Blowouts, Nail-biters and Big Surprises: Primary 2024

Mike Bonin

Hey, everybody, and welcome to what's next, Los Angeles. I am Mike Bonin and I am joined tonight by Alyssa Walker and Godfrey Plata. Thank you both for being here. Mike. Thank you.

Godfrey Plata

Thanks, Mike. We are recording at about 930 on Tuesday night, the 12th, a week after the polls closed and about 5 hours after the county registrar and Recorder released the latest vote count, another 100,000 votes. And I think I can safely say for the three of us and really for anybody who's been following these races, whether they're happy about the results or unhappy about the results, holy shit. I'm glad we can curse on this show. Super glad.

Mike Bonin

That was my main reaction today. We had some big news today. We're going to discuss blowouts in this election, nail biters in this election, and some real significant surprises in this election. One of them which happened today. We'll start with nail biters because that may be the shortest category here.

And the big headline today is Nithya Raman creeped over 50% in council district four. It is a true nail biter. Only because I feel like the drops were just to set this up. We got like a drop schedule this time, which I feel like often. It's just kind of, you get them when you get them.

Godfrey Plata

So we know sometimes around the same day they're happening in previous elections. But this one, we knew they were going to come. We knew the window of when they were going to come. That's just like set up the drama. But I also feel like they divvied up the drops just to give us a little taste every day.

So some of the drops were quite small, but we were still making progress in many of the races. And then for all the spreadsheeters out there, people who put all this data into spreadsheets, it gives us a lot more nuanced kind of trends to look at over. You know, it's really creating more suspense. Absolutely. Thank you.

Dean Logan. Yeah. If you are a political junkie and you were following this race, you were getting your daily fix for sure. Yeah. We are all on group text.

Alyssa Walker

We're all texting each other sometime between four and 05:00 p.m. And to increase the drama, today's drop was at 359 right before the window where people were getting ready to press refresh. Yes. Right. I was not in.

Mike Bonin

The website must have been crashing from all the refreshers.

But sort of to set the stage for this election night. There's three candidates in this race, Nithya Raman and Ethan Weaver. And God, I can never remember the third name, Lev, on election night? It was, I think, 46% for Nithya and, like 42% for weaver. And there are a few folks, Katie Yaroslavsky I was talking to, who said, oh, no, nithya is going to get it without a runoff.

She'll get over 50%. I'm sure of it. And then there are others who were getting a little nervous. And every day the votes came in and it creeped up. 46%, 47%, 48%.

But numbers are dwindling, so you're going to need a bigger percentage. And people were really nervous. And then, boom, today's drop was like 60% of the vote and put her over the 50%. Yeah. I was, for one, not concerned about this.

Godfrey Plata

I thought it was pretty clear that she was going to make it to 50. Now the question is, do we think there's any possibility because we're getting these little tidbit drops, is there another big drop awaiting us with, like, a big volume of votes, that there was an amazing turnout in CD four? The trends show she's never dropped below 50% in a drop. And so the trends would show that that would usually stay the same and increase. I want to look back to Eunice's Hernandez win, which was also a primary win over Gil Sedillo.

And some of those later drops, the percentage got so high, if you remember. Right, like, she was taking the vast majority of the later drop votes. So it's possible we'll see the exact same thing here. I don't think there's really any possibility of her slipping below 50% again. Would love to know your thoughts.

Mike Bonin

It would be real hard. I just looked at the spreadsheet of the daily drops, and since the drops that came after election day, all of the sort of late votes, the younger votes, she has not gone below 55% in any of those drops. Yeah, right. There's still another couple of drops to go in this race, but based on these trends, it would be really a shock if she fell below 50% at this point. And that is a BFD.

That is a big freaking deal because this was a very high stakes race in a lot of ways. 1000%. And, yeah, I think the county said tonight that there's about 126,000 or so votes left to count today. It was the last day for ballots to come in that had been mailed and to legally be counted. And so they're going to be counting all the ballots that have come in by this point.

Alyssa Walker

Those are the updates we're going to get. But La county is 88 cities and 126,000 votes divided up by however many cities were having elections, how many different types of seats there were, and all of that. I would feel really hard pressed to be able to math out the math for Ethan Weaver at this point. Yeah, it's pretty tough math for him. And there were many people.

Mike Bonin

I always worry about candidates that I am most strongly in favor of. Right. The more I like you, the more I worry and the more pessimistic I get. I was really afraid in this race because I had seen over a million dollars spent against Nithya Raman by this dark money pack, thrive LA by the police union, by the fire union, by some really sleazy corporate landlords. So much money going into this race and so much negative press coverage.

I was one of a handful of folks who thought, oh, my God, can Weaver knock her out in the primary? Because that was what a lot of these folks were aiming to do when thrive launched. They said, our goal, take Nithya Raman out in the primary and strike a blow against the progressives. And, wow, she shot them down big. Time, a thousand percent.

Alyssa Walker

And it wasn't just worrying for her seat. I mean, her team and a lot of progressive LA were super behind her reelection and wanted her to win it outright at this time because there are so many other races to focus on and folks can be really stretched. And so if she is able to take this and claim the seat now, it allows everybody who is working behind the scenes to support her to sort of spread out from here and continue to win other seats for city council and many other races as well.

Mike Bonin

Alyssa, what was the significance of this race for you? Well, I think what you said, the money part of. Right. So again, we have like a Rick Caruso type. I mean, not the magnitude of the Rick Caruso spending, but the Rick Caruso supported RICC siphoning money from behind the curtain, or, and to your point, Mike, in the story that you wrote, which really kind of helped us peek behind that curtain, I guess, in a way, to what was going on there, this real concern that was being talked about by everyone that, oh, is this whole thing over?

