Politics

Choppier seas await Mamdani-backed candidates after Diana Moreno’s landslide win

Published

5 months ago

February 4, 2026

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to succeed him in the state Assembly cruised to an easy victory Tuesday night. But Diana Moreno’s win in that Queens special election is likely the last cakewalk we’ll see from a Mamdani-backed candidate in the near future.

The new mayor has endorsed Brad Lander in his quest to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for the NY-07 seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

The pair of Democratic congressional primaries is expected to be far more competitive than Moreno’s race, raising a central question: How far can a Mamdani endorsement get you?

“We’re testing that out,” said Grace Mausser, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter, which has endorsed both Moreno and Valdez, but not Lander. “He has a lot of hard resources that come with an endorsement: his impressive volunteer and donor lists, his strong reach on social media … There’s also the soft power that we’re testing out now, right? Who is the leader of left and progressive politics in New York right now?”

Mamdani has so far been more involved in boosting Valdez than Lander.

The mayor appeared with Valdez — a Queens lawmaker, former United Auto Workers union organizer and the first elected official to stand with Mamdani in his campaign for mayor — at an event the day after she launched her bid. He also filmed a whimsical social media video set in a subway station to boost her fundraising.

Valdez is running against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president who Velázquez has endorsed as her preferred successor. Queens City Council Member Julie Won also recently entered the race in the progressive Brooklyn and Queens district.

The mayor has been largely hands-off in Lander’s campaign after endorsing the former city comptroller on the day of his launch for Congress. Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race, is running in Brooklyn and Manhattan against an incumbent with more than three times as much campaign cash on hand and the backing of Democratic House leadership, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

A political adviser to Mamdani said his team is still assessing how much to get involved in the two congressional contests and cautioned against reading anything into the fact that the mayor has been more involved in Valdez’s race so far. The adviser said the Mamdani team is waiting to make major moves in NY-10 pending the outcome of a court case that could scramble the lines of the district in such a way that Goldman may run in the neighboring 11th District instead.

Regardless, the Mamdani adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the mayor simply lending his name to Lander and Valdez “already carries a lot of weight that these campaigns can make the most of.”

“His direct involvement is always going to be second to governing,” said the aide. “Ninety-nine percent of his energy is going to be focused on running the city.”

The politics-versus-governance balance is part of Mamdani’s clash with Velázquez, the highly respected progressive who effectively warned him in a New York Times interview to stay in his lane.

And the mayor does have a lot of work to do at the helm of the country’s largest city. June’s congressional primaries fall around the same time he and the City Council will be putting finishing touches on the city budget amid serious fiscal headwinds.

“I don’t know if that was the wisest thing for him to do because the job of being mayor is so big,” Democratic strategist Lupe Todd-Medina said, arguing Mamdani could end up in a situation where he’s not able to stump for Lander and Valdez as much as they want and need him to due to the sheer burden of governing New York City.

As June’s primaries still loom more than four months away, a Lander campaign official, granted anonymity to share sensitive considerations, said his team is also still waiting to see if a court decision could rip up the lines of NY-10.

But if the race ends up competitive, the Lander aide said his team is confident Mamdani will help fundraise and campaign for the former comptroller. The fact that Mamdani hasn’t done so yet, the aide said, is understandable since the mayor has been focused on governing in his first month in office.

The two House primaries have different dynamics but they’ll determine whether Mamdani can replicate the magic that catapulted him from relative obscurity to the nation’s second toughest job.

“He has a lot at stake by pushing in some chips on two fronts, but I think he has more at stake in the 7th District,” said Michael Lange, an analyst who specializes in progressive politics. Valdez “is a really close ally who comes from his political movement and his political home.”

Politics

A ‘pride match’ between Iran and Egypt — and Washington state’s gay leaders couldn’t be happier about it

Published

59 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — On Thursday, the Washington state House speaker and its Senate president — likely the country’s first-ever pairing of openly gay state capital legislative leaders — met to strategize with progressive campaigners against a pair of conservative-backed ballot initiatives that would impose new rules on transgender children in schools and sports.

To defeat the measures, the campaign will have to convince voters beyond Seattle’s progressive enclaves to accept their arguments about privacy, liberty and acceptance.

But on Friday, Washington’s LGBTQ+ leaders were thinking about how they might address an even more hard-to-reach constituency: citizens of Egypt and Iran, whose governments criminalize homosexuality but have seen their national teams paired through a scheduling quirk in the World Cup’s only official “Pride Match.”

