After Maine's Rejection, California Has Good News for Trump

Former President Trump was kicked off the Republican primary ballot in Maine on Thursday—but hours later, his campaign received welcome news from a state with a population nearly 30 times bigger. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, left Trump's name on the certified list of candidates sent to county election officials Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reports. Weber had been urged to disqualify Trump by officials including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who in a Dec. 20 letter, urged Weber to "explore every legal option" to drop Trump. "The constitution is clear: you must be 35 years old and not an insurrectionist," Kounalakis, a Democrat, wrote.

Weber told Kounalakis last week that removing Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from holding office, "is not something my office takes lightly and is not as simple as the requirement that a person be at least 35 years old to be president," CBS News reports. She suggested she would leave the question to the court. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, another Democrat, said he didn't support disqualifying the Republican frontrunner. "There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy, but in California we defeat candidates we don't like at the polls," he said last Friday. "Everything else is a political distraction."

California has more GOP delegates than any other state, meaning disqualification would have been a huge blow to the Trump campaign. Under new rules introduced by the state GOP this year, all 169 delegates will go to the candidate who gets more than 50% of the vote, the LA Times notes. Like Maine and Colorado, which kicked Trump off the Republican ballot earlier this month, California will hold its GOP primary on March 5, aka "Super Tuesday." By then, the Supreme Court will likely have ruled on the 14th Amendment challenges to Trump's candidacy, which the New York Times describes as the "most politically momentous matter" before the court since it ruled in favor of George W. Bush after the 2000 election. (More Election 2024 stories.)