Airdate: Friday, October 30, 2026 at 10 am

California voters this election will usher in new representatives, vote on 14 statewide ballot measures and weigh in on many other local races and propositions. With just days to go until the midterms, we want to hear your last-minute voting questions. Are you wondering what you should do if you haven’t received your ballot? How can you find your polling place? How soon can you expect election results? Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, and KQED’s Scott Shafer and Guy Marzorati join us to take all of your voting questions ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Guests:

• Kim Alexander, president and founder, California Voter Foundation
• Scott Shafer, senior politics correspondent and co-host, political breakdown, KQED
• Guy Marzorati, correspondent, KQED’s California politics and government desk

Airdate: Friday, October 30, 2026 at 9 am

As Día de los Muertos approaches, we take time to remember loved ones and notable people who have passed away this year. Just this week, influential labor activist Dolores Huerta died at age 96 months after the deaths of other icons including musician Dolly Parton, feminist Gloria Steinem and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. The ancient Mexican tradition of honoring the deceased offers an opportunity to process personal and collective grief along with celebrating life. We welcome listeners to share remembrances and we’ll reflect on what it means to memorialize someone.

Guests:

• Farida Jhabvala Romero, labor correspondent, KQED
• Ani Rivera, vice president, San Francisco’s commission of the department on the status of women
• Lidia Ruelo-Salazar, healer, culture keeper and founder of Tierra Rituals
• Sam Roberts, obituary writer, The New York Times, Author of “Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit”

Airdate: Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 10 am

Author Priya Parker, whose 2018 book “The Art of Gathering” was about bringing people together, is out with a new book called “The Art of Fighting.” It may seem like an entirely different topic, but Parker says forming and growing successful relationships is not possible being able to navigate disagreement. We’ll talk to Parker about how to handle all kinds of fights, and hear from you: How has conflict strengthened your own relationships?

Guests:

• Priya Parker, conflict facilitator and author, “The Art of Fighting” and “The Art of Gathering”

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. In her decades working with groups, Priya Parker says she’s learned two fundamental truths: Groups can’t sustain without love, and they can’t sustain without conflict. But many of us are so averse to conflict that we’ve lost out on its transformative power and the ability to engage in conflict well. That’s where Parker’s new book comes in, called The Art of Fighting. It offers ways to identify and address disputes, even when they seem insurmountable, at work, at home, in our politics, and with our friends. Priya Parker is a conflict facilitator and author of 2018’s The Art of Gathering, and she joins me now. Welcome to Forum, Priya.

Priya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

Mina Kim: So you say fighting is a good thing, good for individual relationships and for groups. So how so?

Priya Parker: We don’t fight about the things we don’t care about, and we don’t fight with people we don’t care about. If we don’t care, we leave. And so I’m a conflict resolution facilitator, as you mentioned, and part of the way I look at conflict is that conflict is relevance. Conflict is dangerous, but it’s also relevant. And when we don’t have the skills, when we don’t have the moral capacity to realize that conflict is a form of relevance in a community, we’re actually throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Mina Kim: It’s interesting how counterintuitive that idea is — that conflict is mattering, it’s relevance, it’s caring. Why do you think that we have been so averse to engaging in conflict if it has those types of qualities?

Priya Parker: So much of it, I think, is the way we were raised. I know this is true for me. I should probably admit, confess at this moment, that I am a conflict-averse conflict resolution facilitator. I’m biracial, I’m bicultural, I’m half Indian, half white American, but I am actually a third-generation ostrich on both sides. When conflict arises, both on my Indian and my Iowan side, we are very skilled at kind of ducking our heads into the sand and just hoping it’ll pass.

And as I started to research for The Art of Fighting, one of the places I actually looked was at a lot of church literature, because churches are full of conflict. Churches are full of rifts, of schisms. And so there’s actually a lot of really interesting literature looking at which churches are able to get through these pressure points.

There’s a book by a minister — he’s also an interventionist — called Michael Hare. And I think the book is called When Church Conflict Happens. He said that when he goes into churches that are experiencing a rift or a reckoning internally, one of the first things he has to dismantle in order to make any progress is what he calls the misbelief that conflict is sin.

It is not sin. But when we believe that, so many of us believe that quote-unquote good people don’t fight, and we’re actually not able to even have the conversation. As I read his passage, I realized that whether you’re Christian or not, whether you believe in God or not, that notion that conflict is sin has sort of permeated our culture.

And yet conflict is actually how groups articulate what’s important to them. It’s how we repair. It’s how we actually have the most important conversations in our companies and our families. But when we assume that you’re supposed to fight only with your enemies, we’re actually not even building the skill. Why would you get good at something that is immoral? And so the first step to having better relationships is to see that conflict, held well, is actually incredibly crucial to intimacy and also to high-performance, high-functioning teams.

Mina Kim: Yeah. On the intimacy part of it, I was struck by the personal story that you shared, that people were shocked when your parents got divorced. Why were they shocked?

Priya Parker: Because my parents never fought. And so when they did announce that they were separating, everyone, myself included, was shocked because they didn’t fight.

I share this also in the prologue of The Art of Fighting. The story goes back generations, to when my father’s father passed away and we went to his funeral in Iowa. I was sitting in a pew in the church, and the minister rose to give his eulogy. He saved the pinnacle of my grandfather’s virtues for this: In 50 years of marriage, Ruth and Lyle Parker never fought.

My wise stepmother leaned over to me and said, “That’s not a good thing.”

I was kind of surprised by her take on it, and it stuck with me for a long time. Years later, I actually texted my father to say, “Dad, do you — is that true? Like, did your parents never fight?”

And he texted me back, like a very dad text. It was like, “Dear Priya,” comma. I’m like, “Dad, it’s a text.” He says, “I think that’s true. My father served in World War II, and he won that fight, and he never needed to do it again.” Dad.

Mina Kim: Let me invite listeners into the conversation. Listeners, do you agree with Priya that fighting strengthens relationships? What’s your relationship with conflict? Do you try to avoid it, or maybe you tend to start the fight? What questions do you have for Priya about how and when to engage in a fight?

You can email Forum at kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. You can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

So, this aversion to fighting, these models that we’ve gotten about why fighting is not good or what it means about relationships — is that why one of the most common issues you see when you’re called in to address conflict is that groups have been avoiding it?

Priya Parker: We, you know, most of us are actually pretty bad at conflict. When heat rises, we oscillate between avoidance and burning the house down, between what I call unhealthy peace, where real conversations never happen, people don’t actually say what they think out of fear of escalation, and unhealthy conflict — so abuse, manipulation, attempts to destroy.

But actually, there’s a third form of conflict, and I call it healthy heat. Healthy heat is the ability to hold tension with care long enough for it to reveal something new.

As a conflict resolution facilitator — and I’ve been one for 25 years — I actually started thinking about this book in the summer of 2020 because, as you know, if you all remember, that was a summer of many reckonings. It was, for many workplaces, a return to work — a return to the office, sorry — and the battles about where work actually happens. It was the summer of the Black Lives Matter uprising. There were many, many implosions within tech companies, media companies, newspapers, and social justice organizations.

I was a facilitator, along with my peers, brought into those Zooms. Before the pandemic, if I was facilitating an internal reckoning, we were all in person together. You’d get onto an airplane or a train. We were all in these 40 little Zoom bubbles or a thousand little Zoom bubbles.

And I realized that even when I was invited in — which means someone has recognized there’s a problem and they want to work through it, two really important preconditions — in so many of those rooms, we don’t actually have the skills. We’re not taught to fight well. Again, we kind of avoid or we burn the house down. We don’t have healthy conflict rituals within our workplaces. We either say nothing or we sue each other, right? Or we unionize.

And again, unionizing is a really important collective ritual and need. But I would have labor organizers telling me these union negotiations are holding too much because we don’t actually have other mechanisms to hold, release, and help us have healthy heat together.

And so I wanted to write a book. The Art of Fighting is not about how you yell at strangers on the internet. It’s actually asking a different question, which is: How do we fight with those we want to belong to?

Mina Kim: Just to clarify your point about unionizing, are you saying essentially that if there was a dispute in the workplace, people would turn to unionizing if maybe that wasn’t even the best way to resolve it, just because it offered some kind of—

Priya Parker: Structure to fight? I would hear from labor organizers — again, people who believe in unionizing — that, in part, because there aren’t other mechanisms, unionizing was often holding a lot of very serious pain and despair, but often about things like, “What should be the vision of the company?” What should be the purpose of the company, versus labor regulation, or whether, you know, and so on.

Part of what they were saying is that unionizing is actually such a powerful, specific, developed, sophisticated ritual. There’s a table, there are roles, there are people, there are rules, people get trained in how to actually go through every part of the negotiation. It is a designed infrastructure to help hold an imbalance of power between management and labor.

But when we don’t have other ways to hold collective conversations about things like the future of the company, then all of a sudden these rituals are holding too much weight. And even if it’s not union negotiations, in so many workplaces, in part because we are conflict-averse, it’s also not seen as an aspirational skill.

So often, when there is some kind of dispute or disagreement between colleagues, the function is then to go to HR, versus actually building the skills — and not just the skills, but the normalization that great teams have healthy conflict. Because what is—

Mina Kim: The cost? You’ve also referred to the problem of toxic politeness in a workplace. What can be—

Priya Parker: Poisonous about it? That real conversations never happen, that people aren’t — that decisions don’t happen, that people don’t fully understand their roles.

I have a Substack, a newsletter and a training ground called Group Life. The first webinar I did a year ago was part of sessions I hold once a month called Group Help Labs. It’s free; you can find it online at priaparker.substack.com. It’s a very simple question: How do you nurture long-term group commitment?

The key to all groups is that a group is a place where people feel like they’re meaningfully contributing and that they’re meaningfully contributing to it. And if you can’t fight, you’re not going to be able to get to that answer.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Priya Parker, author of the new book The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation with your experiences of conflict, if you’ve even found that it strengthened your relationships. If you have an aversion to conflict, what prevents you from engaging in it? And what questions do you have for Priya about how and when to engage in a fight?

We’ll have more after the break. This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Priya Parker says the most meaningful human connection is forged not because you’ve avoided conflict, but because you’ve confronted it. It’s something she came to know the hard way, she says, but believes in deeply. And in a new book, she explains why. It’s called The Art of Fighting.

And you, our listeners, are invited to join the conversation. What do you think of Priya’s premise? Has conflict strengthened a relationship for you? Do you find that you try to avoid conflict? Why? Or maybe you’re the person who starts the fight. What do you want to know about the best ways, and how to gauge whether or not to engage in a fight at all?

The email address is forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Sue writes: “As a native New Yorker who came here to San Francisco 32 years ago, I can tell you that San Francisco seems to be a very conflict-averse place. New Yorkers disagree with each other, and no one takes it personally. Here, you have an argument and someone thinks you’re canceling them.”

Priya, as someone who lives in New York, do you think there are regional differences in comfort with conflict?

Priya Parker: Yes. This is such a great question. The Art of Fighting came out on September 8, and I went on a kind of old-school, physical national book tour. I went to 12 different cities — Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Huntsville, Alabama, Miami, and a number of other cities. I was so surprised and fascinated by the regional differences in conflict, even in the room in these bookstores.

When I was in Seattle — again, I’m just quoting what happened — there were actually a number of New Yorkers in the audience who said something similar to your listener. In Seattle, I think they called it the Seattle freeze, where there’s a deeply, deeply conflict-averse kind of culture.

Then, when I was in the Midwest, a number of people in the audience would ask questions saying, “We’re famous for Midwest Nice, but we also practice what they call Midwest Ice.” Did you just sort of slowly ice someone out, but you’d never actually tell them that you’re upset?

When I was in the South, someone in Huntsville, Alabama, also said, “Down here, we don’t necessarily — we sort of avoid, avoid, and then one day exit.”

And New Yorkers, I think, also have a reputation for being comfortable speaking their minds. So yes, there are regional differences.

I would say two things. The first is that all of us, particularly in our workplaces, are working with people who come from different cultures, who come from different family conflict styles. Conflict is cultural.

However, when you have a team or a community in which there are shared goals, you can create your own mini-microcultures of healthy heat. In The Art of Fighting, I look at teams, and I look at restaurants that purposely build cultures of healthy heat within their restaurants. One such restaurant is Canlis in Seattle, which has designed a culture that encourages healthy heat.

So even if you’re from whatever region, you’re taught the skills and the rituals, and also the culture, that if you don’t actually bring things up with your colleagues in ways that make normal, everyday repairs — what I call keeping a kerfuffle a kerfuffle — you’re not going to succeed here. And so it’s something that’s learnable.

The last thing I’ll say is that there’s a book she may be interested in called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I write about it also in The Art of Fighting. She looks at how conflict also changes based on which nation, which nationality, you come from.

She has a graph in her book that looks at conflict-averse versus conflict-seeking cultures. On the conflict-seeking or conflict-comfortable side, if I remember correctly, it was the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, and France. The conflict-averse side included Japan, China, and Indonesia.

She says the difference between these cultures is that in cultures where people assume there’s a difference between one’s opinion and one’s identity, people are conflict-comfortable. In cultures where those two things are the same, people avoid conflict.

Mina Kim: So how can we get better, then, at handling conflict? You gave a couple of examples. You’ve talked about doing a hot-takes party with your group of friends, and also a workplace where a boss had them first argue over whether pineapple should be on pizza. What do those things do? Describe some of those things.

Priya Parker: The first step to becoming a more artful fighter, if you will, is to displace this belief that all conflict is bad and start getting comfortable and curious about where, in your friend group, with your family, or in your workplace, you’re actually seeing what I call healthy heat.

The first step is to dislodge this notion that all conflict is bad. Some types of conflict are bad, but there is healthy, generative, creative conflict.

The second is to start understanding, when a fight comes up, what do you have on your hands? Not all fights are worth facing. To be an artful fighter doesn’t mean you’re fighting more; it means you’re finding better fights.

The second step to starting to think about how to become a better fighter is to have discernment about which fights are worth facing and which are not. I actually spend the first three chapters in The Art of Fighting going through the 12 different reasons you should not face a fight.

So I am not pro-fight. I’m actually helping people discern when it’s worth facing a fight and, when it is worth facing, how to set up the right fight. We’re so often having the wrong fight, and particularly in our groups and communities, groups need infrastructure.

This hot-takes party you’re talking about — I first saw it at a tech company where I was speaking. I was in the audience before it was my turn to talk, and I got permission to share the story. This was a company that, by its own admission, suffered from toxic politeness. They had to make a lot of really important decisions and were at a crossroads.

A vice president came onstage and said, “You know, I don’t like starting in a hard place, but we’re going to spend some time looking at five really core decisions that we need to make.”

You could feel the room tense up. He said, “So what I’m going to do is put up a core question that’s really fundamental to this company. You’re going to get in groups of four, and you’re going to debate.”

They all looked terrified. Everyone put their phones down and looked immediately at the stage. Then the first slide went up, and it said, “Pineapple on pizza: yes or no?”

I was in the room, and people were like, “What?” Some people started chuckling. Then he said, “Come on, go into your circles of four.”

People turned to each other, and one person said, “Yuck, that’s disgusting.” Someone else said, “Well, someone doesn’t have a palate.” Then someone else was like, “Ah, this is offensive. I’m Italian. You don’t put pineapple on pizza.”

And all of a sudden, the room was buzzing. People were laughing. Then he put up a second question: “What is the right time for lunch?” One person in my group said, “11 a.m.” Someone else exclaimed, “That’s breakfast!”

Then he had three or four more questions. Part of what was so fascinating about that moment was that he was actually helping them banter. He was helping them practice prosocial conflict, in part to prepare them for the real conversations the next day.

When they did bring things up the next day, you could hear people recollecting, “Remember the pineapple-on-pizza thing?”

Part of what he was doing, very sophisticatedly, was giving people a new experience of fighting over a hot take — a strongly held opinion about something that does not matter.

I’ve done this also with my Substack that I mentioned. We actually hosted a hot-takes party to practice the skill. I did it with my team at our end-of-the-year celebration lunch. We had fried chicken and Caesar salad, and everyone had to bring a two-minute hot take. That became our meal, and people were laughing and disagreeing with each other, but again, about things that don’t matter.

It might seem silly. You’re like, “Why are you spending time doing this?” But actually, as a country, we’ve gotten so bad and polarized at fighting about these very, very large, complex subjects that our muscles have actually atrophied.

So it turns out that in our communities, with the people we want to do work with, low-stakes arguing is actually good practice for higher-stakes arguing.

Mina Kim: Let me go to Andy next in San Rafael. Andy, go ahead. You’re on.

Andy: I just wanted to comment that our whole form of government, from the get-go, is designed around adversarial discourse with each other. You have the multiparty system, and the idea is that they get together, they have differing opinions, but they talk about it, argue about it — not fight. I mean, that’s gotten so out of balance of late.

Mina Kim: Yeah.

Andy: I think you should take your book to Congress and give them a lesson on that.

Mina Kim: Andy, thanks so much. I’m really glad you’re bringing this up because, I mean, our political parties, Priya — they’re always fighting, and rarely, if ever, in recent years, I think would people describe it as generative, using the word that you used there, or productive, right? So what’s wrong with the conflict that they are engaging in, or that we’re seeing modeled essentially daily these days, with a midterm upon us?

Priya Parker: I mean, Andy’s absolutely right. Our democracy is actually set up to have public debates in the open, whether in town halls or in Congress.

I would argue that our country has moved from healthy heat, or moments of healthy heat, into deeply unhealthy heat, unhealthy conflict. There are many, many different reasons for it. Some of them are structural, some are more systemic, some are related to the media and our fragmented media environment. Some of it is because, in part, of social media. These have become performative arguments. They’re not actually moments of healthy heat in a debate.

I think our democracy is really suffering from it.

There was actually a recent incident, a moment in the public eye, that I found really interesting. It was a town hall in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed was hosting a town hall in Cairo, Michigan. I think it was on October 19, and you may have seen this moment online.

Basically, there was a guy who stood up. Again, if you watch it online, the town hall is also this kind of archetypal, Norman Rockwell-like setting. The town hall is this really important public civic ritual that we have a history of — this way in which Americans come together to talk.

Somebody in the audience, I think his name was Tommy, asked Abdul El-Sayed whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.

As I analyze this as a facilitator, what El-Sayed is able to do in that moment with Tommy is practice artful fighting and make sure the room is having the right fight. He remains physically relaxed. If you watch his body, he doesn’t accept the frame of Tommy’s question. Instead, El-Sayed asks a different question of Tommy and the room. He says, “I want to ask, of the question you’re asking, why are you asking this question? Well, do you disavow me?” He says, “No, no, but what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t disavow the Muslim Brotherhood? Have you disavowed them, Tommy? I haven’t heard you disavow them yet.”

First of all, he’s starting to help us articulate what the right questions are that we should be asking as a country. He’s not afraid of building tension — not gratuitous tension, but tension that helps us clearly articulate and hear ideas in the open.

And then he names something. He says, I think, “You assume, Tommy, that because I’m Muslim, somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution,” right?

To me, as I’m analyzing this as a public figure, he’s naming something which, in The Art of Fighting, is a very helpful way to lessen the power of what’s happening in the room.

Then he weaves himself into a longer lineage of other presidential candidates who have also been asked such questions. Hello, JFK, right? He says he, too, was asked, as the first Catholic president, whether he would be answering to the Vatican or to democracy.

And so there are certain moments. Then he calls upon the common hymnal of the Constitution to make his point. Healthy heat is good for democracy.

That’s a moment, I would argue, that’s helpful for all of us to take off the subtext and make it text, and ask, “What do we believe in as Americans?”

I’m always looking for these moments of healthy heat, because when we just say, “Oh, throw away the tension,” no, we shouldn’t do that. These are the conversations we should be having, but in a way that we’re skilled enough to actually listen and have the right fight.

Mina Kim: Yeah, have the right fight, ask the right questions. These are all ways to help determine, as you say, whether or not this is also a fight worth engaging in.

The thing that I think about, though, as you said, all too common, is that the discourse is really about sort of overpowering the other, even snuffing out the other party to some extent. You get the sense that they don’t even want to see each other, see each other coexist. Can you talk about how an existential conflict can make any kind of productive outcome almost impossible?

Priya Parker: It’s really dangerous. There’s a group in Seattle — I think they call themselves the Seattle Love Lab — and they’re able to predict with extraordinary accuracy, I think above 90 percent, which married couples will divorce and which will remain together. They watch married couples.

The number one ingredient or quality they look for, a very dangerous marker and a high predictor of divorce, is disdain. Disdain is toxicity for relationships.

If you look at our country as if it were, metaphorically, this national marriage, the ingredient of disdain that has entered public life over the last decade-plus is really dangerous.

And so, again, coming back to why I’m holding this question of how we fight with those we want to belong to, it’s because I think, if you’re anything like me, almost all of us have differences within the people we actually know, whether in our families or extended families.

So stop screaming at the internet with strangers and start actually engaging with, spending time with, and having fun with people in your actual communities and families who might be different from you. Not just to have fun, because it’s actually really, really important to democracy.

It goes back to my first book, The Art of Gathering. These two books are really in conversation with each other. One of the things I found fascinating as I studied and researched for The Art of Fighting was that some of the best communities, the communities best at conflict, also have a lot of fun. They have a lot of connection. It’s not like you fight over here and then you never have any fun over there. It’s actually deeply, deeply tied together. The places with a lot of heat also have a lot of warmth.

Mina Kim: I think one of the things that you’re getting at — we’re coming up on a break, so maybe we can dig into it more — is that one of the key things for a productive fight is for the parties to actually want to maintain a relationship with each other. I think you called it relational longing. What is that?

Priya Parker: Relational longing is the residual desire to still be in relationship and connection with the other person underneath the crap, right? Underneath whatever the thing might be on the surface, whether you’re arguing about the dishwasher, whether you’re arguing about the election, or whether you’re on a creative team and deeply disagreeing about the vision for a film, a TV show, or an app.

Underneath that, is there still a residual desire, a joy and an interest in working together and being in relationship?

This term actually comes from the conflict resolution facilitator Say Ternier, who’s one of the stars of The Art of Fighting. In this book, I spent time with people who hold heat well — conflict resolution facilitators, lawyers, people who study it, and groups that are part of it. Fundamentally, what she says to look for is whether there’s still that residual relational longing underneath the fight. If you can tap into it, then there’s a possibility for a way through.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Priya Parker about why fighting can be healthy, how not to be afraid of a fight, and also when a fight is worth having. Her new book is The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, and we’ll have more with Priya after the break. This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the value of fighting and how to have a constructive one. Priya Parker feels like those skills have atrophied in our culture and our country, and her new book, The Art of Fighting, is trying to step in and address that.

