HONG KONG — Pro-democracy forces swept Hong Kong district council elections over the weekend, boosting pressure on the city’s Beijing-backed government to listen to protesters’ demands for greater freedoms.

China responded sternly to the landslide in the vote widely seen as a referendum on public support for the anti-government demonstration movement. Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that no matter how the situation in Hong Kong changes, the semi-autonomous region is part of China.

“Any attempt to disrupt Hong Kong and damage [its] stability and prosperity will not succeed,” he told reporters in Japan, where he was attending a G-20 foreign ministers meeting.

Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang added Monday that Hong Kong’s most urgent task is to restore order that has been increasingly shaky as protesters continue to clash with police.

Geng also stressed that tensions in Hong Kong are purely China’s internal affairs.

“The determination of the Chinese government to safeguard the interests of national sovereign security and development is unshakable,” he was quoted as saying by Global Times, a hawkish newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

China has blamed Western governments for fomenting the unrest in the former British colony.

For months, Hong Kong protesters have been demanding that China loosens its grip.

Beijing has steered clear of interfering in the protesters directly, saying that it trusts Hong Kong’s embattled leader Carrie Lam to handle the situation. However, the protests have presented Chinese leader Xi Jinping with one of the biggest popular challenges since he came to power in 2012.

Although district councils have little power and the election is normally a low-key race, over 2.9 million cast their votes in Hong Kong Sunday in a 71 percent turnout, exceeding the 2015 participation levels by nearly 25 percent.

The pro-democracy camp had won a commanding majority of the 452 district council seats at stake, taking control of at least 17 of the city’s 18 district councils in a rebuke to Beijing-backed Lam and her handling of the protests.

Hong Kong’s so-called “pan-democrats” are a group of pro-democratic political parties who have been calling for preservation and expansion of existing freedoms enshrined in law after the former British colony was handed over to China in 1997.

“The electoral results are a huge embarrassment to the entire pro-Beijing camp,” associate professor Kenneth Chan with the department of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University told NBC News.

“I have talked to a few of them and they’re struggling to come up with an answer. The verdict has been passed and the government cannot ignore the public opinion,” he said, adding that Lam is waiting for Beijing’s order for her next move.

“She doesn’t know what to do. The whole country has no idea about the scale and importance of this election.”

Lam issued a statement Monday, saying her government respects the election outcome and promised to “humbly listen” to the public’s opinions.

“There are various interpretations related to the results, and quite a few view it as a reflection of people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and society’s deep-seated problems,” she acknowledged.

The vote is the only fully democratic one in Hong Kong. Members of the legislature are chosen partly by popular vote and partly by interest groups representing different sectors of society, and the city’s leader is picked by a 1,200-member body that is dominated by supporters of the central government in Beijing.

Jasmine Leung reported from Hong Kong. Leou Chen from Beijing. Yuliya Talmazan from London.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — After defeating Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, Kentucky Democrats now have their sights set on Mitch McConnell, who has become their party’s public enemy No. 2, behind only President Donald Trump.

But they know ousting the Senate majority leader will be much tougher.

Bevin, whose inflammatory comments about teachers made him one of the most unpopular governors in the country, conceded the narrow election to Democrat Gov.-elect Andy Beshear earlier this month after a week-long protest of the results.

“This year, it was Matt Bevin. Next year, it’ll be Mitch McConnell,” tweeted Amy McGrath, the former Marine fighter pilot and 2018 congressional candidate who is McConnell’s leading Democratic opponent.

Many Democrats loathe McConnell not only for what they charge is his complicity in enabling Trump, but for packing the judiciary with conservative judges, especially by blocking President Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Meritt Garland, and then ramming through Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Hillary Clinton in a recent speech accused the majority leader of “abdicating” his “responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution” by refusing to confront what she called “threats to the bedrock of our democracy” from Russian meddling to Trump’s alleged abuses raised in the House’s impeachment proceedings.

Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro said Sunday while stumping for his presidential bid in Iowa that McConnell “has done as much or more damage than Donald Trump over the years to our democracy.”

Republicans, however, are not breaking a sweat.

