legislative races, as well as the statewide vote count status. The tool tracks candidates’ vote share, votes counted and the number of unprocessed ballots in each county the districts cover. 

As of late Tuesday, an estimated 570,500 ballots statewide were yet to be counted, according to the Secretary of State’s office. More than 126,000 ballots needed to be “cured” — they had been rejected for missing or mismatched signatures and voters have time to submit a form to verify their signatures. 

A total of eight key contests remained uncalled by the Associated Press as of late Tuesday, including two congressional races, five legislative races and one statewide ballot measure. (CalMatters and other news outlets use AP to declare winners while the vote count is ongoing.)

By making the vote count more transparent, the close contest tracker aims to inoculate against unfounded conspiracy theories about election fraud in California, Alexander said. 

Some prominent conservatives, including GOP U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, are spreading unproven claims that Democrats are “stealing” the 45th Congressional District race in Southern California, where Democrat Derek Tran is leading by a razor-thin margin over Republican Rep. Michelle Steel after trailing her for days. 

“We wanted to create a record of where the vote count stood each day, so that if someone came along later and said, ‘Something hinky is going on here,’ there would be a reliable source of information people could turn to to see how the vote count evolved over time,” Alexander said.

The tracker also comes as frustration about the lengthy process grows in California. State Assemblymember Joe Patterson, a Rocklin Republican, called the procedure “dumb” on social media, arguing that winners of state legislative races will be sworn in Dec. 2, before the results are certified by the Secretary of State. The lengthy process “sows distrust” in the state’s election system, he told KCRA. 

The state Assembly and Senate already held a joint freshman orientation last week for incoming lawmakers, while the five legislative races remain too close to call, Assembly Republicans spokesperson Jim Stanley confirmed to CalMatters. 

“It’s a real problem for incoming lawmakers if they miss out on that,” Alexander said.

Why it takes so long to count — and how to speed it up

While voters and campaigns want to see results sooner, it is particularly challenging in California, Alexander said. 

The state is home to more than 22 million registered voters, according to the state Secretary of State’s office. As of Tuesday afternoon, a total of 15 million ballots had been counted — a number bigger than the populations of 46 other states, Census data shows. 

California has also made it easier for voters to cast their ballots in recent years. A 2021 law made universal vote-by-mail permanent in California, meaning every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot roughly a month before Election Day and the ballots are counted as long as they arrive at county elections offices within seven days after Election Day. In the March primary, almost 90% of all voters voted by mail, according to the Secretary of State.

The widespread use of vote-by-mail slows down the vote count, Alexander said, because they take longer to process. 

“We have to open the envelopes, we have to verify the signature, and all of those things before we can actually accept that ballot,” said Secretary of State Shirley Weber in a press conference last week. 

Additionally, election officials have to first complete counting mail-in ballots before they move onto ballots cast by voters who register the same day they voted to make sure no voter votes twice, said Jesse Salinas, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and clerk-recorder in Yolo County. The number of same-day registered voters has grown over the years, further slowing down the vote count, he said.

But the slow vote count is also because races are closer than more than a decade ago, Alexander said. The state’s independent redistricting commission drew more competitive districts after the 2020 Census, she said, and the top-two primary process was designed to boost candidates who could appeal to a broader range of voters in the general election. 

Between 2002 and 2010, before voters approved the independent redistricting commission, there was an average of one or two close congressional races per general election, Alexander said. But following the 2011 redistricting and the 2012 adoption of the top-two primary, there was an average of five close contests per election cycle, she said.

“People would be less patient with our long vote count if we had more decisive victories, but we don’t,” she said.

Still, county election officials could benefit from more staffing and funding for better equipment, Alexander said. Kern County, for example, has acquired high-speed ballot scanners to tabulate votes faster, she said. As of Tuesday, Kern had processed nearly 280,000 ballots and had only about 8,500 to go. 

The state could also benefit from spending big on voter outreach, urging voters to mail in their ballots sooner, which would help county officials pre-process more ballots and reduce the workload post-election, Alexander said. 