Listeners, when has conflict actually strengthened a relationship for you? Or do you try to avoid it? What prevents you from engaging in a fight? 866-733-6786 is the number to call. You can find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram on social media, and you can email forum@kqed.org.

Abby on Discord writes: “When dealing in a relationship with a person with a serious mental illness in a person’s family, it’s not always safe to step into healthy conflict. How can I address conflict safely in this situation? Or might it be best for my safety not to step into even a healthy conflict?”

What do you think about this for Abby, with regard to, as you’ve been saying before, so much of your book is also about trying to determine when to engage in conflict?

Priya Parker: That’s a beautiful question, and it absolutely has to do with discerning whether, by doing something or saying something, you can alter the situation.

In Chapter Two of The Art of Fighting, I go through whether or not something is worth facing, what type of fight it is, and then, in Chapter Three, whether or not something is worth facing. In asking these questions, and, by the way, again, it’s really about thinking about what I call healthy heat.

Whether it’s because of a specific situation around mental illness, or whether it’s in some cases of abuse or other situations, that may be unhealthy heat. In certain cases, as I write in the book, what you actually need are these other tools. What you may need is a professional interventionist. What you may need is professional help. In cases of abuse — I’m not saying in the mental illness part — what you may need is a restraining order.

Part of the invitation to become a more artful fighter is both expanding the set of tools we have to discern and then using what’s needed in each context.

Mina Kim: Because we do have an election coming up, I’m curious if you could share how you navigate political differences in your own family. You’ve been very open about having very strong political differences with your dad and how you practice what’s called strategic conflict avoidance.

Priya Parker: One of the essays I read as I researched this book that really stuck with me was by a Christian theologian and professor of religion called Joyce Ann Mercer. I think the essay was in the Yale Bulletin. It was called “How Christians Fight.”

She wrote about how she was part of a family — I mean, she is part of a family — that for decades had a lot of political differences. For decades, whenever they came together for Thanksgiving or Christmas or various family reunions, there was always some poking and teasing. They’d get into politics.

She wrote that after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, something changed. All of a sudden, the stakes felt so much higher. It got to the point where they realized that if they were going to behave the way they used to, they wouldn’t be able to gather anymore because the stakes felt so high.

She had to step back and ask, she said, “Why am I getting together with my family? What is their role in my life?”

What they decided to do was engage in what they called strategic conflict avoidance. So, again, not all avoidance is fear. Some avoidance is wisdom.

As I read her essay, I thought about my own life, my own relationship with my father. For me, I’ve engaged in political dialogue with him for 30 years. For many, many years, I would engage and engage and engage. It would be very, very difficult and painful, I think, on both sides.

At some point, I just realized, well, I’m not going to change him, and he’s not going to change me. Actually, this is destroying the relationship. What I care more about is being in connection with him.

My job as a facilitator, my profession, is to help people connect across difference without having to be the same, to help find meaningful connection despite obstacles.

I write about this a lot. I recently wrote about it in my Substack. It’s free; you can see it as the most recent article about how I find connection with my father.

One of the things I’ve started to do is ask what I call magical questions. I’m a parent. I have a nine- and an 11-year-old. I want them to have a relationship with him, but I don’t want us to get into — it’s not interesting to get into each other’s opinions. What’s interesting is his stories.

I was recently visiting him in Florida with my children, and we asked a question at dinner. I think I asked, “What is one thing your mother or father specifically did for you as a kid that made you feel really loved?”

There were three generations in the room. My stepsister had just made her famous Bolognese, and we had Marcona almonds on a cheese plate. It was already sort of a festive feeling.

There were three kids at the table, all under 12. They said, “Oh, well, are you all going to answer, too?” And I was like, “Yep, we’re going to answer, too.” “Are you going to answer as when you were kids?” “Yep, we’re going to answer when you were kids.”

My father, who’s aging and often finds it difficult to follow conversations because he’s hard of hearing, to my surprise, looked straight up with his big blue eyes and said, “Oh, I know. I have one. I’ll go.”

I was like, “What?”

He said, “When my dad taught me how to ride a bike.”

I said, “Oh, well, tell us about it.”

He said, “Well, we’d go down the sidewalk, and he’d push me and run.”

I said, me being the facilitator, and partly because my dad and my kids were there, “What made you feel loved?”

He said, “His patience.”

And it’s like, whoa. Then this other story came up that I’d never heard before. He said, “You know, actually, that same year, I was at school and I was really talkative. My teacher — in those days, people would hit kids with a ruler, like over their head. My teacher hit me over the head with a ruler.”

My kids’ eyes were wide open. He said, “And it was the kind of ruler that had one of those metal edges at the end of it. She hit my head so hard it struck blood. I was bleeding.”

My father was so upset, he marched right up to that school and gave that teacher a talking-to. She realized she was wrong, was so embarrassed, and apologized. Then she invited our family to her farm for brunch.

So he’s telling this story, and again, why would we argue about our politics? It’s not even interesting. And that’s true for most people. Our opinions are not that interesting, but our stories are.

In that moment, I found this way, by asking what I call a magical question — a question everyone in the group would be interested in answering and hearing each other’s answers — that also disrupted my own family narrative that we’re all conflict-averse.

It changed the only story that, in 50 years of marriage, Ruth and Lyle Parker never fought, and it expanded our own sense of what, in my case, Parkers do.

Mina Kim: Yeah. I’m hearing a couple of things in what you’re saying. One is that there are so many ways to build connection, even if you have to avoid a particular aspect of that relationship, even if that aspect of the relationship is something really important to you. But also something you noted earlier about the ability to separate perspective from identity, which feels like it’s also important to hear.

Priya Parker: Yes. And that collapse — there are studies. In The Art of Fighting, I try to look at everyday groups that are experiencing an existential reckoning.

One such group I follow is a group of girlfriends who’ve been friends for 30 years. They met in kindergarten. They’re now in their 30s and 40s, and they now have kindergartners.

This is a group that, like many groups across the country, experienced an internal reckoning in the summer of 2020. They hopped on the Zoom bandwagon when a lot of people were doing those Zoom happy hours. Do you remember that phase of the pandemic?

They got on this happy hour, and five of them had grown up in North Carolina. Five had gone to college outside North Carolina, and five had sort of stayed near home. They’d never been on Zoom before. They were always on a text thread, texting about things like how to scrape mold off doors or, as they became moms, how to suck the boogers out of a baby’s nose. “Are you going to use that thing?”

Anyway, they got onto Zoom, and within five minutes, as it was described to me later, it became very clear that they had to stop the Zoom. Some people were saying things like, “Oh, this pandemic is fake,” or, “It’s overblown.” Other people were shocked. Someone else said, “Oh, those dangerous” — I’m saying this in quotes — “those dangerous protests in those dangerous cities.” Half of the room had been to those protests, and, by the way, they were white women.

All of a sudden, they realized, whoa. All these questions started to arise. They got off the Zoom, but they were asking, “Why are we still friends? What are we to each other? Has this friendship taken its course? Do my friends need to believe what I believe in order to maintain an old friendship?”

I profile and follow this group of women in this book in part because they are us. They are not the only group that has experienced these fundamental questions as Americans.

Part of what I help them go through is realizing that, according to Pew polling, this has also happened more broadly. Before the 2016 election, our political identities and how important they were ranked around fifth or sixth in terms of our other identities. After the 2016 election, and over the last 10 years, the ranking of that political identity has increased, meaning it’s number one or number two.

There are studies now that show that people would rather marry somebody of a different race than somebody from the opposite political party. So, as Americans, our political identity, and the meaning we graft onto it, has changed because of what feels like the stakes for the country.

Mina Kim: Now, let me go to Brian in Marin next. Brian, go ahead. Join us.

Brian: Yeah, thank you. This is really fascinating. I’ve been really interested and enthralled with what some people call the bridging movement or the depolarization movement. These are groups like Braver Angels and BridgeUSA.

There’s an event this Sunday at San Francisco City Hall called the MAGA, DSA, and Everyone Else Mixer. These are groups that lean into the conflict, you could say — the political conflict and how it fractures relationships, families, and communities — but also into the nitty-gritty details of policy, bringing people from opposite sides together to do what the politicians don’t: have constructive debates.

There’s a lot of it based in conflict resolution skills and theories, and I’m sure you’re familiar with that. But I’m just curious to hear more about the leaning in, I guess, and the skills for that, when there’s, you know, the strategic avoidance you mentioned. As a nation, it feels like that’s kind of not an option, right? We have to somehow make the marriage work. Yeah, totally. Thank you. Yeah.

Priya Parker: I think what these groups are doing is really important. What I appreciate about what they’re doing is that they’re practicing, experimenting, and creating what I call collective conflict rituals to help hold our heat.

A group like Braver Angels — my understanding of one of their concepts is that, through the rituals, they have rules and are helping people build the muscles to actually get to the right fight.

One of their core concepts, as I understand it, is getting to what they call accurate disagreement. So often, we’re talking past each other. We’re often believing all sorts of things about each other. Part of the purpose of that ritual, again, not unlike the Abdul El-Sayed moment we were talking about earlier, is to get to the point where we can actually understand where our real disagreements are.

One of the facilitators I interviewed for The Art of Fighting is Prentis Hemphill. One of the things they say is, “We’re often having the wrong fight.”

I think groups like this are doing God’s work to put people in relationship with each other, in warmth, but also to practice healthy heat through ritual.

I kind of joke, but it’s not really a joke, that both my first book, The Art of Gathering, and this book, The Art of Fighting, are not self-help books. They’re group-help books. We have so many apps, tools, and books to help the individual, but we actually have fewer tools to help us as groups.

I want to create a new bookshelf in the library, a bookshelf called group-help books. My books are not the only ones that should go on that shelf, but it’s about where and how we create collective rituals.

Part of The Art of Fighting is that I look at communities, including traditional communities that had collective conflict mechanisms, collective rituals to help them deal with internal conflict. I look at various tribes, the Minyanka people in West Africa, Hawaiian culture, and the Vikings.

The Vikings — I didn’t know this before I researched for this book — were one of the first groups in Northern Europe that had to figure out how to keep a community connected that wasn’t kin, that wasn’t blood-related.

They developed all of these sophisticated internal conflict resolution mechanisms. One of them was called an Althing. Apparently, on Mondays, the soldiers would come together. As I understand it, the Vikings were organized into clusters of a hundred soldiers and their families because that’s what could fit on a warship.

Again, I’m looking at their internal mechanisms. Externally, they were engaged in a lot of unhealthy heat. Internally, they would engage in these rituals called Althings, where on Monday nights they would have these, for lack of a better word, clearing ceremonies. They would come together, and whatever you needed to get off your chest with another soldier, this was the place to do it — to put it out there, to aerate it.

And there were only two rules: No spitting. No killing.

Mina Kim: All right. That will help resolve a conflict. Let me remind listeners you’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re almost at the end of the hour, just letting you know. Priya, it has flown by so far.

Janet writes: “There is an intimacy involved in fighting and conflict. As one who has problems with intimacy, it has always been difficult to confront or fight with someone. There’s a vulnerability involved that my ego has a hard time accessing. It’s much easier when there’s that anger energy and the power that comes from that strong emotion, but it’s still scary.”

I’m just wondering, in the last minute or two, because I also found this part really illuminating, about recognizing and being okay with the physical responses you might have as you’re getting ready to engage in conflict, especially if you’re conflict-averse. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

Priya Parker: I would say to Janet, like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You are absolutely right. Conflict is intimate, right? It is the willingness to say, “You affect me.” My feelings are hurt, or I’m mad. And that can be pretty terrifying.

It is for me, right to this day, when I’m a professional facilitator. To this day, when heat arises in my own relationships or in my work, my palms get sweaty, my tongue gets dry, and my heart is pounding out of my chest.

I’ve learned how to hold it and to realize, one, I’m not going to die. But there are actually physical practices. One of my favorite parts of the book is an interlude called “Preparing the Body for a Fight.” In it — and you can get it wherever you get books, or you can go to the library — I put out my own personal checklist of what I do to prepare my body for a fight, as well as Prentis Hemphill’s checklist as a facilitator.

Prentis is a somatic coach and facilitator. They say every conflict, all conflict, is physical, just not in the way we think. It’s not fisticuffs, right? It’s physical within us. Many of us don’t even realize — we’re not aware of our own physicality — until conflict arises.

Often, our physical reactions are also replaying old conflicts that the current situation might be triggering for us. Mastering fighting is also beginning to realize how and where we practice the tools so that we can hold heat within our own bodies.

Mina Kim: Priya Parker, the book is The Art of Fighting. Thank you so much for talking with us.

Priya Parker: Thank you for having me. What a great conversation. I so appreciate it.

Mina Kim: I appreciate it, too. I also appreciate Janelle Akoili for producing this segment, and, as always, our listeners. You’ve been listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Airdate: Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 9 am

As a kid, Melissa King rushed home from school to grab her meat cleaver and cook dinner for her family. In her new memoir, “The Girl Who Became King,” the Top Chef winner traces her path from her immigrant parents’ expectations to a career in Michelin kitchens. “I didn’t think my life was interesting,” she notes, but in talking with fans and writing this book, King started “owning who I am and being proud of all of those things that I used to tuck away and hide about being gay and even being Asian in America.”

Guest:

• Melissa King, chef and author “The Girl Who Became King: Recipes from My California Chinese Kitchen”, winner of top chef all-stars L.A., James Beard-award winning chef

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Restaurant work is hard — hard on the body, hard on the mind. It’s fun, but to hear Melissa King tell it in her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King, it’s almost like an addiction, with the thrills and camaraderie and generosity of the kitchen, yo-yoing with the partying and exhaustion and precarity. But of course, there are harder things than any job, like figuring out who you are in the context of a complex immigrant family. Oh, and you happen to be gay, also. That really is the glory of this memoir, The Girl Who Became King. We all end up rooting for Melissa King to figure it out, to make it as a chef, to come out, to find love, to find success — and then she does it. Top Chef winner Melissa King joins us here this morning. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa King: Hello, hello. Good morning.

Alexis Madrigal: First things first, for people out there: I understand my daughter was getting you caught up on the Valkyries’ championship run here.

Melissa King: I’ve been busy on book tour.

Alexis Madrigal: Yes, that’s true. Okay, so the game’s tipping off in about 24 minutes. Don’t worry, everyone, we’ll bring you some score updates in the back half of the show. At least two people in here will be excited when the Valkyries go on to win this game. Let’s go!

Okay, back to the book. You didn’t necessarily grow up in a foodie household. You grew up in Southern California, and your parents were both engineers. What was their relationship to food, and when did you know that yours might be a little different?

Melissa King: I mean, my parents bonded over food. They loved going out to eat. They would drive out to, like, Redondo Beach to get crab and try to find all the best Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles, but they didn’t cook very well. I wouldn’t say that they were the best cooks in the world, but someone kind of had to step up and do it, so that became me. I was cooking since I was five and just kind of helping to put food on the table for the family.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, there’s this great scene in the book where you would call your mom at work as an aerospace engineer, and then she would kind of walk you through dinner prep.

Melissa King: Yeah, I was Mommy’s little sous chef. You know, both my parents were engineers. They’d be gone all day and have to drive, you know, an hour or two hours through LA traffic. Someone kind of had to wash the vegetables, get the rice started, and get the bone broth started, and that became me.

Alexis Madrigal: What was your favorite thing to make as a little baby chef?

Melissa King: Oh, little me? Bone broth, really. And even today, if people ask me, like, “What’s your favorite thing to cook?” — which is every chef’s least favorite question.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, yeah. I have it right here.

Melissa King: But I will say that it’s oftentimes soups and sauces. What is it about bone broth? There’s something about it where it’s such a cozy, nurturing dish, and it takes time to evolve the flavors and deepen the flavors. So I love the process. I love the patience of it. And, yeah, I don’t know, something about it is healing.

Alexis Madrigal: What’s your version, right? Because some people go very, very basic, and it’s just an onion in there and some bones. What do you do? What’s the spin?

Melissa King: Oh, when I was a kid, it was always chicken or pork bones. And then we would put a little ginseng or goji berries. I actually have this recipe in Cook Like a King, my cookbook, which came out last year. It’s actually with a black chicken. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it has black chicken and ginseng. It’s something that my grandmother used to make when we were sick. In general, it’s a very healing Cantonese bone broth, an herbal bone broth.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, tell us what black chicken is for people who don’t know.

Melissa King: Yeah, I’m surprised this made the cookbook. I’m actually really proud that it made the book. It’s called a silky chicken, and it’s very high in collagen, so it’s great for your skin. People say it has healing properties. When you make it, the broth itself is like Jell-O. It just really holds a lot of gelatin and collagen in there. It’s really good for you.

Alexis Madrigal: So good. So how did you evolve along this path, right? I mean, people don’t just go from being someone who likes to cook for their family to being a Top Chef. What are the intermediate steps? There’s some steps in there. What did you do? How did you develop it?

Melissa King: Yeah, well, I had quite traditional parents who grew up in a very traditional Shanghainese and Cantonese household. The last thing they wanted me to be was a chef. They were like, “No way. You need to go to a real school, you need to go to real college, get a real job.”

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Melissa King: Which I did. I took those steps. I went to UC Irvine and got a degree in cognitive science.

Alexis Madrigal: [Laughs.]

Melissa King: But I had to kind of check those boxes before I really was allowed to pursue the dream. But I knew at the age of five that I wanted to be a chef.

Alexis Madrigal: What was the first kitchen you got to cook in?

Melissa King: The very first kitchen was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Alexis Madrigal: Kind of a good gig for your first one.

Melissa King: Yeah, yeah. I was a pastry assistant, and I knew nothing about baking. I’m not much of a baker, but I had to get my foot through the door. I just knew that I wanted to give it a go, and at that place, I fell in love with cooking.

Alexis Madrigal: What was the work like? I love the descriptions of the work in the kitchen that you provided.

Melissa King: Yeah, I mean, long hours, especially if you’re baking. You’re up at, like, four in the morning. First of all, the traffic alone was horrible. It was like two hours each way in LA traffic, up the 10 freeway. And, yeah, grueling hours. Sometimes I did 12-hour days, making minimum wage. Most of my career was 12- to 16-hour days.

Alexis Madrigal: And you’re doing the same thing, the same set of things over and over, right? You had a station at some of the places you were working. It seems like, when you’re a home cook — I consider myself a somewhat serious home cook — you’re not doing the same thing a hundred times. You’re doing it one time. One time.

Melissa King: Yeah, which is what Top Chef is like. You do a dish one time, but in a professional setting, the cooking is all repetition. It’s muscle memory. It’s continuing to hone that craft over and over. You’re literally searing a piece of steak every day, like hundreds of them, and doing it over and over until it’s perfected.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, did you hate that part of it, or did you love that part? I couldn’t tell from your description.

Melissa King: There’s a part of me that — it’s a love-hate for sure. But I do think you have to be a little crazy to join this industry, and I think it breeds perfectionists.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. What was your favorite thing to have to make a hundred times?

Melissa King: Good question. I mean, sauce. Yeah, I could do that. I was a saucier for Dominique Crenn here at a restaurant called Luce in San Francisco, and I was doing that every day. I was roasting pounds and pounds of bones and nursing them down into this beautiful, pristine brown French sauce. I could do that all day.

Alexis Madrigal: An associate in a kitchen, as you describe it, is kind of like the point guard of the back of the house there. How come?

Melissa King: You’re the backbone. You know, I think meat takes the longest to cook in a kitchen. And when you’re the saucier, you’re also cooking the steaks and the racks of lamb. You’re cooking all the proteins, so everyone in the kitchen follows your lead. And so you are the —

Alexis Madrigal: What does it mean when you’re following someone’s lead? Would you call out, like, “I’m doing this,” and they’d be like, “Okay, I’m gonna do X, Y, and Z because you just did A”?

Melissa King: Yeah. In restaurants, it’s like an orchestra and a symphony of people. When you’re the lead or the sous chef or the one in charge, everyone’s following your dish because all the dishes have to come up to the window in the pass at the same time. So you have to orchestrate the timing of the pasta and the fish and the salad so that things get out hot at the right time and nothing’s sitting cold. It’s really a very orchestrated experience.

Alexis Madrigal: It’s also, from your description, quite hierarchical as well. There’s the cold line, which is sort of the bottom of the heap.

Melissa King: The bottom of the chain, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: And then you move up to the hot line. So what are those different things? What’s a cold line? What’s a hot line?

Melissa King: Oh, I mean, even before the cold line, there’s the commis, which is like the prep cook. You’re just peeling shallots all day, peeling garlic all day. Brunoise is a very, very small, fine dice, and you’re finely dicing buckets of shallots for hours until they’re perfect. If they’re not perfect, they get chucked in the trash and you have to do it again. But this was the French Michelin-kitchen way back in, like, the early 2000s. Now, I mean, I still think it’s quite similar. There’s still that brigade, and you kind of have to work your way up.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay, so you’ve been the commis, then you move up to the cold line.

Melissa King: Yeah, garde manger, which is your cold line. You get to make the salads, and it’s exciting. You’re like, “Yeah, I get to make the salad!” Then you move on to the hot line, and that’s where it gets interesting because you get to actually use fire and step behind where the stove is. Then you move through, and you become a vegetable cook and a fish cook, and then a meat cook. There were some other steps in between, depending on the kitchen.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, are you glad you learned to cook that way? Because there are other routes now, right? People can just become an Instagram sensation making whatever. Apparently. Are you glad you went through that, or is it a kind of thing like doctors saying, “I didn’t really need to be a resident like that. That was horrible”?

Melissa King: I’m old-school. I’m old-school. I think it really trained me and molded me into who I am today. I believe in building the foundation first and nurturing the basic skills and foundation, getting those foundational skills set before you move on to the next thing. So I’m old-school in that sense.

Alexis Madrigal: On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like you want to run a restaurant on a day-to-day basis.

Melissa King: I mean, do you want to run a restaurant on a day-to-day basis? I mean, kind of. Yeah?

Alexis Madrigal: Is it just — how come? Just because it’s —

Melissa King: I mean, it’s, first of all, a huge financial risk factor, especially in San Francisco. It’s a very, very expensive market to step into. The financial model, as we know from the pandemic, showed its vulnerability. It’s a very, very tough industry to survive in. And I think, as you said earlier, there are many ways to be a chef. I kind of discovered that along the way through my journey, and you kind of read that through the book. It’s discovering that there isn’t just one way. There are many ways that I can touch people’s lives through food.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, it’s amazing that now, like, all of our Bay Area chefs — Samin, Bryant Terry, Tanya Holland — nobody has restaurants. They just do other stuff.

