A Rarity of a Race Has 48 Hours to Go

With just 48 hours left, the Los Angeles mayoral race has turned into a rarity for the city, as incumbent James K. Hahn battles to make a runoff and avoid becoming the first chief executive ousted in more than 30 years.

As candidates stumped Saturday from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley, the mayor was fighting to stave off a career-threatening challenge from two strong rivals: a surging Bob Hertzberg and Antonio Villaraigosa, the man Hahn beat four years ago. The three, all Democrats, are competing for two slots in a likely May 17 runoff.

“Bob, you can run, but you can’t hide!” Hahn yelled into a microphone in a Saturday morning stop at his Miracle Mile headquarters.

Ignoring the incumbent, Hertzberg stuck to his main themes -- traffic relief, a bigger police force and smaller school districts -- as he began his day downtown shaking hands alongside Republican Richard Riordan at the former mayor’s Original Pantry Cafe.

Villaraigosa, meanwhile, continued a 32-hour marathon by hitting late-night spots and greeting bus drivers starting the morning shift in Boyle Heights.

Hahn’s task in Tuesday’s election is complicated by the splintered nature of the city’s sprawling, multi-ethnic electorate. For months, he has struggled to overcome the disintegration of the coalition that put him in office four years ago: African Americans and Valley voters.

While Councilman Bernard C. Parks has cut into Hahn’s black support, many of the mayor’s former Valley backers have been snatched by Sherman Oaks lawyer and former Assembly Speaker Hertzberg.

It is an improbable circumstance for Hahn, heir to one of the most gilded names in Los Angeles political history. Crime has dropped on his watch. He hired a popular police chief, William J. Bratton, after engineering Parks’ departure from that post. Hahn also succeeded in defeating the campaign to break apart Los Angeles by carving out new cities in the Valley and Hollywood. And the economy has remained steady during his four years in office.

“You would think this would be a perfect year for an incumbent to waltz to reelection,” said Steven P. Erie, a UC San Diego professor and expert on Los Angeles politics.

Yet the decisions Hahn calls “gutsy” in his campaign ads have haunted his reelection bid. His support for ousting Parks offended many black voters, and his leadership of the anti-secession campaign undercut him among Valley residents, half of whom wanted to divorce the rest of Los Angeles.

Moreover, the buttoned-down Hahn has been plagued by a lackluster image throughout his term and, more recently, a criminal investigation of alleged corruption at City Hall. The result has been unusually strong competition for a sitting mayor -- and no shortage of fuel for his rivals.

“He’s got a full field this time,” said Erie, “and he’s getting it from all sides.”

If he loses, Hahn will become the first Los Angeles mayor denied reelection since voters ousted three-term incumbent Sam Yorty in his 1973 rematch with Tom Bradley. Hahn also would be the first mayor since John Porter in 1933 to lose reelection after serving just one term.

After campaigns that have drawn little public interest, turnout Tuesday is expected to be typically low. City Clerk Frank T. Martinez predicted that a little more than a third of the city’s 1.4 million registered voters would cast ballots.

With an unusually high number of late-deciding voters, handicapping the race is a difficult proposition. The most recent Times poll found Hahn, Hertzberg and Villaraigosa bunched together in a statistical tie for the lead -- with one in five likely voters yet to choose a candidate.

The poll, completed last weekend, showed Parks in fourth place and state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) running fifth. Also on the ballot are Republican lawyer Walter Moore and six other mayoral candidates, none of whom is widely known.

For many Los Angeles voters, fatigued by the long presidential campaign and distracted by the holiday season, the mayoral race was largely invisible until the candidates started running TV ads in the last few weeks.

But Hahn and his would-be successors have been campaigning hard for months. The mayor, who initially shunned debates and tried to ignore his challengers’ rhetorical jabs, focused until recently on his record, touting specifically the drop in crime since Bratton took over as police chief.

In a radio ad airing Saturday, Hahn trumpeted the “tough decisions” he made in hiring Bratton and fighting “to keep L.A. together.”