But more importantly, she said, the state should allow voters to opt out of vote-by-mail if they want, although she acknowledged that under current law, voters have the option to cast the ballot they received in the mail in person instead. 

“A lot of people don’t want to vote by mail, and then you are stuck with this ballot, and that confuses voters,” she said.

CalMatters reporter Sameea Kamal contributed to this story. 

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MERCED – At first, Marlyn Huesgew Mendoza registered as a Democrat. In 2020, she re-registered as a Republican and voted for Donald Trump for president, as she did this election.

The reason is simple: It was in 2018 — when he was in office — that her family was finally able to buy a house in Merced. The same year, the Trump administration approved her Guatemalan mother’s citizenship application — one that had been rejected under President Barack Obama, she said. The approval letter had Trump’s signature on it. 

“She’s like: ‘Look who adopted me,’” said Huesgew Mendoza, a 25-year-old graduate from University of California Merced and an administrative assistant at the Merced County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. 

“Once he came in and it was just so easy for us, I was like, ‘Huh, he might not be as scary as people may think.’”

Most — if not all — of California’s 12 Latino-majority counties gave a larger share of their vote to Trump compared to 2020, and counties with a higher share of Latino population swung further toward Trump, according to a CalMatters analysis of state voting data. Trump also expanded his vote share in most other counties in California. 

But does that signal a rightward shift among Latinos and a departure from the Democratic Party in California? 

The answer is complicated. 

Absent conclusive demographic data on votes cast in this election, pollsters disagree over how much their surveys show Latinos shifting toward Trump. The AP VoteCast, which surveyed more than 120,000 voters nationwide in English and Spanish, shows 55% of Latino respondents supported Vice President Kamala Harris, while 43% backed Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden won 63% of the vote among Latino respondents versus Trump’s 35%.

But almost all polls reached the same conclusion: Latino support has grown for Trump. 

A mix of factors contributed to the apparent shift: Inflation blamed on an unpopular administration, concern over border security, resistance to Democrats’ messaging on cultural issues and Harris’ lack of appeal, according to pollsters, experts, political consultants and a dozen Latinos in the Central Valley who spoke to CalMatters.

How much other Republicans gained from the growing support for Trump remains to be seen. Nationwide, Democrats won four of the five battleground U.S. Senate seats and declared victory on abortion rights ballot measures in Arizona, Missouri and Nevada. 

In California, with 88% of the estimated vote counted, Trump has received slightly fewer votes than Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Garvey. And in some counties within the state’s toss-up congressional districts, Democratic candidates appear to be outperforming Harris. In Merced County, which falls entirely into the 13th Congressional District, Democrat Adam Gray has received 5 percentage points more of the vote than Harris, with nearly 80% of the votes counted.  

For Gray, who is narrowly trailing Republican Rep. John Duarte, this election does not reflect voters flocking toward Republicans.

“What you want to call a rightward shift, I would call a rejection of more of the same. Voters are saying … ‘We want you guys to change,’” he told CalMatters. “I think people want to see us get back to the basics, and if I’m elected to Congress, I’m going to do just that.”

But Mike Madrid, a longtime GOP consultant with an expertise in Latino politics, called this election a “five-alarm fire” for Democrats, who he said have gradually lost support among Latino voters since 2012. He pointed to a pair of Pew Research Center surveys, which suggested Latino support for the Democratic presidential candidate dropped from 71% for Obama in 2012 to 59% for Biden in 2020.

In California, a majority of Latinos have firmly supported Democrats after former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson championed Proposition 187, which was approved by voters in 1994 to deny benefits to undocumented immigrants but was blocked by the courts. But that support could erode as cost of living increases, alienating working-class residents, many of whom are Latinos, Madrid said. 

“I think this is a pivotal moment. I think it’s as significant as the Prop. 187 moment in 1994, except it was a wake-up call for Republicans,” Madrid said.