We’re talking with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King. She’s also the author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Cook Like a King. Of course, we want to hear from you. Were you the family cook as a kid? What were your go-to recipes? Maybe you’ve come up in the restaurant scene. How do you think it works for people? Call us at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org, or you can find us on social media. We’re @KQEDForum everywhere. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King. We’re talking about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King. Love to hear from you. If you’re a fan of Top Chef, maybe you just want to ask Melissa King a question about it. Sorry, we’re not going to answer anything about Padma Lakshmi. Sorry, too late. Call us at 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org and find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, Discord, or KQED Forum.

I want to talk about another part of your journey, too. Some of this book is about coming up in kitchens and learning how to be a chef. The other part is learning how to be yourself and coming out as a lesbian. It’s so different for kids now, thanks to icons like yourself. But what was it like for you? I mean, was this easy? Were your parents just totally chill about it, as a complex immigrant family, or not?

Melissa King: I wish it was easy. No, it was quite challenging for me because, like I said earlier, I came from a very traditional Chinese family that held a lot of expectations about who you’re supposed to be. I think anyone from any culture kind of feels that and understands the pressure of wanting to please your family. And I think, for a long time, I didn’t want to disappoint them. I kind of put their happiness first. I did that for many years.

I also went to an all-Christian school, and I think a part of me — there was that religious aspect that kind of kept me in the closet a bit. But I always had crushes on women. Looking back at it all, I had crushes as a kid on, like, every best girlfriend that I had. But it took some time. I didn’t really come out until, I think, my mid-twenties. And even then, I was still only, like, closeted. I was half closeted and half not. I was living this dual life on the East Coast, being out, and then on the West Coast, being closeted when I came back home to see my family. So, yeah, I think it took a while.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I mean, you say in the book, too, that when you’re coming out to your mom, it’s not like it just happened once. You did have to continue to come out. As you’re describing it, it was more of a slow fade into being out rather than just one-and-done.

Melissa King: And I think any queer person understands that we don’t just come out once. We come out constantly. When you meet a new friend, when you start a new job, you have to constantly come out and tell people about your partner or about your life. But in the straight world, they don’t do that. There’s no explanation there. So we’re constantly coming out, and it’s something that, as a queer person, we face that sort of responsibility. Yeah, I mean —

Alexis Madrigal: How important do you think San Francisco was in this journey for you? You started to come out on the East Coast, but then you came to work in restaurants here in San Francisco. Did it feel like a welcoming place for you?

Melissa King: Absolutely. San Francisco has my heart. It is my home. I grew up in LA, but I try not to tell too many people that. San Francisco, I moved here in my early twenties, and I didn’t really have any queer friends the first year. There was a part of me that was just aching for that. I remember discovering the Castro and discovering the whole queer community and having my first queer friend. That’s all kind of laid out in the book, but there was such an open-arms experience with the community here. And my first Pride was incredible.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, yeah. How did it go?

Melissa King: I mean, it’s everything you — it felt like a little fairy tale. It was everything I wanted it to be. It felt like this big hug that I needed to give my younger self. It was coming from all the people around me, whether gay or straight. I just feel like all of San Francisco shuts down for Pride, and it’s the most amazing holiday. It’s like Christmas.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because the familial context you had wasn’t just a general immigrant background, wanting to please the family. You also had a very specific intergenerational story going on in your family, particularly on your father’s side.

Melissa King: Yeah, initially, when I was writing the book, I was debating how much of my extended family I wanted to put in there, how much of their stories. I had to really fight to keep stories of my parents and my grandparents, and it felt like that was important to tell because —

Alexis Madrigal: I thought it was really interesting. Why would they want to take that out?

Melissa King: Right? To me, it was just very interesting, and in a way, it showcases who I am. You kind of have to understand and look back and go through that examination of generational trauma to really understand the person I’ve become today. I kind of joke that the book is part The Bear. You have the toxic kitchen stories, and then it’s also part The Joy Luck Club. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched that film or read the book, but it’s one of my favorite movies and books. It showcases the generational gaps that we see within our families, especially being immigrants. So, yeah, I think it’s so much fun. It’s a really fun read.

Alexis Madrigal: But you also had — and I love that you included this, too — this series of families who liked to play mahjong together and got together. Tell us a little bit about what that was like, because I think you called it MJC.

Melissa King: MJC. It’s the Mahjong Crew. Every weekend, my parents would play mahjong with the same families. Mahjong is a game of four, so there were the same four families gathering together every Saturday, sometimes on Sundays, playing for 12 to 16 hours straight. Minimal bathroom breaks. It was just full-on mahjong all day.

Everyone had children, so all the kids became my built-in playmates, siblings, and cousins. To them, they’re my first chosen family. They were the chosen family before even my queer chosen family that I discovered later in San Francisco.

Alexis Madrigal: I love those stories, though, too. It’s a delight to imagine you all because, at the time, you’re going to this Christian school. You’re feeling pretty alienated from the broader culture. There’s the kind of stinky-lunch story at school. But then, in your home life, complex as it was, you had this amazing set of friends and chosen family.

Melissa King: Yeah, I think as a Chinese American, I oftentimes felt caught between worlds. At home, with my Chinese family, I felt like I wasn’t Chinese enough and was too American. But at school, I was too Chinese, and I was made fun of for some of the dishes I would bring to school and the stinky lunchbox, as you said.

Throughout my life, I kind of had this divide. Even in my cooking, you see that a lot. You see me cooking more French. At the time, I was in a lot of Michelin-starred French and Italian kitchens, so my cooking was quite Eurocentric for most of my career. I kept Chinese foods and the things that I grew up eating very much as, “These are just things we eat at home.” I didn’t really meld the two until you see me lean in a bit more to my identity and discover who I really am, and really be proud of that.

You see that progression on Top Chef, too, when you’re watching Top Chef: Boston, Season 12, my first time going on that show, and then the evolution of who you see five or six years later on All-Stars. It’s a completely different cooking style and a different person that’s —

Alexis Madrigal: Fully arrived as a —

Melissa King: Mm-hmm.

Alexis Madrigal: Coherent person.

Melissa King: Mm, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s go to Helena in Fremont. Welcome.

Helena: Hi, good morning, everyone. This is Helena. Thank you very much for this topic today. I just want to share a little bit of a different opinion. I’m Chinese myself. I’m a first-generation immigrant, and my daughter is a Chinese girl. She’s ABC, born here and raised here.

From the first-generation perspective, I agree with the speaker that we think about how to make a living first. Most of the time, Chinese people want to go with an occupation that can really help us survive and set up the foundation, especially on the financial side, for the second generation.

But now, with my daughter, you know, we’re just a regular middle-class family. When my daughter wants to choose what she wants to do, my husband and I fully support her rather than saying, “Okay, this is a more stable job or will give you a decent income.” We ask her, “What do you want to do? What is your passion?” In that way, I think that’s the best fit for her because we really don’t want her to repeat what we needed to do as a first generation, which was to settle and then survive. She has more choices.

Actually, in her first year in college, she got a job in a restaurant as a waitress. She’d never done that before, made so many mistakes, and learned so many lessons. There was so much sweat and tears, but you know what? That’s the best experience she had. She told me stories about how to handle customers, how to work with the chef, how many times she got blamed by the customer or the chef, and what to do. With all the tears on her face, somebody would say, “Where’s my green tea?” She learned so much. She also had to cover one meal for over $160 herself because the payment didn’t actually go through from the customer and she didn’t double-check. That’s a lesson she learned in real life. She paid for it. I’m sure she’ll never make that mistake again.

Alexis Madrigal: Hey, Helena, thanks so much for that perspective.

Melissa King: Yeah, I love that. I think, Helena, you’re a great mother. You’re great parents. I think that perspective of allowing your child to be themselves and do what makes them happy is so important.

Like I said earlier, I always put my family first, and I oftentimes listened to what my parents told me I should be doing. I shouldn’t have done that. There was a point when I kind of resisted that, and I realized I had to follow my heart and follow what made me happy. Happiness always became my North Star throughout this book. You see me following the things that brought me joy.

As Helena was saying, you have to let your children be who they are. They know best what makes them happy, and you have to trust them. You have to trust that. Thank you for sharing that.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King. She’s also the author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Cook Like a King. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re a professional cook out there listening, how do you think you came to your particular cooking style? How does your background inform that? We’d love to hear that as well. Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org or find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord.

Also, a quick update, everyone: the game has not quite started, if you were wondering. Stay tuned here. We’ll give you updates, I promise.

One of the things I think is so interesting is that, for our generation — we’re about the same age — there was still stigma, I think, about non-Eurocentric foods being considered elevated. I’m using air quotes there for everybody. But now, here in San Francisco, you have all these really high-end Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. You have all these television shows filled with all kinds of food. It’s very cool to know about other cultures’ food and things. How different do you think this incoming generation of chefs is? I’m sure you meet some of them.

Melissa King: Yeah, I think it’s amazing what’s happening right now. In my younger years, I never saw food like this. It was so segregated and separate. I think it’s beautiful to see a lot of these restaurants getting the recognition they deserve and the modernization of different cultures, and chefs wanting to go back to their roots and honor their heritage. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

I do think we live in San Francisco, I grew up in LA, and I also lived in New York. These cities have amazing things happening. But I’ve been to other parts of the country, and we still have a lot to catch up on. I just came back from Wisconsin, and they were asking me what chili crisp was. I was kind of surprised, and I’m grateful to be in a position to teach people about this. But I would love to see more of it spread across the country, to where chili crisp, black vinegar, and all those ingredients are just part of your daily vocabulary.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, totally. Esther writes in to say, “What would you want to tell Asian American parents, or just immigrant parents, right now who are trying to raise their children? I feel like I see similar patterns as our parents’ generation.”

Melissa King: Ooh, I mean, like we said earlier, let them be who they are. They’re going to tell you. They know who they are at the end of the day. I think as a parent, you want the best for your children, and that’s what my parents wanted. That’s why they were quite strict: “No, you can’t be a chef. You need to be a doctor and be an attorney.” But that wasn’t what made me happy.

I think you have to listen to your children. Obviously, you also want to steer them. For me, looking back, I’m grateful that I went to college. I’m thankful that I followed those steps my parents tried to set me up for. Therefore, I had a little bit of a backup in case cooking fell through. I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t continued on that route, but I’m grateful to have at least that bachelor’s degree behind me, just in case.

So I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I’m not a parent myself, but I do think there’s some balance there that you have to give and take a little.

Alexis Madrigal: Take a little bit with your children. Yeah, I’m going to take this listener question and spin it into a follow-up. This listener writes, “Given how regimented and organized a professional kitchen can be, why are they always depicted as abusive places, too? I would have thought that if everyone knows what they’re doing, it could and should be a calm place to work.”

At one point early in your cooking career, you really badly burned your hand. Things go wrong in kitchens constantly.

Melissa King: Constantly, every day. I don’t think people see that side of things behind the curtain. That’s why I wrote the book the way I did. I want you to take a little peek behind what goes on. It may look so perfect and pristine from the guest’s experience, and that’s what we want you to feel. We don’t want you to walk into a restaurant and feel stressed out. We want you to feel calm and be able to enjoy your anniversary or your birthday and have a beautiful time.

But behind the door, it is chaos. In a way, it’s organized chaos, but you’re dealing with fire, knives, and a lot of stress. It’s a very high-stress career. Food needs to be on the table at a certain time, and everything needs to be orchestrated and hot. It can’t be cold by the time it arrives at the diner. There’s also a lot of pressure from the criticism you may get from a diner. You look at Yelp and see the things people can say, like, “This steak is overcooked” or “over-salted.” People can be quite critical, and I think that pressure sits on our shoulders daily as we try to offer the most perfect experience for the guests.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King. She’s also the author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Cook Like a King. And of course, we want to hear from you. Maybe you’re the child of immigrants. What traditions did you feel your family wanted to carry on in the kitchen? Or maybe you just want to ask Melissa King what it’s like to be on Top Chef. That’s in the book. Call us at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Bluesky, Instagram, Discord, or KQED Forum. We’ll be back with more with Melissa King right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King. We’re talking about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King, and the James Beard Award-winning cookbook that came out last year, Cook Like a King. Good thing you have this last name — it makes the branding very consistent.

Of course, we’re taking your questions for Melissa King, as well as hearing about the culinary traditions your family has wanted to hang on to in the kitchen. Call us at 866-733-6786 or email forum@kqed.org.

A listener writes in to ask: Does Melissa think there are any accurate depictions of kitchens on TV or in film? Of course, what comes to mind for most people would be The Bear. What do you think?

Melissa King: The Bear. I would say The Bear is the most accurate interpretation of a real-life kitchen, which is why I can’t watch it. It’s quite triggering. Yeah, it’s too real. It’s down to every detail, from drinking water in little deli cups to the way their aprons hang on their necks. Every detail is so, so accurate.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, yeah. I talked to Matty Matheson about that at one point because they brought him in as a consultant to make it realistic.

Melissa King: He nailed it. Yeah, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: I can’t watch it either. It is so stressful. I’m like, “Why would I watch this? Why would I intentionally —”

Melissa King: Imagine working in that every day. Yeah, so now do you want to open a restaurant?

Alexis Madrigal: You know, it’s funny. You have these different descriptions of working in different restaurants, and some of them seem terrible, but others seem quite — I’ll just, this is you writing here. Maybe I won’t actually read it. I’m not sure if there’s a swear word in here. You’re working at this Italian restaurant in San Francisco, and you describe being physically broken. But there’s also this camaraderie, the team aspect. You’re kind of —

Melissa King: It’s called trauma bonding.

Alexis Madrigal: We do live radio. We know all about it, and it’s fun.

Melissa King: No, but it is. You spend more time at a restaurant than you do with your own family because you’re there 16 hours a day. You’re working seven days a week. You don’t even have a day off — maybe one day off a month. It’s grueling. But you spend so much time together that you become family, whether you want to or not.

Alexis Madrigal: And there’s also, in some restaurants at least, that tradition of the family meal, where people get together.

Melissa King: That’s my favorite part.

Alexis Madrigal: I was about to say, that seems like the best part. What was your favorite thing to make for it when you had to do it?

Melissa King: I love making family meal. That became my thing, and people would call me Mama Mel because I wanted to feed everyone. I couldn’t stand that none of us were taking time out of our day to even eat lunch or dinner. We would skip bathroom breaks. We would just be grinding and working so hard, trying to put food on the table for other people.

I was like, “I have to feed my people,” whether it’s 15 minutes out of your day to just sit down or even just stand and eat. I would take whatever scraps I had left over. I was a butcher for a few years, so I often had fish collars that I’d throw on the grill or trim that I’d make into a cioppino. There’s a lemongrass cioppino in Cook Like a King, my cookbook, and that was one of my favorite staff-meal dishes.

But really, I think that’s the most creative time of the day, when you get to take whatever you can find and throw together a beautiful meal for your people. Oh, I love that. So it was fun.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I guess I didn’t really think about that until this book. If you’re searing 65 ribeyes a night and that’s your job, being able to make a fun meal — just make whatever you want, not just have something to eat for a family meal —

Melissa King: Exactly. I think as a chef, the biggest test is whether you can take nothing and turn it into something. That is the gift of a lot of chefs. It’s the gift of butchers. Butchers have so much trim, and they make sausage with the trim. They’re able to turn nothing into something, and I think that was the challenge of staff meal.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in Jay in San Francisco. Welcome, Jay.

Jay: Hi, good morning. Can you hear me okay?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, sure can. Go ahead.

Jay: Great. Good morning to you. I had a really nice meal at Dominique Crenn’s restaurant, Atelier Crenn, and I first moved here right after 9/11. I was going to change careers and teach the blind independent living skills. That was interesting and fun, working in a state agency.

I wanted to ask you: My first job in the kitchen was in an all-Chinese kitchen in the 1970s. I was a fry cook, making egg rolls and wontons. I did a staff meal with a whole chicken cooked in kosher salt, a little bit of peanut oil and ginger and green onion, and some vegetables and rice. It was an amazing meal. I worked in a French restaurant and did the same thing with a whole turbot cooked in kosher salt.

Did you see cross-cultural experiences like that in your professional experience?

Melissa King: For staff meal? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s the beauty of the family of the kitchen: you get to meet people from all walks of life. Some people came from prisons; some people came from everywhere. You meet a lot of interesting characters, but you also get to eat some of their incredible dishes that they grew up with and that they throw together for staff meal.

I trained in a Japanese restaurant, and every day there was a different sort of cozy Japanese stew I’d never seen. They just don’t sell them in Japanese restaurants, but it’s something you make at home. I used to do that myself. I would present soy-sauce chicken wings or something my mom made when we were kids and throw that together for my people at work.

I think a kitchen is a beautiful space because there’s such a diverse array of people. Yeah, yeah, Jay. How long did you cook for?

Jay: Thirty-eight years.

Melissa King: Thirty-eight years? Are you still in it?

Jay: Yeah, I just retired in April from the city and county of San Francisco, at SF General. Twenty-seven miles a day. When I worked with David Burke at the Park Avenue Café for Sunday brunch, we did a Chinese-style dim sum brunch, and all the cooks and all the stations just put up whatever they wanted, like five or six different little two- or three-bite items. I loved that. It gave the cooks an opportunity to do something besides just making staff meals, to showcase their skill set. I love that.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, thanks so much, Jay.

Melissa King: I love that.

Alexis Madrigal: Here’s a really good question for you. Listener Leland writes, “I’m a Chinese American chef born and raised in New York City. Post-COVID, I went through a phase in my cooking to, quote, ‘elevate Chinese cuisine.’ But more recently, I asked myself, ‘Wait, who am I trying to do this for? What am I trying to do? Why am I trying to do this? I don’t even really like the food I was creating. I was essentially just making food to cater to a white audience.’

“I realized that my motivation was rooted in a yearning for Chinese people, culture, and tradition to be on the same level as any other in America. I’ve decided that my motivation is misplaced, and I don’t want to cook with this approach any longer.” What do you think, Melissa?

Melissa King: So good. I love that you’re bringing this up because it’s true. I do think that, as a chef, it’s our duty to tell our story on a plate, but we want to tell the right story. I think it can veer to a point where it starts to become catered toward an audience we don’t even recognize, or they don’t recognize our food.

I think there’s a sense of restraint and balance that needs to be thought through because you can — I’m always like, “Why reinvent the wheel too much?” For instance, we have Cantonese barbecue, char siu, and dim sum, and all these incredible dishes from my childhood. These were so good on their own. Why do I want to mess with this at all, to any degree?

You have to do it with balance. And I think for you, if it’s not feeling right, you know best. Follow your gut and bring it back to those roots, back to just the way Grandma used to make it.

A lot of the recipes in Cook Like a King are literally recipes straight from my grandma, my mom, and even my dad, and I didn’t change them. I wanted to keep those childhood dishes true to what they were. Then there are some that come from the creative parts of my mind, where the artist side of me is like, “Okay, I want to make a Hong Kong milk tea tiramisu, and I want to switch it up a little.”

But I think there needs to be balance and restraint. Otherwise, it becomes something so unrecognizable if you take it too far.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one of the things I thought about San Francisco specifically, within the area, is that it’s maybe one of the great Asian diasporic cities. The intra-Asian cultural exchange has become its own kind of sub-circuit, using Vietnamese flavors and Thai flavors, and Cantonese versus Hunan versus Sichuan. There’s this incredible mixing of Asian cultures here that feels pretty special and kind of different from other places.

Melissa King: Yeah, definitely. Like a kind of —

Alexis Madrigal: Like a kind of native San Francisco thing would be that.

Melissa King: Yeah, yeah. I see that here. I think that’s the beauty of Californian cuisine. It is this sort of globalized thing. It takes inspiration from many different cultures, and it’s kind of its own beast.

Alexis Madrigal: Well, but also, I was just thinking, if you’re drawing on Vietnamese cuisine, you’re also sort of smuggling in some French technique at times. Do you feel differently about that?

Melissa King: Everyone’s just copying each other.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, right, yeah, yeah! I mean, do you feel differently about, say, extending toward Vietnamese cooking versus extending toward French cooking?

Melissa King: For me, yeah. I always believe that if you’re going to attempt someone else’s cuisine, you better study it. You better have traveled there. You better have learned as much as you can about that culture before you even attempt to recreate it, put it on a menu, and put your name on it.

You really have to study the history and understand the heart of that food and that cuisine, or else you do it a disservice. For me, I’m always thinking, whatever I present, I want to make sure a grandma from that culture can eat it and say, “Oh, this is bomb.” But if she’s like, “Oh, what is this? You messed it up,” then I’ve probably done something wrong.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s talk a little bit about Top Chef, because in this book, Top Chef is sort of the life changer. It’s a catalyst for a massive change in your life. How should we think about these reality shows that involve chefs? As you describe it and go into the backstage of it, it seems sort of miserable, sort of exploitative.

Melissa King: It is.

Alexis Madrigal: On the other hand, man, you hit the jackpot out of it, and you have a totally different life on the other side. How have you made sense of that?

Melissa King: I think for me — just to go back for everybody listening — I was an excruciatingly shy person, very much an introvert all the way up until my thirties. Then I did my first Top Chef, and that threw me into this whole other world of public speaking and cameras and having to really own who I am. I think you see a different person transform into someone who becomes so much more confident in themselves.

But I credit Top Chef as being that catalyst because it was the one thing I did in my life where I had to take a huge chance and risk, and I was so terrified. I was like, “I don’t want to do this show. I don’t want to be on TV. I want to just hide behind a kitchen door forever. Leave me alone.”

Alexis Madrigal: Mm-hmm.

Melissa King: And I go and do this thing, and it becomes kind of a heart-opener. Like you said, it is stressful. It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done in my life, twice now. I don’t recommend anybody going and doing a cooking competition on national television. The pressure is very high.

But at the end of the day, I guess I didn’t realize it was also a TV show. To me, I went in thinking, “I’m just going to do my best. I’m going to cook, and I’m going to showcase my food.”

Alexis Madrigal: And your family’s like, “Get on Instagram!”

Melissa King: And then, yeah, everyone’s like, “Okay, we’ve got to figure out what’s next with all this.” But, as you see, a viewer watches 45 minutes plus commercial time. In real life, one episode takes two to three days to film.

