CommentsVOICES--Good news from politics may seem hard to come by against a backdrop of pandemic and polarization.
But in Eastside and Northeast L.A., Glendale and Pasadena, an organized effort to bring women, people of color, veteran and LGBTQ advocates into leadership positions in the L.A. County Democratic Party achieved a series of victories in this month’s state primary election.
The diverse candidates for Democratic Central Committee share a set of core values, such as well-funded public education at all levels and ending gun violence. They range in age from 25 to 71. Several deepened their activism after November 2016 and came to know each other through the East Area Progressive Democrats (EAPD), with roots in Northeast L.A. Known for its advocacy of public integrity and party reform, the club endorsed 28 candidates, and 18 of them won.
Among the winners is Rocio Rivas, a single parent mom and PhD in education from Teachers College, Columbia University, who lives in Highland Park. She joined a successful coalition drive in 2018 that pushed out an L.A. school board member indicted for fraud and replaced him with a representative supportive of accountability for charter schools and better funding of traditional public schools, which her 10-year-old son and more than 80 percent of Angeleno students attend. Her winning total of 24,000 votes is most for any candidate for Central Committee in any district in the eastern half of L.A. County.
Two other winners are Karen Suarez, of Monrovia, an advocate for climate survival and women in politics, and Mitchell Tsai, of South Pasadena, a Taiwanese American and environmental attorney active in protecting green space. At age 36, Tsai won his first ever contest for a post in the Democratic Party, even as the President faced accusations for fueling bigotry against Asian Americans by calling the COVID-19 microbe the “Chinese virus.”
In other breakthroughs, wins by two Armenian American candidates doubled that community’s representation on the county committee. LGBTQ activists won more seats, too, including Godfrey Plata, 35, of Koreatown, and Steve Fisher, 63, of Silver Lake. Both have supported the campaigns of pro-equality Democrats running for office but only recently decided to step up and run for Central Committee.
This large influx of newcomers to the Democratic Central Committee in L.A. County signifies a reckoning with recent abuse in the party. Both the local and state organizations are recovering from a scandal of sexual harassment and retaliation by the former chair of the county and California party whose misconduct discouraged many would-be volunteer leaders before he resigned in disgrace in late 2018.
Lawsuits filed by party staffers in 2019 echo details of abuse chronicled by independent press outlets. Over a decade, the chair’s drunken advances on men escalated to sexual assaults at party gatherings and threats to penalize any victim or witness who blew the whistle, at least one of whom was choked. By this spring, costs to rank and file Democrats for the party’s legal fees and settlements with survivors approached $3 million.
Despite this hit and hurt he inflicted, the former chair retains his seat on both the state and county committee, along with his power to appoint an alternate and attend and vote at party gatherings.
Overcoming the grip of misconduct on an organization, especially one as influential as the Democratic Party, requires changing the people in charge of governance. For the Democratic Central Committee of LA County, that is no easy task. The 147 elected positions are chosen 7 per Assembly District, by Democratic voters in each of the 21 districts in the county. That election happens only once every four years, on the Presidential primary ballot. In many districts, more than 20 candidates file to run for the 7 seats.
Standing out from the pack to get votes from local Democrats requires grassroots relationships, the endorsement of respected clubs and leaders, and diligent communication. This challenge often inspires teamwork among groups of candidates who share a bond of solidarity. Building on the know-how and volunteer base of EAPD, many of the candidates joined together at kitchen tables in organized phone- and text-banking to reach those with mail-in ballots or headed to Vote Centers. Hundreds of voters expressed gratitude for guidance on whom to choose for the low-profile contests.
With vote-counting by the registrar-clerk-recorder completed, victories that several reformers dared not believe in the earliest tallies of ballots on election night are sinking in. ”When I was reaching out to voters, the most frequent question I got was ‘What is County Central Committee?’” says newly elected member Jessica Craven, who lives in Mount Washington, in Northeast L.A. “My answer then and now is, it’s the most basic building block of a better Democratic Party.”
(Hans Johnson is president of the East Area Progressive Democrats, with more than 1,000 members, the largest club in L.A. County and in California.)
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