California Today: Why Move Up the 2020 Presidential Primary?
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Version 0 of 1. Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Today’s introduction comes from our Los Angeles bureau chief, Adam Nagourney. California may have the most people in the nation, but when it comes to nominating a president, it is relegated to the sidelines. The primary here comes late — in 2016, it rolled around in June — by which point the party is pretty much over. State leaders are trying to fix that. Again. Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation this week that would move the 2020 presidential primaries to March 3. “Candidates will not be able to ignore the largest, most diverse state in the nation as they seek our country’s highest office,” said Alex Padilla, the Secretary of State. But will they? When California tried this before, other states quickly followed — leapfrogging ahead or landing on the same day, as happened in 2008, making California just one of many states shouting for attention on Super Tuesday, which fell on Feb 5. And influence? In 2008, California Democrats chose Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. (California Republicans picked right, choosing John McCain over Mitt Romney). Raymond Buckley, the longtime leader of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said he was not worried that California might dislodge his state from the dominance it has long enjoyed at the start of the process. “Have you seen it happen in the past?” he asked. And Tom Vilsack, the former Democratic governor of Iowa, which has first-in-the-nation caucuses, said California could cause headaches for his party by forcing candidates to spend resources in a vast state like this. “If any large state is moved up it places an even greater premium on money,” Mr. Vilsack said. “I find that of interest since many party leaders complain about the role money plays in our politics. If anything moving up the calendar may make it harder for a lesser-known candidate to be given a real chance at being the nominee.” Ricardo Lara, the Democratic state senator who sponsored the bill, said that risk was worth taking. “It’s always going to be expensive to campaign in California,” he said. “But I’d rather err on the side of giving us a greater voice and allowing us to be more influential as a state.” (Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.) • U.S. immigration agents arrested 498 people, many in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, in a sweep targeting sanctuary cities. [The New York Times] • A reality check: Sacramento, at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, is one of the riskiest flood zones in the country. [KQED] • For the second consecutive day, a chunk of rock broke off El Capitan in Yosemite. Crashing rock on Wednesday killed a tourist from Wales. [The New York Times] • In a newly released video, a highway patrol officer is seen fatally shooting a man in Siskiyou County. The victim’s family say he clearly posed no threat. The authorities say he had a knife. [Sacramento Bee] • Raptors soaring over California’s landscape show what can happen when lawmakers have the guts to stand up to the N.R.A. [Opinion | The New York Times] • Seemingly everyone in Hollywood has a story about the Playboy Mansion. Some of them are ugly. [The New York Times] • “We all have anxiety,” says California’s top marijuana regulator. Recreational marijuana sales start in January, and nobody knows quite how the pot economy will work. [The Associated Press] • Investigative series: The tragic story of a 10-year-old boy who was found hanged to death at a Northern California farm. [The Mercury News] • Inside the left wing’s answer to fake news: “This isn’t your grandmother’s journalism. It is the Wild West of journalism.” [LA Weekly] • 36 Hours in Sonoma County: Sipping wine only scratches the surface of what California’s big-sky country has to offer. [The New York Times] • What $999,000 buys you around Los Angeles right now. [Curbed Los Angeles] Discovered by a pair of explorers in 1998, the precise location of the Grove of Titans was kept secret for two decades. The grove is home to some of the world’s largest redwoods — at heights of more than 320 feet and diameters as wide as 26 feet — tucked inside a dense forest in far northern California. If word got out, the fear was people would flock there and trample the trees’ delicate root system. That, park officials now say, is precisely what happened. “Our total visitation kind of just skyrocketed,” said Brett Silver, a supervising ranger at California State Parks. “It’s kind of like an L.A. freeway system out there.” Clues about the location of the grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park surfaced in 2007 in a book about tall-tree hunters. Internet sleuths picked up the thread from there. By 2011, map coordinates were published online. Waves of visitors followed, carving trails through the underbrush and compressing the soil atop the redwoods’ shallow roots. Park officials have now reluctantly accepted a new reality: the Grove of Titans is a full-fledged tourist destination. A plan is moving forward to construct a $1.4 million boardwalk that lets visitors view the trees without setting foot on the forest floor. State funding hasn’t been forthcoming. Redwood Park Conservancy, a nonprofit, is leading a fund-raising campaign. For Mr. Silver, who’s worked in the park for 13 years, the public fascination with the Grove of Titans has been somewhat baffling. “There are just as impressive trees on other trails in the park. That’s my thing,” he said. “But those trees don’t have names. I mean, Grove of Titans, that’s an impressive name.” California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Los Osos. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley. |