Alexis Madrigal: Mm-hmm.

Melissa King: So there’s so much missing. A lot of stuff is edited out from a viewer’s perspective. But for us, that was real life. That was something I lived. There’s much more that I wanted people to know about what happens behind the kitchen door, or behind that door. You’re going to learn about that through the book. It’s a lot of fun stuff. Let’s talk about —

Alexis Madrigal: San Francisco’s current food scene. We want some recommendations. Maybe we’ll go high-low: a high-end spot and a more affordable place for people.

Melissa King: Okay. Gosh, I’ve been — what’s the word? I can’t be classic?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.

Melissa King: I am a classic person. I always eat at the same spots. I’ve gotten to that age in my life where I just want to eat — I just want routine when I come home from traveling.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay, okay. What are they? What are the spots?

Melissa King: I love Anchor Bar in the Castro. Classic cioppino. Get the chowder. I get the Dungeness crab Caesar salad with a little side of avocado. Just a great little date-night spot. Another one is Rintaro.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, Rintaro, yeah. We’ve had Sylvan on here, too.

Melissa King: Sylvan’s great, the whole crew there. You can tell people genuinely love working for Sylvan, and it’s just a beautiful restaurant experience.

Alexis Madrigal: But you came at it — Rintaro, didn’t you? Or your first girlfriend or something? You brought her to Rintaro, didn’t you?

Melissa King: Me? Oh, I bring a lot of girlfriends to Rintaro. That might be the first time I’m exposing that. That’s my date-night spot, you know?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, when you get the DM, “You want to go to Rintaro?” you know what’s up now.

Melissa King: It’s elevated food, but not to the point where it’s pretentious. It’s just good and cozy, well-executed, and has a great vibe.

Alexis Madrigal: There’s also, in his cookbook, like eight pages on how to make rice.

Melissa King: Which I love.

Alexis Madrigal: Truly. And he was such a perfectionist right there. That’s so funny. Okay, what about a neighborhood spot?

Melissa King: Neighborhood spot? I love Mandalay in the Richmond. Have you been?

Alexis Madrigal: No, I haven’t.

Melissa King: It’s a Burmese restaurant. I’ve been going there way before Burma Superstar ever existed. This was, I don’t know, 17 years ago. It’s still owned and operated by the same family, but Mandalay is where it’s at.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, man, yeah. I think producer Grace Juan agrees that this is —

Melissa King: Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: And what about a place you haven’t been but want to try here?

Melissa King: Ooh, I keep hearing about Four Kings, and I cannot get in.

Alexis Madrigal: Yes, that is the problem, which is a great problem for them to have.

Melissa King: Yes, yes. I managed to get in once, and it was fantastic.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah? How was it?

Melissa King: It was great.

Alexis Madrigal: Okay. That’s our next — you and I will go on a date.

Melissa King: Yeah, that’s right. Two Kings.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, it does seem — it’s amazing how hard it is to get in there.

Melissa King: It’s a small spot. Yeah, that’s part of it.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.

Melissa King: But no, that’s good for them.

Alexis Madrigal: One last question here. That’s a good one to go out on. A listener asks, “How do you develop a palate? I know what I like to eat, and I want to be a better cook. I’m curious how I can improve my ability in the kitchen to put out food the family will like. I think my palate’s not that developed.”

Melissa King: You know what? I think your palate can be very developed, or is developed, and you’ve got to believe in that. You just have to try and taste everything. I think when we cook in kitchens, we oftentimes say, “Did you taste that? Did you taste it?” You have to constantly taste while you’re cooking.

I think a lot of home cooks will cook to completion, then sit down and eat it, and they’re like, “Oh, I should have put more salt in that,” or, “I should have done this and that,” or added more acid. But you need to taste as you go, and that will really improve your cooking over time.

Alexis Madrigal: Just — you’re getting, you’re figuring out —

Melissa King: And just get out there. Yeah, explore new flavors, pick up cookbooks. Maybe Cook Like a King — maybe it’ll empower you to cook more in the kitchen. But I think cooking is all just exploration and experimentation.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, we’ve been talking with Top Chef winner and author Melissa King about her new memoir, The Girl Who Became King, and her James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Cook Like a King. Our team is committed to making these scallion pancakes with Oaxacan cheese, which sounds amazing — like a quesadilla, but with a scallion pancake. Sounds awesome.

Melissa King: I must have been drunk when I came up with that one.

Alexis Madrigal: All the best ideas. Thank you so much for joining us, Melissa.

Melissa King: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: And thank you to all of our callers and commenters and listeners. We so appreciate you. Thanks so much. Guys, it’s not going so well for the Valkyries right now. Keep all the good thoughts going. We’re down 17 in the first quarter. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum ahead with Mina Kim.

Airdate: Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 10 am

Next week’s midterm election will decide which party controls Congress for the second half of President Trump’s term. And in the wake of California’s redistricting in favor of Democratic candidates, the state could play an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the midterms. We’ll dig into key races here in California and across the nation, and how issues like inflation and Trump’s approval rating could influence the outcome.

Guests:

• Erin Covey, editor covering the U.S. House of Representatives, The Cook Political Report
• Guy Marzorati, correspondent, KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re now one week from Election Day, and one thing that’s been clear this midterm cycle is that many voters want change. They want relief from high gas and grocery prices and an end to the war in Iran. Democrats are hoping, and analysts are predicting, that the discontent will translate into a wave of votes for their party and control of Congress. But Democrats are also afraid to get their hopes up after past disappointments. Meantime, Republicans are hoping a last-minute spending blitz, along with the president’s red-state tour, will stave off a Democratic sweep.

What do you think, listeners? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention? Tell us by calling 866-733-6786, emailing forum@kqed.org, or finding us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.

Joining me this hour, Guy Marzorati, political correspondent for KQED, covering California politics. Hi, Guy.

Guy Marzorati: Hey, good morning.

Mina Kim: Good morning to you. Erin Covey is also with us, editor at The Cook Political Report, who covers the U.S. House of Representatives. Erin, really glad to have you with us, too.

Erin Covey: Hey, very glad to be on!

Mina Kim: So before we dig into specific races, I want to talk with you about the overall picture, Erin. I noticed The Cook Political Report Friday, I think, just moved another 19 House races away from the GOP. Tell me what drove that latest round of rating changes.

Erin Covey: Look, at this point, we believe that Republicans’ path to holding the House majority has all but evaporated. We’re currently projecting that Democrats will pick up anywhere from 12 to 22 seats in the House. They only need three to hit the magic number, 218, so they should be in a good position to win the majority regardless. It’s really a question of how large their majority will be.

In the past couple of weeks, what we have seen is that a number of Republican incumbents have found themselves in much more competitive races than they were expecting. These are districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024, so that’s where the bulk of some of the swifter ratings changes have been, because these races have really come online late in the cycle.

But it goes to show how much of a drag on Republicans Trump is right now, because his approval rating is deeply underwater, largely driven by his handling of economic issues. These Republican incumbents are suddenly having to worry about turning out voters who, you know, were coming out in droves for the president in 2024.

Mina Kim: So this is despite all that last-minute ad spending, or maybe the fact that they have to do this much ad spending is revealing to you, Erin?

Erin Covey: Look, I think that the ad spending has certainly kept Republicans competitive in places that may have looked worse for them at this point had they not spent as much as they did. We’ve also seen that the ad spending has been disproportionately good for Republicans in the Senate races.

In the House races, it’s been a little bit more even than I think you would expect, and that’s because Democratic candidates have been raising quite a bit of money and have been outraising their Republican opponents for the past several quarters.

And so the money, you know, I think it makes a difference, certainly, if a candidate is able to spend a couple million dollars in the last few weeks of the race. That may keep them from losing their race. But at a certain point, you know, all the money in the world starts to hit diminishing returns, and there’s only so much you can do to change the narrative.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Guy, would you agree with Erin’s assessment that essentially Republicans’ path to maintaining control of the House has all but evaporated? And if you do, tell me why you think that is. What are the main issues that are driving voters?

Guy Marzorati: Well, I think it goes back to midterm elections being referendums on the president. You need to look no further than a couple of data points here. One is the president’s approval rating, which has been hovering below 40% in a lot of public polling. And two is the cost of living, which has driven as kind of the top issue for voters.

I’ve seen charts that have charted Trump’s approval rating alongside gas prices, and it’s almost a complete correlation. So when you look at the fact that voters going to the polls aren’t judging candidates in these House elections individually, maybe, but looking at it kind of in parliamentary terms — which party do they feel like they’d like to send into control in Washington? — and, look, we can talk about what a victory would mean for Democrats in the House or potentially the Senate, but I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of these House elections being referendums on the president. And that’s a really bad sign for Republicans.

Mina Kim: How have you seen Democrats capitalizing on this to draw votes? What has been some of the core messaging you’ve seen and heard from them, Guy?

Guy Marzorati: Well, I mean, one issue I focus on in these California House districts is gas prices, which is surprising in the sense that Democrats have seen this be such a bad issue for the party in California. We’ve had the nation’s highest gas prices for many years, driven largely by state policy pushed by Democrats at the state Capitol.

And so it’s an issue that, if you look back in the last couple of congressional cycles, Democrats have really taken on the chin, especially in inland working-class areas where folks drive the most.

That’s changed this year. We’ve seen nationally that Democrats are running more ads talking about gas prices than Republicans. And while Republicans are still campaigning on the issue in California because of some of our idiosyncrasies at a state level, this is an issue that California Democrats are talking about. You see Democratic candidates in swing districts in California filming ads at gas stations, something you would have just never dreamed of a couple of cycles ago.

It just shows you that, I think — we can talk about this in the course of the show — on Medicaid, on gas prices, on cost of living, so much of the negative impacts of Trump and Republican policies these last couple of years have been concentrated in the very communities that shifted most toward Trump in 2024.

Democrats came into this election cycle in California really feeling on defense. In a lot of these inland areas that moved toward the GOP, both through redistricting and through the fact that the negative impacts of these policies have hit exactly those communities, there’s been a complete turnaround.

Mina Kim: Erin, what have you been seeing in ads for House races across the country that Guy may not have touched on? I’m wondering if corruption is a big deal.

Erin Covey: We’re definitely seeing corruption pop up in a lot of these House races. And, you know, that’s an issue that members from both parties are vulnerable on. Obviously, Republicans are playing a lot more defense this cycle, and so Republican members are feeling much more of these attacks.

But we also see Democratic incumbents who are facing attack ads over their history of stock trading or the fact that their wealth has increased during their time in Congress. I think a lot of voters start from the assumption that all politicians are corrupt. And so an attack ad that is going after stock trading and things that may not have been quite an issue even a few years ago for these members of Congress is suddenly a bigger vulnerability for them.

Mina Kim: What is the biggest defense, or the messaging that Republicans have been doing around issues related to the economy and so on, to motivate their base, Erin?

Erin Covey: Look, Republicans are talking about the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer cut taxes, and that is the one issue that they kind of have going for them economically speaking.

They’re also trying to, whether explicitly or implicitly, distance themselves from the president’s policies, particularly the war with Iran. We’ve seen a number of Republican members of Congress express disapproval for it at this point and break with Trump in a way that these members haven’t before over the war with Iran, because it is so deeply unpopular with voters from both parties.

We’ve also seen Republicans try to distance themselves from the president’s tariff policy, which is, of course, a major vulnerability for a lot of these Republicans as well.

But I would say overall, when we’re looking at ads that are driven largely by cost-of-living issues, the three issues I’m hearing about the most are the war with Iran and its effect on gas and diesel prices, the tariffs, and then the cost of health care and Republicans’ cuts to federal health care funding last year.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Still, Guy, despite those things and the lack of popularity of the president, I still hear many Democrats wary of getting their hopes up for a big blue wave. Tell us why.

Guy Marzorati: Well, I think that the structural factors are against the Democrats in a number of ways heading into this election, by which I mean most of all redistricting and the natural kind of sorting of seats that we’ve seen.

Democrats — and I can use California as an example — have already won the districts where voters have turned against Trump. Most of the parts of the state where voters had a lot of antipathy toward the president, Democrats won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.

So the areas that are left are more on Republican terrain, and that’s kind of true nationwide. There’s just a lower ceiling on the possible gains that Democrats can make, even if we end up in a situation where the national popular vote mirrors a year like 2018, when we saw a huge wave. There just are fewer of those seats to win.

And then Erin can talk about this specifically in the math, but the redistricting war that played out across the country probably ended up in the Republicans’ favor by a few seats.

So Democrats came into this election with those structural disadvantages. Also, the money has been on the GOP side. That’s what the wave is running into: a wall of structural factors that favored Republicans going into this, but may, in the end, not be enough to prevent losses.

Mina Kim: Yeah. This Bluesky user writes, “I wish we on the left could learn that disappointment with the GOP doesn’t mean votes for Democrats.” So, some of the nerves you’re hearing expressed there.

Erin, some other things that I’ve heard: People are worried that maybe polling is overestimating Democratic support, maybe because it has been overestimated in the past in some Midwestern states. I’m sure not a lot of Democrats would want to remember, but how is the polling this time around, do you think?

Erin Covey: Look, it is impossible to predict polling error going into an election. But what we do know is that in the past three presidential election cycles, when Trump has been on the ballot, polling has underestimated Republicans to varying extents. It was a bigger issue in 2020 than in 2024, I would say, when the polling was largely fairly accurate.

But in midterm cycles in 2018 and 2022, the polling has held up pretty well. I’ll remind listeners that even in 2025, the polling actually underestimated Democratic gains in Virginia and New Jersey.

I think there is certainly recent history that points to polling error that did not favor Democrats, particularly in some of these white Midwestern states. But I do think that the polling I have seen — the public polling, the private polling from both parties — it’s all showing good signs for Democrats to varying extents. And so there really isn’t much of a reason to believe that this cycle isn’t going to be a good night for them.

Mina Kim: And the other big determinant of success is turnout, right? So what are you seeing with regard to that? Because midterms historically, of course, bring out fewer people than presidential elections. And, you know, there are demographics that really need to show up to make this blue wave possible, right?

Erin Covey: Yeah, I mean, what we’re seeing across the board in the early voting so far is that Democratic voters are, for the most part, more enthusiastic, turning out at higher levels than Republican voters compared to previous cycles.

But, you know, this is not going to be even across every part of the country. There’s going to be some places like Texas and North Carolina, I think, where Democrats will do disproportionately well.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report and Guy Marzorati of KQED’s politics team, a correspondent for them. And with you, listeners, we want to know how you’re feeling a week from midterm Election Day. There’s more after the break. Stay with us. This is Forum.

Mina Kim: Welcome back to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress, both in California and across the country. We’re talking about it with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, and with you, our listeners.

We want to hear your questions and how you’re feeling a week from Election Day. Are you nervous, hopeful, something else? Which House or Senate races here in California or nationwide are grabbing your attention? Are you a voter in a competitive district? How’s that influencing your vote? What are the issues driving your vote?

866-733-6786 is the number. Email address: forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum.

All right, I want to look at the key California races that are truly toss-ups. And, Guy, once again, it’s David Valadao’s seat in the Central Valley. I mean, every time we do a show about elections, it’s always pretty much this one to watch. Tell us about District 22, Guy.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, so the 22nd District is based in Bakersfield, Kern County, in the southern Central Valley. This is a seat that has, as you know, been competitive cycle after cycle. David Valadao has been the kind of rare Republican who’s been able to hold this seat even when the national winds have turned against the party.

He famously voted for the impeachment of President Trump. He’s been kind of more of a centrist on issues like immigration. He’s been able to survive in really tough elections.

2024 was a little bit different. This district had the largest swing toward Trump of any district in the country. Valadao won a much more comfortable victory than he had in the past. And so this was one that was still expected to be competitive, but seemed to be moving toward the Republican column.

Now, what really changed here was the Medicaid cuts. This is a district that has a higher percentage of folks on Medi-Cal than any other district in California. So, again, when we talk about GOP policy concentrating its downsides on these kinds of districts, the 22nd is a perfect example of this.

Then redistricting came in California with Proposition 50. This district got a little bit more blue, but it’s still competitive, and really it has remained the most competitive congressional district in the state throughout the whole cycle.

There was a really competitive primary on the Democratic side. Randy Villegas, a local school board member who’s more progressive, came out of that primary. And this has become the district that outside Republican groups, the national Republican apparatus, have kind of looked at as their Alamo in California. It really remains the one district where they continue to spend heavily in this area. Democrats and outside groups supporting Democrats have also spent heavily.

So this could end up being really our last competitive seat. I think Cook still has it as the only toss-up left in California, and one in which we’re also seeing a test case on the Democratic side, with Randy Villegas running much more of a kind of populist, progressive campaign than we’ve seen Democrats challenging Valadao with in the past.

He’s brought Bernie Sanders to the district. He’s brought AOC to the district. And he’s running on much more of a systemic argument that politics writ large is broken, rather than just running against Trump, which has been more the traditional playbook that we’ve seen from Democrats.

Mina Kim: Yeah, things like universal child care, Medicare for All, that.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, I mean, a perfect example of this: My colleague Marisa Lagos sat down with Villegas last week in Bakersfield, and she asked, “If you are elected and Democrats win the House, are you interested in holding investigations, looking into potential corruption in the Trump family?”

And he said, “Yeah, sure, I’m interested in that. But what I’m really interested in is looking at political spending and money in politics from both parties across the whole system and examining that.”

That is not a DCCC talking point. You know, this is someone who is looking at the entire system as being at fault, rather than just the GOP or just Trump.

And I think what worried Democrats a little bit heading into this race was, would Villegas kind of be the El-Sayed of California? Someone who is, you know, creating his own news, talking about things other than Trump, kind of taking the focus away from this being a referendum on the president.

It might end up being that the wave is so large and the opposition to Trump is so great that it doesn’t matter that someone who’s as progressive as Villegas can win. But it’s an interesting test case because he’s running a very different race than the other Democrats in the state. And it may turn out to be a great bet. He might be able to bring out voters in the Bakersfield area who have not participated before and create a different electorate than Democrats have been able to produce in that part of the state.

Mina Kim: Erin, I know you’ve been watching this race closely, too. Are there any dynamics that you want to note?

Erin Covey: Well, I think it’s just worth remembering that the one race Valadao did lose was in 2018, which was, of course, another election cycle that was defined by health care. So this is really a significant vulnerability for him.

I think Democrats have a better shot at ousting him this cycle than they have in the past several years. We still have this rated as a toss-up, but it would not surprise me if Democrats end up victorious here.

Mina Kim: Guy, let’s move on to the 48th. I mean, speaking of redistricting, it feels like it had a big influence here.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, this is maybe the most wildly gerrymandered seat of all the competitive races in California. Down in Southern California, Darrell Issa held this seat in kind of northern and eastern San Diego County. This was completely reworked to loop in Palm Springs, a hotbed of Democratic voters, and move toward some of the more Democratic parts of North County San Diego.

What you ended up with was a seat where Democrats really liked their chances of winning. Issa decided not to run for reelection, and instead you have Marnie von Wilpert, who’s a San Diego City Council member, running against Jim Desmond, who is a county supervisor in San Diego.

Here you see one of the dynamics that you often have when a party is facing a potential wave, where Desmond has really tried to localize the race. He’s on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego, and he represents most of the folks in this congressional district.

When I was down there, I really heard his supporters and his campaign talking about the local work that he’s done, his focus on constituent services. That is a signal to me that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t want to talk about, you know, the national politics, whereas von Wilpert is really running on that platform.

She’s the candidate I mentioned who filmed commercials at gas stations. I spent some time at gas stations in the area. That definitely was a big topic for folks in that district. They drive a lot.

And actually, if you zoom out, if you break down the districts based on who drives the most in each congressional district in California, all of the competitive seats in the state are in kind of the top third of heaviest-driving districts.

So this kind of issue resonates, and Democrats like von Wilpert are able to say, sure, we’ve had the highest gas prices for a while, but this recent spike is because of the war that the president started. And that turns out to have been a pretty effective message.

Mina Kim: Yeah, we’re talking about the House races, the key races that will determine the balance of power in Congress in California as well as across the country.

And listeners, tell us which ones are grabbing your attention, both the House and Senate races, how you’re feeling a week from Election Day, and what questions you have about whether this blue wave will materialize. The email address is forum@kqed.org. Post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786.

Brandon in Redwood City is on. Brandon, go ahead.

Brandon: Hi, everybody. Good morning. Um, I just want to say I saw Bernie and Jane Kim and Ro Khanna. I even handed a business card to Ro Khanna on the street. I don’t know why he was wandering around out in front of the Curran Theater after everything wrapped up, but I was just inspired.

I’ve already voted. I’ve voted yes on Prop 40 and no on 41 and 42. Those are the two big ones for me. I know it’s probably going to go, but my comment, and I’d like to hear some input, is just more so, I hope that not only, obviously, do we get a blue wave, but I hope the Democrats, you know, now that we finally throw the ball to them, catch it and get across the finish line, and do that by doing what the people want.

I, for one, am not interested in seeing a bunch of attacking Trump. I’d love to see the guy in jail. Don’t get me wrong, but I do think that we need to focus on bringing down prices and really reach a peace accord with everybody who has voted for them.

I don’t want to see retribution, and I just hope that we can do things that the farmers and the truckers and those people on the MAGA side can point to as beneficial for them, you know?

Mina Kim: Yeah, thanks. It’s interesting. It’s almost like you’re hearing a little bit of what you were describing, Guy, about Randy Villegas’s approach and what Brandon is saying he wants to see.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, and I think this is an open question for Democrats if they do win back the House and the Senate, what kind of approach they’ll take.

You’ve heard Democratic leadership in recent weeks kind of dance around the question of whether their top priority would be pursuing an impeachment of the president. I think that’s an issue where Democrats feel cross-pressured from both the base, who would like to see hearings, investigations, and an acknowledgment that, look, the political impact of that might not be so great, and what voters are asking for as their top priority, which is addressing the cost of living.

So that’ll be fascinating to watch. And I also think the margin really matters for Democrats. If it’s just a handful-of-seats majority that they’re able to hold, that creates a really difficult, interesting dynamic for the next potential speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.

You’re going to be dealing with members, many of them newly elected and more progressive, who might have a different agenda and want to take the party in different directions. If the margin they’re able to gain on election night becomes larger, that gives more room to operate for whoever the next Democratic leader is.

Mina Kim: Erin, do you think Brandon’s feelings align with what you’re hearing nationwide?