But some experts warned it may be too early to tell if the past three presidential elections are a referendum on the Democratic Party, given that Democrats have won toss-up statewide races in battleground states and have won every statewide race in California since 2006. 

This election is an outlier, with Biden withdrawing from the race and passing the torch to Harris so late in the campaign, said Roberto Suro, a professor of journalism and public policy at the University of Southern California.

“You’ve got to put an asterisk on this election, or actually, multiple asterisks. Trump as a candidate is a giant asterisk,” Suro said. “Trying to say we are seeing any kind of permanent realignment is a mistake.”

‘The bottom line is money’

Huesgew Mendoza isn’t alone in believing that her life changed for the better after Trump took office in 2017. 

Sandra Izaguirre, a 34-year-old in-home caretaker from Lancaster in Los Angeles County, said she supported Obama in 2008, but not in 2012. Then a first-time mother working at a fast food restaurant, Izaguirre needed health care. Obamacare required bigger businesses to provide full-time employees health benefits or pay a fee, so Izaguirre said her employer just cut her hours to disqualify her.

“I wasn’t improving. If anything, I was hurting more,” she said. “I just wanted a change already.”

That drove her to vote for Trump in 2016. A year later, Izaguirre said, she was able to buy her first home. 

But because she couldn’t work as an in-home caregiver during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said she almost defaulted on her house but was saved by a federal mortgage relief program approved on Trump’s watch. The economic downturn, mixed with the state’s failure to stop unemployment benefits fraud, was “a recipe for disaster,” she said.

Even economic concerns, however, weren’t enough to drive Izaguirre to the polls this November. But that’s not because she didn’t support Trump: She said her vote for him in deep-blue California would not have made a difference anyway. 

But the economy is top of mind among Latino voters, as well as among voters overall, as polls have consistently shown throughout the 2024 campaign. Latino and Black Americans are the most likely to feel the pinch of high inflation compared to the overall population, according to a 2022 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

Latinos in California make up 40% of the state’s population but more than half of poor Californians, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California last year. The poverty rate among Latinos rose to 16.9% in fall 2023 compared to 13.5% in fall 2021, the analysis shows. 

It’s a pain felt by Annissa Fragoso, a Merced insurance agent who voted for Harris this year. As a business owner, she said, she’s “struggling a lot with the insurance industry” and growing frustrated with state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, a Democrat.

“The Latinos in the past were registered and supportive of the Democratic Party, but it has not been very supportive of us,” she said. 

Fragoso, who lost in the March primary for the Merced County Board of Supervisors, said she spoke to a lot of Latino voters who saw Trump as an agent of change on the economy.

“The bottom line is money,” she said.

Adrian Jurado, a painter in Los Banos who said he never registered to vote since he believed he couldn’t make a difference, said that ever since the pandemic, there were fewer painting jobs because people weren’t willing to spend anymore. But when Trump was in office, he said, the economy seemed better.

“I’ve never had it like this,” he said. “It used to be that you could put a little bit away. I wasn’t able to put nothing away.”

While consumer prices have climbed by 20% over the past four years, average wage gains actually outpaced inflation, according to an analysis by the NBC News. But that does not match people’s perception, as expenses keep rising, the analysis says. Many voters frustrated with the economy embraced Trump, even as economists warn that Trump’s proposed tariffs could hike prices even further nationwide as well as in California.

But voters may be punishing incumbents rather than voting for Republicans, said Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, research director at the Latino Policy & Politics Institute of UCLA. 

“You get reminded of those high prices every single day because you are buying something every single day,” he said. “High inflation was a global phenomenon. It was not unique to the United States. But who happened to be in power when it happened? It was Biden and Harris.”

Julián Castro, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, said Trump’s win resembles the victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000: All three campaigned against a Democratic administration that “faced headwinds,” he said. 

“In 1980, the economy was similar to 2024, at least in people’s minds,” Castro said. “In 2000, after eight years of Democratic governance, there was a pent-up demand for a change.”

But even though they are frustrated at the economy under the Biden administration, most Latinos who spoke to CalMatters said it doesn’t mean they will continue to vote Republican.

