‘KILL BILL’ CONTEST ALERT! GUESS WHICH BILLS WON’T SURVIVE, WIN PRIZES — Suspense day is right around the corner! On Thursday, California lawmakers will run through hundreds of bills in quick succession and announce which will (and won’t) advance from the Appropriations committees to the floor. Now’s your chance to make predictions and compete against your fellow politicos — and the Playbook authors — to guess which bills won’t survive the dreaded “suspense file.” Those with the most accurate guesses will receive a shout-out in California Playbook and some extra special swag. Remember to leave your name and email with your prediction so we can contact you if you win. THE BUZZ: CROSSING THE (PARTY) LINE — Republicans were quick to characterize state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil’s sudden departure from the Democratic Party last week as evidence that the status quo is not working for Californians and that Latino voters are moving toward the GOP. But the Modesto lawmaker’s flip may say more about her own electoral prospects than any dissatisfaction in the electorate. Alvarado-Gil, in a slate of TV, newspaper, and podcast interviews over the last few days, has slammed her former party as becoming “unrecognizable” and said she no longer identifies with its values. But there has also been a longstanding question of whether she could win again in her district as a Democrat. Her 2022 victory in a traditionally Republican-held, rural district was largely seen as a quirk of the state’s top-two primary system. The fact that she and fellow Democrat Tim Robinson were able to advance past a wide range of Republicans in a primary race to the runoff was effectively a statistical anomaly, said Paul Mitchell, political data analyst and vice president of Political Data Inc., (which only works with Democrats in partisan legislative and congressional races.) “She won in a flukey outcome, And you can't expect the fluke to happen again,” Mitchell said of Alvarado-Gil. “The rationale for [changing parties] was probably as true the day after she won in 2022 as much as it is now.” The new Republican has swiftly felt the effects of her decision. She was immediately removed from the Legislature’s Latino Caucus (more on that below) and, as of Friday, was stripped of her committee assignments, per a letter from Senate President pro Tem Mike McGuire to the body’s Rules Committee, reviewed by Playbook. Alvarado-Gil will no longer chair the Senate’s Human Services Committee nor serve as vice chair of the Joint Committee on Fairs Allocation and Classification. She also lost her seat on half a dozen other committees: agriculture; business, progressions and economic development; governmental organization; insurance, military and veterans; and the select committee on California’s wine industry. We expect Alvarado-Gil will continue to go through a somewhat awkward transition period. It’s unclear how many of her staffers, who joined her team when she was a Democrat, will stick around to work in a Republican office. Her former legislative director, Mike Sharif, announced his departure last week. She’s also still facing some internal consternation from members of her new party. Despite an Instagram post that might suggest otherwise, the senator has been working hard to let people know she does not support Vice President Kamala Harris, going so far as to make it the first thing mentioned in her X bio. It will be years before we see how this switch affects her next bid for reelection in 2026, but stats show voters in her district aren’t getting any less Republican. The electorate as a whole has seen Republican registrations rise very slightly since 2022 and Democratic registration decrease by about the same margin. The same is true for Latino voters in the district, who saw a 2 percent bump in GOP registrations in the last two years. Mitchell warned not to make too much of that shift, however. Because Republicans have a closed primary in California, the state often sees registrations tick up slightly during presidential election years, he said. Nevertheless, Alvarado-Gil’s move was seen by some as a symptom of a wider shift among Latinos away from Democrats. Her removal from the Latino Caucus was slammed by Republicans (and some Democrats) up and down the state, including California GOP Chair Jessica Millan-Patterson, who is Latina. The caucus for decades has limited its members to only Democrats, and chair Sabrina Cervantes defended the removal last week, saying Alvarado-Gil has "chosen to affiliate with an extremist, right-wing political party that constantly attacks and scapegoats our Latino community, both historically and in the present." But others disagreed with the move, citing the bigger context of an important election year. "We're seeing Latino support at its highest for Trump or for a Republican nominee in quite some time," said Democratic consultant Mike Trujillo. "If anything, we need to communicate more with our weird family members, not less." GOOD MORNING. Happy Monday. Thanks for waking up with Playbook. You can text us at 916-562-0685 — save it as “CA Playbook” in your contacts. Or drop us a line at lkorte@politico.com and dgardiner@politico.com, or on X — @DustinGardiner and @Lara_Korte. WHERE’S GAVIN? Nothing official announced.
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