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Summer is coming, but it's not exactly warm in New York yet. The real heat right now is in San Francisco, where voters are heading to the polls today to decide who gets to fill what may be the most symbolically loaded congressional seat in the country.

Nancy Pelosi held California's 11th District for nearly four decades. She was the first female speaker, the architect of the Affordable Care Act, and the most feared vote-counter in modern Democratic politics. Now she's 86, stepping down, and trying to do one last thing: pick her own successor. Whether she can pull it off is genuinely unclear.

The three candidates running to replace her each represent a different answer to the question Democrats can't stop arguing about. Scott Wiener, the state senator leading in polls by double digits, is the pragmatic one: pro-housing, pro-business within limits, openly gay, and probably the first person in this race you'd call electable in a general.

Connie Chan is Pelosi's choice: a labor-backed supervisor with deep union ties and a progressive-taxation message, born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, but badly outgunned on money. And then there's Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's former chief of staff, who has spent nearly $10 million of his own Stripe fortune turning the race into a referendum on the Pelosi era itself. Carlo spoke with him not long ago, and he was blunt about his ambitions: primary challenges to top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Under California's jungle primary, only the top two advance. The polling has Wiener comfortably ahead, with Chan and Chakrabarti essentially tied for second. If Chan finishes third, Pelosi's most personal political bet since leaving the speakership fails in her own backyard.

What makes this more than a local race is what each outcome actually means. A Wiener win suggests San Francisco, the supposed heart of the American left, is more interested in competence and results than ideological purity right now. A Chakrabarti upset would be a genuine shot across the bow for the Democratic establishment, a sign that the insurgent energy of 2018 still has somewhere to go.

While a Chan win would be, in some ways, the most poignant result: proof that Pelosi's machine, her relationships, her labor alliances, and her name still carry weight even as she walks out the door.

There's a lot riding on today beyond San Francisco too. Six states vote, the LA mayor's race is genuinely wild, and the California governor's primary is quietly one of the most important Democratic contests of the cycle. But if you are a crazy politics addict like me, the Pelosi succession is the one to watch tonight. It's the clearest test yet of where the party's soul actually lives.

P.S. In other wild news, the biggest story of Monday was President Trump reportedly unloading on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an expletive-filled phone call, furious over Israel's escalation in Lebanon and what he saw as Netanyahu threatening to blow up his Iran negotiations. Trump apparently put the brakes on a planned Israeli strike on Beirut. Netanyahu's office stayed quiet. Trump posted on Truth Social afterward saying talks with Iran were continuing at a rapid pace. Tehran had said earlier in the day they were suspending negotiations. So, you know, normal Monday.

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

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With negotiations hitting a new wall over Israel's continued strikes in Lebanon, China and Russia are positioned to play an influential role in determining the degree to which the United States and Iran can outlast one another in a long war.

Tehran has long invested in deeper cooperation with Beijing and Moscow. And while neither relationship amounts to a military alliance, the two powerful partners have maintained critical lifelines on economic, diplomatic and defense fronts despite Washington's efforts to isolate the Islamic Republic.

Even as the White House faces its own growing pressure to end the confrontation due to declining popular support, rising energy costs due to the disruption to traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and the sustainability of depleting munitions stockpiles, however, an extended conflict is expected to severely test the limits of Iran's resilience and underline the importance of its foreign partnerships.

“I never met the guy. No, he’s irrelevant to me. I don’t know who he is.”

—DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin when asked about former U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino amid an ongoing spat.

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. ⬅

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