“I’ll just see how it goes in the (next) four years,” Izaguirre said. 

‘That’s not me’

Trump has promised to conduct the largest deportation in American history, targeting immigrants in the country illegally, with or without criminal records. 

But Izaguirre, as well as other Latino Trump supporters who spoke to CalMatters, said they do not want undocumented immigrants who have been working in the country for years to be deported. The majority of them supported providing legal status for those immigrants — a policy Democrats have championed. 

Trump’s victory has terrified some migrants at the border and undocumented immigrants in California. 

“I feel worried because I don’t know what the future will be for us people who don’t have documents, and we work here,” an undocumented immigrant in Delano told CalMatters in Spanish. CalMatters is not naming him due to his concern for his safety. 

But others said Trump’s mass deportation plan would not touch them. 

“He said he was going to deport people who have a bad record. That’s not me. I don’t have a bad record,” said a farmworker in Stanislaus County who spoke to CalMatters on the condition of anonymity and who said she came to the country by paying off a “coyote” — a term for smugglers — 20 years ago. 

Huesgew Mendoza likened Trump’s mass deportation to yelling fire in the theater. “It just sounds too scary, too major,” she said. 

And Aaron Barajas, 46, who voted for Trump this year in his first presidential election, slammed policies that would “rip people apart from their family,” arguing those who are already established in the United States should be allowed to obtain legal documents. But he distinguished between those who are already living here and those who wish to come in, arguing Trump merely wants to “bring people into our country, but do it the right way.”

It appears Trump’s rhetoric on immigration has not deterred Latinos from voting for him, unlike the assumption Democrats have made following the passage of Prop. 187, Suro said. 

“The hypothesis was that, when confronted with threats to the immigrant population and xenophobic rhetoric and harsh exclusionary measures toward immigrants … you would alienate Latinos,” he said. “Trump has very vividly disproven that.”

That’s in part because of “scapegoating” by Trump and his allies, who targeted migrants “physically at the border” for mass deportation, Castro said. “They cleaved the recent arrivals from people who have been here for a long time, and that’s why I think you hear people express confidence that he doesn’t mean them.”

Another factor could be the rapidly changing demographics among Latinos in California, as more young, U.S.-born Latinos become eligible to vote, experts say.

“Overall, fewer Latinos are as close as they used to be to the immigrant experience,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC. “How close you are to the immigrant experience can directly affect how you view policy on internal (immigration efforts) versus border (immigration).”

The anti-immigrant sentiment could even be appealing to some Latino voters who are “fueled by a deep desire to assimilate or to be seen as belonging to a larger American culture and to differentiate themselves from those who are seen as outsiders,” said Dominguez-Villegas at UCLA. 

A referendum on Democrats?

While it’s too early to draw firm conclusions from the election, the takeaway for Democrats is that they must be better at reaching Latino voters, something both major parties have done poorly in California, political consultants say.

California Democrats are “clearly in danger of losing Latino support long term” due to “bad branding” that lasted for more than a decade, Madrid said.

But, he added, “there’s very little evidence that suggests Latinos are becoming more conservative. There’s a lot suggesting they are becoming more populist.”

Michael Gomez Daly, a senior strategist with the progressive California Donor Table, said he’s unsure how best to counter the backlash Democrats faced from voters hurt by inflation, stressing that voters may remember Trump with “rose-colored glasses.” 

However, he said, Trump proved “inspiring” among Latino voters even with his “problematic” rhetoric. Living in the toss-up 41st Congressional District where GOP Rep. Ken Calvert narrowly defeated Democrat Will Rollins, Gomez Daly said he saw conservative YouTube ads targeting young men all the time. 

“I think Democrats need to recognize the economic situation that much of inland California is facing and speak to those problems and give hope to people,” he said. “I think that was lacking.”

CalMatters’ data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to this story.

Update: On Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press declared incumbent Rep. Ken Calvert the winner of the U.S. House race for California’s 41st Congressional District.