Godfrey Plata

Is this progressive wave that people thought, this momentum that we thought was building? Is that part over now? And is it back to this law and order situation where we've got the police, the police protectively picking the candidates, basically, who are going to win? And it's not to say that it didn't happen elsewhere, and we could talk about that, but this is one of those places where I think there was a lot of anxiety, and it's feeling good to see both this and some other really historic wins in some other council races, too, which we'll talk about later. Yeah.

Mike Bonin

And to the extent that there is a sort of a public narrative about LA politics, and maybe it's just a conventional wisdom, but to the extent it exists, there was a dispute over whether or not Nithya's first election in 2020, defeating David Rue in a grassroots, unconventional campaign. Whether or not that was a fluke. Right? And then in 2020, Ugo, canth, aunissies, they all showed, okay, this isn't a fluke. This is like a real thing.

This is a new phenomenon in LA. And this election looked like it was shaping up to be the empire strikes back. The establishment, the corporate landlords, the public safety unions. They were going to show, okay, we know how to beat this, and we are going to beat this and we're going to annihilate it. And that did not work out for them.

It did not work out for them. And not only was it potentially folks who have always been against Nathea or the progressive wing of LA being tested or testing her, at this moment, she had a completely different district to run in. Right. Like, 40% of her residents were new. Because we remember on leaked audio tapes that leaked out in 2022, from 2021 in redistricting, that there were a couple of council members that reshaped her district so that it wasn't completely the giant renter district that she won in the first place.

Alyssa Walker

And so this was a true test of her appeal and her policy leadership as well. It was definitely the money that was going behind Ethan to try to slam her down. But it was a real test. That is a huge point. They have been gunning for Nithya since the day she walked in the door.

Mike Bonin

The council member who has received the most votes out of any council member in Los Angeles city history. And they treated her sort of as a political pariah. They tried to undercut her. And one of the things that had me worried is this was not the best electorate for her. Right.

She won in 2020, unprecedented year, groundswell of support. A lot of new voters, engaged voters. This electorate looked like it was shaping up to be older and whiter and more conservative, and that was an Ethan Weaver electorate. So the fact that she pulled this out shows, I think, tremendous political muscle. Yeah.

Alyssa Walker

And absolutely, it continues her legacy of doing real grassroots work at the doors. Right. A lot of these progressive candidates, including Nathy's campaign, continue to knock on doors as their primary way of getting the voters and ensuring that they come out, including the voters who might not be as likely to vote in a primary that is going to be older or whiter or more affluent. And so that's why we're seeing all these last minute votes come in at 60%. These are all the voters who otherwise may not have been planning to vote in the primary.

And it's fantastic to see that progressive muscle play out at a time where it's not expected at all. Yeah, I got to say, I was breathing a real sigh of relief, hooting and hollering when the results came in this afternoon. For a while there, I felt more high than I have been since I got sober 29 years ago. It was just like, wow, okay. I have very strong biases on this race, as is very clear.

Mike Bonin

And it was for me, this was the nail biter. This was the nail biter. But it wasn't the only one. There's a couple of others out there. One of them statewide, the statewide ballot measure, proposition one.

I just looked at the secretary of state's website a few minutes ago and it literally says 50 50. I haven't seen that before. It's 50 50. The difference is 4000 votes. With measure one leading by 4000 votes.

This was a hugely supported by Governor Newsom. Like all sorts of ads, all the endorsements. This was supposed to be like a lopsided victory. And it's really going down to the wire. Yeah, I'm looking to.

Godfrey Plata

It's literally like 4000 votes. Again, it's hard to tell the trends on this one because in some circles, in some progressive circles, if that types of voting holds, the voting trends hold that we've kind of been talking about. A lot of progressives were saying to vote no on this. So it's just been hard to tell at any given point which way the vote is going to trend. And if it does fail, it's such a huge embarrassment for Gavin Newsom, like a really mandate on his agenda that is going to be very difficult for him to overcome.

Alyssa Walker

Yeah, I'd really like to look, when all of this is over, at the undervotes for this particular proposition for folks who are listening. Under votes are when people just leave it blank but vote on other aspects of the ballot. And I'm curious about that because it's incredibly confusing as a proposition. Lots of people want to support folks with mental health needs, et cetera. And it was really interesting how many mental health groups were opposing this particular campaign.

But to know that you kind of had to be plugged in to that conversation or plugged into folks having that conversation because so much of the paid campaign was the yes campaign. It was on Facebook and Instagram every time that I pulled it over. And so I have zero idea which way this is going to end. Like, no predictions about which way this is going to go. Like true nail biter, but I am curious to see how people just kind of opted out of this.

Godfrey Plata

Yeah, that's a great question. The kind of general rule is that things that are going to cost us money, usually there's a higher bar, of course, for approval. But I have seen some of the commentary after election day and it just seems like something that he strong armed with all this other stuff packed into it when we could have made some really good mental health reforms as a simplified yes or no question, that could have really done a really great thing for the state. If it fails, if it happens to fail, I hope we can actually vote on a housing bond in November because if you read some of the stories, he actually forced everyone else that wanted to put something on the state ballot to move this to November. Turnout will be better then it's a better time to vote for things.

Things can pass. But what a flawed proposition. Yeah, this was one of the things probably most on voters minds, right. Homelessness, mental health, two big issues on voters minds. I don't think there's anybody anywhere along the political spectrum who's satisfied with the mental health care system in this country or this state.

Mike Bonin

And this was such a lopsided dialogue. Right? There were definitely people, as Godfrey says, mental health advocates who were opposed to this. They thought it would move the money around and take it away from places where it needs to be and that it would make it easier to incarcerate people involuntarily and wouldn't be addressing mental health. But the public dialogue, the money, the news coverage was really overwhelmingly in favor of this.

And it really does speak to the trust level I think voters have with Governor Newsom, because this was Governor Newsom's baby. He owned this. He was in all the ads. But there's something that really surprises and disappoints me about the debates over health care in California. Like I said, huge issue, really complicated issue.

