Shifting Alliances Shape Mayor’s Race

With just eight weeks to go before the Los Angeles mayoral election, the leading candidates are seeking to win over critical voting blocs in a city whose electoral math has become as complex as its electorate.

Latinos, African Americans, Republicans, San Fernando Valley residents and Westside liberals -- groups that were once almost predictable in their allegiances -- are up for grabs.

And the candidates are drawing up a wide range of strategies and messages in the run-up to the March 8 election.

Mayor James K. Hahn is the best-known and best-funded candidate. But each of his major opponents -- Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, Councilman Bernard C. Parks and state Sen. Richard Alarcon -- has an ethnic or geographic strength to exploit.

These candidates, with their overlapping bases of support, could easily fracture once-united blocs, many political observers say. With five veteran politicians in the race, no one is likely to capture a majority in March and win outright.

Early polls by candidates and their allies show that Hahn and Villaraigosa are the leading contenders to advance to a May runoff election, though that could change.

“You can’t predict what coalitions may emerge,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist who has been studying Los Angeles political campaigns for more than 20 years. “Things are just not as stable and predictable as they once were.”

For most of the last four decades, the city was divided largely along clear ideological lines as liberals and conservatives fought for control of the corner office in City Hall.

A conservative bloc kept Sam Yorty in power through the 1960s. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a liberal coalition of African American and Westside Jewish voters pushed Tom Bradley to five victories.

In the 1990s, the alignment shifted again. A coalition led by white San Fernando Valley voters and Westside Democrats jarred by the 1992 riots combined to give Republican Richard Riordan two terms as mayor.

When Riordan left office in 2001, Hahn was elected with an entirely new coalition of conservative Valley voters and African Americans loyal to his late father, legendary county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who represented South Los Angeles for 40 years.

Within a year of taking office, however, the younger Hahn found himself at odds with the two pillars of his electoral coalition.

He confronted a spirited secession movement in the Valley and a black community angered by his decision not to reappoint Parks as police chief.

That alone would have hurt any reelection campaign, but the mayor is also laboring under ongoing criminal investigations into city contracting.

Incumbency, nonetheless, carries big advantages: No incumbent Los Angeles mayor has lost since Yorty was unseated by Bradley in 1973.

Hahn, 54, has already struck a blow at the liberal coalition that fed Villaraigosa’s 2001 run by stealing much of his support from organized labor.

In the earlier race, Hahn finished second to Villaraigosa in the April election but beat him in the June runoff.

As he did four years ago, Hahn is trying to reach a broad cross-section of voters by focusing on public safety.

Nearly every week, the mayor appears somewhere in the city to talk about double-digit drops in violent crime or to share the stage with Police Chief William J. Bratton, whom Hahn tapped to replace Parks two years ago.

Political strategists say the crime issue promises to play particularly well in the more conservative San Fernando Valley, which Hahn has no plan to concede despite the bruising 2002 secession campaign. The mayor makes frequent visits there, and has locked up endorsements from the West Valley’s two city councilmen and one of the area’s leading businessmen, Bert Boeckmann, a secession backer and owner of Galpin Ford in North Hills.

Hahn’s efforts to woo back the black community, which voted for him by a 4-1 ratio in the 2001 runoff, have proved more delicate.

Hahn, whose name had been political gold in South Los Angeles, regularly visits the area’s all-important churches, and he has the endorsement of Councilwoman Jan Perry, one of the City Council’s three African Americans. But some community leaders still nurse resentments.

“The last time around, we gave Jimmy Hahn support because of his father,” said the Rev. Frederick O. Murph, pastor of Brookins Community AME Church and the son of a friend of Kenneth Hahn. “This time, the free lunches are over.”

Parks, whose successful run for City Council two years ago drew heavily on anger toward Hahn among African Americans, is, in theory, best positioned to complicate the mayor’s efforts to reclaim that part of his base, political observers say.

But black voters make up a diminishing share of the electorate in Los Angeles -- 17% in 2001 -- which means that Parks, 61, must reach beyond South L.A.

The former chief has made repeated trips to the Valley, where his law enforcement credentials and fiscally conservative, anti-union positions could find a receptive audience.

Parks’ campaign, however, has had trouble finding a message, and its momentum has been disrupted by internal instability. He recently hired a new campaign manager, his fourth.

Ominously, many African American leaders have withheld endorsements, and Parks has come under fire in South Los Angeles for, among other things, siding with businesses seeking liquor licenses in his district.

Political consultant and South Los Angeles community leader Kerman Maddox said he believed that Parks could win a majority of the black turnout, but that a significant number of African Americans would return to Hahn or ultimately support other candidates.

“It would be a mistake by the other mayoral candidates to assume they have no chance with African American voters,” Maddox added.

Hertzberg and Villaraigosa have also been meeting with black community groups. Hertzberg appears most focused, however, on solidifying a base in the Valley, part of which he represented for three terms in the Assembly before term limits forced him out in 2002.

