Latino Turnout Not Much to Cheer About

We’re working the streets of Boyle Heights, looking for anyone who managed to find their polling place Tuesday. Not this guy with the hood up on his Nissan, futzing with the battery. He says he’s not a citizen.

Up and down the avenues we go, south of 6th, west of Indiana, the June sun high and fierce and stubborn. Erica Bernal says her do-gooder group worked this precinct hard, ragging people to get off their duffs and vote.

But of the 1,058 registered voters in the precinct, 71% found something better to do.

Watch TV? Stand on a corner? Yak on the phone?

We come upon a man in a Yankees shirt; he’s not a citizen. This one’s not registered; that one doesn’t care to chat. We march on.

I keep seeing self-congratulatory pronouncements from Latino leaders regarding Tuesday’s voter turnout in Los Angeles, and I have no idea why they’ve got their party hats on.

“Latinos vote en masse” trumpets the La Opinion headline. Ecstatic boosters proclaim, “This is our time.” They proudly tell us Latinos are doing their civic duty like never before.

Maybe the problem is my math. I understand the Latino turnout was higher than ever. But given the circumstances, which included the possibility of the first Latino mayor here since 1872, it’s no stretch to call the turnout an embarrassment.

For starters, 34% of the registered voters in Los Angeles are white and 41% are Hispanic. But 52% of those who voted are white and 22% Hispanic.

Even at that, the numbers are misleading. In 1998, Los Angeles had an estimated 1.1 million adult Latinos, according to Bernal, who’s with the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).

Of those 1.1 million people, 554,818 were U.S. citizens. The numbers have jumped since 1998, but only about 315,000 Latinos are registered to vote. Of those, an estimated 130,000 to 135,000 voted Tuesday.

So allow me to explain exactly what it was that Latinos did en masse on Tuesday.

They stayed home.

Somewhere between 80% and 90% of them.

There may be more Latinos with Laker flags on their cars than Latinos who voted.

In fact, we may find out that while more Latinos than ever voted on Tuesday, more than ever chose not to vote.

Do me a favor and please don’t whine about language problems or disenfranchisement.

Of course there are barriers, but Latinos didn’t just get to L.A. yesterday. They’re in the majority, and they should have been lined up around the block on Tuesday.

Antonio Villaraigosa lost to Jim Hahn by less than 40,000 votes in an election in which roughly 400,000 eligible Latino voters thumbed their noses at the whole thing.

Which is not to suggest that they would have, or should have, voted for Villaraigosa. Some, according to Bernal, weren’t crazy about him, which is understandable.

But NALEO didn’t knock on doors and hit the phones telling people they ought to vote just because a Mexican American was running.

“We told them they have a responsibility, and that if they want clean streets, safe streets, better schools, they have to get involved,” Bernal says as we walk east on Whittier Boulevard, in the precinct where a measly 29% of registered voters did their duty.

“We appealed to their sense of community and their desire to live in a better environment, because that’s what brought many of them here.”

People liked that pitch, says Bernal, who is less jaded than I about the turnout and tries to put a positive spin on the overall showing. But when she asks people why they didn’t vote, they say they didn’t know if they were registered, or they didn’t think it mattered. Yadda yadda yadda.

So-called experts tell us that as the city becomes less white, Jim Hahn will come to represent the end of an era.

What do they know?

The Latino community’s brightest political stars, Villaraigosa and U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra, both ran for mayor and did not inspire Bacchanalia. Becerra, soiled by an amateur smear campaign his troops ran against Villaraigosa in the April election, lies wounded beside him on the battlefield.

Unless Jim Hahn is found with a dead woman or a live boy, he’s good for eight.

At a liquor store on Whittier, we find a clerk who’s registered to vote but didn’t, and if you dangled a million bucks in front of him, he couldn’t tell you who was running.

Another clerk says she’s registered to vote but didn’t. When we ask why, she disappears through a rear door.

Imagine the crowd back there.

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Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.