I don't know exactly what the right solution is or the balance is, but it doesn't sound like people at the state level actually spend much time seriously digging into those issues and sorting them out. All of a sudden we've got the care courts, which are, boom, rushed through the legislature, almost no debate, and then this comes out. And again, it was almost like criticism of, it wasn't part of the political dialogue, and it's just a really crappy way to deal with a complex issue. Maybe you want to retire into the assembly, Mike. Yeah, no, retire up.

Godfrey Plata

Also, I just think of if you're going to. I mean, we're going to have to vote on this again, because we do need to reform the mental health system, and it requires a vote, which is, again, just like. I mean, they should have thought that through a little bit more, because I thought what could be kind of a big win is like, everybody needs mental health support right now. Everybody needs substance abuse support right now. Everybody needs behavioral health.

This should have been positioned as, like, we all need this. And to make it sound like it was only for combating homelessness, which it really wasn't about, I found that very disingenuous. And I think they could have had a big win here if they would have just been like, this is something we all need. We're not going to stigmatize anybody or make this be about something else. Vote for us.

Vote for our future. For sure, there's another nail biter out there that a lot of people haven't been following, but I've been paying a lot of attention to it and devoted some time on both social media and on this podcast to it. And that's been this really scary race for school board in Glendale, where there has been a growing movement, sort of seeded by proud boys and libs of TikTok and January 6 insurrectionists to try to infiltrate some of the schools. And last summer, there was this stuff out at Sataquay elementary in north Hollywood. Violent confrontation outside Glendale Unified School District, and two of the ringleaders of that were running for school board.

Mike Bonin

One of the races, fortunately, was lopsided. On election night, you could tell that telly C. Was kicking the ass of Jordan Henry, a two time loser who moved into Glendale, has no ties to Glendale. Ran for city council and lost, now ran for school board and lost. He's the real sort of guy, tied into all of these right wing folks.

Really ugly, ugly, nasty, homophobic dude. And then the other race was tighter. This one was really tight. The other one was more of a slightly more homegrown bigot, Anita Kripekian, who was running for the other seat. She's more tied into the system, the school system there.

She does have kids in the school system, and she was going up against a former PTA president, Netta Fareed and Krapekian, the homophobe was in the lead for most of this election, and it swung today, and Nita Fareed is now slightly in the lead. That one could still swing, but there has been a tremendous amount of effort by parents, by LGBTQ activists, by teachers, by the teachers union to sort of stop this right wing wave from entering Glendale schools in southern California. And I'm personally very relieved. Godfrey, have you been seeing people paying attention to this in the broader LGBTQ community? I haven't, and that's part of why I'm so glad you are actually bringing it up tonight.

Alyssa Walker

I think what happens in La county is races that are in La City, which, of course, is the largest race or largest area amongst the 88 cities in La county. We tend to overshadow so much of the news, and it's important that adjacent cities like Glendale actually get paid attention to, because if we don't, clearly they'll be infiltrated by these national groups that are looking to take over easy to win seats. And I'm so glad that Glendale residents that were paying more attention to this were leaning into this particular race. I imagine there were lgbtq political groups that were leaning into this race in know. Like, we in LA City have been so preoccupied by many of our LA city races ensuring that we get our winners in at the city council race that I think we could do a better job as activists and as the left here in Los Angeles paying attention to some of the smaller races because the nation is and they're right next door to us, so we got to do better at that.

Godfrey Plata

Yeah, I found out about it because of your show, Mike, so thank you. Going talking to so many candidates throughout this whole election cycle. Yeah. Shout out in particular needs to go to the folks on the ground who've been working on this. There's a group, Glendale Unified School district parents for public schools.

Mike Bonin

They're on Twitter at Gusd four f o r all. They've been doing amazing work, as have gay and lesbian Armenians who have felt really personally ostracized and hurt by this. These folks were nasty. Just so folks know. They put posters up around the city of Glendale with the photos of school teachers and school administrators saying groomers on mean.

It was a really scary situation, and I'm glad it looks like, at least at the moment, that both of these candidates are going down. We do need to pay attention to this stuff. And we know elections are not the end all and be all of this conversation. Right? I know.

Alyssa Walker

Even though Satakoy elementary made the news on one big day last year, what I understand from folks who are parents who send their kids to Satokoi elementary is that that group of parents is still an organized group of parents that is going to continue to resist any sort of notion of inclusion or diversity in any form in the curriculum and in the days that are celebrated there. And so I think it's something we all could be paying much more attention to, because it's not just these seats, it's our kids and the adults that support them at stake. Okay, so those were the nail biters that we had in this election, but there were some real blowouts in this election. There's a whole bunch of blowouts, good ones and bad ones. One of the biggest ones in the city of Los Angeles was measure HLA.

Mike Bonin

Alyssa, want to talk us through that one? Yes. I haven't looked at the latest numbers there. It was like a measure m level of votes. It got over two thirds, right?

65, 66% is where it is. Yeah. So, like, two out of three people voted for it, which is just a huge margin, despite the best efforts of the firefighters union and council member Tracy park to tank this in the last week, two weeks. I don't know, it was such a comical thing to watch this. And, Mike, I'm sure you'll have thoughts as well, like this last gasp of the road diet wars finally playing out in the ballot box, and it was great to get the ballot.

Godfrey Plata

When you looked at the ballot on election day and the firefighter mention is not on there that the firefighters were trying to stop it. They were so late in organizing to stop this that it was kind of just like a blip. It didn't even matter. So it was a very big victory, and I'm so curious to hear your thoughts, Mike, because there's so much to talk about. Like I said, this conversation has been going on for ten years, eleven years, twelve years, and this finally seems like a real wake up call for the city to finally do something.