Erin Covey: I think so. I think that voters are frustrated with the system writ large right now. And I think Democrats are bearing the brunt of that criticism right now from some of their voters because they view them as not willing to fight back against the Trump administration as much as they would like.

But, of course, fighting back looks different to different voters, whether or not it means widespread health care legislation or investigations into the president and members of his Cabinet. There is a lot of disagreement, both within the base and within party leadership, I think.

And so it remains to be seen the direction that Democrats will take policy-wise, assuming they win the majority in the House. But what I will say is that Trump is still going to be president at the end of the day, even if Democrats have a majority in the Senate as well. It will not be filibuster-proof, and so there is very little that can actually get done legislatively.

Mina Kim: Actually, Erin, while we’re on state-level races, I do want to just ask you quickly about a statewide race that has gotten a lot of national attention recently, and that’s the Ohio governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, of course, Vivek Ramaswamy, posted a malicious ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton and essentially weaponizing her mother’s betrayal of Acton when she was sexually assaulted as a child.

There has been so much criticism and condemnation of this ad. I’m just curious if Cook has seen that translate into any notable shift away from the Republican candidate.

Erin Covey: Yeah, so the answer is yes. We did recently move this race from toss-up to Lean Democrat, in part as a result of the backlash to that ad that Ramaswamy ran.

But I think even before that, there was a sense that Acton was developing a bit of a clear edge here. And, look, I think the attacks in this race have been very personal all cycle. Sometimes when you have a candidate who is just so enmeshed in that, it can cause them to do things that are, you know, politically unwise.

This ad clearly was going to backfire on Republicans. We’ve seen that it did. And there were a lot of Republicans who were critical of it after it was released. So it is not a surprise that it has given Acton further momentum in the final stretch of this race.

Guy Marzorati: And that just didn’t seem like an ad you would run if you felt like you were up by five points. You know, I think you roll the dice and hope that the impression voters get is the one that’s presented through the ad, but we saw a huge amount of media coverage of the ad as a story. So voters were getting the full information about the context of that, and clearly it backfired.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Well, staying with California for one more toss-up race, this is one where there is a lot of spending, ad spending, and this is the 13th. Guy, remind us about this district, the race that Adam Gray won to claim it a couple of years ago, and why Republicans are spending so big here.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, the nail-biter district. This was, I believe, the closest congressional election in the country in 2024. Adam Gray won this seat by 187 votes after losing it very narrowly in 2022.

This was another district where the lines were moved because of Proposition 50. It’s in the Central Valley, centered around Merced and Modesto, but it also added parts of Stockton, which brought in more Democratic voters.

And this is one where Gray is, as he’s been known, a Valley Democrat. He’s really run his career as a centrist, both in his time in the state legislature and in Congress. He’s really focused his messaging on the gains he’s been able to bring back to the district through the budget.

The Republicans have focused their attacks on Gray’s vote in support of the gas tax while he was in the state legislature, which ended up funding transportation and road repair.

This is one where I think it’s so interesting. You look across these districts in California, and as much ground as Republicans have lost here in the last 10 years on the congressional level, I think they’ve actually been pretty good at candidate recruitment. I don’t think they necessarily lost because they put forward folks who just can’t find a way to win.

In this case, the Republicans put forward Kevin Lincoln, who is the mayor of Stockton. I mentioned Democrats added a lot of blue voters in Stockton. Well, Kevin Lincoln has won in Stockton as mayor. Yet again, we go back to this national environment and these national headwinds that Lincoln is running against. I think it’s why you saw Cook shift this race toward Democrats in recent days.

Mina Kim: Yeah, so what is Lincoln trying to attack Gray on for the most part, Guy?

Guy Marzorati: I mean, it’s focused on this 2017 vote that Gray took when he was a member of the state Assembly to increase the gas tax. He’s defended it. He’s said, you know, the state went a number of years before that without increasing the gas tax, which funds road repair in the state.

But the gas tax is a big reason — you could say the number one reason — for the price differential between California gas and gas elsewhere in the country. So it’s become a real target issue for Republicans.

It passed the Legislature. Voters approved it two years later when there was a repeal effort. So, you know, Gray might feel comfortable sticking by his vote, but certainly in a district like that, where the cost of living is the top issue and voters do drive a lot, that is something Republicans have keyed in on as they’ve attacked Gray.

Mina Kim: Erin, do you have any insight into why Cook moved the race from toss-up to Lean Democrat? It was a while back, actually, so — so I actually moved it to Likely Democrat recently.

Erin Covey: Yeah, I was going to say, look, I think that both parties’ super PACs have stopped a lot of their spending here because they’re increasingly seeing this seat as out of reach for Republicans this cycle.

You know, I don’t think it’s over, certainly. I think Kevin Lincoln — I agree that he’s a good candidate who could certainly make this race closer than it should be. But the polling has pretty consistently shown Gray with an edge.

I’ll remind folks that this district shifted six points to the left after redistricting. This obviously was an incredibly close race in 2024, when Trump was winning the district by about five and a half points. This is now a seat that Harris won narrowly.

So it is different, and the environment is a lot different for Democrats as well, of course, nationally speaking. Even if Gray is vulnerable on his record in Sacramento before he went to Washington, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Lincoln to close the gap here this cycle.

Mina Kim: So, Erin, how would you overall assess the success of redistricting efforts by both Democrats and Republicans midway through?

Erin Covey: Look, I think it’s basically a wash. Republicans came out slightly on top. We are projecting that they will be able to net around three seats due to redistricting alone, but that is not by the wide margin they were hoping for.

That’s because a lot of the maps that Republicans redrew in the past year were predicated on the fact that Republicans would be able to match Trump’s margin in a lot of these parts of the country. What we have seen is that his approval rating has dropped off so much that they’re probably not going to be able to do so.

Guy Marzorati: I mean, one question I’ve been thinking about this last week is, given this national environment, do Democrats need to gerrymander in California? Could they have won two, three, four seats under the previous maps, given where things stand?

Mina Kim: I think they certainly could have. Well, but, right, these maps will be in play in ’28 and ’30, right, Guy? Maybe they’ll pay some dividends there for Democrats, at least.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, and there’s a whole messaging component to this that we can talk about.

Mina Kim: Yeah, we’re talking with Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, and Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report. And with you, our listeners, we’ll talk Senate after the break. Stay with us. This is Forum.

Mina Kim: You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. The key House races in California and Senate races nationwide that will decide control of Congress for the rest of President Trump’s term — that’s the topic of our conversation this hour with Erin Covey, editor at The Cook Political Report, who specializes in the House of Representatives, and Guy Marzorati, politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics with always an eye on the nation.

Listeners, how are you feeling a week from Election Day? Nervous, hopeful? What questions do you have about the strength of this so-called blue wave materializing? Which House and Senate races here in California and nationwide are grabbing your attention, and what are the issues driving your vote?

Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Call 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786 as well, to get your voice heard.

Before I go to calls, really quick, Erin, tell me where Cook has the Senate picture right now for Democrats and Republicans.

Erin Covey: Right now, we believe that control of the Senate is a pure toss-up. We’re projecting that Democrats will flip anywhere from two to six Senate seats. Now, they only need four for the majority, so that is now well within their reach, which is a very different picture from what we saw at the beginning of 2025, when it looked like Republicans were the overwhelming favorites to hold the Senate majority.

Mina Kim: Yeah, so four to get to 51, right, to overcome the vice president’s tie-breaking vote?

Erin Covey: Correct.

Mina Kim: All right. Well, I think we have a question from listener Colin in San Francisco. Hi, Colin. Thanks for waiting.

Colin: Good morning. I’ve been following the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed for the open Senate seat in Michigan with great interest. Understanding Israel-Palestine isn’t the first issue that most voters base their decisions on, the University of Southern California’s Democracy Lab just ran a poll in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in which 72% of respondents answered that they have a very unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, with an additional 15% answering that they had a somewhat unfavorable opinion.

Does this indicate that, at least until very recently within the Democratic Party, there’s a large gap between where most of the elected representatives are on Israel-Palestine and where their own voters are?

Mina Kim: Colin, thanks. Erin, do you want to take that first, and then we can get into the dynamics of this particular race as well?

Erin Covey: Yeah, look, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically over the past couple of years. I believe that, according to Pew, only older Republicans now have a favorable view of Israel if you’re looking at various age groups divided by party.

And so this is really an issue where increasingly there are a number of elected Democrats who are out of step with their base. It has been very difficult for them to navigate.

And, of course, there are parts of the country with larger Jewish populations that have a more nuanced view of Israel. We’ve seen this play out in a number of House races. Of course, it’s been a factor in the Michigan Senate race as well.

I think, ultimately, there are other issues that are driving voters’ behavior more, largely the cost of living. But this is certainly an issue that could impact some voters’ decisions.

Mina Kim: Where does Cook have this Senate race?

Erin Covey: We have it rated—

Mina Kim: —as a pure toss-up. Pure toss-up. Okay, so not leaning down at all. But interestingly, people have been pointing out that El-Sayed’s — you know, the way that he’s been resonating with voters — was not predicted. What do you think is causing that?

Erin Covey: Look, I think this is a really interesting matchup. We’re seeing both candidates campaign in parts of the state that are unexpected.

Mike Rogers, the Republican, is campaigning down in Detroit, hoping to make some inroads with Black voters there who preferred Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the Senate Democratic primary.

At the same time, you’re seeing El-Sayed campaigning up in the Upper Peninsula, which is a historically very Republican part of the state. But I think his message on affordability and the way that he has clearly separated himself from the Democratic establishment has been compelling to a lot of voters in the state.

Mina Kim: Yeah, interesting. He’s not a socialist himself, but has received a lot of support from democratic socialists and those to the left of the party. I’m just curious if you think that says something about where national Democrats could go, or whether they’re watching it to see if that’s where they’ll go, Erin.

Erin Covey: Yeah, I mean, I think that is the big question this cycle. Can we see these candidates who either are democratic socialists or have been tied heavily to the democratic socialist wing of the party? Can they still be successful in these swing seats, where historically moderates have done better?

Look, I do think that if they do end up winning in a lot of these places, that is largely going to be a result of the political environment, in which Trump is so unpopular that voters would rather vote for someone they might think is a socialist over a Republican who is going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.

But that is the reason that this race, I think, is still quite close. The polling we’ve seen shows that El-Sayed has the edge, but it’s not by a wide enough margin to say that it’s really a Lean Democrat race at this point.

Mina Kim: I see. Anything you would add about this race, Guy?

Guy Marzorati: I mean, I think just looking across the polling in these Senate races, I don’t think people should be surprised one way or another with these results. There’s a lot of conversation about polling errors, but if you look at RealClearPolling, all of these races — whether you’re talking about Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska — are within three points.

That going one way or another does not indicate a massive polling error. So I do think the Senate, as Erin says, really is in that kind of toss-up state.

Mina Kim: Well, another seat that has gotten so much attention, Erin, of course, is the one in Texas: Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico. Tell us about this race and what it might highlight in terms of an opportunity for Democrats in Texas.

Erin Covey: This is a really remarkable race. I mean, when we’re talking about the issue of corruption, it is a bigger issue here than in any other race in the country.

And that is because the Republican nominee, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted the sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn in the primary earlier this year, has a litany of corruption allegations against him. He’s been indicted.

There are a number of Republicans who are not going to vote for him. They’re not going to vote for the Democrat, James Talarico, either. But if enough of those Republicans decide not to vote in the Senate race at all, that is how Talarico gets to victory here.

And we do see this race as a toss-up as well. Again, polling has also shown Talarico with a pretty consistent edge. Some polls show it’s shrunk a little bit in recent weeks, which makes sense. This is a state that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024, and so we really should not see a Democrat doing as well here as Talarico is.

But I do think that Democrats are in a better position this cycle to flip the seat than they were even in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke got quite close.

Mina Kim: Yeah, Democrats are definitely wary of that 2018 loss to Ted Cruz, pretty decisively, by Beto O’Rourke. And so I imagine they are very worried about having their hopes dashed. But why do you think Talarico has resonated so much with Texas to make it as close as it is, besides just the national headwinds against Republicans?

Erin Covey: I mean, look, I’ll say the big difference between 2018 and this cycle is that Paxton is not Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he was running a strong campaign. He was raising money, and he did not have this massive baggage that Paxton has, which is too far of a line for some Republican voters in Texas to cross. Even some prominent leaders in the state have mentioned recently that they are not going to be voting for Paxton.

And so that is really the main issue driving things here.

Talarico, I think, has also run a really strong campaign and has been very successful at messaging voters in new ways. He’s really taken advantage of social media in a way that I think a lot of candidates have not done in recent years. So he has really been able to energize support on the ground.

He’s also a seminarian and talks about his faith in a way that is unique for a Democratic candidate. I think that could help him make inroads with some Republican voters. Of course, he’s quite a bit more liberal than a lot of these voters, but if he’s seen as an upstanding religious man, that provides quite a contrast with Paxton.

Mina Kim: I want to hear, Guy, what you find interesting about the dynamics of this race, but I’d also love to ask a little bit more about the Latino vote in this case. Kind of like California, right? It’s an interesting bellwether.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah. I mean, on this statewide Senate race, keep an eye on races like this in Texas, where there’s more than two candidates on the ballot in the general election. Life is a lot easier for Democrats if their candidate doesn’t actually have to get over 50% to win. Talarico is in that position, and some of the other states are in that position as well.

On the Latino vote in Texas, look, this was a huge factor in the gerrymandering that took place in the state, where Republicans in Texas used 2024 as the baseline for how they were drawing these districts. That baseline was Latino voters, especially along the border, shifting toward Trump.

So if that’s your baseline and that vote completely changes between 2024 and 2026, suddenly that gerrymander is no longer in such a confident state. And so I think that’s what Republicans are dealing with.

In California, of course, the gerrymandering was the other way. Democrats drew these districts to make them more advantageous to unseat Republicans. But it’s something we’re certainly also watching here in places like the Central Valley, where the Adam Gray seat, the 13th District, and the 22nd District are both majority-Latino seats that went toward Donald Trump in 2024 and could go back the other way in 2026.

Mina Kim: Yeah, so Erin, what are you seeing? Are you seeing potentially a shift from 2024 to 2026, with Latinos moving away from Trump and the Republicans?

Erin Covey: Yes, we’re seeing a major shift both in polling and in special-election and off-year election results. We have seen significant reversion among Hispanic voters away from Republicans.

And I think it’s important to remember that before 2024, a lot of Democratic Party leaders were taking Hispanic voters’ support for them for granted. Republicans were able to make significant inroads, and Trump was able to make significant inroads by talking a lot about economic issues and promising that he was going to improve these voters’ prospects.

But, of course, the past two years have done the opposite of that for many of these voters, who are not Republican voters. They are more independent voters who liked Trump in 2024 but are much more willing to swing back toward a Democrat than a tried-and-true Republican voter in some of these other parts of the country.

That’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift left in a lot of these South Texas seats in particular, which are majority Hispanic.

Mina Kim: Yeah, it’s been really interesting to watch. Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED.

And let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’ve got a lot of people who are actually asking questions and focused on what happens after the Democrats take the House.

Barbara in Sunnyvale has a slightly different take from Brandon, who writes, “Unless we want more corruption, Dems need to vigorously investigate it if they take the House. Dems won’t have much power to legislate since their legislation will likely be vetoed by Trump.”

Well, that’s, of course, if they can get it through the Senate. Let me go to Dan in Santa Clara. Dan, go ahead. You’re on.

Dan: Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Erin, you earlier mentioned the Senate not having a supermajority to be able to overcome a filibuster. I’m fairly active in the Democratic community, and there’s a lot of talk about doing specific carve-outs for specific votes. I was wondering, is that just idle chat, or is that a possibility?

Erin Covey: Yeah, no, I think it’s a possibility. But again, I think that actually getting any legislation signed into law is going to be close to impossible over the next two years, at least.

But, of course, if Democrats enter the 2028 presidential cycle with majorities in the House and the Senate, if they even have maybe a 52- or 53-seat majority in the Senate, that puts them in a position in 2029. So we’ll see what happens there.

But yes, I think, to the previous commenter’s point, there is still a lot of disagreement, both among Democratic voters and among Democratic Party leaders, about how to focus their efforts over the next two years with Trump still in office.

Guy Marzorati: And I think if it’s 51 votes, we have to talk about the Fetterman factor. You know, where does John Fetterman in Pennsylvania position himself? If he suddenly becomes the only thing standing between a potential Republican majority, how does he caucus? How does he vote?

Mina Kim: Well, Alan in Benicia writes, “I hear folks saying that if the Democrats can’t win both houses now under these conditions, they will never win. But sadly, I can think of another scenario. After two more years of screwed-up policies, the backlash to Republicans could be even more pronounced.”

Guy, how soon do you think we’ll know the balance of power in Congress? How soon could these tight races in California, for example, be called? What do you think people should be prepared for?

Guy Marzorati: I mean, if history is any guide, a close congressional race in California is going to take probably more than a week to decipher. Now, it’ll depend on how close the margin is, but we’ve seen some of these races, especially in the Central Valley, where some of the counties have been on the slower end of vote counting, drag deep into November before we know the winner.

In previous years, that’s been really key to the actual majority in the House. That might not be the case this year. We might know whether Democrats hold the majority before we know, for example, who’s won in the 22nd District in California.

And, look, maybe some of the recent changes to speed up the vote count here, with more funding for counties to do that, will have an impact. But I’m certainly not expecting to know, for example, the result of that race on election night.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Nationally, Erin, what should people expect? What should they be prepared for?

Erin Covey: Look, it’s going to take a while to count all these votes. I think that if we’re talking about which party is going to have a majority in the House, we’ll know that relatively quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a call on that within the first day.

That’s because we expect Democrats to win by a wide enough majority that they won’t need to know the results of California’s 22nd District, for example, in order to get to that magic number. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, that is not the case.

But in the Senate, things could take a while. In Alaska, there is a very competitive toss-up Senate race that is not going to be tabulated until two weeks after the election because it’s conducted using ranked-choice voting.

So I would encourage folks to be patient and to remember that this is just the process playing out. Some states have to take longer than other states to count their votes.

Mina Kim: Right, that’s, of course, Democrat Mary Peltola challenging Senator Dan Sullivan. And there’s been a lot of activity in that race, but that is too much to get into at the moment.

But sort of related, Steve writes, “I’m particularly frightened that the post-election period will be violently divisive, as Trump already incites all kinds of thuggery. And the Trump administration has continued to be brazen in making threats about their plans to illegally subvert their predicted election losses into fake wins.”

So what’s the plan to resist that? Either of you want to try to take that on?

Guy Marzorati: I mean, certainly what we’re seeing in California right now is unprecedented. This probe by the Justice Department into what they allege are noncitizens on the voter rolls, coming just a week before the election — I’ve never seen anything like this.

We’ll see how it plays out in court and what impact it will have electorally, but I think it’s probably fair to say part of this is political, either sowing doubt or just kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall, given the electoral environment.

Even though it might not have a huge impact in any specific race, especially given just the numbers here. I mean, just to put it in context, the Department of Justice has brought forward this idea of 20,000 voters across the state who are noncitizens on the voter rolls, not necessarily having voted. So nothing that’s actually going to swing an election.

But I think it’s just part of this kind of unprecedented action we’ve seen around legal activity in the polls.

Mina Kim: Yeah, and of course, speaking of Alaska, right, Erin, basically the DOJ is saying that if the Republican candidate narrowly loses, Alaska should not certify that election.

Erin Covey: That’s correct. The DOJ has already preemptively filed a lawsuit essentially saying the results are not legitimate if Dan Sullivan, the incumbent, loses.

Look, I don’t think this is going to hold up in court, but it certainly could lead to a lot of mistrust and conspiracies in those weeks leading up to the Alaska result actually being tabulated.

Mina Kim: Well, I really appreciate you coming on to share your analysis, Erin. Thank you so much.

Erin Covey: Thanks for having me on.

Mina Kim: Again, Erin Covey is editor at The Cook Political Report, and Guy Marzorati is politics correspondent for KQED, covering California politics and beyond. Really appreciate you being on with us as well.

Guy Marzorati: Thanks, Mina.

Mina Kim: And, as always, to our listeners, thank you for sharing your questions and comments and really showing your engagement in the election process. We appreciate that, too.

My thanks to Ana de Almeida Amaral for producing today’s segment. You’ve been listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Announcer: Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.

Airdate: Friday, October 23, 2026 at 10 AM

Soaring energy prices are the leading factor behind rising inflation across the United States, where consumer prices are up 3.7 percent over last year. In California, where energy costs have become an issue in the governor’s race, electricity prices are surging to a rate of about double the national average. We’ll look at what’s driving the rise here in California and across the U.S., and hear about how policy solutions could help bring prices under control.

Guests:

• Mike O’Boyle, senior director of policy and strategy, Energy Innovation
• Meredith Fowlie, professor, UC Berkeley, faculty director, Energy Institute at Haas, co-director, Environment and Energy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research

Airdate: Thursday, October 22, 2026 at 10 AM

Last week, a man on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia died when he was ejected from the ride — a death that follows a pattern of apparent safety incidents on Six Flags roller coasters nationwide. A recent CNN investigation into Six Flags Magic Mountain, located just north of Los Angeles in Valencia, exposed serious safety concerns surrounding X2, one of the park’s most popular roller coasters. Over its nearly two-decade run, the ride has been linked to more than a dozen severe hospitalizations and two deaths, including riders who suffered severe brain hemorrhages. Six Flags officials have since closed the coaster — plus 10 others related to the subsequent Goliath incident. We’ll speak with a CNN reporter who broke the X2 story, and look at why apparently dangerous rides weren’t shut down sooner.

Guests:

• Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent, CNN
• Dr. Nitin Agarwal, associate professor of neurological surgery at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University School of Medicine, acting chief and education director, neurological surgery, Veteran Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System
• Dr. Calvin Kuo, assistant professor, School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of British Columbia
• Christopher Bulone, partner at the Dordick Law Corporation

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia permanently closed its popular X2 roller coaster last month after a CNN investigation found the ride was linked to two deaths and dozens of injuries, including brain hemorrhages. Weeks later, a man died in Georgia after being thrown from the Goliath roller coaster, prompting Six Flags to briefly close similar rides across the country, including in California. The incidents are raising questions about the safety and regulation of roller coasters, which millions of Americans ride each year for the thrill, the rush, and the bragging rights.

Joining me now is Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent for CNN based in Los Angeles, who investigated safety concerns with Six Flags’ X2. Kyung, welcome to Forum.