Three Democratic candidates who mounted high-profile challenges to Republican lawmakers in the Inland Empire fell behind as election results rolled out, with about three-quarters of ballots counted as of Tuesday.

Rep. Ken Calvert, a Republican who has represented parts of Riverside County for more than three decades, was leading challenger Will Rollins in a rematch of their 2022 race for California’s 41st Congressional District. The Associated Press hasn’t called the race yet, but Calvert claimed victory on his social media accounts Monday, thanking Riverside County voters who have “once again placed their trust in me.”

Rollins wasn’t giving up. There could still be at least 80,000 votes left to count between mail ballots and conditional ballots, he said in a statement Monday, declaring the race “too close to call.” 

The Rollins campaign cited discrepancies in the total number of ballots the Riverside County Registrar of Voters has reportedly received by mail. There are more than 40,000 unprocessed ballots from the district, more than 35,000 uncounted ballots and more than 11,000 conditional ballots, his campaign estimated.

The 41st District also has the highest number of “uncured” ballots — those with small technical errors — of any competitive congressional race in California. Rollins argues the remaining ballots could still move the needle on the race.

“Our campaign is following the election results extremely closely, with eyes and ears at the Registrar of Voters every single day,” Rollins said. 

His challenge to Calvert was one of a handful of swing races that could decide which party controls the House of Representatives. But Republicans are well on their way to taking both the House and Senate, along with the White House, regardless of final results in the Inland Empire.

Palm Springs Councilmember Lisa Middleton conceded her race for California’s new 19th Senate District to incumbent State Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh. The candidates were statistically tied when polls closed last week, but Ochoa Bogh’s lead widened in the following days to more than 7 points Tuesday.

“I congratulate my opponent Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh,” Middleton said in a statement. “I wish her success and promise cooperation in representing the people of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. … We have lost a race. We remain steadfast to our values. I will continue to work with all who are committed to freedom, fairness, and opportunity for all.”

And Republican Assemblymember Greg Wallis inched ahead of Palm Springs City Councilmember Christy Holstege by a fraction of a point in the race for the 47th state Assembly District, reversing her slight lead. That race, divided by just a few hundred votes, is still listed as a close contest on the Secretary of State’s website.

The state Senate and Assembly races won’t change the political equation in California’s legislature, where Democrats still hold a supermajority.

However, all three races dampen their supporters’ hopes of increasing LGBTQ representation in California. Rollins, a former federal prosecutor, is gay. Middleton is a former state administrator, and hoped to become the first transgender lawmaker in California if elected. Holstege, a civil rights attorney, identifies as bisexual.

None of them made sexual or gender identity a centerpiece of their campaigns, instead focusing on issues such as infrastructure, the environment and public safety. But LGBTQ leaders in the Coachella Valley, which is part of all three districts, said they’re bracing for rollbacks of civil rights including attacks on same-sex marriage and transgender protections under a second Trump administration, the Desert Sun reported. 

Lea esta historia en Español

Google’s payments to influence state government surged to almost $11 million from July through September, nearly 90 times more than the same period last year, making it the highest-spending lobbyist employer in California in the third quarter.

Its lobbying blitz came as the tech giant engaged in a fierce battle at the state Capitol during the final months of the legislative session over whether it would have to pay news outlets for publishing their content.

Google’s lobbying expenses never previously topped $1.3 million in a single quarter, according to state records, and are typically far less. During the first two quarters of 2024, Google spent on average of about $261,000 on lobbying — 41 times less than its $10.7 million bombardment this summer.

The company did not respond to questions about its lobbying, which last quarter was ahead of more typical titans of influence in Sacramento, including the Western States Petroleum Association, the California Business Roundtable and the California Hospital Association.

During that period, which included the end of the legislative session in August and the governor’s bill signing period in September, Google reached the conclusion of a contentious two-year battle over journalism funding.

The search behemoth could have been on the hook for tens of millions of dollars or more annually under Assembly Bill 886, a proposal to require major tech platforms such as Google to either pay a fee or negotiate with California news outlets for using their work. Introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, the measure passed the Assembly last year before Wicks shelved it to negotiate directly with the industry.

