Valley Voters, Low Minority Turnout Propelled Riordan : Election: Contest was marked by deep racial divisions, Times exit poll shows. Disparity points to challenge for mayor-elect.

Richard Riordan was elected mayor of Los Angeles because he took close to three-quarters of the vote in the San Fernando Valley--running especially strong in Anglo districts--won over moderate Democrats and benefited from a lackluster turnout among minority voters, a Los Angeles Times exit poll shows.

Although Riordan and his opponent, City Councilman Michael Woo, both had pledged to reach out to all segments of Los Angeles, the poll showed the same kinds of deep racial divisions among voters that characterized the primary contest.

Eighty-five percent of voters who cast ballots for Riordan were Anglo.

Although most of Woo’s supporters were Anglo as well, he also won most of the African-American, Asian-American and Latino votes.

The disparity points to one of the biggest challenges facing Riordan in a city where Anglos dominate the electorate even though they represent a minority of the population.

“Richard Riordan won the election; he has yet to win the city,” said Times Poll Director John Brennan, who directed the survey of 3,402 voters at 50 polling places.

The poll has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Citywide, more than 70% of voters were white, and Riordan won their votes by 2 to 1.

In the northwest Valley’s largely affluent and white 12th City Council district, for example, Riordan racked up 75% of the vote, according to unofficial returns.

In the southwest Valley’s 3rd City Council district, where longtime incumbent Joy Picus was defeated by former aide Laura Chick, Riordan captured 71% of the vote.

Ethnicity also appears to have played a significant role in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where Richard Alarcon led Lyle Hall by just 164 votes in the 7th District City Council race.

If Alarcon’s lead holds, he will become the first Latino member of the council from the Valley, but Hall has not yet conceded the race, saying that still-uncounted absentee ballots could give him the victory.

While the two candidates ran virtually neck-in-neck in neighborhoods that were ethnically mixed, Alarcon led nearly 3 to 1 in precincts that were predominantly Latino.

Commenting on the problems facing Riordan, Larry Berg, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said: “He needs to demonstrate to this community that he is going to be mayor for all of the city.”

Riordan made unexpected political inroads among Latinos, receiving 43% of their vote, up from 20% in the primary.

And although Woo sought to portray millionaire Riordan as a ruthless corporate raider, the businessman garnered support that cut across most income groups.

Woo, who came out of the April primary 9 percentage points behind Riordan, failed to make adequate inroads with two groups he needed to turn the election around: those who had voted for other candidates in the primary and those who had skipped the primary.

Riordan got just over half of the votes of those who had supported losing primary candidates, including 53% of those who voted for Richard Katz and 65% of those who supported Joel Wachs. Woo managed to win a majority of supporters of Linda Griego and Stan Sanders, although Sanders had endorsed Riordan.

The poll also showed that Woo, a Democrat, suffered from a low turnout among minority voters who constituted his political base.

Woo captured 86% of the black vote. A massive effort by Woo and his supporters to get out the vote in South-Central Los Angeles boosted the number of African-Americans casting ballots.

But those additional voters were far eclipsed by a larger increase in turnout by Anglos. Ultimately, blacks accounted for only 12% of the vote in Tuesday’s election, down from 18% in the April primary. Anglos accounted for 72% of all voters Tuesday.

In the South-Central-based 8th and 9th City Council districts--where Woo did best, winning more than 80% of the vote, turnout was below 35%.

By contrast, the turnout was 50% in the north San Fernando Valley and 48% in the West Valley.

One in seven of those voting Tuesday had not voted in the primary and these voters went for Riordan by a 55% to 45% margin, giving him extra padding on his already formidable primary advantage. Of these new voters, 72% were Anglo and just 9% were black.

“The black community was suspicious of Mr. Riordan,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who did not endorse either candidate.

“The overall black community has been suffering for quite some time now. You have a city that went up in flames. A year and a half later, no real response to it. They don’t really believe what anybody is saying anymore. They’re not concerned very much about people who they see for the first time when they’re campaigning. . . . So they just turn off.”

Woo substantially improved the share of the Jewish vote he won in the primary, but in the end he only split their votes with Riordan and was unable to offset his almost 4-1 loss among Anglo Protestants and Anglo Catholics.