But what will they do? We still don't really know. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack on this one. Just a little context for folks who aren't as nerdy as the three of us are. Measure HLA was the healthy Streets initiative that, once approved, would require the city, once it repaved an 8th of a mile of a block or a street, would have to bring the streets up to its mobility plan, which is a planning document approved back in 2015, which basically laid out a network in the city of streets that were transit priority, mass transit priority, streets that were quiet, neighborhood priority, streets that were pedestrian priority and streets that were sort of cycling priority and goods movement.

Mike Bonin

It really planned out the city because the city has not been planned out very well at all and was meant to make two things, really to make it easier for people to get around the city by any way they want, not just prioritizing the single occupancy vehicle, but giving people a legitimate, safe, convenient way to get around any way they want. It was about choice. It was also about safety because the leading cause of death of children, LA county, auto collisions. We have had more auto collisions, fatal collisions last year than murders. So it was really designed to make the streets safe.

And kudos to streets for all, which put this on the ballot and got this passed because it's an example of the city of Los Angeles needing to be forced to do even the most basic things. I know, Alyssa, you've recently went to New Jersey and saw a city where they've done this stuff without being forced to. They've just created a city that they didn't have. They didn't have to be forced by threat of lawsuit to fix their streets and sidewalks like Los Angeles. I was on KPCC last week.

Godfrey Plata

Sorry, La est on airtalk with the amazing Tamika butler and talking about Hoboken because they have not had a traffic death in seven years. And it's all because of infrastructure. Right? I mean, we know this is the answer. We know we could be doing a lot better to make our streets and sidewalks safer, but we just choose not to do it.

And we have really good examples, not just in New Jersey City, but also in, you know, there's the good examples of how this works. Long beach, they're not that far away from where we live right now. And also their fire trucks have no problem getting to their emergencies. So I think that argument just needs to go away finally. But I think the point to be made is like, yes, the threat of being, if the mobility plan is not followed through, you can sue the city and try to force them to do it.

But as we've seen with our sidewalks, the same year that we approved the mobility plan and I worked, God, I worked on the outreach for the mobility plan, and it was a wrenching experience in that a lot of great stuff that should have been a lot better got torn out at the end, including by council members. When they approved it, it barely passed, and a lot of the council members were. And it was this crazy conversation about taking some of these parts out of it that I don't want, that I don't want that in my district. I don't want that. It shouldn't be a question.

It shouldn't be left up to council members, number one. But the same year that the mobility plan barely passed, we also had this huge sidewalk settlement, the largest class action lawsuit in history, filed as an ADA accessibility lawsuit on behalf of Angelina's with mobility disabilities. And that was supposed to fund this bond to fix our sidewalks. Look around. How well did it work?

Not very well, because the city did not choose to prioritize the funding and the maintenance and the staff and all the things, and even, like, an inventory of which sidewalks needed to be fixed first and in which neighborhoods. Right. So here we have this tremendous opportunity once again. We find ourselves at this intersection, literally, where we can make a very different choice for how we choose to implement this. And I know it's going to be, again, like a very politicized.

It already has been through a lot of the reports that have come out ahead of this. It's going to be a very politicized discussion, and I'm just hoping for a real serious reckoning that occurs, starting with the transportation committee that meets next week or whatever. You were in charge of that for so long, Mike, and you saw how hard it is to fight this on the ground, of course. But what advice do you have for these council members? Who are they have to shape this policy now?

Mike Bonin

Yeah, I fought these wars for so many years. I mean, there were the celebrated public road diet wars in council district eleven, in Mar Vista, and in Playa del Rey back in 2017. But then there were the less public, quieter wars against the bureaucracy and some other elected officials every year to get funding for street safety improvements, for even basic things. Right? Not even the gold standard, like your sort of basic stuff.

And every year it was a fight with a handful of council members who didn't like projects. One of them, notoriously, was Gil Sedillo, who really was against bike infrastructure completely in his district. But then it was also with sort of folks within some of the bureaucracies, whether it was somebody in the mayor's office who was pursuing an agenda differently than the one that their boss was publicly proclaiming, or folks in the sort of the budget analyst's office that were trying to undo things. And you asked what my advice would be for the people who are there now. My advice would be to watch out for what is going to happen in the belly of the beast.

And I can predict two things that are going to happen right now. You mentioned the sidewalk settlement two weeks before the election, councilwoman park and the city budget guru, Matt Zabo, were claiming if approved, HLA would cost the city $3.1 billion. Zabo was saying all of the money that we've already agreed to pay to fix sidewalks in that legal settlement, the Willett settlement, he was somehow attributing to this bond measure or this ballot measure. Absolutely not true. So what you're going to see is the first thing that's going to happen is the folks who were saying, we need to spend 3.1 billion to get this done are now going to come in with a much smaller estimate because they don't want to do.

And so they're going to say, oh, we only need to do a quarter of a million this year, right? That's the kind of thing you're going to see be. The other thing you're going to see is the city budget's a freaking mess, in large part because they give massive raises to the police department, and so they're going to need to cut other services. And what they're going to do is they're going to blame measure hla for a cut in the street repaving budget. They're going to say, we can't afford to do repaving because of measure HLA, and it's actually going to be because they're trying to balance the budget and they weren't going to do those services anyway.

It's going to be a shit show. And fortunately, we've got some good folks there who I think will keep an eye on it and fight it. I think the other thing that we've really got to do is those folks who are going to be champions of implementing great aspects of the mobility plan, I hope, choose particular projects to get shepherded through first that help to build public trust in some of these changes. Like what we know is true is that Culver City, and they've sort of renovated their downtown to be more pedestrian friendly to accommodate for buses and emergency vehicles more. As soon as the council shifted over from a progressive majority to one that is less progressive than previously, they began to undo some of this work.