Instead, in August, she announced a deal for Google to provide $55 million over the next five years for a new fund for local newsrooms and $70 million for an artificial intelligence accelerator. Under the deal, the state will also kick in $70 million over five years for the newsroom fund, while Google will continue $10 million in existing annual grants that the company had threatened to pull if the bill passed.

“That agreement was an escape clause for Google,” said state Sen. Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat who was pursuing another proposal, approved by the Senate in June, that he estimates would have raised $500 million a year for California news outlets by charging major tech platforms a mitigation fee.

Google had to ramp up its lobbying this summer to offset renewed momentum for the journalism funding bills and secure a deal with more favorable terms, said Glazer, who did not support the final agreement. “Their spending was a reflection of the cheaper alternative.”

Wicks, who did not respond to an interview request, has previously called the deal the best of what was possible.

The millions of dollars spent to push Google’s point of view was largely funneled through two other organizations, according to its lobbying disclosure report: The tech giant paid $7 million to the Computer and Communications Industry Association and $2.75 million to the California Taxpayers Association during the third quarter. The groups ran advertisements on television and social media opposing the Wicks and Glazer bills.

Both organizations have previously lobbied state officials, but the summer payments from Google resulted in budgets hundreds of times greater than in the spring. Their spending in the third quarter was directed almost entirely to hiring Washington, D.C.-based advertising firms, according to their disclosure reports.

Google’s record lobbying payments last quarter far exceeded other major tech companies that would have been forced to pay up under the Wicks and Glazer journalism funding proposals.

Amazon spent more than $918,000 during the third quarter, its largest lobbying quarter on record and triple the amount in the same period last year. Meta, which threatened to remove news posts from its Facebook and Instagram platforms if it had to pay for them, spent nearly $366,000.

Google didn’t just pour money into persuading lawmakers. It also contributed a small fortune to the campaigns of 40 elected officials on a single day, campaign finance disclosures show. On Sept. 13, two weeks after the Legislature adjourned, the company cut checks totaling $107,500 to 39 legislators, including Wicks, plus Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis — more than a third of the $301,800 that Google contributed to state campaigns since last January.

Google’s financial disclosure for the third quarter mentions lobbying the Legislature on more than 30 bills, as well the governor’s office and several state agencies, without providing a breakdown of its spending.

Another priority this summer was Senate Bill 1047, which would have required testing large-scale AI models to determine whether they harm society. Big tech players, including Google, vocally opposed the regulation and it was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September. 

But Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who carried the measure, said Google’s lobbying appeared to be more focused on the journalism funding legislation. While the company was a leading voice against his AI testing bill, he said, its efforts there seemed to be directed outside of the Capitol.

“It was not a tidal wave of activity,” Wiener said. “It was much more online and on social media.”

Lea esta historia en Español

In 30 years in America, Alejandro Gamez took any job he could as an undocumented worker — at fast food restaurants, factories and car washes and driving trucks, even when conditions were poor. 

“I had no status,” he said. “I had no options.”

But after speaking up in 2017 about unpaid wages at an Inglewood car wash, his fortunes changed. As part of a state investigation into that employer’s labor practices, Gamez this year became eligible for four years of protection from deportation — and a temporary work permit that seemed to open doors overnight. The 51-year-old Hawthorne resident said he can apply for better, stable jobs that pay more and provide benefits. He now has a union-represented position in a college kitchen and a Social Security number to build his credit.

“It changed my life,” he said in Spanish. “It is giving me many job opportunities, to be better financially and to give a better life to my family.”

His opportunities are thanks to a recent federal program that grants temporary legal status to workers involved in certain labor investigations. With some of the nation’s strictest workplace laws but widespread concerns of employer retaliation, California has issued more than 200 requests to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asking it to grant legal status to workers who report violations. 

