CommentsKEY RACE VOTER GUIDE--The many resistance marches in this ‘speak up’ era make me optimistic and are encouraging, but what about increasing and improving engagement and participation in local elections?
I understand and appreciate that this upcoming Los Angeles election is the penultimate election of the year (Jimmy Gomez and Robert Lee Ahn will face off in another local election for the 34th Congressional District on Tuesday, June 6, a special election forced after Xavier Becerra left Congress to become California’s Attorney General) and that soon enough local elections will coincide with national elections. All that’s a good thing, in my opinion.
Local elections matter. Working families need to be able to count to eight on the Los Angeles City Council. Can we? How far over can the LAUSD board bend for the Charter Schools’ lobby? As current schoolboard member Steve Zimmer said, just after the election: “Looking ahead to the runoff, Zimmer said he hoped that voters understood what’s at stake.
‘Voters have a stark choice,’ he said, ‘between whether we can make more dreams come true for kids through working together with our teachers and parents or whether we’re going to return to the politics of conflict, competition and confrontation.’”
“Why, you may ask, is this special election taking place on April 4, a month after the un-special municipal primary and six weeks before the even less special municipal general election? Because election officials are heartless and cruel.” Hillel Aron explains it all in the LA Weekly: Yes, Los Angeles, It's Time for Another Election.
And in the March 15 LA Weekly he sets us all a bit straighter on the actual turnout numbers in Los Angeles city elections (what HAS happened to Mariel Garza’s objectivity?): Actually, Voter Turnout in L.A.'s Last Election Wasn't That Bad There’s a graph, too.
“The [above] chart, put together by Mitchell for the delight of his Twitter followers, shows voter turnout in LA municipal elections since 2003. It excludes even-year statewide and national elections, which have much higher turnout. As you can see, projected turnout for the 2017 primary election – 18.5 percent – dwarfs the 11 percent turnout of 2015, when there was no mayor's race. It fell a bit short of the 21 percent turnout in 2013 – but that was a highly competitive mayor's race to fill an open seat.
“The most recent citywide election where, like this year, a mayor was running for a second term was in 2009, when Antonio Villaraigosa was up for re-election. That year, turnout was ... 18 percent. Exactly what it was this year.
“‘If people were looking for signs that you’re going to have this crazy engaged electorate in every election now that people are protesting in the airports and watching Sean Spicer press conferences, if you were to think that that would lead to more people voting, you’d be wrong,’ Mitchell says. ‘This turnout seems to be pretty consistent with prior past elections.’”
We vote, we win. The more people who register and vote, the better off we’ll all be.
Speaking about upcoming local elections, I’m as mired in that muck as anyone else plus I spent 20+ years driving Figueroa. And while I’ve witnessed incumbents voted off the City Council beyond MAV (Joy Picus and Joan Milke Flores to name two) I’ve never, ever seen the LA Times withdraw an endorsement.
Me? I love reading Tony Butka’s writing on northeast Los Angeles. He thinks what I think about the race in CD 1:
“I also like Gil. He’s a hard guy to get to know, and he does not have that “hi, how are ya’” plastic veneer of the true professional politician -- like Eric Garcetti or Herb Wesson, who smile at you even though they’d do you in without even a flicker of emotion. At the same time, I know that Gil has always had a real passion for the under-represented like the undocumented and dreamers, even though those people mostly don’t vote and have a very healthy distrust of government. He’s demonstrated these qualities going all the way back to when he ran SEIU Local 660 (now SEIU Local 721) in LA County. And that was at a time when these opinions were not without controversy. Same for the California state legislature.”
Here's one of the “grafs” that irked me most:
“Cedillo was a champion for immigrants during his time in the state Legislature, particularly those who are undocumented, and that good will surely counted for a lot in this heavily immigrant district. But how long can he coast on that?” Mariel Garza opinion piece in the LA Times on March 20
I know Gil Cedillo, and he’s never coasted, not now, not ever.
(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch and is a retired union leader now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’)
-cw
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How about a Resistance March to the Polls? Speak Up! Our Thoughts!
