With Garcetti Trailing in Polls, Ugly Race Expected

It takes no great stretch of political imagination to guess where the race for Los Angeles County district attorney is heading.

It will not be a pretty place.

Both campaigns have conducted their own polls, and both agree: The campaign between now and Nov. 7 will be about defining--or redefining--the electorate’s sense of challenger Steve Cooley’s identity.

The question is: Who can do it first and most convincingly?

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti can be expected to furiously attack Cooley, a top deputy in his office, in the hope that voters will decide that the incumbent--who has miserable job approval ratings and has trailed in every poll this year--is the lesser of two evils.

Cooley’s job will be to parry those attacks while letting voters know that he doesn’t have scales or breathe fire.

“Cooley needs to identify himself,” said H. Eric Schockman, associate dean of political science at USC. “People aren’t willing to just substitute somebody until they know who it is they’re substituting.”

The most recent poll, conducted in late July for the Cooley campaign but released only this week, showed Cooley leading Garcetti by 53% to 31%. The poll, which questioned 400 registered voters, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The race has tightened significantly since April, when a Los Angeles Times poll showed Cooley leading 55% to 18%. However, Cooley did better in his own poll than in one done by the Garcetti campaign in June, which showed Cooley leading by 46% to 31%.

Although polls conducted by campaigns are generally treated skeptically, there is no evidence that the numbers in either poll were inaccurate or flawed.

What all the polls have shown consistently is that Garcetti is stuck well below victory level, hovering somewhere below the 37% of the vote he received in the three-way primary election in March. Cooley placed first in that election, with 38%.

The Cooley poll reaffirmed that Garcetti has astonishingly high name recognition--98% of respondents knew who he was, which puts him in a league with the president, the pope and very few others.

“He’s the best known district attorney in the United States,” pollster Alex Evans said.

However, because 70% of the respondents disapprove of the job he is doing, Garcetti is also one of the least popular prosecutors.

“The only way he can turn this around is if he launches a horribly negative blitz on Cooley, and convinces voters that while they might not like Garcetti all that much, Cooley is some kind of devil,” said former Dist. Atty. Robert Philobosian, a staunch Cooley supporter.

Garcetti has at least three things going for him: He is the incumbent, he has lots of money, and many voters don’t know who Cooley is. In Cooley’s own poll, only 55% of the respondents had heard of him. Although the pollsters said he was well liked among those who did know him, it’s not clear how well they know him or how firm their support will be--especially after Garcetti unleashes a $1-million ad campaign against him.

“Because he’s so ill-defined and unknown, his base of support and his following . . . are soft and tenuous,” said Garcetti’s campaign manager, Eric Nasarenko. “We have the resources to give the voters a comparative choice in this election.”

Does that mean it will be an ugly campaign? “I think it’s going to be an issues-oriented race,” Nasarenko said, “where voters will be given an opportunity to compare and contrast the two candidates’ records.”

In particular, he said, Garcetti will focus on three issues that he believes he and Cooley disagree on: crime prevention programs, the three-strikes law and gun control.

Cooley’s campaign manager, John Shallman, assessed the race a bit differently. “You’ve got a two-term incumbent who is so far behind and so damaged that the only thing he can do at this point is damage us so badly that people will somehow change their perceptions,” he said. “But you can’t damage someone else that badly without damaging yourself.”

Shallman recalled the sharply negative--and, many felt, misleading--1996 campaign Garcetti waged against challenger John Lynch. “There is an absolute certainty, 100%, that they will have to do the same thing here,” Shallman said.