Kyung Lah: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Mina Kim: Yeah, I really appreciate you being with us, too. So, I’m curious what went through your mind last week when you learned a man had died riding a different roller coaster at Six Flags in Georgia, with this coming right on the heels of your own investigation into X2.

Kyung Lah: Well, it was just crushingly sad. I think it’s really important to remember that the people who go to these theme parks, you’re doing it for fun, a lot of times with your family, your kids. Um, and this person who died on this ride is, you know, someone who went for that exact reason. He’s a cherished teacher and robotics coach. So it’s just tragic and sad.

And so what we weren’t really sure about is how, because this is a completely different ride than what we focused on. We focused on Six Flags Magic Mountain, looking at some of the patterns of injuries that were brought to our attention. And what we did is we then dug into further public documents. We took a national look at what we could gather together after what happened in Georgia. And by digging through more documents, we found more information. And we don’t know what happened. But what we can report to you is that there are certain patterns that we’ve been able to find.

Mina Kim: Yeah, it’s still being investigated. State officials are investigating. Before we go deeper into what you found at X2, I’m just curious what you make of Six Flags’ decision to shut down the Goliath and similar rides across the country, including here, because I wouldn’t be surprised if the increased scrutiny from your reporting on X2 may be a part of it.

Kyung Lah: Well, certainly our reporting at least brought it to the public’s attention, which is what we hope to do as journalists — to make people aware that when they go to anything, whether it be, you know, on your street or in your government, we want to make people aware of what’s happening around them.

And so it’s a little difficult to know what exactly prompted it, to take this sort of broad move. But what we can tell you is that in our reporting, we were able to focus on the X2, and then there was a lot of attention this summer due to our investigation, and then this happened. And so Six Flags decided to take the move. What we have heard in this statement is that the park does have a comprehensive safety program. That’s what they told us, built on rigorous inspections for each ride, and that it’s still conducting its own review of the incident.

Mina Kim: Yeah. So, in your investigation, you and your colleagues found severe injuries, even deaths, linked to the X2 coaster, which Six Flags Magic Mountain permanently closed last month. But I’m curious what prompted you to look into this.

Kyung Lah: So, I live in Southern California. I don’t actually live that far away from this park. I’ve never been on the X2 ride. And one of my reporting partners, Melanie Hicken — Blake Ellis also was one of our reporting partners — it came to our attention that there were two women who were injured the first week of July, six days apart. They both went to the same hospital.

And what was really extraordinary was their injuries. After getting off that ride, both of them experienced the same sort of physical reactions. They both were rushed to the same hospital, and the injuries happened just six days apart. And so, because of that, we started digging. And in looking at publicly available documents, we simply found that there were other cases. And it was truly extraordinary when you dug through what was publicly available and that just simply hadn’t been put together. And that’s what we did.

Mina Kim: So, one of the women was Pamela Gillen. What did Pamela Gillen experience after the ride? It sounds like she lost consciousness pretty quickly. This was —

Kyung Lah: Because she says that she doesn’t truly remember everything that happened. She remembers getting jostled on the ride. Her daughter was celebrating her 16th birthday on July 5 when they went together. They both got in the X2. And when Camille, her daughter, got off, she noticed that her mother just looked lifeless, that there wasn’t a thought behind her eyes. And they discovered — they pulled her off the ride. And then medics started to understand that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

An ambulance rushed Pam to the hospital, and surgeons shocked her family because they discovered what’s called an acute subdural hematoma. That’s essentially a brain bleed. And she was rushed into emergency surgery. A woman, 39 years old at the time that she got on that roller coaster — by the time she got off, surgeons had to cut her skull open in emergency surgery to try to relieve that pressure on her brain.

Mina Kim: What was Naomi’s outcome, Naomi Greer-Wilkinson?

Kyung Lah: Let’s start with what her parents said, because I want to make sure that people understand the timeline. So Pam Gillen gets off the X2 ride, she goes into emergency surgery, the ride keeps going. Six days later, Naomi Greer-Wilkinson gets onto the X2 ride, unaware of what had happened to another woman just six days previous. That is according to her family, and we know that when Naomi got off that ride, she, too, was not able to walk. Something was wrong with her, and her parents believed that it was the jarring that had damaged her brain. She, too, was taken to the exact same hospital and had to go into emergency brain surgery.

She, too, had a severe brain bleed, and her mother tells us that she remembers one of the surgeons storming through the emergency room yelling, “How many is it this month? They’ve got to shut that ride down.”

Mina Kim: Wow. And I understand that Naomi remains in critical condition in a coma. We actually had our producer, Jared, speak with the lawyer representing Naomi’s family, Christopher Bulone. He wasn’t able to join us on air, but here’s how he described Naomi’s condition.

Christopher Bulone: There’s basically just enough response from Naomi on a ventilator to see that she’s still in there somewhere, that there’s some level of awareness, some level of understanding at 25 years old. What’s apparent is that she is not close to being able to speak or being able to interact with her environment, really, but that she’s alert enough to experience pain.

Mina Kim: I want to invite listeners to join the conversation. Listeners, is what you’re hearing making you rethink riding roller coasters, or do you remain a dedicated thrill seeker? What questions do you have about roller coaster safety? Do you think roller coasters, especially modern ones, are getting too extreme? Have you ever been injured from a roller coaster ride?

The email address is forum@kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. Or call us at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786.

We’re talking with Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent for CNN based in Los Angeles. Her investigation is called “They Braved a World Famous Six Flags Roller Coaster. Then They Were Rushed to the Hospital for Emergency Brain Surgery.”

Kyung, tell us about the X2. It’s been called an extreme ride, a 4D experience. What does all that mean?

Kyung Lah: If you look at — and this video is available on YouTube — and I am not one to get motion sick, but when you look at the front-facing car of X2, it is astonishing. This is not the roller coaster, at least, I grew up with, you know, one of those with the bar across your lap, maybe a harness over your shoulders. This is something you sit in, where your legs are almost free-flowing and you’re seated. The seats spin 360 degrees forwards and backwards, and they’re independent around the track. You plummet at 200 feet at speeds up to 76 miles per hour. And the thing that will really make your stomach go, “Whoa,” are these raven turns. They’re half loops that turn into sheer drops.

And it is a thrill. If you look on Reddit and you look at some of the roller coaster forums, people love the X2, but it does shake you. And you see a lot of that in the discussions on the forums.

Mina Kim: Douglas on Discord writes, “I think we’ve unfortunately reached the limit of what roller coasters are capable of to give humans the biggest possible thrill while still being safe, especially in the modern era of maximizing profit, which usually means maintenance budgets get cut along the way.”

Did that cross your mind? Have we reached the limit of what is safe for humans to experience on a roller coaster when you were doing this, Kyung?

Kyung Lah: One thing to really keep in mind is that theme park-related accidents are really rare. There’s an industry report we found that showed there were roughly 1,500 injuries in 2024. You compare that with how many people get on roller coasters, and a lot of those injuries were classified as being related to guest behavior or medical conditions. About 25 percent were caused by technical or operational issues, like mechanical problems with a ride or operator error.

But what we had to do is, of course, look at what was happening to the company. Why are we seeing certain patterns? The pattern we saw with these two women, when we expanded it out, there were up to a hundred that we found. It is something to note that there was a merger between Six Flags and a competitor, Cedar Fair. That merger happened in 2024. And Six Flags, according to its own financial statements from recent years, has struggled financially because of weak attendance and some crushing debt. So some of that is something that the documents show Six Flags was going through as these injuries were occurring.

Mina Kim: Yeah, and as you noted, these types of rides are sort of the marquee rides. They’re the ones that draw consumers and can help maximize profit. We’re talking about the X2 and CNN’s investigation into it. It closed permanently last month, and we’re looking at why. More after the break.

I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. After a man was thrown from a roller coaster at Six Flags in Georgia last week, the company closed similar rides at parks across the country, including in Valencia. This was less than a month after Magic Mountain in Valencia announced the closure of its popular X2 roller coaster, which has been linked to two deaths and dozens of injuries, including traumatic brain hemorrhages.

Things I learned from reading Kyung Lah and her colleagues’ investigation. Kyung is senior national correspondent at CNN.

Listeners, join the conversation with your questions about roller coaster safety, whether what you’re hearing is making you rethink riding roller coasters, or if you have ever had an injury on a ride or know of someone who did. You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

And let me go to caller Christine from Connecticut. Hi, Christine, you’re on.

Christine: Hi there.

Mina Kim: Hi, what’s on your mind?

Christine: I wanted to share a story of my sister, who got a minor injury two separate times on the exact same ride at a Six Flags. The first was in New Jersey, and the second time was in New England, in western Massachusetts. I think the ride was a Spider-Man ride, and in both instances, her jaw was permanently, like, locked in an open position, and she had to go to an ER to have it popped back into place.

Mina Kim: Wow, Christine. Well, I hope your sister’s okay, but thanks for sharing that story. I should note, we reached out to Six Flags as well for a response to your reporting about injuries on their roller coasters, Kyung. And this is what they said, something sort of similar to what you described earlier. Sue Gordon from Six Flags wrote:

“Safety is our ethos and is at the heart of everything we do at Six Flags. Every ride undergoes documented safety inspections before opening each day,” supported by comprehensive maintenance programs designed to meet or exceed industry safety guidelines. “We are aware of allegations made in pending X2 litigation and take them seriously. The allegations are being carefully reviewed, and the company will respond appropriately through the litigation process.”

There is a sense that a lot of people who ride roller coasters have that safety on roller coasters would be a high priority for the companies, because any kind of injury or death would be very bad for them. But who is supposed to oversee and make sure that these safety inspections and so on are happening, that the maintenance program, as Six Flags described, is exceeding industry safety guidelines?

Kyung Lah: Well, in the state of California, it is Cal/OSHA. It is the Occupational Safety and Health — oh my goodness, we call it OSHA. I’ve shorthanded it, excuse me. They oversee the theme parks. And what we have found is, even in talking to the lawyers, they’re not necessarily focusing on the state, in part because there is a belief that the state does not have enough inspectors, that the technology has exceeded what the standards of the state are, and that the overall belief of what is acceptable, what the oversight is — that there’s nothing that’s standard.

So that is where I think there are a lot of questions. Essentially, Six Flags is, in some places of this country, regulating itself. And so Cal/OSHA did not sit down for an interview, did not respond to our questions, and we just don’t have an answer for you.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Actually, Christopher Bulone told Jared something very similar with regard to, I guess, the limits of Cal/OSHA’s ability to really determine whether a roller coaster is safe. Let’s hear it.

Christopher Bulone: And I think the big part of the problem is Six Flags probably hasn’t been telling them the whole truth. I think Six Flags has been leaning on — I know that they’ve been leaning on this idea that the X2 passed inspection, and that because it passed some ANSI inspection, that meant that it was safe. The problem was that they’re relying on inspections for the ride that don’t test for the type of unique forces that are involved in this particular roller coaster, it being a kind of an almost one-of-a-kind type of roller coaster.

Mina Kim: So Cal/OSHA is supposed to, you know, I guess, inspect these permanent rides on an annual basis, but it sounds like it’s sort of over their heads with regard to what they are supposed to understand about them and test for.

Kyung Lah: The question I would have for — and thank you, Google — the Occupational Safety and Health Division in the state of California. What I would want to know is, there was a death. Christopher Hawley, 22-year-old Christopher Hawley, died on the X2, and the ride was allowed to reopen after a brief closure.

Mina Kim: And this was in 2022, right?

Kyung Lah: Yes. And then you had the injury of Pam Gillen, and it was allowed to continue. So my question would be, perhaps the technology may have exceeded what the state would understand or regulate, but if there is this pattern, it seems like a natural thing for the state to question why, to ask why.

Mina Kim: Yeah, and the other thing that I noticed is that you were wanting to ask Cal/OSHA and also tried to ask Six Flags if the incidents of these injuries had been reported by Six Flags to Cal/OSHA. What did they say?

Kyung Lah: We didn’t hear from Cal/OSHA. You know, we asked that specific question. They would not respond about the history or say how it was allowed to reopen.

Mina Kim: And did Six Flags say anything about whether or not they had reported, say, for example, Pam Gillen’s incident?

Kyung Lah: Yeah, they didn’t answer our specific questions. We had to actually dig into court filings to find out what their defense of reopening some of these rides was. And what we found is that in those previous court filings, Six Flags did state through lawyers that it went through those daily inspections and that normal riders would not [suffer a] traumatic brain injury.

Mina Kim: Mr. Matthew writes, “A friend of mine accompanied his friend and her baby on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in the ’90s. And there was a bad accident, a sudden braking that threw patrons from their cars, causing several injuries. Everyone was shuffled to separate rooms where they were offered NDAs in exchange for cash and Disney swag. Almost everyone signed away their right to sue or even speak of the incident. I wonder how many injuries are handled this way so that the public and authorities have no idea of the scope and frequency of the incidents.”

Do you know if Magic Mountain reached out to, say, for example, Pam or Naomi’s families?

Kyung Lah: From the viewpoint — what we have heard from both Pam and Naomi’s families is there was a representative who did show up at the emergency room, provided the family and offered them fast food, and that was the last that they heard from them. And then they reached out to a lawyer.

The lawsuits that we found and dug through through a public records request — we have noticed a pattern that multiple lawsuits settled before going to trial, and that includes a wrongful death suit of 22-year-old Christopher Hawley. So a lot of times, if you settle a lawsuit, then it doesn’t come out into the public viewpoint of why Six Flags would potentially have to pay some type of damages.

Mina Kim: What’s been the reaction to your reporting since your investigation came out?

Kyung Lah: I could tell you from my kids’ viewpoint — the teenage children, one of whom likes roller coasters and has not been on the X2, said that kids are furious. “I’m the roller coaster killer at their high school.” But what I think is important to note is that there was a lot of interest about this among youth, because young people may not be paying attention to what a lawsuit says or what the state does or doesn’t do. They just know if the ride’s open. The assumption from a young person’s point of view is that it’s safe.

So there has been a considerable amount of interest, and I found that to be really encouraging, because we want to reach the people who are going to get on these rides.

Mina Kim: Sounds like a lot of people also reached out to Christopher Bulone and other attorneys at his firm.

Kyung Lah: They had a news conference after our first investigation published, and they had 100 people alleging some type of traumatic brain incident. We don’t know the extent of their injuries. We haven’t been privy to any of them except for one additional man who I interviewed. And those 100, according to the law firm, they say, meet California’s statute of limitations, where they could potentially file a lawsuit against Six Flags.

But what I found to be really fascinating is that the law firm says they had a total of 300 reach-outs, people alleging all sorts of different injuries from this one specific ride, but the other 200 didn’t necessarily meet California’s statute of limitations and weren’t able to file some type of lawsuit.

Mina Kim: Well, let me go to caller Iyer in Oakland. Iyer, you’re on. Go ahead.

Iyer: Yeah, I was calling because, well, hearing that this ride closed last month made me remember that the first and only time I was at Magic Mountain, I was about 20, and X2 is the first ride that I did that day. I had my arms up in the thing, and on one of the turns, it tweaked something in my back, which caused, like, a lot of pain and walking around funny the whole day. And I’ve ridden a lot of roller coasters throughout my life, but the only time I ever got hurt was on X2. And it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t something to go to the doctor over, just something notable in my brain from a while ago.

Mina Kim: Well, I’m glad it wasn’t serious, but thank you so much for sharing that. Let me go next to Posey in San Francisco. Posey, go ahead. You’re on.

Posey: Hey, thank you. I am a terrifying ride addict. Maybe this will change me a little bit, but I want to comment. A few years ago, I was in New York with my mom, where she’s from, and we went to Coney Island and I rode that old, old roller coaster. And in its way, I found it more terrifying. It’s so old and rickety, and it’s not enclosed, and it almost feels like it could fall off the track. And we were in the front car, and it was really, really, really scary. It was amazing.

So, I don’t know if there’ve ever been accidents on that, but I loved it, and it was terrifying. And I’m also a Forum addict. Thank you.

Mina Kim: Well, Posey, thanks for sharing that. And that’s really what it’s about, as you were saying just at the very beginning, Kyung. People go on these rides to be able to have that thrill, right? That adrenaline rush, that sense of safe danger, never expecting that they could come off of it with a traumatic brain injury.

Kyung Lah: Certainly not. There is a public expectation that when you get on any sort of amusement park ride, you will get off and be okay. That’s a basic sense. It doesn’t matter if there’s a sign that is posted to warn you that you may get jostled or, you know, there are some signs up around Six Flags, around the bigger thrill rides. But there is a general public expectation of safety.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent at CNN based in LA, who looked into the history of deaths and injuries linked to Magic Mountain’s X2 ride, which has now shut down. It’s been permanently closed as of last month.

And you, listeners, join the conversation with your questions about why, and whether what you’re hearing is making you rethink riding roller coasters, or do you remain a dedicated thrill seeker? Have you ever had an injury on a ride? Do you worry about roller coasters getting too extreme? And what questions do you have about potential injuries? 866-733-6786. Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram are our social channels, where you can find us at KQED Forum, and you can email forum@kqed.org.

I do want to bring into the conversation Dr. Calvin Kuo, assistant professor at the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kuo, thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mina Kim: Talk to us about the experiment that you did to look at what the brain is doing on a roller coaster.

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, this was some time ago, I think in 2017 or something like that. But we work with a kind of wearable device to monitor motion, essentially. And we’ve used these devices to essentially measure how the head responds in contact sports, like American football and soccer headers. But we were curious about essentially what’s going on on a roller coaster. So we had a few folks, or a couple of folks, wear these devices on their heads, and we went to a theme park to ride a few of these roller coasters to see actually what’s going on with the head while folks are on these rides.

And then, once we understood those motions, we used these computational models to essentially try and understand what those motions do to the brain itself, and to model how the brain kind of twists and turns and stretches inside the skull.

Mina Kim: So that is what the brain is doing, huh? It’s twisting and turning. It’s sort of shaking in the skull during the — right?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah. So the brain is quite soft. You know, a lot of people equate it to Jell-O. So when you have — when your head undergoes a lot of these motions, the brain does as you would a plate of Jell-O: kind of jostle around. That is effectively what the brain is also doing.

Mina Kim: And so where and what kinds of injuries did you find, or areas where the brain was being affected by all of this?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, so thankfully, we didn’t see any injuries in our participants. And to be clear, a lot of the rides we went on — we did compare a lot of the observed findings with a lot of the sports research that we do in understanding how this compares to, like, a soccer header or an American football contact hit.

In general, these roller coaster rides didn’t produce motions that are any larger than any of those kinds of things you’d expect in contact sports. But we did observe that they are comparable. So what we saw happening to the brain was comparable to essentially heading a soccer ball. And a lot of these — where there’s the most kind of deformation or jostling of the brain — really is happening towards the periphery, on the surface, which is where we expect to see these kinds of bridging veins and things like that, that are consistent essentially with subdural hematomas.

Mina Kim: We were hearing from Posey that Posey was on sort of an older wooden ride. Are older roller coasters better than the modern ones we’re seeing today?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I don’t know, but I think from our observations, a lot of what I think is going on is it really has to do more with the kind of aggressive jostling of the body on these roller coaster rides that really kind of whips the head back and forth. So if a roller coaster is smooth and going through these, you know, kind of high maneuvers smoothly, I actually suspect that’s not going to be quite as bad as really getting jostled and shaken around.

I think I spoke to your producer. I mentioned there are some similarities here to things like shaken baby syndrome, where we know you aggressively shake a baby and that can lead to similar kinds of traumatic brain injuries. And it’s really that aggressive jostling that is potentially problematic.

Mina Kim: Yeah. So one should really consider the jostling, maybe then more than, like, the dip, if the dip is very smooth, or the length of time when you’re going at a very high speed, Dr. Kuo.

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, that’s what I think. But of course, you know, there’s a lot more that needs to be done to actually measure and understand what’s really going on to the head in a lot of these rides.

Mina Kim: When you hear about Kyung’s description of the X2, right, where the rider is sort of free-flowing, it’s shifting 360 degrees, raven turns, very high speeds, and so on, does this sound like a recipe for brain injury?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, so it’s interesting, because I know, you know, fighter pilots and things like that go through similar high-G maneuvers and things like that. And, you know, the mechanism behind that is a little bit different than what we see in these kinds of head traumas.

The head traumas, at least from what I work with and understand, are really caused by very fast impacts and direct head impacts and things like that. And we’re talking about your head hitting against a headrest or a side rest or something like that, that really causes those very rapid, essentially, jostling or accelerations of the head that can cause injuries. Now, what causes that jostle, right? It could be because you’re going through a very sudden change in motion through one of these raven turns or something, and that could be the cause of that jostling that then results in those head impacts.

Mina Kim: We’re talking with Dr. Calvin Kuo, assistant professor at the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent at CNN, about her investigation into the X2 roller coaster, which shut down last month at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, and broader questions that it’s raising about roller coaster safety. Stay with us.

I’m Mina Kim. You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re talking this hour about how last month, Magic Mountain announced the closure of its popular X2 roller coaster, which has been linked to two deaths and dozens of injuries, including traumatic brain hemorrhages. You can learn more about this in Kyung Lah’s piece, which she co-investigated. She’s a senior national correspondent at CNN. It’s called “They Braved a World Famous Six Flags Roller Coaster. Then They Were Rushed to the Hospital for Emergency Brain Surgery.”

Listeners, join the conversation with your roller coaster experiences, your questions about roller coaster safety, and your reactions to the response by the state and Six Flags. You can direct them to Dr. Calvin Kuo, assistant professor at the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and to Kyung Lah, at 866-733-6786, at the email address forum@kqed.org, and on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.

Let me go to Eileen in Kensington. Eileen, go ahead. You’re on.

Eileen: Hi. You’ve talked about OSHA, and that’s the agency authorized to inspect workplaces and to protect employees, and I think that’s irrelevant to the issue. And as the physician just talked about, it’s the forces on the brain that are the issue. So I think Cal/OSHA is just not the right agency to be inspecting roller coasters. They might be able to opine on whether the roller coaster is going to fall off the tracks, but other than that, they’re not going to have anything to determine whether the rider could possibly be injured.

Mina Kim: Eileen, thanks. That’s an interesting point, Kyung, right? I do know that there have been incidents where workers have been injured from the roller coasters as well while they are working at the theme park. But what do you think of Eileen’s point that maybe this needs to be under a —

Kyung Lah: And we were wondering the same thing when we started to figure — started to understand, or just simply ask, okay, who regulates these roller coasters? And that it’s Cal/OSHA was very surprising to us as well. This is a governmental question, right? Various agencies oversee different parts of our lives, which are often surprising in the state of California. But this was certainly something that surprised us as well.