Alyssa Walker

And although we've just passed a directive, certainly to your point, Mike, there's already going to be some slow walking of this, and we've really got to prove to the public that we have to upkeep the demand so that the only folks who get elected and over and over reelected to the council are folks who are supportive of all of these evolutions in our city. For sure, if people are fighting over being able to do the projects, then we're in good shape. But there is one thing even the advocates need to look out for is there was a concern about this measure when it was proposed, and it's an argument about equity, because we know where the unsafest streets and intersections are in the city, and it's not an equal division around the city. They tend to be in lower income areas, black and brown communities, south Los Angeles, east San Fernando Valley. And because this ties these improvements to street resurfacing, that's not by itself an equitable implementation plan.

Mike Bonin

Because what the city usually does for its resurfacing budget is it divides it by 15. So every council member gets the same, roughly the same amount of street miles to make HLA work equitably, which I think there's a lot of members on the council who believe in that. They have to smash that divide by 15. You need to be doing more work on the infrastructure in the neighborhoods that have lacked it for decades. And those tend to be, again, low income communities of color.

That's going to be the big test. Yeah, I also just thought the numbers. Everybody tried to get really upset about these high $3 billion to fix our streets. Honestly, we need way more than that. I don't want anybody to.

Godfrey Plata

I actually think that is a good number. If you look at cities like New York and what they plan for years in advance, not just one year at a time, but actually planning a capital improvements like list of what they are going to do and in which neighborhoods for years in advance, that is something we need to be looking at, and it does need to be in the billions. And that sidewalk settlement was 1.4 billion. That price has gone up in the time that we waited to do it. And just fixing the sidewalks, we know isn't enough.

We need bigger sidewalks. There's a lot more that needs to happen in this conversation. So don't try to say that it's not going to cost us money, because it is, and we want it to. And I want those good sidewalks. Yeah.

Alyssa Walker

I hope a lot of this energy around HLA continues to build into the demand for a capital infrastructure plan in general or capital improvement plan. Sorry for the city. For folks who don't know, I believe we don't have one as a city of LA. Many other big cities in California do. And it would mean a backwards plan for the city in terms of a lot of the infrastructure that Alyssa is pointing to.

I do hope that the equity conversation continues in that one as well, because it can be as easy to pass a sip a capital improvement plan that doesn't actually serve the needs of communities of color and local communities, but we need a plan even beyond these particular mobility measures that we've just directed. Yeah, there were a couple of interesting dynamics at play on this one, too, that for me, sort of speaks to some of the dynamics and the nature of Los Angeles politics. Right. When measure HLA was being discussed, there were a group of people who had a real significant concern about the costs. Those tended to be the same people who had absolutely no concerns about the cost for the police contract, just a few months.

Mike Bonin

And they were people who were saying, we need the police contract because of public safety. Well, as I said, more people are dying from auto collisions than from murders. This is public safety. Right. It is public safety.

The other thing it pointed out for me, know I've been doing some teaching at LMU with Fernando Guerra, who does this big poll every year, the study of Los Angeles. And he was telling the class that one of his observations about Los Angeles from all the years of doing the survey is that the residents and the voters of Los Angeles are significantly more progressive and more hungry for big things than the elected officials who represent them. And this is an example of that. Overwhelmingly, people said, yeah, we want this. And it's been something that's been sort of on the back burner and getting shoved around at city hall for a while.

Surprise. We will see. So there were some other big blowouts out there. We had a big blowout in council district twelve, Godfrey, which you were involved in that campaign for the losing candidate. Want to tell us?

Alyssa Walker

Yeah, it's a little upsetting of a blowout, I suppose, in council district twelve, which is in the valley, when you think about Northridge and north of that, we've been represented by council member John Lee, who if you google the term saffer B, you'll also find lots of things about John Lee as well, lots of ethical concerns.

He's a Republican in a very widely democratic council.

Sorry. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the correction. Former Republican in name.

Okay. He was endorsed by the. Well, not officially endorsed, but he and Ethan Weaver in CD four, as I think Ellie forward pointed out, the. The local republican party said, we didn't endorse these people, but we do believe they will uphold our values in office. Absolutely.

Godfrey Plata

What a great happened. And he was challenged by somebody who was endorsed by the Democratic Party, Serena Overstein. And this is a seat know John Lee's been challenged before by Lorraine Lundquist as well, for city council. And Dr. Lundquist was able to get really close to getting to that seat.

Alyssa Walker

And so there was the hope that we could channel that kind of energy again in the valley, this time with another candidate endorsed by the Democratic Party. And at this point, it's kind of fallen short. Something that really sucked in the process was seeing that Mayor Karen Bass had put her weight pretty late in the game, but still her weight behind incumbent council member John Lee, which had a lot of people both scratching their heads and just angry and sad that she would put her weight behind him, given his past Republicanness, but also the way that in which he does have face ethical violations or whatnot. So we're going to continue to fight in the San Fernando Valley. Of course, in my work organizing across the city and the county, there are so many amazing folks who are building in a more progressive direction in the San Fernando Valley.

And I think maybe just unleashing what's progressive there, rather than folks who have just gotten really just jaded by politics because they've been represented by people like council member Lee. And so, you know, we'll try again there, I imagine, in four years. But that's the story of that former. President of the ethics commission. I think the organization she runs is jewish worldwide human rights organization.

Mike Bonin

She great candidate. She is more moderate than, well, probably all three of us, but maybe better suited to that district. But Lee benefited from more outside expenditures than anybody. He had $1.1 million spent just on his behalf. I think tripling how much he raised by the police union, landlords, the whole deal.

This is the race where they really threw in and got a return on their investment. Yeah, the money in this race was astounding. I guess he's just like the most reliable pseudo republican vote on the council, so might as well go all out to ensure that he gets to stay there. But I was just astonished. This deep valley seat, just the spending.

