������Ƶ

Gabbard Vs. Green? No: Coming off a wildly successful election season, Hawaii Republicans are evidently already looking to 2026. After all, they picked up four seats in the Hawaii Legislature in November and won the trifecta — the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives — at the national level. The GOP effectively controls the U.S. Supreme Court, too.

Tamara McKay, state chair of the Hawaii Republican Party, is now wondering whether state Sen. Mike Gabbard might do as his daughter recently did and jump ship from the Democratic Party.

“Recently, a member approached me with thoughts on a strong candidate for Hawaii’s 2026 gubernatorial race. I suggested that if Senator Mike Gabbard were to consider switching parties, as his daughter Tulsi Gabbard has, Hawaii might warmly receive him as a viable candidate for governor,” McKay said in an emailed GOP newsletter Thursday.

“This idea was met with great enthusiasm, prompting a lunch meeting with Senator Gabbard. I was informed during the lunch, Senator Gabbard expressed openness to the idea, pending thoughtful consideration and prayer with his family. This possibility brings hope for strong leadership in Hawaii, and we look forward to seeing where this journey may lead.”

Gabbard himself, however, tells The Sunshine Blog the thought of running for governor “has never entered my mind.”

“I never said I was open to the idea. I simply said that I would talk with my family and pray about it,” he says. “At this time, I’m deeply engaged in preparing for the 2025 session and I have no interest in running for governor in 2026 as a Republican or a Democrat.”

Well, that clears that up. Late Thursday, McKay sent out a revised GOP email that dropped any reference to Mike Gabbard.

Gabbard previously was a member of the GOP, by the way, even running against U.S. Rep. Ed Case in 2004. He lost but was elected to the state Senate two years later. He was reelected in 2010 as a Democrat and has been in the Senate ever since.

Meanwhile, The Blog notes that Democratic Gov. Josh Green is actively fundraising for an expected reelection bid in 2026.

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat opinion writers are closely following efforts to bring more transparency and accountability to state and local government — at the Legislature, the county level and in the media. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

When all is cured and done: Legislative races don’t get much closer than the one that unfolded in central Oahu’s House District 39.

First Democratic challenger Corey Rosenlee led Republican incumbent Elijah Pierick by 331 votes in the election night count. But the next day Pierick pulled ahead by 20 votes after more ballots were counted that apparently had been cast in person (overall Pierick won in the in-person balloting 72.8% to 22.1% while Rosenlee led in the far more plentiful mail ballots 51.9% to 48%).

That 20-vote margin was close enough to trigger an immediate recount. And in what The Blog assumes was a disappointment for election deniers everywhere, the exact same totals were counted.

Then came the “curing” of defective ballots, which ended Wednesday with Pierick still ahead but by a mere 11 votes. Barring a court challenge, that’s the final tally: 4,712 to 4,701.

Every vote counts, folks.

Crime pays: J. Kalani English is a convicted felon who received early release from federal prison earlier this year. It’s unlikely that the former Maui County councilman and state Senate majority leader would run for office again, but The Blog was intrigued to see that he did file a campaign spending report this year.

The filing, covering of 2024, shows English with $7,575 in cash on hand, though he raised no money. But to Go Daddy in Honolulu in order to close out costs for campaign emails and website work.

English’s bribery bro, Ty Cullen, terminated his campaign spending committee in January and escheated the remaining to the , which is used for partial public financing of campaigns. The payment also covered .

Cullen, who is also out of the slammer, was vice chair of the House Finance Committee when he resigned shortly after pleading guilty along with English in February 2022.

Under , we note, a felon who has served time and been fully discharged can both vote in elections and run in them. Just sayin’.

MINT condition: The Blog is in the midst of Michael Connelly’s new crime thriller “The Waiting,” another in the series focused on Los Angeles Police Department Detective Renee Ballard who sometimes teams up with another Connelly favorite, Harry Bosch, to solve tough cases. (The Blog is waiting for Mickey Haller aka The Lincoln Lawyer to make an appearance.)

A secondary theme in this new one has Ballard worried about her mother, who was living on Maui during the August 2023 fires. Six months later, Ballard’s mom is still listed among the missing and she’s in touch with a Maui Police Department pal who is trying to help.

Ballard’s cop friend “works for something called the MINT,” Ballard tells her therapist who wants to know the latest on her missing mom. “Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force. That’s a horrible name so we shorten it, give it a catchy acronym.”

Later, Ballard and her cold case unit puzzle through a difficult case of their own that hinges on DNA tests — results that are stuck in a backlog at the police lab. She declares she’s going to apply for a grant like Maui’s for a mobile DNA lab. “They put in what they can find of the human remains and they get DNA comparisons done in ninety minutes,” she says.

The Blog couldn’t help but wonder if Connelly, a former LA Times cops and court reporter, had maybe read Civil Beat projects editor Jessica Terrell’s fascinating in-depth examination of how the Maui Police Department quickly brought in the latest DNA technology after the Lahaina fire and how officers used it to painstakingly identify the dead.

“By mid-October — a little over two months after the fire — police had identified all but one of the 96 victims recovered from the burn zone during the official five-week search for human remains,” Terrell reported. “The story of how a small county police department that didn’t even have a medical examiner on staff at the time of the fires managed to achieve such a milestone is largely a story of science and collaboration. Incredible leaps in technology over the last decade, along with an enormous influx of volunteers from across the country, helped accomplish what would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.” 

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier mobilized “a new team dubbed the Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force, or MINT,” Terrell reported.

Turns out the Maui chief coined that “horrible” MINT name, too, taking it from the flow chart in the police after-action report.

Pelletier, who as a captain with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department served as incident commander when a sniper shot and killed 60 people at a music festival on the Vegas Strip, was able to line up a couple of loaner machines from ANDE, the company that has developed the technology.

Rapid-identification DNA technology had been used after similar fires in California left behind incinerated bodies that were practically impossible to sort out. In Lahaina, where 102 people died, the situation was grimly similar — in many cases bone fragments and ash were all that remained after the inferno.

Pelletier morphed the MINT into a permanent cold case squad. And now Maui has it’s own ANDE rapid DNA machine. It arrived last month, thanks to the Maui Police Foundation which paid $375,000 for the machine.

Will Connelly’s fictional MINT help find Ballard’s mom among the ashes? Or rule her out as a final victim of the Lahaina fires? The Blog can hardly wait to find out.