Members of Seattle’s World Cup organizing committee set out to make the June 26 game a showcase of the city’s inclusivity before a random draw ensured two of the world’s most repressive states toward sexual minorities would take the field. While FIFA has banned critics of the regime in Tehran from flying the country’s pre-revolutionary flag (under rules prohibiting the display of political symbols), soccer’s governing body hassaid it will permit rainbow flags over objections from Iranian and Egyptian soccer officials.

“How many opportunities do you have to get positive messages about happy queer people beamed into Iran and Egypt?” said state Senate President Jamie Pedersen. “I don’t think there’s going to be any way for people who are watching the game and seeing images of the stands to be able to avoid the fact that there’s going to be a huge contingent of rainbow flags waving.”

Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins have known each other since the 1990s, when they first worked together on a failed campaign to pass a statewide non-discrimination law. Both were subsequently elected to the legislature — she from Tacoma, he from a Seattle district encompassing Capitol Hill, the traditional seat of gay power — and rose to lead Democratic majorities in their respective chambers. Along the way they became friends, attending each other’s marriages and raising children in parallel.

Now they are collaborating with the No Hate in WA State campaign to defeat two separate initiatives that will appear on the November ballot after the two leaders refused to take them up in their legislative chambers. One,characterized as a parents-rights measure, would allow parents to opt out of classes related to sexual education or gender diversity and compel educators to notify parents if their children request medical attention. Aseparate measure would “prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students” in interscholastic sports, and require girls to receive a medical examination confirming their biological sex.

Both Pedersen and Jinkins said they expected to build on the coalition that helped enshrine gay and lesbian rights at the ballot, first bypassing a domestic-partnership regime in 2009 and then three years later by approving a same-sex marriage law that had passed the legislature before facing a citizen’s-veto threat. (Let’s Go Washington, the campaign committee organized to pass the two transgender-related initiatives this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“What we saw, going back to the 1980s and 1990s, is people didn’t think they knew anyone who was gay or lesbian. Once they started to realize they knew people, that started changing opinions dramatically,” said Jinkins. “It stopped the other side from being able to use stereotypes to characterize us.”

In interviews Friday morning, both of the legislative leaders cast the day’s unusual Pride matchup — and its likelihood for friction with soccer fans in Seattle’s streets — as a healthy development for the state’s LGBTQ+ community.

“That’s one of the best things about the World Cup, some of the exposure that different communities are having to one another,” said Jinkins. “It’s not just Iranian and Egyptian fans learning about Pride, it’s us learning about Iranian and Egyptian culture and thought.”

Neither, however, planned to attend the match itself despite receiving invitations to do so. Jinkins said she would likely visit a “fan zone” watch party being hosted by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians at its administrative headquarters in her Tacoma district. Pedersen, who concedes he is “not a sports fan,” was scheduled to participate in a Trans Pride event in Capitol Hill, the historic heart of gay Seattle where he is deep in an aggressive reelection campaign against a challenger to his left.

“I feel bad when I take up the ticket for something where there is a lot of demand,” Pedersen said. “People who really enjoy it should be having this experience, and probably not me.”

Politics

Judge halts executive order seeking to create federal voter list…

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of nearly two dozen states that challenged the Republican president’s order in granting a summary judgment. Her ruling applies to this year’s midterm election cycle.

Plaintiffs argued in two lawsuitsboth filed in federal court in Boston, that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. The judge agreed, saying in her ruling that the provisions of Trump’s order seeking to create a federal list of eligible voters and using the U.S. Postal Service to determine who can receive a mail ballot are “legally void” because they “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”

It was the second ruling in as many days against executive orders Trump has signed seeking oversight of the nation’s elections. A separate ruling Wednesday prohibited an executive order he had signed last year that would have required people to show documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote.

Order targeted mail voting, administration likely to appeal

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, whose state was among the plaintiffs, celebrated the court’s decision.

“Millions of independents, Republicans and Democrats across Arizona have voted by mail for decades,” she said in a statement, noting that nearly 80% of ballots in the state are cast by that method.

Mayes, a Democrat, singled out military families, voters in the state’s rural expanses and Native Americans who cast ballots from tribal lands.

“Donald Trump’s executive order targeted all of these voters,” she said. “But today, the courts affirmed what the Constitution makes clear: States run their elections, not the President.”

