Analysis: In LA, black-white wins
Wednesday, 6 June 2001 10:10 (ET)
By STEVE SAILER, UPI National Correspondent
LOS ANGELES, June 6 (UPI) -- As fashionable as it has become to trumpet the
rise of Latino power in American politics, Tuesday's mayoral election in Los
Angeles showed that the much-discussed Hispanic ascendancy hasn't yet quite
gone through the formality of coming into existence.

That seeming human embodiment of the cresting Latino political wave,
Mexican-American mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, lost to a bland
white man named James Hahn. With all precincts reporting, Hahn, a four-term
city attorney, held a 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent lead.

Following his first-place finish in the April primary, Villaraigosa, the
former Democratic speaker of the California Assembly, seemed to radiate an
aura of inevitability. The Census Bureau recently announced that Hispanics
had reached parity with African-Americans in numbers nationwide. Further, it
proclaimed, Hispanics now comprised a near majority 47 percent of Los
Angeles' population.

The attendant publicity made the one-time union organizer appear to be the
man of the multicultural moment. Villaraigosa's election, it was widely
written, would make him the most visible Latino official in America.

The Southern California Establishment leaped on the Villaraigosa bandwagon.
The personable politician won endorsements from Democratic Governor Gray
Davis, the Los Angeles Times newspaper, most unions, many liberal activist
groups such as the National Organization for Women and the Sierra Club, and
the influential billionaires Eli Broad and Ron Burkle.

Yet, not even the strange-bedfellow endorsement by outgoing Republican mayor
Richard Riordan could help the liberal Democrat Villaraigosa beat the
slightly less liberal Democrat Hahn.

Because Villaraigosa was once an American Civil Liberties Union official, it
was not hard for even Hahn, the scion of L.A. politics' most distinguished
liberal dynasty, to get to the right of him on crime. Public safety has
become a big issue again in Los Angeles as the murder rate skyrocketed from
425 in 1999 to 544 in 2000.

Hahn put together an interesting winning coalition of African-Americans,
Asian-Americans, and moderate to conservative non-Hispanic whites. According
to the L.A. Times exit poll, Hahn picked up around four-fifths of the black
vote, two-thirds of the Asian vote, and a little less than three-fifths of
the white vote. Despite Riordan's endorsement of Villaraigosa, Hahn won over
70 percent of L.A.'s dwindling band of Republicans.

The overheated commentaries celebrating the historic importance of
Villaraigosa's primary triumph, which sometimes seemed to imply that L.A.'s
blacks and whites were about to see their political power swept into the
dustbin of history, may have helped unite these seemingly opposed races.

Strikingly, the anti-Villaraigosa forces ranged from firebrand Congresswoman
Maxine Waters to conservative gadfly Hal Netkin. His Web site relentlessly
challenged Villaraigosa to apologize for advocating long ago during his
youthful tenure as head of UCLA's branch of MEChA (which was then a Chicano
racial separatist organization), the secession of "Aztlan" (the Southwestern
USA) from the rest of America.

Black-white coalitions are by no means unknown in Los Angeles, however.
Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American, won five straight elections from 1973
through 1989 despite the great majority of L.A.'s voters being white. The
heart of Bradley's white base, though, lay among wealthy Jewish liberals. In
2001, Jews in glitzy West L.A. tended to favor Villaraigosa. Conservative
gentiles in the middle class San Fernando Valley went for Hahn, whose father
had represented a heavily black district for 40 years.

The frustrations Hispanic politicians experience in trying to fully exploit
their rapidly growing numbers -- up 58 percent in the 1990's -- stem from a
variety of causes.

Although 13 percent of the population is now Hispanic, a large fraction are
not citizens and thus cannot vote.

Due to high birthrates and immigration, residents of Mexican descent average
only 24 years of age, almost 13 years less than the rest of the population.
Thus, a relatively high percentage of Mexican-American citizens are below age
18, and cannot yet vote. Many others are young adults, who typically vote
less often than older people.

Latinos also tend to come from fairly undemocratic political cultures. Not
surprisingly, registration and turnout ratios among Hispanic-Americans are
often below average.

For these reasons, Latinos cast only 21 percent of the vote in the L.A.
mayoral election, despite making up almost half of the populous. This is
almost triple the level Hispanics registered in the 1993 mayoral election.
Still, individual whites remain three to four times more likely to vote than
individual Hispanics in Los Angeles.

Also, Latino politicians, who are mostly Democrats, suffer compared with
black politicians because Latinos voters don't make up as solid of a liberal
bloc as blacks. In the 2000 Presidential election, about 35 percent of
Hispanics voted for Republican George W. Bush, compared with less than 10
percent of blacks.

Further, at least on the national level, Hispanics are divided up into
several races and many nationalities. In Los Angeles, however, the local
Latinos tend to be mostly of Mexican mestizo origin.

In the Los Angeles mayor's race, however, more than 80 percent of Hispanics
voted for their fellow Latino Villaraigosa.

If Hispanics maintain this kind of ethnic solidarity as their population
continues to soar in coming decades (the Census Bureau projects the number of
Hispanics to rise from 35 million to 98 million in 2050), the future should
eventually prove golden for Latino politicians.

Still, the Los Angeles results show that all political strategists who rely
on the fashionable assumption that Hispanic political power has arrived in
full force could be in for some nasty surprises in the meantime. --

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.