They look at the other results from the Nov. 5 election in Kentucky, when the GOP swept five other statewide offices besides governor, and the fact that Trump remains popular in a state he won by 30 percentage points. Republicans in Washington and Kentucky see few viable paths for McGrath to topple McConnell.

“There are a lot of positive takeaways from the election and the environment is only going to improve in 2020 with President Trump on the ticket,” said McConnell’s campaign manager Kevin Golden.

They will grant McConnell is unpopular — the single least-liked senator in the country, according to Morning Consult polls — and they’ll acknowledge McGrath is likely to raise more money, thanks to liberal donors across the country eager to defeat him.

So they’ll spot her, say 45 percentage points. But the GOP says getting that last 5 percent will be nearly impossible. To date, there have been no independent polls of the matchup.

“The notion of getting pro-life Trump voters to support her is just a fantasy,” said Scott Jennings, a Kentucky-based Republican operative and former George W. Bush aide. “But I suspect her consultants will all have six or seven wonderful beach houses when it’s all over.”

Democrats don’t claim it will be easy, but say they know what they’re getting into and still see a way to win. One prominent Kentucky Democrat, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said he told McGrath she had a 10 to 15 percent chance of winning and she didn’t dispute it.

“I’m not about to tell you this state is trending back Democratic,” said McGrath’s campaign manager, Mark Nikolas. “But (Beshear’s) win was proof positive that our assessment was correct that this a winnable race.”

Here’s what Democrats have going for them: Money, a deeply unpopular opponent in anti-incumbent moment, and the energy of the Trump-era left.

When McGrath declared her intention to challenge McConnell, money poured into her campaign at an unprecedented clip. She raised nearly $11 million in her first quarter in the race, more than the $7.5 million McConnell had raised all year.

“I think we will not only outraise McConnell, but give Beto a run for his money,” Nikolas said, referring to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s ultimately unsuccessful bid last year to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in which he raised over $80 million.

And they say Beshear’s victory is further proof of Kentuckians’ penchant for throwing out unpopular GOP incumbents, going back to Sen. Jim Bunning, who quit his re-election race in 2010 to endorse outsider Republican Rand Paul, and to Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who was defeated in 2011 by Beshear’s father, Steve.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Washington say, if nothing else, there’s value to keeping the GOP Senate leader busy and forcing Republicans to divert money to the race.

But here’s what Democrats have working against them: This is Kentucky we’re talking about.

The commonwealth, like many Southern states, has a long history of voting Democratic in local and state races, but breaking for the GOP in federal races. And if anything, the state is trending more conservative as Democrats flee their former party.

Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives for 95 years until 2016. Now, Republicans have near super-majorities in both the state House and Senate. And while 12 of the past 15 governors were Democrats, the commonwealth hasn’t elected a new Democratic senator since 1974.

McConnell’s last re-election bid in 2014 also attracted national attention and liberal enthusiasm. But he went on to crush opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes by almost 16 percentage points.

And while Beshear was able to pick up support from Trump voters this year, the president will be on the ballot with McConnell next year.

That means, Democrats knowledge, they’ll need a not-insignificant chunk of voters to split their ticket — voting for a GOP president and Democratic senator. And ticket-splitting is increasingly rare in a politically polarized America. In 2016, every single state voted the same way for Senate and president for the first time ever.

That’s why McGrath has sometimes tied herself in rhetorical knots by trying to drive a wedge between Trump and McConnell while remaining attractive to liberal online donors.

“Mitch McConnell is the epitome of a dysfunctional system, he created the swamp that Donald Trump said he was going to drain,” she said on Seth Myers. “So that’s my way there, that’s my message: If you want to drain the swamp, you have to get rid of Mitch McConnell.”

She made a major misstep out of the gate when she said earlier this year that she would have voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — only to reverse herself hours later.

The move sparked outrage not only from fellow Democrats but raised concerns that McGrath was undermining her own credibility since she had slammed Kavanaugh last year and has been caught on camera telling donors in Boston, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky.”

“I think she has let the national Democratic Party and the consultants consult her to death,” said Matt Jones, a popular local radio and TV host who considered entering the race against McConnell as a Democrat before opting out last week.

