Older Voters Seen as Key in 2 Council Races

One is a Mid-City district emblematic of Los Angeles as the Melting Pot of the ‘90s. The other, to the west and north, is about as white as one could imagine in a polyglot metropolis.

Despite these striking demographic distinctions, there are profound similarities in the voters who will determine the outcome of Los Angeles’ two City Council races Tuesday.

In both districts, the election will be decided by the community elders, who by virtue of their age or, more important, their length of residence, are the dominant voting group.

These are the voters who are being targeted by the candidates, the people whose doors are being knocked on, the people to whom the political message is tailored.

In the 10th District, where incumbent Councilman Nate Holden is in a tough runoff with attorney J. Stanley Sanders, the campaign message is being beamed to older, middle-class African American homeowners.

Fifth District candidates Mike Feuer and Barbara Yaroslavsky are talking to an even older population, more than one-third of them Jewish.

The pool of voters who will decide these races, known in the lexicon of political consultants as “high-propensity” voters, shrinks with each election. It seems messages that resonate with faithful voters seldom galvanize the electorate at large.

“We’re moving from an active toward a narrow political system,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton who has studied Los Angeles politics for 20 years. “It’s a wonder anyone shows up [at the polls] at all.”

Harvey Englander, a veteran political consultant who worked on Holden’s primary campaign, concedes that computer-targeted campaigns contribute to the lack of voter participation.

“It’s very depressing,” he said. “We try to reach 2% of the population to get a candidate elected by 1% of the district.”

That said, however, there are active campaigns in both districts to capture that 1%.

And more is at stake than who will fix the potholes. The outcome of these races has ramifications that traverse district boundaries to affect the entire city. Because of its historic role in coalition building, Sonenshein calls the 5th District the most pivotal seat on the council.

“As the 5th goes, that’s how citywide liberalism goes,” Sonenshein said. “Whoever represents the 5th is very important because of the affluence and activism of the district.”

The 10th District is also critical, he said, in that it is a key voice for middle-class blacks at a critical time for African Americans in Los Angeles.

Here is a look at both districts on the eve of the election.

The 10th

The best and worst of Los Angeles collide in the 10th District.

Sanders, a lawyer seeking to wrest the district’s council seat from incumbent Holden, saw it all on a recent campaign walk.

Just as Sanders was admiring the neatly trimmed lawns on a street of colorful Mediterranean-style houses near Washington and Crenshaw boulevards, loud popping noises broke the evening calm. “You better not go around the corner, they’re shooting there,” warned a man clutching his beverage in a brown paper bag.

Stretching from Palms to Koreatown, and Wilshire Boulevard to the Crenshaw district, and split by the Santa Monica Freeway, the 10th City Council District is filled with the contrasts that define Los Angeles.

African Americans dominate local politics in the district, where Tom Bradley served as a councilman before becoming in 1973 the first black mayor of a predominantly white U.S. city.

But most district residents are either Latinos or Asian Americans, a fact revealed in businesses with names such as “Azteca Taekwondo.”

There is spectacular architecture, from the Art Deco Wiltern Theatre at its northern end to the grand old Victorian and Craftsman houses in the West Adams area to the south. There are wealthy African American neighborhoods, and gleaming new stores, hotels and offices in Koreatown.

But the district’s main corridors, Pico, Washington, Venice and Jefferson boulevards, have become low-rent eyesores.

The high-end businesses that add value to neighborhoods are now in shopping centers elsewhere, several of them in the 5th District.

“The [Santa Monica] freeway killed everything in the mid-’60s” said Joseph Duff, a local activist and 35-year resident of the district.

Aside from the personal attacks the candidates have leveled at each other, crime and revitalization of the district’s business corridors have been the topics most discussed at block club meetings and in debates.

Duff said that the commercial erosion, along with crime and the decline of public schools in the area, have damaged the quality of life in the district, where Holden received 46% of the vote in the April primary to Sanders’ 43%.

But the drawbacks, Duff said, are offset by the district’s assets, its neat rows of immaculately kept houses and integrated neighborhoods.

Virginia Hayes-Williams, 67, has lived in the district since 1947. Like Duff, she is excited about the diversity of the district, but believes that the topic has been ignored by the campaigns. “We need to be reaching out to all races, and the councilman, whoever it is, should be doing this.”

Racial diversity defines the 10th’s 218,000 residents, 41% of whom are Latino, 35% African American, 14% Asian American and 10% white, according to the 1990 U.S. census.

But as in the 5th District, the color that seems to matter most in this election is gray. Fifty-five percent of those who regularly vote in local elections are over 65.

Although Latinos and Asians combined are a majority of residents, they are less than 15% of the district’s 72,000 registered voters, according to consultants. African Americans make up 65% of 10th District registered voters, and whites 20%.

Because campaigns are geared narrowly to likely voters, issues that affect thousands of district residents are not addressed. “There is a huge gap between citizens and non-citizens in the 10th,” Sonenshein said. “We don’t know enough about what non-citizens think.”

Many of the district’s Latinos are hourly workers and immigrant entrepreneurs who need different kinds of economic development projects than those that appeal to the homeowners who dominate politics, Occidental College economist Manuel Pastor said. “Politicians tend to go for trophy projects, the ones you can stand in front of and cut a ribbon, like supermarkets,” he said.

Pastor said that immigrant workers might benefit more from policies that would help workers start small businesses.

Korean Americans have complexities of their own. Although few vote, many donate heavily to candidates, and Holden has for years worked to raise money in Koreatown.

While representing less than 1% of voters, Korean American individuals and businesses contributed 26% of the money Holden raised between 1991 and 1994.