Godfrey Plata

I guess maybe people are very receptive to his message there. And there were some people who were receptive, and all they needed to do was amplify that a little bit. I was kind of astonished to see the spending and how wide of a margin that he got. Really. It was huge.

Mike Bonin

It was a similar margin to, I think, measure HlA. Just sort of flipped in the dynamics. Oh, God, you're right. It's two out of three for Stafford B. Wow, that's embarrassing.

Alyssa Walker

I also think there's a lesson here about the importance of ground game in all of this. We're going to talk in a little bit. I know about particular campaigns that were able to battle big money in their districts, to claim seats and runoff, and so super excited that that is possible, including in the valley. But I think what this also shows is that endorsements are not enough. You can be a democratically backed candidate.

Assembly member Pilar Chavo spent so much of her time trying to support Serena to win this seat, even at the expense of her own race, which is going back and forth. But we know she's going to win it in November. I think the ground game piece is really important. So building in the valley and continuing to spread that energy of people, power out there is going to be vital in the future, I think is the big lesson. Do you think that?

Mike Bonin

I think for the left, the unexpected competitiveness of the race for council district four, the Nithya Weaver race, sucked attention and energy away from this race. I don't know if it was unexpected. I think council member Rahman's race in 2020 taught us some lessons in the progressive and left wing of LA and activism around what was possible and what kind of work that that took. And if we were going to multiply that out to multiple seats, we saw that tested in 2022 with multiple people running at the same time. And now council members Soto, Martinez and Hernandez in their seats as well.

Alyssa Walker

These are constant stress tests, right? It's like any organizing, like union organizing, the bigger wins you are trying to win, the more stretched you get. And it's a constant test on your structure as an organizing system. And I think we're getting there. We're clearly showing a lot of that potential and promise, but we've got to continue leadership development across the entire system to make sure that they're campaign staffers, field directors, like all of that.

Really understanding how you do this ground game. Well, yeah, and she joined late. I mean, for a while it was looking like he was going to be unopposed, which I guess it's at least better that somebody ran, that we could get some of this messaging out. But it does make a difference, I think, when it was right down to the wire, I feel like for her to join the race and know, for money especially and all that stuff, it does make a difference. Also, some big blowouts for three of the most powerful positions in the state of California, maybe the three of the five most powerful local government positions in the country.

Mike Bonin

The Los Angeles County Board of supervisors. We had three supervisors who were up for re election in some sharply redrawn districts. Holly Mitchell, who won resoundingly. Catherine Barger, who was up against Assemblyman Chris Holden and Burbank mayor Constantine Anthony. She won outright.

And then former councilwoman, now current county supervisor, former congresswoman Janice Hahn had a huge victory over. God, I can't remember who she was. No one needs to know. I can't recall. He who shall not be named really matter, does it?

Godfrey Plata

Yeah. He likes to wear a hat, doesn't he? A cowboy hat. Is it a. Can't see it.

Mike Bonin

Did he used to hold office at one point? Maybe he was a police officer. No. This isn't the only election that he's lost. No.

Alyssa Walker

My dear friend Alex Villanueva looking at. His phone during the primary night last year. Remember that? When he was looking down on his phone at his watch party? And was that.

Godfrey Plata

I was hoping he was doing that again this year. Janice, my dear friend, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Villanueva and I had some nasty battles back in the summer of 2021 in Venice. And then, of course, he did this wacko invasion of my friend Sheila Cuel's home and tried to implicate her in a whole bunch of stuff in her last few months in office.

Mike Bonin

Janice really kicked his ass. She absolutely humiliated him. This was, like, more than two to one. She just absolutely crushed. Thank goodness.

And he is, of course, crying election fraud. Oh, yeah, yeah. He says there's some kind of recall or something he wants. Or he wants. Sorry, a recount.

Godfrey Plata

What was he arguing? He was saying that. What kind of fraud was he. I just barely read that. He was saying the election results must be false if Janice carried conservative parts of the county.

Alyssa Walker

What he wants to do is waste our public dollars again, right, if we're going to go in a recount or whatnot. What a waste. Because this is a clear blowout, like your category said, mike, in this particular race. But more than it being laughable that he even entered this race, it was kind of scary, right? Because for a moment, when you picture former Sherfi Nueva having power at the county board of supervisors, being one of five leading 2 million people in a predominantly latinx district, that's a scary thought that his direction, one that would claim fraud right now, would be the one to be 20% of the vote there.

So I am glad there's a blowout here for Janison, for sure. Yeah. I mean, this guy's scary. He's nuts. He's a little bit trump.

Mike Bonin

He's a little bit Joe Arapayo, the notorious sheriff from Arizona. He's a bad dude. And I was really afraid when he got into the race, too, for the reasons that you just said, godfrey. It's also an anti incumbent mood in a lot of places. And there are just too many places around the world and in this country where crazy authoritarians have gotten elected and sometimes the fire lights and it happens, and I was a little afraid.

So again, thank you, Janice. Thank you, Janice. Good job. Very good. Another big blowout in the US Senate race.

Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey will be going up in November. Either one of you have any particular thoughts on that one?

Godfrey Plata

How boring. It's just really disappointing to me that we have just, I don't think any really exciting choices between the two of them for people who really have a vision for making the state kind of move past some of the establishment issues that we have currently. So to me, it's just like. Could. Have had so much of a different path forward, I think, for our future.

And, I mean, hopefully the republican baseball player doesn't win. I don't think he will, but it's just pretty upsetting, I think, when we could have had so much more. I'm taking away at least two lessons from it. One is I think whenever I think of campaigns, whether I was supportive of them or not, I think about what got them to win. And I think the Schiff campaign did a really great job defining the race.