In liberal Louisville, whose thriving restaurant scene and affordable cost of living have attracted expats from major cities, along with the upwardly mobile of rural Kentucky, antipathy toward McConnell abounds. But confidence about beating him is harder to find, even after Bevin’s loss.

“I don’t know how much of a bellwether event the governor’s losing was,” said Marc Murphy, the former district attorney here who is now a trial lawyer and progressive editorial cartoonist for the Louisville Courier-Journal.

The mood feels very different from, say, Portland, Maine, another left-wing island in a rural state, whose hipster coffee shops and localvore eateries are abuzz with talk of Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ potential demise next year.

“It’s going to be a long slog,” said state Rep. Nima Kulkarni, a young progressive who won her Louisville-area seat last year. “If Bevin had not continued to keep saying the stupid things he did, he might have won.”

Charles Booker, Kentucky’s youngest African-American state representative, announced a week after the gubernatorial election that he is exploring a Senate run against McConnell — a sign that some Kentucky Democrats are not sold on McGrath.

Booker, who grew up in the Louisville’s poor, largely African-American west side, has spoken about his struggles to afford insulin to treat his diabetes and told NBC News that Democrats need to assemble a “new coalition,” instead of trying to keep playing it safe with the same playbook.

“There’s a lot of people across Kentucky that are ready for something different if they just had the chance to know that it’s possible,” Booker said. “Turnout is historically low in Kentucky and Kentucky’s one of the most disenfranchised states. So you really have to engage people and build that infrastructure and inspire folks to do something different. And then they’ll vote.”

He added, referring to the Senate major leader’s opposition to action on climate change, “We know Mitch McConnell has hurt the whole nation and we realized that we’d be doing the whole nation — and in fact, the planet — a pretty good deed by getting rid of this guy.”

WASHINGTON — Michael Bloomberg is about to find out if money really can buy you love.

The billionaire former New York City mayor officially entered the presidential race Sunday, pitching himself as the wealthy white knight for a Democratic Party deeply anxious about its other candidates’ ability to defeat President Donald Trump.

“I know what it takes to beat Trump, because I already have. And I will do it again,” Bloomberg said in his launch email.

Were it not for his immense wealth, estimated at $55 billion, Bloomberg’s late entry would likely be dismissed as of little significance.

Democratic voters say they already have plenty of options in 2020 and Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who jumped in the race two weeks ago, had to cancel a recent event at Morehouse College in Atlanta after no one showed up.

But rival campaigns are reacting differently to Bloomberg’s entry as they did to Patrick’s or that of billionaire Tom Steyer, who has struggled for relevance despite spending tens of millions of dollars on TV ads in recent months. There’s a hint of fear in some of their voices when they privately discuss Bloomberg, even as they argue he has no shot.

If Steyer, financially, was a battleship compared to other candidates’ fishing boats, Bloomberg is an aircraft carrier.

The media mogul and former mayor, who has already made the single largest political advertising purchase in history, is worth some fifty times as much as Steyer.

Bloomberg spent more than $250 million combined on his three mayoral campaigns in New York City and has doled hundreds of millions more on charitable and political causes. Aides say he’ll spend whatever it takes on his latest project, the presidential run.

Some welcome the development as a needed shakeup to the messy status quo of the 2020 primary.

“I’m all for it. I think he will be good for the Democratic field,” Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who considered running for president in 2020 himself, said in an email to NBC News.

“He is now the only candidate that has actually done something to impact gun violence. He is the only candidate that has done something to deal with reducing health care costs by helping to keep people healthy via sugar associated taxes,” Cuban said, stopping short of an endorsement. “Adding the substance he brings on these issues is a net positive in my opinion.”

Others noted that Bloomberg’s vast wealth would be a potent weapon against Trump, who is building an unprecedented war chest for next year’s election.

“He’s got what it takes and he’s got the resources to take it to Trump,” Steve Benjamin, the popular mayor of Columbia, South Carolina told the AP. “I believe firmly that Mike Bloomberg can win. I think resources are going to matter.”

But others, including several candidates who have been on the stump for months, accused Bloomberg of trying “buy our elections,” as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders put it.