“These decisions weren’t politically popular with everyone, but they were the right choices for L.A.’s future,” he said.

Much of the race has centered on whether Hahn’s retiring style is suitable for the nation’s second-most populous city.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political science professor at USC, said Hahn had “the bad luck to be the first major L.A. candidate to run for reelection in the post-Arnold era.” Gov. Schwarzenegger, she said, “has raised the bar for political communication and political communicators. Basically, we’ve redefined what it means to be a political leader in this state.”

Bill Carrick, producer of the mayor’s campaign ads, bristled at the idea that his candidate was too bland. He called Hahn “steady” and “confident.”

“This is a very smart guy who’s able to articulate what direction he wants to take the city,” Carrick said. “He understands how the city works.”

Working in Hahn’s favor is the power of incumbency. It has enabled him to raise more money than any of his challengers and draw frequent media attention in a season of rainstorms and mudslides. It has also brought the support of organized labor, which is deploying the bulk of its campaign volunteers to work on the mayor’s reelection effort.

For his part, Villaraigosa, a former Assembly speaker who gained national attention during his 2001 mayoral run, has largely recaptured the citywide political base that he built during that campaign. Now a city councilman from Mount Washington, he is the favorite of Latinos, liberals, Democrats and younger voters.

While pledging to “restore people’s trust” in City Hall, Villaraigosa has stressed his record in Sacramento and City Hall expanding health coverage, fighting crime and “helping workers negotiate fair wages.” His slogan -- an emotional appeal to voters -- is “hands-on leadership, straight from the heart.”

But Villaraigosa has had to fight the perception that he has lost some of the spark of 2001, when his candidacy was often framed as a test of whether Los Angeles was ready to elect its first Latino mayor since 1872.

As for Hertzberg, he has sought to stake a claim -- with some success, the Times poll found -- on blocs that elected Riordan: Republican, conservative, moderate, Valley and Jewish voters. He also has stuck relentlessly to his campaign themes, above all his pledge to break apart the Los Angeles Unified School District -- something that is actually beyond the purview of the mayor.

Hertzberg’s eye-catching television ads depict him the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, strolling across the city saying that L.A. deserves “a mayor who thinks big for a change.” The implication, Erie said: “You’ve got a pygmy ... a dwarf in the office” under Hahn.

With little time left, the mayoral hopefuls scrambled Saturday from one end of the city to the other, beneath a sky that alternated between gray and blue.

Villaraigosa’s whirlwind civic tour took him to bowling alleys, a bakery, an MTA bus yard and a number of greasy spoons serving hangover-prevention breakfasts. “I’m showing people I’ve got the ... energy to run the city, man,” he said.

Alarcon took his own spin across town, accompanied by comedian George Lopez, while Parks campaigned from South Los Angeles to the Westside, carrying a message that the city needed new leadership. He made a side trip to the City of Commerce, where he met an old friend, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and Ali’s longtime photographer, Howard Bingham, who was inducted into the California Boxing Hall of Fame.

Hertzberg continued to try to diminish the mayor -- at one point comparing him unfavorably with his late father, the famously gregarious county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

“He just had a tremendous personal relationship with the people he represented. You could tell he cared,” Hertzberg told a group of black community leaders at a coffeehouse in the Crenshaw district. “Jim just doesn’t seem to connect with people like his father did.”

Rallying supporters at his campaign headquarters, Hahn pressed his days-old assertion that Hertzberg had done the bidding of Enron as Assembly speaker during the state’s 2001 energy crisis. Hahn also called for Hertzberg to release a list of his legal clients. He led followers in a chant: “Who are your clients?”

On Saturday afternoon, Hahn made a brief stop at a party in the Beverlywood home of Robyn Ritter Simon, a planning commissioner. As guests snacked on tea sandwiches and cookies, the mayor implored the group in the living room to call friends and urge them to go to the polls.

“The key for me is turnout,” Hahn said. “Who votes Tuesday is going to decide this election.”

Times staff writers Richard Fausset, Noam N. Levey, Jeffrey L. Rabin and Henry Weinstein contributed to this report.