Alyssa Walker

And they defined the race as Schiff versus Garvey and not just defined the race as such, but invested as well in defining the race. I think that became a hill to climb for the other two big democratic women candidates who are running against them, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee. The second thing that I'm thinking about is how in California we deal with these really stark Northern California and Southern California divides amongst our politicians that sort of climb the ladders in each of those places. I held a bunch of ballot parties all across La county and it was fascinating to hear. Folks have pretty good name recognition for Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, but less so for Barbara Lee.

And that's just not the strength of a campaign. And we know, know her campaign didn't fundraise as strongly, but in Northern California, her name recognition is different because she does come out of the Oakland tradition up there or whatnot. And so certainly it's more complicated than that. Like I said, there's like the money piece, anti blackness, I imagine plays some sort of role here. Age played some sort of role here as well, in people's perception of what happened in this race.

But defining the race and then this northern California and southern California divide are two things that I'm thinking about a lot coming out of this. Yeah, it's the first time I can remember where both of the US senators are from southern California, from the Los Angeles area for a long time. They were both from northern California up until Padilla got appointed. Yeah, I was a Barbara Lee supporter. I was an early supporter of Barbara Lee.

Mike Bonin

I just have so much fondness and respect for her. She's had a tremendous career and I wish she had been able to cap it off by serving the US Senate, but she deserves nothing but the best. She really is phenomenal.

But that was not a surprise. That race was not a surprise. But there were some that were surprising, some very surprising ones. Well, maybe not surprising to all of us. Alyssa Walker says she was not surprised by what happened in council District 14:00 a.m..

Alyssa Walker

I. Correct. Council District 14 is the Kevin title seat. It featured a tenant's attorney, Isabel Gerado, a grassroots activist, and two sitting state legislators, Wendy Carillo and Miguel Santiago. And what happened, Melissa?

Godfrey Plata

Well, the drama was so great going in because it was like, the question was, I mean, there were a lot of people who were saying that KDL was going to pull it off in like go to 50% as an incumbent because he has been spending our money on all of these pseudo campaign materials and events and new playgrounds, which I keep pointing out, which is just a brazen way to try to buy parents off. But basically he doesn't sit on committees. So he just has all of his time to go to set up all these food giveaways and ribbon cuttings and put out these mailers and then also put out some really gross campaign materials as well. So all these people thought name recognition, he's trying to win our hearts back. He's going to hit 50.

I never thought he was going to hit 50. But what happened the first couple dumps drops was KDL was in first, Miguel Santiago was second. Isabel has surged to the top. Now she has the most votes. I'm looking at right now it's 24.46%.

So now it's looking like those establishment politicians, the sitting assembly members, are not going to be in the runoff and it's going to be this really expertly executed grassroots campaign that's going to stay on the top. I don't think it really has a chance to flip again because her percentage of the votes that she's getting on these later drops has been so high. So I have a feeling that she's going to close this out and it's going to be quite the race to watch the two of them go at it. I'm so excited. Yeah, it is.

Mike Bonin

I guess the conventional wisdom, the standard conventional wisdom was very surprised by this dynamic in the race, that Isabel is now in the lead and is probably going to stay in the lead. Godfrey, were you surprised? I think I am pleasantly surprised. I think I had a lot of hope that Isabel would make it for sure into our runoff, but she was running against at least two and a half really strong candidates in this particular race. Three, you can decide who's a half.

Alyssa Walker

I think a lot of people walked into this race and once they knew that it was Isabel versus these three career politicians, a lot of folks thought Miguel was going to take like, labor got behind Miguel really quickly because he has been, he has been right by labor for all of his assembly career and people thought that he would take it. What I think a lot of the career politicians didn't count on was the ground game, again, that can beat the power of organized money. And the ground game here was 85,000 doors hit by the Isabel Herado campaign. And it was a result of not just having fundraising enough for a paid canvassing staff, but also more than 250 volunteers, many of them part of a lot of organizations in the area. I know that Isabel's campaign has shouted out DSA, for example, for bringing out a lot of volunteers in particular to go knockdoors, because it is that one on one connection with voters that will repair the distrust that Kevin de Leone and others who are on that leaked audio tape have instilled.

And not just that leaked audio tape, but there's a history, right in CD 14 of politicians that continue to show us that they will act against the public interest.

And that door to door kind of conversation about real issues from someone who is a tenant lawyer, a queer single mom, is exactly sort of like the fresh take and fresh do over that a lot of the district is calling for. It's not going to be easy, right? Especially if it's against Kevin de Leone. The fact that he still had 24% of folks voting for him is no small deal. And the electorate is larger going into the general.

We do hope that it'll be more progressive electorate, a more diverse electorate that might lean toward Isabel, but that ground game work cannot go anywhere. And I hope it doesn't go anywhere during her actual serving of the district as a council member as well. I don't think it will. Knowing the ethic of that campaign, I think something we're going to learn between now and November is if in fact it is KDL that runs in the runoff alongside her. Which establishment Democrats or organizations will ride or die with him.

Mike Bonin

Right. Like, we're going to see a lot of faces shown between now and November. And I think if enough of us remember how anti black, racist, classist he was during those tapes, hopefully folks will be able to shake off any endorsements that come his way. I mean, that's such a good question, like who is going to go from Santiago because he did have everybody, all the major endorsements and are they going to go to him? I mean, I can't really see it, but I'm sure there'll be some surprises.

Godfrey Plata

Right.

It will be really something to see if someone, like you said, if even they back the progressive over their old buddy. Right. I mean, they have to. Right. Because they ran against him.

Right? Yeah. This race fascinated me because I saw what Isabel was doing and I knew that she was a force out there. I mean, for months they've been knocking on doors and texting and shout out to Walker Foley, her field director, who does amazing work. But while I sort of moved significantly to the left while I was in office, I sort of grew up in that sort of more establishment political environment.