AP AUDIO: Federal judge halts Trump’s election executive order seeking to create a federal voter list

AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports President Trump has suffered a legal setback for a second straight day in his bid to get oversight of the nation’s elections.

The White House stood by Trump’s executive order and indicated the administration would appeal the ruling. The order, said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, “lawfully protects our elections, and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail in its implementation.”

The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits challenging the order, argued that the motions were premature and that plaintiffs lacked the legal basis to bring their claim based on the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

But in an interim order before Thursday’s ruling, Talwani said the motions pertaining to this year’s election cycle were relevant: “In light of the EO’s specific deadlines over the next three months, and the reality that elections will be occurring throughout this period with the November 3, 2026 midterm occurring in just five months, postponing judicial review is impracticable and may inflict significant hardship on Plaintiffs,” she wrote. That order denied the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the challenges.

Executive order sought to give Postal Service a central role in elections

Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.

Trump issued his second order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government — through the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration — create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list.

Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos.

The Postal Service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.

Postal Service workers have pushed back against the order, saying they are not equipped to determine who is eligible to vote in each state. After Trump issued his order last spring, the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association said forcing its members into such a role “risks politicizing one of the nation’s most trusted public institutions.”

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat whose state was among the plaintiffs, said the executive order illustrated how Trump was attempting to “abuse power in previously unthinkable ways” to interfere in elections.

She said it “strains credulity” to think the U.S. Postal Service could set up a workable system for pre-screening individual voters to determine whether they would be allowed to vote by mail, adding that it would be “a shocking violation of American constitutional rights.”

The Postal Service did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment.

Trump’s second election executive order faces multiple legal challenges

The lawsuit seeking summary judgment was filed by Democratic attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia. Also signing on were attorneys representing Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general.

The states also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, had argued that no one would be prosecuted for violating the order.

The other lawsuit filed in Talwani’s court was by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, which have sought a preliminary injunction against the executive order.

In yet another lawsuit filed against the executive order, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May agreed with the Trump administration that it was too early to block the order because it had yet to be implemented. That lawsuit was brought by Democratic and civil rights groups, which have appealed.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe BidenTrump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigationsincluding ones run by Republicansfound it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta and Hanna from Topeka, Kansas.

Politics

The drone war over World Cup skies

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The federal government wants credit for mounting the World Cup’s best defense.

The Transportation Security Administration this week said its federal air marshals have seized more than 300 drones that broke through Federal Aviation Administration airspace restrictions imposed over World Cup stadiums or at nearby fan events in what the Department of Homeland Security called “the most comprehensive airspace security and drone mitigation effort in U.S. history.”

As part of that effort, local Federal Bureau of Investigation offices across Atlanta, Miami, New York, Dallas and elsewhere have released rolling social-media updates on their counter-drone enforcement activities, including the interception of dozens of unauthorized drones, along with warnings to recreational drone operators to keep their aircraft grounded.

“These incidents reflect the reality that drones are becoming part of the security environment surrounding major public events,” Michael Robbins, president of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, told Blue Light News.

“The encouraging news is that authorities successfully detected and mitigated these incursions, demonstrating both the professionalism of the teams on the ground and the value of investing in effective counter-unmanned aircraft systems capabilities,” said Robbins, whose group represents drone manufacturers and suppliers.

Beyond countermeasures kits that include portable or wearable detection or jamming tools, law enforcement officials and security personnel are also utilizing enhanced training measures at the FBI’s drone training center in Alabama, which opened last year. FBI director Kash Patel boasted to Congress that “every single agency across the country wants their police officers there.”

As enforcement ramps up, a more fundamental question persists: whether many of the operators behind these incursions are knowingly breaking the rules or simply unaware they are flying where they shouldn’t be.

A former drone industry executive, granted anonymity to candidly discuss how drone policy has evolved in the last few years, said some drone manufacturers have simply put more responsibility on operators to figure out restrictions instead of baking it into the technology.

“Stepped up enforcement has some deterrent effect, but ultimately technology solutions will be most effective at preventing or mitigating incursions,” the executive said.

For now, as large-scale events continue across the U.S. — including the upcoming Olympic games — the next phase of thwarting drones must include “continuing to modernize our counter-UAS framework, expanding the deployment of proven detection and mitigation capabilities, and ensuring federal, state, and local partners have the clear authorities and tools they need to protect the public while preserving the tremendous economic and public safety benefits that drones provide every day,” added Robbins.