But just months after Gamez got his reprieve, the program may be on the chopping block: President-elect Donald Trump and his advisors have vowed mass deportations, a return to workplace immigration raids and the repeal of similar temporary protection programs. 

Gamez’s attorney, Yvonne Medrano, said she’s expecting the program to be axed soon after Trump takes office Jan. 20. Her firm, the Los Angeles-based Bet Tzedek Legal Services, is no longer pursuing new cases under the program after representing workers seeking protections in 15 different workplace investigations.

“Removing this protection will return workers to a time when they fear deportation for asking for minimum wage, their paychecks or any other protections they have,” Medrano said.

Other immigration attorneys in California had already stopped filing new applications before Election Day. They said they expect Homeland Security to honor the four-year reprieves that the department has already granted, but are uncertain what happens next. 

“This is a discretionary program,” said Jessie Hahn, senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group. “We are not anticipating that if Trump were elected he would continue the program.” 

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about his intentions for the program.

It has created another group of immigrants who have been granted temporary permission to be in the United States as the chances of a federal immigration overhaul have grown ever slimmer — making their prospects heavily dependent on the see-saw of each presidential administration. 

The program, one of several Biden administration efforts to boost the enforcement of labor laws, aims to give state investigators easier access to witnesses who may otherwise fear reprisal for making workplace complaints. 

It’s similar to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that gave work permits and temporary deportation protections to immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. without authorization as children. About 500,000 residents have that form of legal status, but the program has stopped granting new applications after challenges in the federal courts. Trump tried to rescind the program in his last term; Stephen Miller, a close Trump advisor, said he will do so again, the New York Times has reported.

Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement is much narrower — 7,700 workers have benefitted since January 2023. Anyone who’s not a U.S. citizen can apply if they can prove they were working for an employer under investigation. First, a state or federal labor agency must submit a letter to Homeland Security saying they need the cooperation of worker witnesses in each investigation. 

Those granted deferred action are shielded from deportation and allowed to work legally for four years, but there is no path toward permanent residency. Some recipients see it as a way to earn money legally and get better-paying jobs outside the underground economy. Others said it gives them time — and a much quicker path to a work permit — as their other immigration-related cases wind their way through the federal bureaucracy.

Immigration attorneys and advocates say while some applicants are seeking reprieves from active deportation cases, most have been living and working without papers undetected, meaning they’ve come forward to federal immigration authorities for the first time. 

It’s not clear how many of those workers are in California. A Homeland Security spokesperson would not release state-by-state figures, citing “ongoing investigations.”

But California is an eager participant in the program; Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration says it was the first state to file a letter supporting worker protections. The state is home to nearly 1.5 million workers who are undocumented immigrants, making up more than 7% of the workforce. 

Such workers are a frequent focus of the state’s labor investigations, and labor advocates say undocumented workers routinely fear both losing their jobs and being reported to immigration authorities for complaining about workplace violations. 

“This fear can prevent them from fully cooperating with labor enforcement agencies in reporting and corroborating violations of the law,” Daniel Lopez, spokesperson for the state Labor Commissioner’s Office, said in a statement. “Ultimately, fewer protections undermine workers and impact responsible employers.”

In the past two years, the office, which investigates wage theft, has sent letters supporting deportation protections in 136 workplace investigations covering potentially hundreds of workers. The Division of Occupational Safety and Health has sent at least 12 letters. The Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which oversees farmworkers’ rights, has sent 10, and the Civil Rights Department, which investigates workplace discrimination complaints, has sent 60, spokespersons said.

The state has even paid to help immigrants get work permits. Last year, Newsom announced $4.5 million to pay for free legal services to help farmworkers who are involved in labor investigations apply for deferred action. The money, allocated through mid-2026, has so far helped screen more than 500 workers for eligibility and 175 apply for the program. 

There are as many as 800,000 seasonal and year-round farmworkers in California; at least half are believed to be undocumented.

“Agricultural regions have very limited access to immigration legal services,” said Jason Montiel, spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, which administers the grant to five legal aid groups statewide. “Providing farmworkers direct access to immigration legal services when their labor rights are violated increases the likelihood that they will file labor claims and collaborate with labor agencies.”

