Los Angeles: The emerging race to replace Mayor Eric Garcetti is showcasing Los Angeles’ diversity and winning candidates who emerged from a growing field of hope will have the ability to navigate the rivalry in the city’s racial and ethnic communities and form alliances. would be required.
No single group dominates the ballot box in the country’s second most populous city, which makes coalition-building an essential task.
Democratic US Rep. Karen Bass formally stepped into the 2022 contest on Monday, hoping to become the first woman and second black mayor. Tom Bradley, the first black mayor, held the position from 1973 to 1993.
Bass represents a district in Congress that is closely related to some of the city’s traditional Black neighborhoods, where she also grew up. He promised to prioritize the city’s rampant homelessness crisis, which has seen piles of rubbish litter almost every corner of the city.
“I have spent my entire life bringing together groups of people in coalitions to solve complex problems and drive tangible change, especially in times of crisis,” Bass said in a statement.
With all my heart, I am ready, she tweeted.
Bass will compete for votes with a range of diverse candidates.
City Councilman Kevin de Leon, who once headed the state Senate before being ousted, is a Latino born with Chinese ancestry to a Guatemalan mother and father; Black businessman Mel Wilson is from the San Fernando Valley region; Jessica Lal, who leads the Downtown Business Group and is of Indian descent; City Attorney Mike Feuer is Jewish; and City Councilman Joe Buscano, who spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, is a first-generation Italian American whose parents immigrated from Sicily.
The race is nonpartisan, but the leading contenders are all Democrats, surprising in a city where the party’s voters outnumber Republicans 3 to 1. Bass and de Leon are favorites of the progressive wing of the party, with other candidates standing across the Democratic spectrum.
The winner of the 2022 contest will inherit a city facing a maze of urban ills, including broken roads and sidewalks, a rising crime rate, LA’s notorious traffic and home prices that are out of reach for many working-class families. are out. Primary is in June.
Candidates will need to communicate with voters in neighborhoods with different identities: single-family homeowners in the vast sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, Latinos who live east of the city, young professionals in trendy Silver Lake, or traditional are residents of predominantly black neighborhoods. South Los Angeles.
Asian votes are running in the Koreatown and Little Tokyo neighborhoods, and there are large populations of Armenians, Russians and others.
Fifty-two languages are spoken in addition to English in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which enrolls 650,000 students in LA and surrounding communities.
The town is a quilt with different patterns, said Michael Trujillo, a Democratic adviser who advises Bascano. The wider issue will be homelessness, he predicted, with voters looking for a candidate who will put a date on the calendar to end empty lots and down overpasses, tents that have become fixtures along freeways and lines of rusted RVs.
Trujillo said that with such a diverse electorate, you should be able to speak with a common theme. The candidate who can maintain that theme is most likely to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.
In 2005, when Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa became the first Latino mayor in more than a century, he had to allay fears in the black community that he would be displaced from government jobs in favor of Latinos. While he was a candidate, Villaraigosa spoke of overcoming the black-brown divide, which can lead to violence.
Villaraigosa won after ultimately vowing to unify the city and win support from prominent black people, including Democratic US Representative Maxine Waters. He took the mayorship from then-Mayor James Hahn, another Democrat who lost support in the black community after the ouster of then-LAPD chief Bernard Parks, who is black.
Bradley, also a Democrat, became the city’s first black mayor by forming a coalition of blacks and white liberals that moved the city away from its conservative roots.
Garcetti was first elected in 2013 with strong support from Latino and white voters, including in Republican-leaning areas, even though she was outperformed by rival Wendy Grael in traditionally black neighborhoods.
Garcetti, nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as ambassador to India, often shifts to Spanish during his appearances and reminds audiences of his Mexican-Jewish-Italian roots, jokingly calling himself a kosher burrito. Huh.
Bass, 67, was a physician assistant and community organizer who became the first black woman speaker of the state legislature in 2008. She was serving her sixth term in the House, and previously headed the Congressional Black Caucus.
She was on the Bidens’ short list when she was considering running for the vice presidential election and is also close to her fellow Californian who leads the US House of San Francisco Nancy Pelosi.
Latinos and black people are the pillars of the Democratic Party in California and often end up on the same side of political issues, but there has been conflict over the years as the Latino population in LA and across the state has grown.
Black people make up only 9% of LA’s population while Latinos make up almost half, although they can be disproportionate voters and many are too young to vote, or are not citizens. Whites make up about 30% of the inhabitants.
Jaime Regalado, former executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, said winning primary candidates would need to form a coalition that would generate 22% to 25% of the primary vote – to move forward. Enough two-person November runoff in a crowded field.
One group is not going to suffice, he said, likely to attract a sizable chunk of the black and liberal vote to Bass, forcing his rivals to seek support where they might not be looking for votes. were thinking.
With the bass coming in, it’s a scuffle, he said.
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