Mina Kim: Let me go to Rob next in San Francisco. Rob, go ahead. You’re on.

Rob: Thank you. Uh, I think the biggest takeaway from this should be that the public should not trust these rides as absolutely safe. I mean, I was always under the impression, growing up and as I got older, that they wouldn’t put a ride in these parks that was not safe, but clearly that is not the case. And the public also needs to think, “Do I really want to get on this?”

I mean, my wife and I went to Disneyland about ten years ago, when our son was young, and we went on Space Mountain. I hadn’t been on a roller coaster in a long time. And when I got off, my wife and I both commented that the whole room felt like it was full of smoke because we were having this visual kind of a sting. We realized we’re too old to go on a coaster. I just couldn’t handle it physically, and it lasted for about 15 minutes, almost ruined our morning because when we got off, we were just — we were kind of traumatized. And I thought, wow, um, I think people need to think about this. And the more of a reputation these rides have for, you know, screwing the living poop out of you, um, may not be the best thing for you physically. And you don’t want to have a life-altering injury just because you wanted this thrill-seeking —

Mina Kim: Well, Rob, thanks for sharing where you’re at. I actually want to put your experience to another guest who’s joining us now, Dr. Nitin Agarwal, associate professor of neurological surgery at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University School of Medicine. Dr. Agarwal, thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Thank you for having me.

Mina Kim: Rob was saying, “Maybe I’m too old to ride roller coasters anymore.” Are certain people at a higher risk of injury from a roller coaster? Are their brains at a higher risk of potential injury?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: You know, I think that most roller coasters have warning signs about if you have prior existing neck conditions or back conditions or recent surgery, then maybe limit riding them. And as we get older, more people are prone to these types of things. So, in a sense, older people could be more prone to injury from a roller coaster.

Certainly, that thrill-seeking tendency doesn’t go away with age, so we still want to re-experience those magical moments from when we were younger, but there certainly is a risk as conditions progress.

Mina Kim: Um, you co-authored a 2025 paper that analyzed 20 years of data about neurological injuries on roller coasters from kids under 18 years old. Are kids more susceptible?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: You know, it’s a great question. We don’t know whether kids are more susceptible or not. The reason and rationale behind the study was to see a population that, you know, does often participate in roller coaster rides.

In the study itself, we noted that older children had a little bit of higher frequency of experiencing concussions, though we’re not really sure why that was the case. One thing that is concerning for me for children in that population that we studied is especially in some children, their heads are proportionally larger and their muscles are less developed, and their spines and ligaments might be more flexible. So those anatomical differences might increase susceptibility to head and neck injuries. So it’s one reason why children are an interesting population to look at for this study.

Mina Kim: Let me go to Anya, caller Anya next in San Francisco. Anya, go ahead. You’re on.

Anya: Thank you so much. Yeah, so this is — I listen to you often, and to hear about this ride, I teach in San Francisco, but I used to teach in Los Angeles, and I’m an eighth-grade math teacher. But we get to do fun things with kids, like take them to amusement parks. And a lot of my students have never been on roller coasters before. They don’t get to go to amusement parks.

And we would take our students to Six Flags when I was teaching in LA. And they were, “Ms. Wong, please, can we get on X2? Let’s get on!” And the joy on their faces. They’re so excited, and I love roller coasters. And I said, “You guys, this is terrifying,” like, to think about how fast we’re going, how high up we were.

And then the very next ride — this was about in, I think, 2017, was the last time I took this particular field trip — the ride got stuck. And I was thinking how high we were up on that ride, where if anything were to happen, that would be terrifying. I have other people’s children, and I want my students to experience joy and to be courageous, but knowing that I was putting them in such harm is really terrifying to hear. So thank you for hearing this.

Mina Kim: Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, I guess one thing I did see from your study, Dr. Agarwal, is that — and maybe this will help you feel a tad better — the overall injury rate, you said, was pretty low for roller coasters.

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Yes, indeed. It’s quite a low rate of injury. You know, I think what’s more important here from the study is general awareness, and that if you have a pre-existing condition, if you have a neck or back condition, then, you know, be mindful and heed the warning signs. And more importantly, on the coaster itself, follow the restraints, keep your head back, those things, because sudden acceleration, deceleration, rapid rotational movements — that’s really when injury can strike. But if general precautions are followed, injury rates are pretty low.

Mina Kim: So you mean there are ways, if you can, to position yourself on the ride to maybe make it a little bit less likely that you will be jostled about in a way that could cause injury?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Indeed. I think, you know, myself, I enjoy roller coasters, and I’m always the person turning over to my loved one saying, “Keep your head back,” before it starts.

Mina Kim: Do you think that the types of messages that theme parks put — you know, warnings before you’re riding a ride — are enough? The requirement generally is just a height requirement and so on. Do those need to change?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: You know, it’s hard for me to comment on the exact requirements to put out for each specific ride. But I think general safety of the restraints, keeping your head back, especially when you look at our study and there were injuries from your head hitting the safety bar or being jostled around or those types of things — I think most of those probably come when people do not follow the safety signs.

Mina Kim: Dr. Kuo, did you find in your study, you know, with people doing the wearables and so on, that it mattered where they sat on a roller coaster?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, I mean, we saw a lot of variability just in the kinds of motions that were observed. So we did go on a couple of rides a couple times, just trying to intentionally sit either in the front or the back. And there are certainly some differences just from the physics of it all.

But a lot of this really just depends on, you know, as Dr. Agarwal mentioned, just kind of how much jostling there is and how well you are kind of resisting a lot of that jostling. So I do think a lot of it is kind of person-dependent in a way, right? And just trying to kind of protect yourself and physiologically kind of resist a lot of that jostling.

Mina Kim: Well, Laura writes, “I love the classic wooden coasters. I went on a newer one years ago and my body said nope. I like the smoothness and fluidity of the classic wood coaster. It still has thrills, but does not assault the body. On my mom’s 80th, we went on the Giant Dipper in Santa Cruz. We both were grinning from ear to ear.”

Casey writes, “About 12 years ago, I took my twins and some friends to Great America for a day of rides. After one particular roller coaster that had their legs free, extreme spinning, and very sudden stops, at least three out of six kids got off saying the ride always gave them a headache. I have wondered ever since how many people are getting repeated mild concussions on these newer roller coasters without knowing it.”

Sort of similarly, Deborah writes, “I’m wondering how many brain injuries are not apparent right after the ride, possibly the result of cumulative trauma, like for football players.”

Your thoughts, Dr. Agarwal, on what Deborah and Casey are remarking on with regard to the headaches and sort of maybe not readily apparent that they have been injured from a ride?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Yeah, so we do know that you do not need a direct impact in order to suffer a head injury or a concussion. So that is a known phenomenon, and something people should pay attention to is anybody with a prior concussion, an existing cervical spine disorder, or any condition that makes the head, neck, or associated blood vessels fragile should take additional precautions and avoid roller coasters.

And most commonly, these are things that are noted in warning signs: prior head injury, prior concussion. So, you know, that would concern me, that somebody’s having repetitive experiences like that.

Mina Kim: Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. What signs should you look for, Dr. Agarwal, after you get off a ride that you may want to take a break or maybe even go see a doctor?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Just because you didn’t hit your head, I think it’s important to look for signs such as worsening headache, like you mentioned, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, any visual changes, confusion. People can have difficulty with balance or gait. Those are classical signs, hallmark signs that should prompt medical evaluation.

More concerning signs that would require rapid evaluation for me would be a sudden, severe headache or any sort of neurological deficit where someone has weakness on one side of their body or difficulty speaking. Those require immediate emergency medical attention.

Mina Kim: Is it possible that something very serious could not show up for a day or two, Dr. Agarwal?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: You could have delayed symptoms. Someone could feel initially normal before developing symptoms over an hour or so. So I think it’s important that people know and pay attention to symptoms, even if it’s in a delayed fashion.

There are instances where you could have a tearing of a so-called bridging vein, and you could have intracranial bleeding where it might not appear immediately and then cause symptoms or signs later on. We often see that with head trauma.

Mina Kim: Let me go to caller Nancy in Richmond. Nancy, go ahead. You’re on.

Nancy: Oh, hi, thank you. Yes, several years ago, maybe 25 — I don’t remember — on a roller coaster at Disney World in Florida. And I was an adult. I’m 75 now, so I was an adult. And when I got off the ride, one of my eyes — a blood vessel had popped in one of my eyes. And I really haven’t thought about that in a long time until your program.

Other than that, I mean, I was fine. My vision was fine. I didn’t tell anyone other than the person I was with, and, you know, I didn’t have a headache or anything like that. But it was shocking to see my eye, and then it did clear up. I can’t remember how long. I mean, it wasn’t — I don’t think it was a couple of days. I mean, it did clear up. Anyway, I just wanted to share that.

Mina Kim: Well, Nancy, thanks so much for sharing that. I’m glad that it wasn’t too serious, but yes, I imagine that was quite shocking as well. You know, Dr. Kuo, we’ve been talking about age and kids and development and so on, but you also had subjects ride the same ride and have very different responses. I’m imagining they were fairly similar in age. So do you know what caused that?

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, I mean, so we only had two people, so there’s nothing definitive I can really say. But from the sports literature, there is quite a lot of work that goes into understanding what factors might influence the protective effect of the body to resist head impacts and therefore concussions.

So there has been a lot of work looking into whether things like neck strength and neck stability help with resisting impacts and resisting this jostling around, which is potentially protective. So, as Dr. Agarwal mentioned, with kids having a relatively larger head compared to the rest of their body, and their neck strength — that is known to play a role in terms of their ability to resist a lot of this jostling. And then that might lead to a strike against the headrest or just jostling in general.

Mina Kim: Well, Douglas writes, “I’ve never been injured, but I rode an older roller coaster at Six Flags called Ninja, and, man, it hurt to ride on. The coaster jostles you on the hard G-force turns. It whips your neck back and forth and generally removes almost all of the fun from the experience.”

Let me go to Ali in Oakland. Ali, go ahead. You’re on. Hi, Ali, are you there? Oh, sounds like we do not have our connection with Ali. We’ll see if we can get that back.

John writes, “Going on a roller coaster is flirting with death. What keeps people from understanding that simple fact?”

What are your thoughts about that, Dr. Agarwal? Is it flirting with that? Does the person basically have a responsibility not to go on it, and that, you know, they should not necessarily have the expectation of safety from the manufacturer or the company?

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: You know, I think that the most important thing here is to have good rider safety precautions, and individuals with brain, neck, or spine conditions should consider or reconsider riding one of these coasters. But if you don’t have a medical condition, you don’t have one of those pre-existing conditions, I think there’s some general safety around these coasters, and they’re generally safe for healthy individuals who follow the guidelines.

So, most importantly, serious injuries occur when — um, when people have, um, existing conditions or don’t follow the safety advice. And then, obviously, there’s a responsibility to investigate them and determine what additional measures could be provided.

Mina Kim: Kyung, what are you watching for moving forward with this? It sounds like Six Flags could be facing potentially a slew of lawsuits.

Kyung Lah: I am looking at that. What Christopher Bulone, the attorney you mentioned and spoke with, has said is that the anticipation is that, of the 100 additional people who’ve reached out to their law firm, they anticipate filing individual lawsuits representing those various clients because all of their injuries are so different. He doesn’t envision it becoming a class-action lawsuit, but he does envision one after another filing all of those lawsuits. Mm.

Mina Kim: And also, of course, our heart goes out to Naomi Greer-Wilkinson’s family, as she remains in a coma after riding X2 this summer. Kyung, thank you so much for your reporting on this. I really appreciate it.

Kyung Lah: Thank you for having me.

Mina Kim: Again, Kyung Lah, senior national correspondent at CNN. Also, Dr. Agarwal, associate professor of neurological surgery at West Virginia University. Thank you so much for joining us as well.

Dr. Nitin Agarwal: Thank you.

Mina Kim: Dr. Calvin Kuo, assistant professor at the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. I really appreciate having you on.

Dr. Calvin Kuo: Yeah, thank you so much.

Mina Kim: And thanks always to our listeners for sharing their experiences and their questions, and to Jared Sport, who produced this segment. You’ve been listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the Generosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.

Airdate: Thursday, October 22, 2026 at 9 AM

Less than two weeks from the midterms, election officials and teams of lawyers are preparing for what has become a depressingly familiar American tradition: challenges to voting. The Trump administration has been focused on voter integrity, including filing suits to take purported noncitizens off voter rolls, and attempting to collect sensitive voter data from states. Meanwhile, legal teams are gearing up for challenges to election results. We’ll talk to experts and hear your concerns.

Guests:

• Richard Hasen, Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law, professor of political science, and director of the safeguarding democracy project, UCLA School of Law
• Sophia Lin Lakin, director, voting rights project, ACLU

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Over and over, independent researchers, Republican county elections officials, and others have found that voter fraud is a vanishingly small problem in American elections. For example, the Trump administration claimed that 15,000 voters — 16,000 in Nevada, a state where almost 1.5 million people cast ballots in the last presidential election — are noncitizens. But they did not provide evidence of that, later sending a list of 185 people to state officials. Those officials told the Trump administration that all 185 were actually citizens. The New York Times headline told the story simply: “From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle.”

And yet, the Trump administration continues to make accusations about widespread voter fraud and illegal voting. Today, we talk with two experts on voting and elections in this country about the state of play in our democracy ahead of the midterms. We’re joined this morning by Richard Hasen. He’s the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. Welcome.

Richard Hasen: Good to be with you.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined by Sophia Lin Lakin, who’s Director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. Welcome, Sophia.

Sophia Lin Lakin: Thank you for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: Rick, let’s start with the news from just yesterday. A federal judge in Northern California blocked the Department of Homeland Security from carrying out field operations to uncover voter fraud in nine states. What was DHS actually trying to do?

Richard Hasen: Well, what they say they’re trying to do is enforce a federal law that makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. What I think they’re actually trying to do is project the image that there’s a widespread voter fraud problem in this country and to kind of mimic the claims that President Trump has made — that noncitizens are voting in droves and affecting the outcome of elections.

But for people who are on the other side of this, many of whom likely are innocent of the charges that they’re being charged with, this looks like an act of voter intimidation. The court yesterday said that this could violate a part of the Voting Rights Act. It’s called Section 11(b), which makes it a crime to intimidate voters. I think this is the first time it’s been used against the federal government, which says a lot about the position of the federal government today. But voters need to know that they can go about their business and cast their ballots without interference from the federal government, and certainly without armed people trying to arrest them for potential crimes.

Alexis Madrigal: Sophia, what else do we know about this effort called, quote, the “Unlawful Voter Initiative”?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, I think Rick is absolutely right. If you announce enough lists, charges, and investigations, you create the appearance of a crisis. And here, in particular, the facts in the case demonstrated that the field operations weren’t targeting simply evidence of noncitizens, but actually looking at citizens, naturalized citizens, as possibly someone to be investigated.

So it was going very broad to try to drum up this narrative that there’s something wrong here, something that justifies what otherwise would be indefensible: this kind of chilling of voters who are just trying to have a say in our democracy. And that’s what we’re watching for. And unfortunately, many of these efforts are laying the groundwork for —

Alexis Madrigal: You know, Rick, just listening to both of you, it sounds like the important piece of this for the Trump administration is the sort of rhetorical value of tossing out these big numbers and then anticipating that the smaller numbers, or nothing that comes out of it on the other side, won’t make it back into the same kind of right-wing media circles.

Richard Hasen: I think that’s part of it, and I know we’re going to get into talking about what happened in Southern California with the arrests. But the idea that they’re sending SWAT teams and doing predawn raids with armed officers to arrest someone for a misdemeanor — yeah, certainly it’s trying to send a message.

But I think there may be another purpose as well, and this one is much more worrisome, which is that this could be trying to lay the groundwork for some kind of postelection challenges to the results of elections. I don’t think that’s likely to happen unless we have a very close election for control of the House or Senate, but certainly the predicate is being laid there that California officials and officials in other places are not doing enough to police their voter rolls, and therefore the results of the election could be suspect.

Alexis Madrigal: The DOJ has come after California, demanding that California take a supposed 20,000 noncitizens off the voting rolls. How did they actually convey this information to the state of California — who these people were, and these kinds of details?

Richard Hasen: So it’s very odd. A few months ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced that there were up to 190,000 noncitizens on the rolls in California. We didn’t hear more about that. They didn’t provide any names or any information to the state when they made that announcement.

And then, just while the election’s going on — this was just last week — the government gave a thumb drive, a portable drive to plug into your computer, with a sticky note with a password on it, and said, “Here’s the names of 20,000 potential noncitizens. We want you to go through this list and take these people — take their ballots away. Don’t mail them ballots or don’t count their ballots when they come in, and we’ll give you 48 hours to figure it out.”

I mean, just a completely unprofessional way of approaching this and a completely ridiculous demand. And I think, 49 hours after they sent that letter, they filed a lawsuit to try to force California — actually, only Los Angeles County so far — to segregate out ballots that might be from noncitizens.

California and Los Angeles have responded and said that’s against state law. It’s against a federal law called the National Voter Registration Act, which prevents purges of voters in the 90 days before the election. And it’s impractical, and we can’t do it. So this is now going to be heard by a judge down here in Southern California.

Alexis Madrigal: And just to be clear, just to lay it out for people: Obviously, you’ve been covering this area of the law for a long time. We have a fairly complicated, very local election system — counties up to the states, et cetera, et cetera. How strange is this kind of request and its actual means? Let’s say you wanted to do this — the quote-unquote right way to try to get a state to look into people who might, maybe, shouldn’t be voting. Is there a mechanism that would make sense for this, or how — just —

Richard Hasen: Sure. Yeah. So the federal government maintains a database called the SAVE database, and it’s not so accurate, but it does contain some lists of who’s counted as a citizen and a noncitizen. Some states have been using this. They’ve been voluntarily comparing their own lists to get information, and it could be a decent source for leads on trying to ferret out noncitizen voting.

We know states that have used it have not found all that much noncitizen voting. So it’s not as though you’re getting big disparities between the states. But never have I heard of anything like this, where the federal government is giving a list that’s kind of unvetted.

And, you know, the same day that they sought a temporary restraining order in the district court to force Los Angeles to segregate these ballots, they had this very public arrest — this is what I was referring to a few minutes ago. They announced 28 people who were being charged, and 11 of them were arrested, including this guy in the 5 a.m. raid who had just had six surgeries, who was a Trump supporter, who says that he didn’t register to vote, and who has relatives with the same name as his.

And this kind of points out the problem. The federal database is full of partial information. Lots of people have the same names or similar names. If you don’t have all the identifying information, the federal government cannot know if this person is a citizen or noncitizen. And so mistakes happen.

That’s exactly why the National Voter Registration Act provides that you can’t have systematic purges of voters in the 90 days before the election, because you run a significant risk of disenfranchising eligible voters. There’s a right way to do this. It’s not to do it while the election is ongoing.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. You mentioned these arrests in California. I guess there were 28 people arrested. So, you know, a tiny fraction. And yet there were arrests; they made a case against them. Sophia, what do you say to people who look at the arrests and say, “Aha, look at that. There were people voting who weren’t supposed to be voting”?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, you know, I think about when people talk about this being about election integrity. We need these really difficult barriers; we need these draconian measures of investigating everybody that’s on the rolls, all these kinds of things. And you say, “But we should be caring about whether eligible voters are able to participate in our elections, that we’re getting people who are having their say and we’re electing leaders and politicians that people want to have in office.”

If we’re creating barriers, if we’re creating these systems that maybe are catching these tiny fractions of individuals who end up on the rolls — who, by the way, study after study has demonstrated are on the rolls frequently because of administrative mistakes or human error, not for any malice, right? — if those tiny fractions of people are what we find, what kind of system are we creating?

We’re creating a system where eligible voters can’t cast their ballots. We’re creating systems that are fencing out large populations of eligible voters from being able to participate. So I say systems have mistakes. It’s great that we’re catching them. That is the point. We know the safeguards are working because we are catching them. At the same time, we need to really be thinking about not treating eligible voters as collateral in this witch hunt to solve what is a tiny, tiny problem.

Alexis Madrigal: We are talking about prospective legal challenges and real ones that the Trump administration is mounting in advance of the midterm elections. We’re joined by Sophia Lin Lakin, who’s Director of the Voting Rights Project with the ACLU. We also have Richard Hasen, Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law. You can check out his Election Law Blog.

We want to hear from you — your concerns about voting. 866-733-6786, or forum@kqed.org. We’ll be back with more right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. We’re talking about the legal challenges the Trump administration is mounting in advance of the midterm elections. We might get into what they might do afterward as well.

We’re joined by Rick Hasen from UCLA School of Law, Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, and Sophia Lin Lakin, Director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. We want to hear from you. Have these efforts by the Trump administration made you question the integrity of our voting system? Are there people in your life who question whether our elections have integrity? Give us a call: 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media — Bluesky, Instagram, Discord, et cetera. We’re KQED Forum.

So let’s talk a little bit about the DOJ notifying counties that it intends to monitor voting in various states. Sophia, is this an unusual thing? How would you characterize this?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, you know, historically, the Department of Justice has had monitors and observers at polling locations. In fact, there is some statutory basis for sending them in some instances, just to, again, ensure that elections are running smoothly and that there aren’t issues coming up in places where there might have been before. And that’s why you have volunteers who are monitoring and observing polling locations as well.

But, of course, we’re living in a time where you have the Trump administration and allies of the Trump administration saying kind of concerning things about how they might be going about watching, whether there might be investigations, and other intimidating-style rhetoric accompanying this. So I think everyone is going to be on high alert and watching to make sure that these observers, these monitors, stay within the lines of both state and federal law that protect voters against voter intimidation and election interference.

There are also quite a lot of state rules that regulate where and how observers can be with respect to polling locations. So, you know, I’m not going to say that anything is going to happen, but we’re all going to be looking at it very closely and carefully.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, Rick, obviously, this is just the era in which I grew up, in which it felt like everyone sort of agreed that voting was a good thing and that more people should vote, not fewer. I always would have imagined that monitors like this would have been there to make sure that people were able to vote, or that there wasn’t anything — that people weren’t being denied their right to vote.

Richard Hasen: Well, sure. I mean, that has been the purpose of monitors. You can go back to the 1960s and federal agents being sent down to the South to assure that Black voters, who were enfranchised by the 15th Amendment but who were still disenfranchised de facto by local election officials, could actually vote.

