Anglo Vote May Be Pivotal in Heavily Latino 1st District

After finally succeeding in a decades-long battle for a predominantly Latino supervisorial district, Latino voting-rights activists now are confronted with a bitter paradox: The Anglo vote may well prove pivotal in the Jan. 22 special election intended to select a Latino for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

This political irony is grounded in numbers--a combination of demographics and voter turnout trends--and helps explain why Latino candidates traditionally have fared poorly in major California elections.

The newly drawn 1st District is 71% Latino with about 1.2 million Latino residents, making it the largest bloc of Latino voters ever assembled for a local election in the nation.

However, even though Latinos are the overwhelming majority in the new district, they are only a narrow majority--51%--of the registered voters. And Latinos traditionally turn out in lower numbers on Election Day. Anglo voters make up about 40% of the district’s registered voters, Asians 6% and blacks 3%.

With the campaign only 10 weeks long, the four major candidates--all of whom are Latinos-- are foregoing efforts to register large numbers of Latino voters. Instead, they are relying on direct-mail campaigns to target “high-propensity voters,” those who have cast ballots in several past elections. But only 38% of these sure-shot voters are Latino, according to one recent survey.

“It’s such a horse race that you really don’t have the ability to carry out the responsibility that you feel to bring (Latino) voters back into the system,” said Dina Huniu, campaign manger for state Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier).

In a civil rights lawsuit, Latino activists successfully argued that the all-Anglo Board of Supervisors historically created district lines that discriminated against Latino candidates. A federal judge approved new district boundaries and scheduled an election for Jan. 22.

But the lawsuit did nothing to change the tactics used by the political machinery that dominates major campaigns in California and elsewhere. Latino voting-rights activists say Latinos get short shrift as hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent in direct-mail campaigns directed mainly to Anglo voters.

“Unlike other southwestern states, the Latino vote in California is not highly regarded by the political consultants and the political leadership,” said Richard Martinez of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

“The most common tactic is for the candidates to say that the turnout will be low,” Martinez said. “And they say getting out the Latino vote will be an extra cost beyond the campaign budget.”

The four major candidates in the race are Calderon; Sarah Flores (a former aide to Supervisor Pete Schabarum); Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina, and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles).

All four are making a concerted effort to expand their support in more racially mixed suburbs--such as Hacienda Heights, Monterey Park and Whittier--in the eastern half of the district.

They have established their campaign headquarters in suburban communities, not in the overwhelmingly Latino barrios of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights and Westlake that are the heart of Southern California’s Spanish-speaking community.

“We can’t describe this district in one word; we can’t say it’s the ‘Latino district,’ ” said Pat Bond, a political consultant for Molina. “The actual population is overwhelmingly Latino, but the voters are a much more diverse universe. (Latino voters) make up a big part of the district, but they are in no way overwhelming.”

During the first full weekend of campaigning after the Nov. 30 filing deadline, Molina sent most of her volunteers to work in the San Gabriel Valley, considered the stronghold of Flores and Calderon.

Ron Smith, political consultant to Flores, has taken pains to express his candidate’s commitment to Anglo and Asian voters.

“I think this is the difference between Sarah and all the other candidates,” he said. “We have said we have to appeal to everybody and others are gearing their campaigns just to Latino voters.”

With the impact of the Latino vote uncertain, the candidates are tailoring their message to a broad constituency of Latino, Anglo, Asian and black voters. They seem reluctant to portray themselves as “the Latino candidate.”

Instead, they say the concerns of Latino voters--principally crime and gang violence--are shared by all voters, regardless of race.

Even the large number of Latino candidates works against the Latino vote becoming a dominant factor in the election.

“Traditionally, the election would be won within the Hispanic community,” said John Palacio, a Santa Ana-based political consultant. “But because you have a large number of Hispanic candidates who are well known, it would seem that none of them is going to run away with the Hispanic vote. They will probably try to keep close in the Hispanic vote and make their strongest effort to reach Anglo voters.”

Low voter registration and voter turnout are common in Latino communities in Southern California. Several campaign insiders said they expect voter turnout for the Jan. 22 election to run between 14% and 20%. By contrast, voter turnout in the gubernatorial election last month was 59% statewide and 57% in Los Angeles County.

The 1st District overlaps the East Los Angeles-based state Senate, Assembly and congressional districts, which have the lowest percentage of registered voters in the state.

The 56th Assembly District, for example, has fewer than half as many registered voters as the adjacent 59th Assembly District, centered in the San Gabriel Valley.

“Latinos don’t have a strong voting history,” Martinez said. “That’s because past candidates have not taken the vote seriously and have not made the investment necessary to get that vote out. What candidates have done in the past is to try and get the Latino vote that comes out and not increase the number of Latino voters coming out.”

Latino activists shaped the new 1st District boundaries with a voter registration campaign in mind, said Leo Estrada, a UCLA demographer who helped develop the redistricting plan that was finally adopted by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon.

Estrada said the district was designed to include the home turf of community-based organizations--such as Mothers of East Los Angeles--that could provide foot soldiers for a mass registration effort.

“We thought that a voter registration campaign would be the icing on the cake necessary for Latinos to dominate the vote,” Estrada said. “But now there’s no time.”

The deadline to register voters for the election is Dec. 24.

Given the short campaign, Estrada said, it was inevitable that the candidates would focus on wooing voters outside the Latino community and Latino voters who are already registered.

“It’s a strategy that has been forced upon them and that may come back to haunt them,” Estrada said. “One thing they cannot afford to do is have the Latino community feel they are going to be ignored.”

Estrada said he expected a higher than average Latino voter turnout Jan. 22 because of publicity surrounding the voter discrimination lawsuit. Whether Latinos would turn out in equally high numbers for a runoff election is a question, he said. A runoff is scheduled Feb. 19 if no candidate wins a majority of the votes.

“If there is a runoff, there could be a huge downfall in terms of Latino votes,” Estrada said, because the Latino vote traditionally declines in runoff elections. “Anglos who vote consistently could have the greater impact in the runoff stage.”

A few of the many problems causing low Latino voter participation were clear one recent weekend afternoon when two Molina volunteers walked the streets of Los Angeles County precinct 1859 in Boyle Heights.

Clara Solis, 30, and Jeff Hernandez, 26, used a list of registered voters to target the homes they would visit. Their primary goal: to persuade voters to fill out applications for absentee ballots.

Most conspicuous were the residences the volunteers ignored because they didn’t appear on the list. They walked past most of the homes with children, and almost all of the homes where Spanish rancheras and corridos were blaring from living-room stereos.

“You’ll notice that we’re skipping a lot of homes,” Hernandez said. “One of the things you notice when you’re doing voter registration in these neighborhoods is that there’s a high percentage of non-citizens. You start to go through your rap in Spanish, you realize that they would register if they could, but they can’t.”

Still, the volunteers could take heart from words of support offered them by 69-year-old Alberto Medina, a U.S. citizen who spent most of his life raising a family in northern Mexico.

“I always vote for the Latinos, even if I know they’re going to lose,” he said in Spanish. “But maybe this time we’ll win.”