Would-Be L.A. Mayors Do the Math for 2001

In the lexicon of Los Angeles politics, it’s called “counting to 300,000.”

That’s roughly the number of votes the political professionals figure it will take to be elected the next mayor of the nation’s second-largest city.

In one sense, that’s hardly any. After all, more than 3 million people live here, so it takes the approval of just one in every 10 to win the city’s top office. But getting to 300,000 is vastly complicated by Los Angeles’ ethnic and geographic diversity, which forces candidates to combine issue positioning and ethnic appeals in complicated ways.

“To win here,” said one political veteran, “it doesn’t take many votes, but you have to go out and find them.”

Today, as a crowded field of would-be mayors takes shape, half a dozen candidates are doing the addition, parsing the city into council districts and neighborhoods and figuring how to combine this constituency and that into a winning coalition. In each case, the candidates start by trying to build a solid base of core supporters, then begin reaching beyond their natural constituency.

Recent history suggests two paradigms:

Tom Bradley held the mayor’s office for a generation by winning overwhelmingly among African Americans and liberal whites, particularly Jews, holding his own among moderates and essentially conceding the city’s most conservative elements.

Richard Riordan flipped that strategy on its head. He “started right and moved left,” as the political pros say. For Riordan, that meant running from a strong base in the more conservative San Fernando Valley, then reaching out to moderates and faring reasonably well among Latinos. African Americans overwhelmingly voted against him, but Riordan did so well elsewhere that he prevailed, both in 1993 and, even more convincingly, in 1997.

Today, two candidates are approaching the 2001 election with strategies that mirror the Bradley and Riordan campaigns.

City Atty. James Hahn, who grew up in South-Central and whose father represented that area for more than 30 years, wears a Bradley-like mantle. He enters the campaign with a strong hold on black votes and, as the campaign unfolds, he can be expected to reach out to Latinos while trying to rack up enough liberal and moderate support to produce a coalition victory in the tradition of Los Angeles’ longest-serving mayor.

Businessman Steve Soboroff, meanwhile, is attempting to replicate Riordan’s wins. Like Riordan, Soboroff is a Republican whose initial focus is on the Valley. Preserving his ability to move left, however, Soboroff also emphasizes his long civic involvement, as well as his commitment to education and to parks--issues he believes can take the edge off conservatism.

But Jim Hahn is not Tom Bradley; he’s neither black nor an ex-cop, both of which helped define Bradley as a person and a politician.

And Steve Soboroff is not Dick Riordan. Although wealthy, he does not have Riordan’s essentially unlimited personal fortune; he is running at a time of relative calm, not in the wake of a riot; and he comes to the table without the Riordan political brain trust of campaign consultant Bill Carrick and Democratic Party insider Bill Wardlaw.

Carrick already has signed on with the Hahn campaign, and Wardlaw is known to favor County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a longtime friend but one whom many observers now believe will sit out the race.

Growing Latino Vote Generates Ideas

Meanwhile, the rest of the field is taking shape, and the city itself continues to grow and change.

Bradley governed in a time when blacks comprised the second-largest ethnic group of voters, and he succeeded, in part, because he started every campaign with African American voters solidly behind him. But the 1997 mayor’s race marked the first time in Los Angeles history in which more Latinos than blacks cast ballots. That has given pause to the city’s political class and hope to Latino candidates considering a run.

Most notably, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and Congressman Xavier Becerra are eyeing the race. If they enter, and it seems likely that both will do so despite the advice of some supporters who believe they should wait, the two men would bank on a sort of Latino-based version of the Bradley coalition. In essence, that means starting from a Latino base and then reaching out to liberals and some moderates.

The chances of turning that into a winning strategy, however, are severely hurt if both run, splitting their natural base while other candidates are able to build on one.

For his part, City Councilman Joel Wachs employs a strategy similar to Soboroff’s: appealing to cost-conscious conservative Valley residents.

Wachs enjoys an important advantage over Soboroff in that he is one of the city’s longest-serving politicians and, therefore, has a cadre of loyal constituents. But he lacks Soboroff’s personal fortune and some observers believe the two men, who are competing for essentially the same voters and who also deeply dislike one another, may cancel each other out.

Finally, there is the possible candidacy of State Controller Kathleen Connell, who is sounding out pollsters and other political operatives and who could build her coalition around a female base. If she succeeded, Connell would then likely move from there to pick Hahn’s pocket for liberal and moderate votes and could even challenge Wachs and Soboroff for Republicans, especially Republican women.

With a proven track record for fund-raising and a solidly centrist position on the issues--and with the certainty that a possible political breakthrough for women would generate huge attention--Connell’s early pondering already has attracted significant interest.

Connell’s troubles, however, are that she does not come to the campaign with any identifiable geographic base or local track record. In addition, she has alienated a fair number of political insiders over the years with her brusque manner.

“To know Kathleen Connell,” one observer said, “is to vote for Steve Soboroff.”

As the campaign works through its early months, most analysts agree that Hahn is far ahead of the pack in terms of securing his base. Partly because no leading African American has emerged in the early stages of the mayor’s race, Hahn comes to the campaign with the prospect of winning heavily in the three council districts with the largest number of black voters.