The Department of Justice sent some monitors last year during the Prop 50 election, and I believe in Los Angeles County, which is the largest electoral jurisdiction in the United States, they sent two people. Those people observed the tabulation process — that’s the process by which ballots are counted after the election. And then it turned out that was a nonissue.

A thousand monitors across the entire United States is not really that many when you think about it. And because of the protections that state law provides for the voting process and the post-voting tabulation, I’m not expecting that these DOJ officials are going to do much more than just observe. Now, they might claim that they’re seeing something that’s illegal, but so far we haven’t seen anything like that when they’ve sent observers to California, New Jersey, and some other places last year.

Alexis Madrigal: Just so folks can kind of see, we’re painting this picture of the comprehensive efforts that are being conducted, or at least wide-ranging efforts here. So, Sophia, another one of those is around voter-roll data. The DOJ has filed 31 lawsuits in D.C. and 30 states seeking unredacted voter files, and you’ve been involved in challenging those efforts. What’s the government seeking? Why is it seeking it? Why are you challenging it?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Yeah, the DOJ has been seeking the full, unredacted voter files from each of these jurisdictions — these 30 states and the District of Columbia. And that would include sensitive voter data, like driver’s license numbers and partial or full Social Security numbers in some instances.

This is information that isn’t normally just turned over to anyone, and that’s a good thing for voters. I’m sure that gives them comfort. And the DOJ — I think this is very similar to what we were talking about earlier with respect to these lists of purported noncitizens or other ineligible voters on the rolls — is attempting to create a national database that has this information, where the federal government can take a look and see if they can come up with lists and numbers of purported noncitizens to either try to compel states to do something with it, like remove them, as you’re seeing in California right now, or, again, for possible investigations, like we saw with respect to the field operations we talked about, or just simply to put the numbers out in the world and suggest, as Rick mentioned, that there might be something wrong with election results if they go a way that perhaps is undesirable.

So we’ve been involved in a number of these lawsuits across the country to push back on these DOJ requests. And so far, every single court that has visited this issue or addressed it has agreed with the voters that this data should not be turned over, that this request is invalid, and dismissed those cases. So that is where it currently stands: 26 cases, 27 courts.

Alexis Madrigal: So, Rick, let’s imagine that our electoral system wasn’t being weaponized, and we didn’t have rampant election denial within the Republican Party since 2020, which has become kind of a loyalty test. Is the basic idea of a national database of voters a good thing? I mean, just trying to get a sense of whether, were this done the right way, it would be something you would support.

Richard Hasen: So the first thing to note is that the United States is unusual among advanced democracies in that we don’t have a national identity card, right? In most other countries you could think of, like Germany or Australia, they conduct national elections and automatically register all of their citizens to vote. We don’t do that in this country.

If we had a national ID number that could go with people from state to state, it would be easy. Now, there’s a lot of politics unrelated to voting, right, where people don’t want to create this kind of system. So we have this hyper-decentralized system, which diffuses power between federal, state, and local governments. And even within states, it diffuses power within counties and between the executive branch and administrators. It’s really a mess.

I wrote a book in 2012 calling for national, nonpartisan election administration. And the Trump era has convinced me that I was wrong, because I see the problem that can come from centralizing power over elections in the federal government, particularly with a Supreme Court that believes in the so-called unitary executive theory, that all executive power has to flow from the president. That’s a recipe for an executive manipulating election outcomes.

I think our democracy is too weak to support such a system. So I think we need something else. And I think creating a national database would make sense so long as the government really bears the burden of all the costs of figuring out who is a citizen and all the costs of registering voters. It shouldn’t be that eligible voters have to jump through hoops each time they move in order to register and reregister to vote.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Sophia, I think this is another one of these moments where I feel like the world I grew up in is not the world that I live in, in the sense that where I grew up, in Washington State, opposition to something like a national voter ID database or a national voter database or a national ID was a right-wing issue and would have been an intense issue of liberty. How does the ACLU — and how do you — see it?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, we absolutely agree that, unfortunately, we live in a world right now — and this is something that the ACLU has always been somewhat concerned about, although “somewhat” might be underplaying it — the potential abuse of power wherever it comes from, whether from any sort of power or authority structure, whether it be state government, local government, or, as we’re seeing today, the federal government.

It’s very unfortunate for our democracy and our voters at this time that we’re seeing this abuse of power coming from the federal government in a way that really highlights the issues with giving that kind of control, with, as Rick has pointed out, a Supreme Court that has given us some indications that they aren’t as willing to police the excesses. Although, when we may or may not get into it, the court has policed some of the excesses this election cycle, which gives me some confidence — but again, not maybe the kind of limits that we would want to see at a time when we have, unfortunately, a federal government that’s willing to weaponize that federal government apparatus against voters.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in John in Oakland. Welcome, John.

John: I’d like to appreciate you taking the call, and I think it’s a great discussion with your panelists, a great selection of a topic. My question or my observation is, I know it’s true that many naturalized citizens who can vote actually understand our Constitution and laws far better than many, many U.S. citizens — comparable to maybe what an attorney would need to know in California to pass the California bar. And I’ll take the response offline. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: Thank you so much. You know, Rick, I feel like I hear variations of the comment that American citizens who were just born here, born into it, don’t really have a real sense of our Constitution or civics education that maybe would be useful in some of these cases.

Richard Hasen: Yeah, I guess I have two observations here. One is that the SAVE database that we talked about — one of the flaws in it is that it’s not up to date. So some of the people who are getting flagged as noncitizens by the federal government are actually people who naturalized over the last few months or a year. And so they get mistakenly treated as criminals when, in fact, they did everything right. They waited until they were citizens and then registered to vote.

On the point about ignorance about the Constitution, I think we need to think about what voting is for. This is maybe more of a philosophical point, but you could say that voting is about making the best choice, in which case we might want to limit the franchise to people who are the most educated. Maybe only KQED listeners should be allowed to vote. And, you know, that kind of logic, I think, leads to literacy tests, leads to restrictions — or some people say voter registration should be hard because we should only let people who work hard enough and run the gauntlet be allowed to vote.

My view is that voting is allocating power among political equals, and we shouldn’t be able to decide, “You don’t speak English well enough,” or, “You can’t read,” or, “You’re not watching the PBS NewsHour,” and so you can’t vote.

So I think, yes, it would be great to have better civics education. I think it’s important to protect democracy for people to understand what our rights are and why our elections are so precious. But that can’t be a basis for deciding who votes or who doesn’t vote.

Alexis Madrigal: What a great answer. That was Richard Hasen. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law and Professor of Political Science and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law. We’re also joined by Sophia Lin Lakin, who’s Director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU.

We’re talking about the legal challenges the Trump administration has been mounting in advance of the midterm elections. Taking your calls if you want to join the conversation. You know, maybe there’s people in your life who question election integrity. What have they been saying to you? How do you answer them? 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED Forum in all those places.

Sophia, I wanted to ask you about mail-in ballots. You know, California is primarily a mail-in ballot state. I feel like earlier in this election cycle there was so much about mail-in ballots. And then the Supreme Court case came down, and Watson v. RNC, a 5–4 ruling, seemed to support mail-in ballots. Can you talk to us about where we are in this kind of newish front of mail-in ballots versus the RNC?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Yeah. No, I unfortunately think that mail ballots, mail-in voting, which has been a wonderful source of accessible participation for so many voters — for some of whom that’s actually the only way they’re able to participate in elections — has been under attack by the Trump administration, Trump himself, despite his using mail voting himself for quite some time now, as well as from the RNC.

It was, I imagine, a huge relief for many voters, especially voters in California, that the RNC v. Watson case came down the way it did. The ruling said that the grace period California had after Election Day for ballots that were timely cast to continue to arrive — as we know, sometimes the USPS is not as fast as we would like it to be in processing mail and getting it where it needs to be on time — means those ballots can still count.

And that’s true not just in California, but across the country in places where states have these grace periods for mail ballots. That’s good news, I think, for a place like Alaska, where mail does take quite a long time to go from one place to another just because of the size of the state and the remoteness of some of those locations.

But, you know, the Trump administration had an executive order earlier this year trying to, again, meddle in mail-voting processes by trying to turn the USPS itself into a gatekeeper of who got mail ballots at all. We, along with other organizations, as well as a coalition of states including California, which led the coalition, stood against that USPS rule that was put in place to implement this executive order from the Trump administration. The case eventually got to the Supreme Court, which left in place an injunction blocking the USPS from performing this gatekeeping role for purposes of this November election.

So what I’d like to say to everyone listening is: mail voting is safe, it’s reliable, and it’s going to operate the way it has, so you can rely on that. But I understand, unfortunately, that all of these actions around challenging mail voting and its processes have created concern and doubt among voters about whether it’s reliable, whether they can and should use it.

For those voters, I would say there are other alternatives — likely alternatives in your state, early voting, and other ways to participate. If that makes sense to you, you should go ahead and use what makes sense for you. We would recommend that people go ahead, get their ballots, get their plans in place, and vote as early as possible, because if anything goes wrong, you have a chance to fix it.

Alexis Madrigal: One listener writes in to say, “I voted by mail, but put my ballot in a ballot box at the public library. I don’t trust the post office.” Kind of one of the repercussions of this rhetoric and these legal challenges.

We’re talking about what the Trump administration has been doing in advance of the midterm elections, and what issues may arise after them. That’s coming up in the next segment. We’re joined by Sophia Lin Lakin, Director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. We also have Richard Hasen, Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law. He’s also the author of the book A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.

Taking your questions, taking your concerns. You know the phone number: 866-733-6786. You know the email: forum@kqed.org. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with UCLA’s Rick Hasen and the ACLU’s Sophia Lin Lakin. We’re talking about prospective legal challenges the Trump administration may mount around the midterm elections — the ones they already have, and the ones that may still be to come.

David writes in to say, “Trump is laying the groundwork for insurrection. The absence of facts supporting the attacks on California voting is not relevant to the people who are the intended recipients of the allegations. Trump told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by because he’s prepared for the potential of reactivating a vigilante posse to seize control regardless of elections.”

I think that is one of the range of opinions, probably on the more extreme side, about what may happen after these midterm elections. We’ve been talking a lot about the rhetoric and various actions of the administration leading up to the midterms. Nonetheless, if you look at the polling data, it looks like things could go very well for Democrats.

Rick Hasen, let’s say that does happen and Democrats have a fairly big day at the polls in November. What’s the range of possibilities you can foresee for the Trump administration to try and keep a hold of the House or the Senate, even if, by the terms of the election, they have lost?

Richard Hasen: If it turns out that it’s not a close margin for control of the House or control of the Senate, I don’t think there’s really very much that the Trump administration could do, or would probably even try to do, because it would just be pointless.

My concern is, let’s say we’re talking about the Senate. The Senate is more likely to be close than the House, based on the polling and based on just the smaller number of people who are elected to those offices. Let’s say it comes down to Alaska, where, as Sophia mentioned, it takes a while for them to get the ballots and count the ballots. They also use ranked-choice voting, which means it takes longer to compute the results.

If we’re in a period after the election where we don’t know who controls the Senate, I think that’s a very dangerous period for the country. I mean, it could happen in California with the House because we take a while to call some close races here as well.

My nightmare is the potential for the Department of Justice to try to seize ballots or voting machines. The president said his regret after 2020 was not seizing voting machines, so I don’t put any possibility out of my mind. But I think the biggest factor is the margin rather than the scruples of Trump or those around him.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one listener on Bluesky writes, “Why aren’t we better prepared for this? It’s been about a decade that Trump and Republicans have questioned results not in their favor. This isn’t new.”

Richard Hasen: Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing is that Donald Trump is president. He controls the machinery of the federal government. Now, as Sophia mentioned, there have been case after case — those involving mail-in ballots, voter rolls, and many other things — where the courts have said the president doesn’t have a role here. But he is trying to assert a role every time and in every avenue that he can.

So I’m actually hopeful that after the 2026 midterms, Donald Trump will lose interest in elections because he won’t have anything personally at stake anymore, and maybe we can get back to some normalcy.

There are lots of things that I think, if we put Democrats and Republicans in a room and we weren’t worried about what Donald Trump thought, we could do to improve elections, to increase both the accessibility of voting as well as voting’s integrity. It’s not a zero-sum game. There’s a lot that can be done to make things better.

But right now, there was a story in the New York Times, I believe it was last week, that the president railed against the voting system on 440 days of his second term, which was about 70% of the days of the second term. In that sort of environment, there’s just no moving forward. We just have to get past this moment.

Alexis Madrigal: You know, Sophia, recently there was a Washington Post report that Trump allies were urging him to issue an executive order that used the guise of foreign interference as a way to take control over elections. I mean, we haven’t done it yet. Eleven days to the election. Do you expect anything sort of that dramatic in these last couple of weeks?

Sophia Lin Lakin: We’re living in an upside-down world at this moment, so I’d say we are prepared for just about anything. Whether I expected a different story — but I would say that the president’s record on his executive orders when it comes to voting hasn’t been very good.

As Rick has mentioned, not only was there this recent executive order related to mail voting that I chatted about earlier, but there was a prior one in March of 2025 that attempted to again take over some of the machinery of elections and add, for example, a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form.

And again, the courts blocked that thing very clearly, right? The Constitution is clear on this point. The president doesn’t have a role in our elections. That authority belongs to the states and Congress here. And that would remain true if he were to declare any sort of national emergency. Those national emergency powers don’t change the scope of his authority. I mean —

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s say something like that were to happen, or some other thing that tested this principle, and it goes to the Supreme Court. How do you think that would play out, Sophia?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, I’m hopeful that what we’ve seen so far with respect to the USPS ruling itself would indicate that the Supreme Court, too, would see these as sort of out-of-bounds, quite exotic plays that have no business interfering with our election, especially given that we’re in the midst of an election cycle itself.

So I take some of the signs that we’ve seen from the court on this as at least a suggestion that they themselves are not interested in upending the system in the ways that the president is grasping for in these quite dramatic, power-grabbing endeavors.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, Rick, did Watson, the mail-in ballot case before the Supreme Court, give you the kind of comfort that Sophia is describing?

Richard Hasen: Watson didn’t do that. I mean, Watson was really a statutory interpretation case. I think it was an easy case. I was surprised that the court divided so closely on the question.

What gives me more confidence is a ruling back in 2020. So Ken Paxton, who’s now running for the United States Senate as a Republican candidate in Texas, filed a lawsuit directly in the Supreme Court to try to throw out the Electoral College votes of four states that had voted for Biden but that had Republican legislatures, in the hopes that these Republican legislatures would then submit alternative slates of electors. And that got no traction at the Supreme Court.

We’ve seen other cases since then, including a very important case disputing the results of the 2024 North Carolina state Supreme Court race. It certainly didn’t get the kind of attention as 2020, but it was very important. And it was a very conservative Federalist Society member, a federal district court judge in North Carolina, who shut it down.

Similarly, a very conservative judge in Philadelphia wrote an opinion in a case where Trump tried to challenge the results in Pennsylvania in 2020 and shut it down.

I think even though we see lots of divides in the courts on questions like voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, or campaign finance, when it comes to preserving free and fair elections, I think we still have a consensus in this country that the winner of a fair election should be able to take office. I mean, it’s a very low bar, but I think we’re meeting it.

Alexis Madrigal: You mentioned earlier about the Senate, that if there were a time when it wasn’t clear who had control of the Senate, that would be a dangerous time for the country. I mean, just for example, to put some meat on the scenario bones here, if in Texas, you know, Paxton or Talarico wins by a thousand votes, you’d kind of expect that either side would ask for a recount or challenge or so. How do you think that scenario might play out?

Richard Hasen: Well, so it’s normal that in a very close race, if you’re talking about a race for Senate where millions of ballots are cast and there’s a 1,000-vote difference, of course every candidate’s going to contest that. That’s normal. That would not be a sign that there’s an attempt to subvert the outcome of the election.

It’s more a situation where, imagine in California, because we take a longer time to count ballots, and we know that late-arriving ballots tend to be Democratic-leaning because Democrats tend to vote later and are more likely to vote by mail. You can imagine a situation where the vote total so far that had been announced showed that a Republican candidate had more votes counted so far, and then the Trump administration tries to seize ballots or seize machines and makes it impossible to do a full count.

Then the argument could be, well, you know, we should go with whoever was leading at the time that the counting was in the middle. I mean, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. That would not be normal. That’s not like a recount after all the ballots have been counted.

I think our state and local election administrators have their heads down. They’re trying to run the election. If there’s a recount because it’s a close election, they’re going to follow the rules. And I think for the most part, we can count on courts to do so as well.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Do we have any indications in the various court systems about how they might react to an attempt to seize ballots or voting machines?

Richard Hasen: Well, you know, we have not had a situation in modern times where a court has approved a search warrant to seize ballots or voting machines in an election that’s still alive.

You may remember that last year, the Department of Justice was able to get a search warrant to seize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, related to the 2020 election. So that was a dead election. It was long gone. And the search-warrant affidavit, which we saw, was full of discredited conspiracy theories that had been made about the Georgia vote being rigged in 2020.

One of the things that’s important to do, learning from that, is to educate judges. We at the Safeguarding Democracy Project put out a guide for judges: What do you do if you get a search warrant asking for ballots or voting machines? There are ways that we put forward in this document for courts to protect legitimate law-enforcement investigations while still assuring that the electoral chain of custody is preserved so that we can figure out fairly who the winner of the election is.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. You know, JB writes, “California needs a better system. It takes forever to get results and even longer to certify results. Why does it take forever to give results when other countries, such as Brazil, have results almost instantly?” Rick?

Richard Hasen: Well, I mean, one point here is that we vote on many things. I think in Los Angeles, we’re voting on 60-something things. That takes a long time. We also have a lot of vote-by-mail. We have a huge volume, and lots of people wait until a day or two before the election to submit their ballots. So there’s a big bottleneck.

I do think we need to improve things. California has changed its laws a little bit to make things go a little bit faster. They’ve also allocated, I think it was $40 million, to try to speed up the count.

But, you know, if we were just voting — you know, pick your party, Green Party, Libertarian Party, whatever — it could go very quickly because you only have to count one thing. And, you know, in most of these places, they have uniform systems. All the ballots look the same everywhere in the country. Again, it goes back to this decentralization. It also goes to the lack of adequate resources given to election officials to be able to move more quickly.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Last kind of realm of nightmare, Rick: If the Democrats win the House, could Republicans just refuse to seat them? Is that on the table as a strategy?

Richard Hasen: So the House and Senate are different. We’re only electing a third of the Senate because senators serve six-year terms. So the Senate is a continuing body, and they can adjudicate disputes over who’s won a Senate race.

The House is different. The entire House dissolves on January 3, 2027. There is no Speaker of the House. And so the first step is figuring out who’s won elections, who gets sworn in, and can vote for Speaker of the House.

There have been a lot of scenarios spun out that Mike Johnson, before he leaves as speaker in this Congress, would appoint someone as a clerk, who would be the civil servant making the decision about who can get sworn in. If Democrats actually win and there’s no question about it, the idea that the civil servant is going to not recognize the results in a number of races in order to throw it to Republicans — I think that would be like a coup d’état. That would be politically unsalable. That would be something where I think courts could get involved and adjudicate, because the clerk is not Congress, and the clerk can be ordered to do things.

So it’s very far-fetched. If we again have a razor-thin election and there are legitimate questions about who has control of Congress, then I think there could be some manipulation at the margins in that case. But again, extremely unlikely. That’s not the kind of thing that’s keeping me up at night.

Alexis Madrigal: Somehow, we end up talking about that term autogolpe all over again. Sophia, how are you preparing for maybe some of the scenarios that seem unlikely or extreme, but that may be — you know, late at night, when Rick is asleep but I am not — you’re worried about?

Sophia Lin Lakin: Well, you know, my job is to think about all these different nightmare scenarios that other people have and make sure that we have a plan and a response, and we’re ready to go if any of them were to come to pass.

From the litigation and legal side, of course, that means having legal analysis, clients lined up, template papers ready to go in any jurisdiction where we need to go, lawyers on the ground, and the like.

But also, to your question of whether we’re prepared and how we’re preparing, much of the work to make sure that these elections go according to law, that they are completed on time, and that all the things that happen are resolved properly is preparatory work on the front end, right? Making sure that judges, as Rick has pointed out, have the information they need; county election officials have the information they need; and we’re educating voters, too, about what they need to know and what their rights are.

We have been conducting these KYR — Know Your Rights — safeguarding trainings for volunteers. We’ve had over 10,000 people attend these so far. We’ve had almost 100,000 new Democracy Defenders members — this is what we’ve been calling them — sign up with the ACLU since April.

These are people who are interested in figuring out how they can meet this movement, wanting to say, “Not on our watch.” People we can deploy and mobilize across the country to make demands of officials, peacefully demonstrate, and also just document what’s going on and let us know if there are issues that need to be resolved, either by a call to an election official, if we need to run to court, or if there needs to be a larger mobilization at play.

So we’re doing all of this work. Much of it has already been done, but we’re watching and monitoring extraordinarily carefully and ready to act at a moment’s notice.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Last couple of listener comments here. One writes, “Step back and consider a point often not discussed: Why on earth would an undocumented resident risk calling attention to themselves, risking criminal prosecution and deportation, for the sake of one single vote? This makes no sense.”

Ruth writes, “While I’m concerned about the administration sending in monitors, I am more concerned about the fact that they have refused to allow international monitors access to the polls.”

Another listener says, “I have volunteered as a poll watcher in Nevada, which was a Democratic Party effort. I found the process a little boring, but also reassuring. I didn’t see any irregularities. I saw people from all parties trying to get their voices heard. Of course, in the parking lot of the library in Sparks, there was a significant Trump gathering — trucks with flags, folks expressing their support — but nothing like interference that I saw.”

The last person writes, “I miss the days when we would mostly go to the polls. I know people are busy, but I always enjoyed heading to my local polling place, seeing other people participating in the civic process, and feeling like I was getting to have my voice heard.”

So, you know, coming up in 11 days, you can go vote. We’ve been talking about the legal challenges that may be brought around these midterm elections. We’ve been joined by Rick Hasen, UCLA professor at UCLA School of Law. Thank you so much.

Richard Hasen: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: We’ve also been joined by Sophia Lin Lakin, Director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU. Thank you, Sophia.

Sophia Lin Lakin: Thank you.

Alexis Madrigal: I’m Alexis Madrigal. Thank you so much for your comments and your listenership. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with me and Mina Kim.

Announcer: Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the Generosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.