The poll also indicated that the coalition of blacks, liberals and Jewish voters that kept Mayor Tom Bradley in office for 20 years may be a thing of the past. Forty percent of the voters who backed Bradley four years ago voted for Riordan.

He also managed to attract the vast majority of moderate voters despite Woo’s characterization of him as too far to the right. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than 2 to 1 and where Bill Clinton, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer garnered more than 60% of the vote, Republican Riordan captured 90% of the GOP votes and took 40% of the Democratic voters from Democrat Woo.

Riordan’s most striking victory came in the vote-rich San Fernando Valley, where he defeated Woo by a margin of almost 2 1/2-to-1. The San Fernando Valley accounted for 44% of the city’s vote.

Slightly less than a third of Riordan’s supporters in the Valley said they backed him because they view him as outside the city political Establishment, slightly fewer said it was because they considered him tough and one in five said his stands on the issues mirrored theirs.

A third of Woo’s backers among Valley voters said their candidate understands Los Angeles’ multiculturalism and one in five said he would care about people like them and be a coalition builder.

A Times analysis of the voting in the race to replace Ernani Bernardi as the northeast Valley’s representative on the council found that race and ethnicity appeared by a decisive factor there.

For example, in a Pacoima precinct where registered voters are almost entirely Latino, Alarcon won 146 votes, compared to 58 for Hall.

However, in a Lake View Terrace neighborhood where one-fourth of voting-age residents are black, one-fourth Anglo and more than a third Latino, Alarcon got 118 votes compared to Hall’s 105. A nearby precinct gave Hall a slight edge, with 60 votes to Alarcon’s 57.

The figures support anecdotal evidence from voters interviewed at the polls: Every person who voted at the Telfair School in Pacoima between 6:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. was Latino. And every one said he or she voted for Alarcon.

“He will do a good job, and we will have a representative of the Latino people,” said Luz Cariel, who supported Alarcon. “I think we need the representation.”

Bob Stiens, Hall’s campaign manager, said he expected Alarcon to win 75% of the Latino vote, but had hoped that black and Anglo voters would turn out for Hall in strong enough numbers to win.

“The key was Alarcon’s strong . . . program to get Latinos out to vote,” Stiens said.

Still, Latinos clearly were not the only voters supporting Alarcon.

The boundaries of the district were redrawn last year, expressly to give Latinos in the area greater power.

However, because the majority of registered voters in the area are Anglo, Alarcon had to also win over black and white residents.

According to Stiens, support from black residents, who make up 19% percent of registered voters in the area, was split between the two candidates.

And while Hall received about two-thirds of the vote in largely Anglo areas, Alarcon got 80% in Latino areas.

“We knew that the Latino group was part of our base, but in order to win our election we had to broaden,” Alarcon said in an interview. “So I think that winning the other precincts is just as significant.”

In the 3rd District, Chick got 58.5% of the vote compared to 41.5% for Picus. But, in a demonstration of her broad-based support, Chick outpolled Picus in 145 of 163 precincts.

A number of voters interviewed Tuesday described their votes for Chick as a rejection of Picus.

“I want to get rid of the other one,” said Charles Willis of Canoga Park, a Chick voter. “I don’t think she’s represented me.”

The choices of other Canoga Park voters interviewed mirrored the districtwide balloting, with Chick supporters slightly outnumbering those for Picus.

One of the chords Picus struck during the hard-fought campaign was her efforts, which police say were successful, to drive drug dealers out of Lanark Park to make it safe for families. Ironically, Picus was defeated in every precinct surrounding the park, in some cases by margins of 2-to-1.

At the same time, the four-term incumbent won several precincts in the area around Warner Ridge, where she unsuccessfully fought to block a large commercial office project.

Times staff writers Richard Lee Colvin and Frederick Muir and Assistant Poll Director Susan Pinkus contributed to this article.

Valley Voter Impact

San Fernando Valley voters* were key to Richard Riordan’s mayoral victory in two ways. They turned out in greater numbers (46%) than their counterparts in other parts of the city (43%) and cast ballots heavily favoring the victor.

Valley Riordan: 71% Woo: 29% *

Citywide Riordan: 54% Woo: 46% * Valley figures include four City Council districts wholly contained in the Valley.

Source: Los Angeles Times exit poll and city of Los Angeles figures.