Hahn has enjoyed support in that community in each of his five successful citywide campaigns, an electoral record unmatched by any of his potential rivals. Moreover, none of the leading candidates so far has much of a record in the African American community, so observers tend to view Hahn as invulnerable there.

Where the city attorney has a tougher time is in the second half of the Los Angeles political calculus, the reach beyond his base.

On the Westside, Villaraigosa, Connell and Becerra will challenge him for liberal votes. In the Valley, Soboroff and Wachs will compete for moderates and almost certainly deprive him of conservatives. On the Eastside, Soboroff and Wachs will challenge him for moderates and conservatives--the same voters who helped Riordan win in 1997--but all of the Anglo contenders would undoubtedly be battling upstream against either Villaraigosa or Becerra.

For those two Latino candidates, finding votes outside their base is even more challenging than it is for Hahn, who has the benefit of long experience in city politics and reasonably good name recognition citywide.

Some Problems for a Liberal

Villaraigosa, for instance, is little known locally despite the fact that the speakership makes him one of the most important politicians in California. His task, then, is to make himself known, a job he has undertaken with characteristic zeal and charm, relentlessly appearing at events across the city.

But he also is a liberal who opposes the death penalty and relishes his relationship with the American Civil Liberties Union--all positions that make it hard for him to appeal to moderates. And his actions in recent weeks have raised other questions about his ability to pull that off.

Most notably, some Villaraigosa supporters cringed at his recent trip to Mexico, where he effusively praised President Ernesto Zedillo for the president’s help in dropping the legal challenge to Proposition 187. That measure sought to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants and was strongly opposed by Villaraigosa and other Latino leaders, but it won handily at the ballot box, and the speaker’s glee over its death is bound to antagonize some of those voters.

“Let’s put it this way,” said one Hahn supporter, “Antonio’s picture on the front page with Zedillo did not play well in Chatsworth.”

The early positioning in this campaign to some observers suggests room for a Riordan-like candidate: someone outside traditional political circles whose background would stand in contrast to the establishment candidates. Such a candidate, that thinking goes, would benefit from anti-City Hall sentiment, especially in the San Fernando Valley.

All of that points to Soboroff.

He is an affable, earnest businessman with a good tan and a serious commitment to his family, though he sometimes touts that so vigorously that people roll their eyes. At a recent fund-raiser for City Councilwoman Laura Chick, for instance, most speakers gave quick, glib toasts to the councilwoman or otherwise made sport of the event. Soboroff, by contrast, stood with a child at his side and spoke passionately about the future of children in Los Angeles.

“It was a little over the top,” one attendee said.

Nevertheless, Soboroff does in some respects seem to have the ability to mimic Riordan’s 1993 strategy. He’s a Republican in a largely Democratic field, so he may have the ability to develop a core group of supporters in the Valley. He is working the campaign early and hard, impressing many insiders with his obvious commitment to the effort. And he’s easy to like, so voters may warm to him.

But largely unnoticed in Riordan’s first campaign was the huge amount of behind-the-scenes work that the lawyer and venture capitalist and his camp did to prepare for that race. Riordan was the chief backer of a term limits initiative years before the mayor’s race. He contributed heavily to the anti-Rose Bird campaign and put up seed money for Proposition 115, an overhaul of the state criminal code written by prosecutors.

So insiders already were aware of him long before he announced his candidacy for mayor. He and his allies worked the right wing quietly and effectively in the months before he joined the campaign; by the time he ran, Pete Wilson, Ronald Reagan and the Christian Coalition--all far more conservative than Riordan--were on board.

All of that left Riordan so protected on the right that his move to the middle during the race was relatively easy, especially when he ended up in a runoff with Councilman Mike Woo, who seemed to many to embody the battered political establishment.

That last issue--voter frustration with politics as usual--was of crucial importance because the 1993 campaign unfolded in the shadow of one of Los Angeles’ most wrenching calamities, the 1992 riots. That tragedy badly shook the city’s confidence in itself, and it made voters especially willing to embrace the idea of an outsider candidate.

Today, voters appear relatively happy with their city and its government, making an outsider bid much harder.

Still, there is great political potential in the kind of coalition that Riordan built and that Soboroff and Wachs most logically could emulate.

Today’s Los Angeles is an enormously diverse place; some believe it is the most diverse city on the planet. But its voting public remains predominantly white and largely split between the more conservative Valley and the more liberal Westside.

The fifth council district, for instance, which includes much of the Westside, typically generates as many votes as all three largely African American districts put together. The trick to that approach is that while most voters on the Westside and in the Valley are white, they cover a broad ideological range, so it’s hard to bring them together into a single voting bloc.

The result: Any candidate with an eye on 300,000 votes needs to bridge either ideological divisions or ethnic ones--or both.

As the pros are fond of saying, there are a lot of ways to win in Los Angeles, but none is easy.

“The candidate who works the hardest,” said political consultant Rick Taylor, “is the candidate who will win.”

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Winning Los Angeles

In 1993, Richard Riordan’s winning coalition was the mirror image of the one that kept Mayor Tom Bradley in office for 20 years. Riordan won handily in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside, doing fairly well among Latinos and conceding blacks to his opponent, Councilman Mike Woo. Riordan carried nine council districts (though one was a virtual draw) to Woo’s six.