“This election should not be for sale,” Warren told reporters in New Hampshire on Saturday. “We need to build a grassroots movement, that’s how democracy is supposed to work.”

Bloomberg has flirted with running for president for years on various party lines.

But his decision to do so now underscores the concerns about Joe Biden— allies said months ago Bloomberg was staying out of the race because he didn’t see a way to beat the former vice president— as well concerns among moderates about Sanders or Warren becoming their standard-bearer against Trump.

But Bloomberg lacks an obvious component of Biden’s biggest political strength: The support of African-American voters. Bloomberg, 77, also lacks the generational appeal of Biden’s leading contender in the moderate lane, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Bloomberg has no chance of getting on a debate stage under current Democratic National Committee rules, since he’s said he’ll refuse all donations and the party requires candidates to show broad support from hundreds of thousands of grassroots donors.

The DNC could change its debate qualification rules in the future to accommodate Bloomberg, but Bloomberg allies say he doesn’t need the stage because his resources allow him to reach voters directly.

The businessman has also taken the unusual strategy skipping the early states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, to run a national campaign focused on winning to delegates to next year’s Democratic National Convention. That has some wondering if he’s hoping to win at a potential contested convention when superdelegates— insiders presumably more amenable to his message— would get to vote.

Some on the left argue Bloomberg will actually help Sanders or Warren by serving as a foil and by splitting the votes of moderates.

“The line on the centrist side, with Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Patrick is a lot longer than the line on the progressive side,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a co-chair of Sanders’ campaign, said in an email. “Show me the field, and I’ll show you who wins. The chances of a progressive nominee are looking good.”

Bloomberg has used his vast wealth to nearly single-handedly revitalize the gun control movement, pumping money into groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which have helped turn the tide on gun politics after decades of dominance by the National Rifle Association.

He has also funded major efforts to fight climate change and has been a fixture at United Nations climate talks, organizing a coalition of mayors of the world’s largest cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

He’s also funded campaigns to get cities to hike taxes on sugary drinks, cigarettes, and trans fats— efforts that have earned him praise from public health advocates, but also scorn and mockery from others as a “stereotypically laughable example of a liberal nanny state,” as Time magazine once put it.

That largesse has earned him plenty of goodwill among liberals. But many say Bloomberg is out-of-step today’s Democratic Party even beyond its smash-the-billionaires left flank.

Bloomberg’s past comments about women, for instance, may be viewed less favorably in the wake of the #MeToo movement. And his former embrace of Stop and Frisk policing, for which he recently apologized, is sure to haunt him in the Black Lives Matter era.

Then there’s questions about his partisanship, or lack thereof. While Bloomberg has been a Democrat for most of his life, he first for mayor ran as a Republican with the critical backing Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor who is now Trump’s personal lawyer at the center of the Ukraine scandal.

In fact, Bloomberg has never won an election as a Democrat, and only re-registered with the party last year when he gave $100 million to help Democrats flip the House.

When asked in 2011 about Trump’s leadership of the birther movement against then-President Barack Obama, Bloomberg defended Obama but added that, “I’m a friend of Donald Trump’s, he’s a New York icon.”

Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the centrist New Democrat Network and New Policy Institute, said it’s “way too early to write off” Bloomberg at a time when voters are scared and looking for someone serious and competent to lead them.

Bloomberg is a capable politician, Rosenberg noted, beating both parties to win the mayoralty of the country’s largest city and remaining popular throughout his 12 years in office. But Bloomberg’s reputation in the Big Apple hasn’t translated to the national stage. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, less than half of respondents said they were familiar with him.

But his successor and longtime critic, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who waged his own ill-fated presidential campaign earlier this year, said Bloomberg’s image as a data-driven management wiz will not hold up to scrutiny.

“I think he’s going to have a whole lot of explaining to do. He is claiming to be a great unifier and great builder, but I can tell you, I have spent six years trying to fix what he broke,” de Blasio said in a phone interview.

He noted Bloomberg opposed raising the minimum wage and vetoed a paid sick leave bill, and said Bloomberg’s response to the Great Recession was to give Goldman Sachs a pep talk, instead of holding them accountable.

“The mythology will not last long,” de Blasio said.