Candidates Use Mailers to Solidify Voter Base

With a month to go until Los Angeles voters cast their ballots, hundreds of thousands of glossy mailers have begun to arrive in homes around the city, sent by candidates attempting to shore up their bases of support among their core supporters.

Commercial real estate broker Steve Soboroff, the lone Republican in the race, has already hit 120,000 Republican homes with two mailers, which describe him as the only GOP candidate and the hand-picked successor of Mayor Richard Riordan.

Former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, meanwhile, is launching a six-page piece that trumpets his growing coalition of liberal and party organizations--from the California Democratic Party and National Organization for Women to the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club and the county AFL-CIO.

Villaraigosa and Soboroff are probably the most liberal and conservative major candidates in the mayor’s race, and their mailers clearly appeal to their most stalwart supporters.

Securing an ideological base is a time-tested practice of electoral politics--locally and nationally--although it also raises challenges for the two candidates if they advance to the runoff, where more centrist voters could hold the key to victory. In her own mailers being released this week, state Controller Kathleen Connell targets voters in the ideological middle.

The mailers arrive in a quickening campaign that concludes in the April 10 primary election. Most of the money spent in the mayoral campaign so far has gone to television advertisements designed to appeal to a broad audience. But the Villaraigosa and Soboroff mailers are tailored more narrowly.

“In a primary, you want to consolidate an ideological voting block,” said Parke Skelton, Villaraigosa’s campaign consultant. “This is a very, very liberal electorate in this city.”

In recent weeks, Villaraigosa has added to that coalition with the backing of former state Sen. Richard Katz, former City Councilman Marvin Braude and U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of the most senior and respected members of the California congressional delegation. Late last week, Villaraigosa topped his endorsement list with U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), whose portrait appears on the mailer.

Waxman said he believes the multiethnic coalition of political leaders sends a powerful message, when aligned with the environmentalists, feminists and labor organizations also backing Villaraigosa.

“This is creating the kind of excitement I haven’t seen since the first Tom Bradley campaign for mayor, when I was a young assemblyman,” Waxman said.

Hoping to lock up as much of his liberal Democratic base as he can before election day, Villaraigosa has also sent 150,000 absentee ballot mailings to environmentalists, Latinos and Democratic women.

On the other end of the spectrum, Soboroff’s mail advertises him as the only Republican candidate in the field and “a problem-solver, not a politician,” his campaign slogan. One of the mailings focuses on Soboroff’s history as a civic activist--a longtime mentor for the Big Brothers program and former chairman of the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

Both mailers focus on three central promises of his campaign--to work to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District into smaller units; to combat gangs by teaming troubled children with mentors and to fight traffic by building light-rail lines along several freeways.

Riordan, who is leaving office on June 30 because of term limits, describes Soboroff’s work improving parks and helping clear the way for construction of a rail project that will connect the Port of Los Angeles with downtown.

“I think that both Soboroff and Villaraigosa run the risk of alienating a lot of other voters, if they are to be successful and get into a runoff situation,” said John Shallman, campaign consultant to Connell.

Soboroff and Villaraigosa have their own credentials to rebut the notion that they are ideologues. For the Republican businessman, it is his work for the Big Brothers and planning with diverse groups to improve the city’s parks. For Villaraigosa, it is the cross-party alliances he built in the Legislature on parks and school bond measures and backing from some surprising quarters, including conservative homeowners’ association leaders in the Valley such as Gerald Silver of Encino and Gordon Murley of Woodland Hills.

Connell, a Democrat, has tried to avoid being drawn to either end of the political spectrum, instead planting herself in the ideological center. Her first campaign mailer touts her “executive and financial management experience” and efforts as controller to save tax money.

Her mailer, arriving in 200,000 likely voters’ mailboxes this week, stresses her work on issues of particular interest to women, such as fighting for complete medical coverage for those with breast cancer. The mailer pledges to create preschool programs for 4-year-olds and to open hotlines staffed by police officers who are experts in domestic violence and family counseling.