Jong Han Kim, 32, says that many Korean immigrants either are not citizens or are cut off from politics by language. A lawyer at a top Downtown firm, Kim is an active voter. But his wife, who is not a citizen, does not vote and has little interest in local issues, he said.

“Those of my generation or background are more likely to be involved than those in the first-generation who don’t speak English well and are shy about the whole process.”

The 5th

An elderly man, his plastic grocery sack in tow, scooted around the corner into the Canter’s deli parking lot on Fairfax Avenue. Once the hub of the 5th, Fairfax now is the eastern boundary of a far-flung district, nearly half of which is in the San Fernando Valley.

The man, Aaron Langsan, 85, a retired butcher, has lived in the Fairfax area since 1950. In the council race he favors newcomer attorney Feuer over Yaroslavsky, wife of longtime Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, now a county supervisor.

“We got a Yaroslavsky,” Langsan said. “One Yaroslavsky is enough. Give a chance to somebody else.”

Later that same day, Barbara Yaroslavsky was knocking on voters’ doors in the Pico-Robertson area, south of Fairfax, when another older gentleman peered through a window and promised her his vote.

Why? “I’ve known the family for many years,” said Isadore Siegal.

These exchanges capture the essence of political debate in the 5th District these days, whether voiced outside Canter’s on Fairfax or Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard.

They also, in a way, frame the issues in a politically astute area in which many residents are choosing between a candidate associated, rightly or wrongly, with the way things have been and one who portrays himself as a leader for the future.

For a district known for its political activism and high voter turnout, however, interest in the race is surprisingly low.

Marlene Adler Marks, managing editor of the Jewish Journal, a weekly newspaper, said the race has not caught fire because two good candidates allow voters to sit on the fence. Many voters do not want to repudiate Zev Yaroslavsky by voting against his wife, yet neither are they fully committed to Barbara Yaroslavsky’s candidacy, she said.

Roberta Weintraub, a losing primary candidate, sees voter malaise stemming from people’s belief that their vote doesn’t matter.

The race has badly split the activist Jewish community that provides the glue for the district; many Feuer backers have longtime ties to Zev Yaroslavsky. Not a few wonder aloud about the fallout of their decision not to support his wife. Feuer’s staunch refusal to criticize Zev’s legacy is expected to help heal the breach if he wins.

Geographically speaking, the 5th District is a long, relatively narrow swath of territory that stretches in some places from the Santa Monica Freeway to Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley. It is bounded roughly by the San Diego Freeway to the west; its northeast tip is in North Hollywood. The eastern border on the Westside is jagged: At some points it’s La Cienega, at others Fairfax.

Celebrities and movers and shakers are among the residents of neighborhoods such as Westwood, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, Sherman Oaks, Studio City and the hillside communities between the Westside and the Valley.

But the district also contains more modest neighborhoods of Spanish duplexes and apartments near Pico and Robertson, as well as quiet, urban and suburban housing tracts on both sides of the hill.

You can shop till you drop at the four malls in the district, and with a $41,462-per-capita income, many have the wherewithal to do just that. But there is no police station to be found within its boundaries.

According to census data, 83% of the population is white. Residents from Latino, Asian and African American backgrounds make up the balance of the district’s residents, but most are not high-propensity voters, consultants say.

In the primary, the average age of the voter in this district was 61. Confounding common political wisdom, the older the voter, the more liberal the results are likely to be here, consultants say.

Though the 5th District has changed geographically over the decades, it has not changed its political stripes.

“It’s very liberal, very affluent, very old, very well-educated,” said Parke Skelton, consultant for Weintraub in the primary.

Though much is made of the Westside-Valley division, Skelton said he was surprised to learn through polls how little difference there is about what people care about--crime, education and quality-of-life issues predominate throughout.

“Crime is really an issue,” said Sandy Gooch, a.k.a. “Mrs. Gooch,” founder of the natural grocery store chain, who hosted a Feuer fund-raiser at her home atop Mulholland Drive. “Why are we living behind guarded gates? Something needs to change.”

The fact that crime rates have gone down here, and all over the city, does not allay the perception that once-safe neighborhoods are now dangerous.

One thing that unites voters is their increasing feeling of distance from city government and their dismay at the level of service they receive for their tax dollars.

Though she has taken pains to distinguish herself from her husband, Yaroslavsky has faced questions of whether she will continue to run the district as he did. To supporters, and there are many, it would be good if she did.

“She’s been a partner to him all these years,” said Lynn Rogo, president of the PTA at a grade school in Westwood. “She’s not just a housewife. She’s been almost apprenticing for this job.”

Others have balked at a Yaroslavsky dynasty, and take umbrage at a wife who wants to follow in her husband’s footsteps.

“I have a hard time with her campaigning on Zev’s name,” said public affairs consultant Robin Gerber, who has worked with Zev Yaroslavsky on Soviet Jewry issues. “As a woman professional, I have a problem with that.”

Gerber, like many others, see in contender Mike Feuer a fresh young leader not unlike a young Zev Yaroslavsky.

A public interest attorney, known for running Bet Tzedek, a legal aid clinic, Feuer, 37, won 39% of the primary vote, while Yaroslavsky, 47, the presumptive front-runner, finished second with 26%.

Yaroslavsky argues that her decades of work at the grass-roots level will make her an effective lawmaker, regardless of who her husband is.

Republican consultant Allen Hoffenblum says the outcome of the contest depends neither on philosophy, experience or pillow talk. “The mailings, cat-calling, yelling and screaming are all for show,” Hoffenblum said. “What matters is who is going to get their voters out.”

* SCHOOL ELECTIONS: Complex factors at work in L.A. Unified’s 5th District race. B1