Record Percentage of Latinos Turn Out to Vote, Exit Poll Finds

An electorate, dominated by older, well-educated and high-income whites--but including a historic percentage of Latinos--reelected a Los Angeles mayor and city attorney Tuesday and may have propelled a school repair bond measure through a difficult passage, according to The Times’ exit poll.

In what appeared to be shaping up as a record or near-record low turnout, perhaps as few as one in eight of the city’s adult residents--and only one in four of its registered voters--turned up at the polls.

But the fact that Latinos represented a higher share of the voters than ever before, for the first time surpassing the percentage of black voters, may be a significant harbinger of more proportional Latino participation in Los Angeles’ public affairs.

One of every three adult Angelenos is a Latino. But Latinos comprise only about 14% of registered voters and historically have voted in small numbers--recording only 8% to 10% participation in typical municipal contests.

The Latino record of participation is in stark contrast to the record of blacks, who comprise 13% of the city’s adults yet account for 18% of its registered voters.

In Tuesday’s contest, a Times poll of 3,035 voters leaving 60 precincts citywide indicated that Latinos surpassed their own historic voting levels and eclipsed black electoral power for the first time. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll suggested that it was the school repair bond measure, Proposition BB, that was most responsible for drawing the record number of Latinos to the polls. Nearly 70% of the children in the Los Angeles Unified School District are Latino. Thus, Latinos stand to benefit the most from the $2.4 billion measure that had to win approval of two-thirds of voters to take effect. And Latinos were overwhelming in their support for the measure. A majority of Latinos also listed education as the most important issue confronting the city.

Latinos also contributed significantly to what appeared to be shaping up as a landslide reelection victory for Mayor Richard Riordan.

The strength of Riordan’s victory in the nonpartisan race is especially remarkable because Riordan is a Republican in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1. Early returns and the Times poll showed Riordan heading for a mark never before achieved by a candidate registered as a Republican--60% of the vote.

Riordan’s appeal had very broad elements. Even the nearly 4 out of 10 whites who identified themselves as liberals voted for the multimillionaire lawyer-businessman who regards himself as a moderate and first won election in 1993 on his pledge that he was “Tough Enough to Turn L.A. Around.”

To win election to his first term as mayor, Riordan started from a base of white Republicans and expanded his constituency to include half the city’s Jewish voters, and majorities of white Democrats and Latinos.

During his first term as mayor, the exit poll indicated, Riordan was able to expand significantly his base among Latinos and Jews (who tend to vote in high numbers) and retain enormous popularity with whites.

But the exit poll found a major hole in what would otherwise be a broad-based Riordan coalition. Riordan, the poll found, has a very low standing among black voters that has not appreciably improved in the last four years.

In the 1993 election, blacks went very heavily for Riordan’s opponent, then-City Councilman Mike Woo.

This time, black voters supported Riordan’s principal opponent, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), by a margin of more than 3 to 1.

One in 20 Riordan voters cited Riordan’s understanding of multicultural Los Angeles as an important reason for their support.

That was a key reason cited by more than 1 in 5 Hayden voters in explaining their support of him.

Hayden’s supporters also cited reasons such as Hayden “cares” and “thinks about people like me” as reasons for their choice.

Thus, one way to look at the election is as a split between voters who believed that it was most important to choose someone like Riordan who they felt could better manage the city’s business and those who viewed Hayden as someone who could better manage its diversity.

The election was also marked by shifting coalitions. This is easily seen in Riordan’s ill-starred effort to help the candidacy of a former aide, Ted Stein, who was running for Los Angeles city attorney. It turned out that Riordan had little in the way of coattails to offer Stein because Stein’s opponent--three-term incumbent City Atty. James Hahn--had a viable and quite different coalition of his own.

Hahn beat Stein--a lawyer and developer who served as a mayoral advisor and president of the city Airport Commission--in all racial and ethnic groups, but overwhelmed him among blacks and beat him handily among Latinos as well.

Still another coalition was formed in an effort to forge past the two-thirds mark necessary to pass the school repair bond measure.

That coalition, which was led by Latino voters, was especially broad, with only whites who identified themselves as conservatives showing marginal support for the proposition. Even so, half of them said they voted for the measure.

The increased Latino turnout may be due in part to a voter registration drive organized by news organizations and television stations that serve the Latino community in response to the recent passage of Proposition 187, which seeks to restrict public services to illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which seeks to eliminate affirmative action programs.

Newly registered Latinos have overwhelmingly declared themselves to be Democrats, perhaps as a rebuke to congressional Republicans who have sought to revoke welfare benefits for legal immigrants who are not citizens as well as illegal immigrants.

The foreign-born constitute 45% of the adult population of the city, according to the 1990 U.S. Census.

In Tuesday’s voting, the exit poll showed, foreign-born naturalized citizens accounted for one in every five voters.

Still incomplete turnout figures Tuesday evening indicated that this election could challenge Tom Bradley’s run for a fourth term in 1989 as the lowest turnout for a mayoral contest in recent history. That year, only 24% of registered voters came to the polls--a far cry from the turnouts of 76% and 64% in 1969 and 1973, when Bradley was battling Sam Yorty for the mayor’s post. To win, Bradley built a coalition based largely on blacks and Jews.

In Tuesday’s election, whites, who comprise 42% of the city’s adults, accounted for almost two-thirds of those who voted.

Blacks, who comprise 13% of the adult population, matched their population share.

Latinos, who comprise one-third of the city’s adults, still were proportionately underrepresented at the polls. The exit poll indicated that only about one in six of Tuesday’s voters was Latino.

Older voters--over age 65--voted twice their strength in the general population, as did Jews. The relatively wealthy--defined here as families earning more than $60,000 per year--voted 2 1/2 times their strength.

Times Poll director Susan Pinkus, consultant Raphael Sonenshein, Times director of computer analysis Richard O’Reilly and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this article.

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How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll interviewed 3,035 voters as they left 60 polling places in the city of Los Angeles. Precincts were chosen based on the pattern of turnout in past municipal elections. The survey was by confidential questionnaire in English and Spanish. The margin of sampling error for the entire sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For some subgroups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Because the survey does not include absentee voters or those who declined to participate, actual returns and demographic estimates by the interviewers were used to adjust the sample slightly. Interviews were conducted by Davis Research of Calabasas. Raphael Sonenshein, professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton, was a consultant.