Newsom’s spokespersons did not respond to an inquiry about what will happen with the state grant program if federal rules change.

Nicole Gorney, a supervising attorney with VIDAS Legal Services, which is receiving a state grant, said that she has 12 farmworker clients waiting to be granted deferred action. She had hoped the state would expand the program to include workers in other industries. 

“There are still a lot of workers out there who may qualify but really don’t want to come out of the shadows,” she said the morning after the election.

Gamez’ deferred action was granted in connection with retaliation claims he and his coworkers filed against Century Car Wash in 2018. That year, they had also filed wage theft claims with the state Labor Commissioner’s Office. According to state records, they told the office their managers made them show up earlier and leave later than the businesses’ opening hours, but their time-sheets didn’t match all the hours they worked. The car wash’s co-owners denied the claims, and told the state the time-sheets were accurate. 

After demanding payment from his managers, Gamez said he was fired, and told to leave in front of customers. According to state records, he and his coworkers won the wage claims in 2021; a state hearing officer ruled Gamez was owed more than $20,000. But the state is still investigating claims the workers were fired and questioned about their immigration status in retaliation for speaking up. Last year at Gamez’ attorney’s request, the Labor Commissioner’s Office sent a letter to Homeland Security to request deportation protection for the workers. 

“The ongoing investigation … is being conducted by our Retaliation Complaint Investigation unit and requires worker cooperation and testimony,” Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower wrote in the letter. 

Reached by phone, one of Century Car Wash’s owners deferred to the co-owner, who did not respond to a request for comment. 

Gamez said his deferred action status kept him calm last week as many immigrants feared for their futures under a second Trump administration. 

Others who received the protection remain afraid. 

Alejandra Montoya came to the United States five years ago fleeing “problems in the family,” she said, and found work in the Central Valley’s fields. She had a degree in business administration in her native Mexico, and said she never intended to be an undocumented immigrant. But she had a son, and stayed to raise him in Bakersfield. 

Montoya said she enjoys farm work, despite the hard days on her hands and knees picking and bunching carrots for $3.05 per box. On a good day, when the field conditions are forgiving, she can take home $150 or more, she said. 

Working for a contractor hired by Grimmway Farms, she said she kept her head down, until one day last September when a coworker, Rosa Sanchez, was struck by a truck and killed in the field next to hers. Montoya said workers had raised concerns about that driver and she believed the accident was preventable. Some of the workers were told to keep working around Sanchez’ body, she said. Stunned, and now knowing what else to do, she did. 

It was “traumatic,” she said through a translator. “Inhumane.”

In March, the state’s workplace safety agency issued more than $65,000 of citations against Grimmway, the contractor Esparza Enterprises and another contractor that employed the driver, alleging serious safety violations for allowing employees to work “in close proximity to a Commercial Truck being driven in an unsafe manner,” according to files obtained through a public records request. Federal and state records show the driver was backing up when the truck struck Sanchez.

The company and its contractors have contested the citations. Esparza did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Grimmway spokesperson Dana Brennan wrote the company has strict policies prohibiting retaliation against employees or contractors’ employees who report issues at work. 

“We have a confidential, anonymous, bilingual hotline where employees can report ethical concerns,” Brennan wrote. “As we have since we first learned of this tragic accident, we are committed to working with authorities throughout their investigation and extend our deepest sympathies to Ms. Sanchez’s family and her co-workers on this grievous loss.”

As a potential witness to the accident, Montoya applied for deferred action with the help of the United Farm Workers, and has since become more active with the organization, encouraging coworkers to apply and speaking at a union convention in September. 

The day after the election, she said she’s both relieved she got her work permit this year and fearful that she’s given her information to federal immigration authorities. In the fields, most of the workers were talking about Trump’s victory, “about what will happen with us now.”

“It protects us from deportation,” she said of the program. “Even so, the fear exists … Whenever he wants, he can take it away.”