Mayoral Runoff Is Made for Television

It’s less than a month until Los Angeles picks its next mayor, and here’s what the candidates are not doing: They’re not rallying voters or walking door-to-door. They’re not down on the Venice boardwalk shaking hands, or greeting people coming out of Metro stops, or walking Ventura Boulevard. They’re not stumping around the city every day, with television cameras trailing their every move.

In fact, former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and City Atty. James K. Hahn have been running for mayor mostly out of sight, spending their days calling donors for money and meeting with top industry executives, opinion makers and community leaders in intimate receptions. They have had about one public event a day, if that--usually a quick news conference at a school or a senior center.

Why isn’t the average Angeleno seeing more of the two men vying to run the second-largest city in the country?

The answers: It’s about time. It’s about money. It’s about, essentially, the nature of Los Angeles--its notorious political apathy and enormous geographic spread.

Most campaign veterans agree that the best way to reach people in this far-flung city is through television commercials--an incredibly expensive method.

From the first round of the election April 10 to the runoff on June 5, the candidates have less than two months to raise the $1 million to $2 million they each need to run enough television commercials to have an impact, a task complicated by the fact that city ethics rules require that they raise that money in $1,000 chunks.

“The scarcest resource besides money right now is time,” said Steven Erie, a senior fellow at USC’s Southern California Studies Center, who compares the brevity of the last round of the mayor’s race to the short elections in Great Britain. “So right now it’s a stealth campaign in terms of public interaction.”

And Los Angeles--a sprawling city with a generally indifferent attitude toward local politics--does not easily lend itself to the one-on-one retail politicking that candidates diligently practice in other cities. A politician trying to get from San Pedro to Northridge, for example, has to travel more than 40 miles.

“One of the big factors is we’re a horizontal city, not a vertical city, like New York or Chicago,” said Darry Sragow, an unpaid advisor to Villaraigosa. “You can spend a lot of time pounding the pavement in Los Angeles and you’re just not going to meet a lot of people.”

In fact, so-called retail politicking is difficult in the state as a whole, whose large terrain prohibits candidates from making many local stops and encourages a reliance on television.

The two areas where Villaraigosa and Hahn have been making regular stops are South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, where they have been fighting for the support of African Americans and conservative whites. But during those appearances, they usually meet with small groups of people or hold brief, choreographed news conferences.

That may change this weekend. With only 24 days of campaigning left, both men are gearing up more active public schedules, including precinct walking, rallies and church visits. Both campaigns say they plan even more public appearances as election day approaches.

But even when Hahn and Villaraigosa have had public events, they have not always been covered by the news media. Politics, local campaign consultants bemoan, is just not a big story in Los Angeles as it is in other cities.

In the last month, most of the mayoral candidates’ appearances have been attended by only three or four reporters, in a city with more than a dozen media outlets. That’s paltry payoff for an event that usually requires a significant amount of staff time to organize.

At one Hahn news conference at a Northridge senior center last week, the city attorney stood behind a podium surrounded by a group of seniors and addressed only two reporters--including one from the campus radio station at Cal State Northridge.

“The unfortunate reality is that the press doesn’t cover all the public events,” said Hahn consultant Kam Kuwata. “And from our point of view, you have to reach thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, a day. You have to think about the efficiency of your time.”

And there’s another risk to public appearances: Unscripted events with average voters run the danger of getting a candidate “off message.”

“It’s not always the cleanest way to deliver your message,” said Julie Buckner, who was state Controller Kathleen Connell’s first campaign manager in her mayoral bid. “What if you go out and try to do an event on education, and your opponent has given the media a list of 12 votes you made on something else? . . . The truth is, the most effective way to deliver your message is through paid media.”

So the two mayoral candidates have been focusing on raising money for television commercials--the medium through which most voters will get to know them. Both candidates started running their first runoff ads last week.

“The result is a constant chase for checks that keeps them in the office dialing, and in places like Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air,” Sragow said. “Most candidates would rather spend their time in other places.”

Ironically, the mayoral candidates’ lack of interaction with actual voters in this municipal election is a strange counterpoint to what happens in states like Iowa and New Hampshire during the presidential race, an election on a much larger scale. As the first voters to take stock of the presidential hopefuls, residents of those states expect to meet the candidates in person, or at least see them on their local newscast.

As a result, voters there are much more engaged in the political process and their own role in the election, said GOP consultant Dan Schnur, who was a senior advisor to Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) during his presidential bid.

But the way politics is conducted in Los Angeles is unlikely to change because the distance between the candidates and the people they hope to represent is locked in place by a vicious cycle, political experts said. Residents who don’t have personal interaction with the candidates are less likely to pay attention to the process.

“It’s a lot harder for a voter to get excited about a candidate who they only see in campaign commercials and coming out of fund-raisers,” Schnur said.