Like many who have served in the Legislature, Hertzberg, 50, is largely unknown to Los Angeles voters overall, polls show.

He is also laboring to overcome his ties with a state Legislature that is unpopular among many voters.

Hahn is already attacking Hertzberg for his activities in Sacramento, including for taking donations from Browning Ferris Industries, which operates a controversial landfill in the Valley.

But Hertzberg has two advantages. He comes from the most voter-rich section of Los Angeles; Valley voters typically make up about 40% of the city’s electorate. And there is no well-known Republican in the race to siphon off conservative Valley voters.

Though increasingly outnumbered by Democrats, the city’s Republicans could prove a significant force. They formed Riordan’s base and nearly propelled Republican Steve Soboroff into the mayoral runoff in 2001.

With his call to split up the Los Angeles Unified School District, Hertzberg has taken up a campaign message that has been a staple for candidates seeking to build support among GOP voters.

“There is a marked constituency in the Valley that favors breaking up the school district,” said Valley political strategist Larry Levine. “It’s probably not a majority, but if Hertzberg captures it, it could lift him into a competitive position.”

But Hertzberg opposed a district breakup when he was in the Assembly, and favoring it now is a mostly symbolic gesture because the mayor has no direct control over the schools.

That did not stop Hertzberg from boarding a yellow school bus last month to tout the plan. One of his stops was in Boyle Heights, where he appealed directly to Latino voters.

Two other candidates -- Alarcon and Villaraigosa -- are already counting on the Latino vote.

Four years ago, voters in Boyle Heights and other Eastside neighborhoods, energized by Villaraigosa’s bid to become the first Latino mayor in modern Los Angeles history, helped drive Latino turnout to 22% of the electorate, a historic high.

This time around, the numbers may be even higher, said Harry Pachon, president of USC’s Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, which tracks Latino voting patterns.

“You may see people saying, ‘We came so close last time, we have to try again,’ ” he added.

It is Villaraigosa’s solid base among those voters -- along with continued support from Westside liberals -- that positions him as Hahn’s leading challenger, according to early campaign polls.

But wary that his energetic appeal to liberal Democratic voters four years ago did not produce a win, Villaraigosa, 51, is trying to lay the foundation for a more centrist effort.

The former Assembly speaker’s first campaign policy initiative was on the bread-and-butter issue of crime: a proposal to hire more police officers by going back to county voters with another sales tax measure in 2006.

Villaraigosa, as he did in 2001, has crisscrossed the city to drum up support, visiting Jewish groups with Westside Councilman Jack Weiss and talking to Valley homeowners.

At the same time, his campaign plans to highlight Villaraigosa’s work in his heavily Latino council district: cleaning up blighted properties, working with local activists and filling potholes.

Villaraigosa’s efforts to consolidate Latino voters citywide could be complicated by Alarcon, himself a former city councilman.

Four years ago, Villaraigosa easily turned aside a challenge to his base from Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra, who came in fifth in the race with just 6% of the vote.

But unlike Becerra, who relied on the same Eastside voters as Villaraigosa, Alarcon has his own base of support in the East Valley, which is increasingly Latino.

Alarcon, like Parks, faces the challenge of getting his message out without the campaign war chests amassed by Hahn, Hertzberg and Villaraigosa. In 2001, the top three finishers were the top three spenders.

But as an 11-year veteran of elected office, Alarcon, 51, is well-known in the East Valley, which has become one of Los Angeles’ most diverse areas.

Although the race at times has had the feel of a grudge match -- with long-standing animosities between Hahn and Parks, Hahn and Villaraigosa, and Hertzberg and Villaraigosa -- Alarcon has stuck to earnest policy pronouncements and avoided clashes with the other candidates.

At public appearances and at a debate last month, he voiced concern about poverty in Los Angeles and touted his efforts to push government to promote economic development in the city.

That is an alluring message for many Latino voters, said Pachon of the Rivera institute. “The No. 1 group of people that Latinos identify most with are working families,” he said.

“It’s not surprising that economic mobility is something that candidates would talk about.”

The challenge all the candidates face is to find a message that appeals to more than one voting bloc, political observers say.

“The imperative to have a coalition is as strong as it ever was,” Cal State Fullerton’s Sonenshein said.

“It just may be that we don’t have any lasting coalitions we can predict from election to election.”

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Voting for mayor

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When to vote: Election day is March 8.

How to register: Eligible citizens can register to vote in this election by mailing a registration form to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk by Feb. 22. Forms are available at post offices and libraries or can be requested by calling (800) 481-8683 or visiting the secretary of state’s website at www.ss.ca.gov.

How to vote absentee: Voters can request absentee ballots from the city clerk by calling (213) 978-0444 and vote by mail between Feb. 7 and March 7.

Los Angeles Times