{{current_date_full}}

Good morning, everyone.

First of all, many of you wrote to me on Friday asking about Carlo after his surgery. He's doing well, stubborn as ever, didn't want to take a single day off, but he'll be back sooner than later. Leo is also out this week on a well-deserved break, so you're stuck with me.

Now, to the news.

I want to start in Colombia, where yesterday the country held its first round of presidential elections. Abelardo de la Espriella, a 47-year-old lawyer and political outsider, will face leftist senator Ivan Cepeda in a June runoff to decide the country's presidency. De la Espriella took 44 percent of the vote against Cepeda's 41 percent, with nearly all ballots counted, a stronger-than-expected showing for the pro-Trump candidate who calls himself "The Tiger" and has billed himself as a political norm-smashing outsider. The runoff is set for June 21.

For those not deep into Latin American politics, a little context: Colombia has long been something of a sweet exception in the region, a country where democratic institutions actually held, where the extremes were kept at bay, and where transitions of power happened without much drama. That changed in 2022 when Gustavo Petro became the country's first left-wing president. And on Sunday, for the first time, Colombia got its own right-wing populist ready to take power, set to face off against the leftist heir of that same Petro era. 

Voters across Latin America are increasingly ditching leaders who pitched progressive policies aimed at addressing root issues like inequality and corruption. Instead, they've turned to candidates promising heavy-handed security crackdowns. Colombia is now part of that trend.

What struck me watching the results come in was how much Cepeda reminded me of Kamala Harris, a candidate running under the weight of an unpopular incumbent, unwilling or unable to fully break from the president in charge. Cepeda and outgoing President Petro sowed doubt in the first-round results, claiming without evidence that hundreds of thousands of votes were manipulated and that foreign actors interfered. Sound familiar? 

It made me think about something bigger: maybe democracy is this game that's built to fail every four or eight years. We give each side of the political spectrum a chance to fix things, until they can't, and then we hand it back to the other side. Maybe that's just the hard truth of the whole project, a system designed to disappoint, where both sides take turns proving they're not quite up to the job.

Anyway. California votes today, and its two biggest races are wide open heading into primary day. 

In the governor's race, more than 50 candidates are on the ballot, with the top contenders being Democratic billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, former Biden health secretary Xavier Becerra, and Republican Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host backed by Trump. Hilton is warning of what he's calling a "doomsday scenario," two Democrats advancing to November without a Republican on the ticket, which he argues would suppress GOP turnout up and down the ballot.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass is in a fight for her political life. Her first term has been defined by the Palisades Fire, the most destructive in the city's history, and she wasn't even in the country when it ignited. Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, who lost his own home in the blaze, has turned the fire into the centerpiece of his insurgent campaign. A Berkeley IGS poll found Bass, Pratt, and progressive council member Nithya Raman essentially tied, with no candidate holding a statistically significant edge. 

California hasn't elected a Republican to statewide office in two decades. Today we find out if that streak holds.

Sign up for The 1600 in one click here. 🔔

Jesus Mesa is a Newsweek politics reporter based in New York. You can get in touch with Jesus by email here. 

Subscribe to the 1600 Podcast 🔔
YouTube
Apple
Spotify
iHeartRadio

In this episode of The 1600, Newsweek’s Carlo Versano and Corbin Trent, publisher of “America’s Undoing,” put the Democratic Party under a microscope and try to diagnose how it all went wrong, how to get America building again, and why Democrats scared of change can’t seriously mobilize against the Trump machine.

Watch the latest episode here. ⬅

Genevieve McDonald—a Maine lobsterman, former state lawmaker, and one‑time political director for Democrat Graham Platner—has emerged as a central figure in the turmoil engulfing Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign. The campaign is currently reeling from revelations from a Wall Street Journal report that his wife warned aides last year about sexually explicit messages he sent to multiple women, alongside the resurfacing of offensive online posts that have shaken the race.

"Most people don't know that ‘Dumb’ ends in a B"

—President Trump while explaining the creation of his “Dumocrats” nickname for Democrats.

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].