Mike Bonin

And I really, you know, Miguel and Wendy are two really formidable candidates. And I really like both of them personally a lot. And I thought, God, Miguel was like his best friend when he got in the race. I thought that was the end of Kevin de Leon. I thought, God, maybe he won't even run against Miguel because everybody who would support Kevin, organized labor, would go to Miguel.

And I thought maybe it would be Isabel and one of the two state legislators in the runoff. Kevin's clearly got a base here. I'd like to think this is the ceiling and he can't go above it. But it's going to be an interesting runoff because if we have seen anything since the tapes came out, we have seen sort of the moral depravity of Kevin de Leon and how low he can go, not just what he said on the tapes, but the way he's behaved afterwards, sort of the false apologies, the sort of clear misuse of public funds to campaign and the way he has tried to stoke racial divisions in the campaign. And it's already starting on social media.

Right. And he's going to play to that because Isabel is the only non Latino who was in that top four. And just like he said in the tapes, they're trying to steal power from us. He's going to be saying that same thing. It'll be real interesting, as you say, to see who supports Isabel, who supports Kevin and who stays neutral, because there's going to be a lot of folks, they don't know Isabel, right?

And they're going to be afraid of her because she's going to be labeled as the same way they tried to label Nithya, like a crazy fringe commie anarchist or something like that, and with an ideological agenda to destroy the district and all this kind of crap. And so they're going to be wary of her and are they going to go to Kevin? And I think we should start creating a book of all the public statements that people put out about Kevin de Leone in October of 2022 and post. Them on a website. Where are you now?

This is what you said then. What are you going to say now? So much more for. That was the other thing, too, that this campaign was really. I think there was an LA Times headline that everyone was just kind of being kind of polite.

Godfrey Plata

And even Santiago didn't go hard on KDL until the last week or something like that. There is so much more to say. All the AHF stuff. He was basically a lobbyist while he was being paid by the AIDS Healthcare foundation in this moment where he took office because he was installed early. But then he was actually out there advocating for a housing developer.

We all knew there were some problems here, but now we know it's basically like a slumlord. That has been also questionable political motives and decisions here. But there's so much more to go on and to hit him for. Hit him on. Don't hit him.

People did try to hit him and he tried to hit other people. There's so many more things. Literally. Yeah, literally. It's funny I said that, but that actually was correct.

There are so many things to hit him on publicly that really didn't come out during this primary season. And she can go very hard on him if she wants to, and I hope that she does. He deserves it. I mean, I think certainly a lot of that stuff will come out, but to your, like, not enough people still know who Isabelle is, and I'm hoping a lot of who Isabel is dominates that. I think, you know, assembly member Santiago and assembly member Carrillo probably still have futures ahead of them.

Alyssa Walker

I know Kevin de Leon has a lot of digging out of where he is still to do, but if the assembly members care about their futures and want to continue to serve in public, I hope they take this opportunity and endorse Isabelle Gerardo here and all their followers continue to do so as well and learn about her being pro worker, pro tenant, all of the things that we know are true of her district and their constituents. And I think this could also be an opportunity to really unify for justice as opposed to divide.

Mike Bonin

It really could be. And I really hope that Miguel and Wendy, who again, I think are great public servants who do have a future ahead of them, I hope that they get in behind Isabelle. And I think for people in the progressive community, electing Isabel is probably priority one in the fall. But for the rest of sort of the civic responsibility, priority one should be defeating Kevin de Leon. It's the same outcome.

Come at it whichever way you want, but let's just get this done, please.

Other surprises out in council district two, a lot of people were very surprised. Nobody was surprised that this is the seat currently held by council President Paul Krakorian. I think everybody was expecting that former assemblyman Kokorian's former chief of staff, Adrienne Nazarian, would come in first. And then I think other people were, you know, for second place, either Sam Kabushan or Manny Gomez, both relatively well known names. Nobody that I spoke to, even frankly on the left, was expecting that Gillian Burgos was going to come from behind in these late votes and come in with a very strong second.

Over 20% at this point.

Godfrey Plata

Yeah, this one I definitely was the same thing. I thought Manny Gonaz was for sure going to be in the top two again, like some name recognition, like all the things that we've been talking about, and I'm just comparing now, which is we'll talk about, I think we'll talk about ten in a minute, but we'll have kind of like an incumbent type of a number, like a 37%. And then Gillian, who is just completely new to the entire scene where you're looking at ten, like Grace U. Has been around for a while. She's run before.

She's been in this race and similar numbers, which is just kind of really mind blowing, again, like, to this very well executed grassroots campaign. And she, speaking of things like the Satakoy situation, she was on the ground for those really a lot of really big, I think, flashpoint issues in the district when Crichorian was not present and making statements and being out there kind of supporting this community. So I just saw her as being a real leader on a lot of these things that came up in the district long before she got into the race very early. And she was kind of already acting, I would say, like a representative of the community. It was really great to see.

Alyssa Walker

And she has been right for folks who don't know her. She serves on her neighborhood council. She has led their housing and homelessness work on the neighborhood council. She has been an activist alongside Black Lives Matter. She's not new to everybody, and I think that made it.

Godfrey Plata

Yeah, I don't mean to say. I meant to, course, especially amongst bigger names, especially three men in particular with potential names. And I think what went well for her is that she was able to consolidate a lot of the progressive folks who would have energy in her area, in North Hollywood, in the surrounds. I think it probably benefited her that there were six candidates in the race so that folks could split votes, which is also what happened in CD 14. Right.

Alyssa Walker

Like, people split votes in that race as well. And so what an opportunity this was for her to just keep her head down, do the work. That's what her team did. They canvassed every single day. Two renters in particular.

I canvassed for her, and we were directed specifically to apartments, specifically to tenants, to ensure that another tenant would take this particular seat. And so it's really exciting to see how well she's done here. It's going to be a hard race. Like, the divide here between her and the person in first place is larger and is different from Isabel, who is in first place in her race. And so I think this is where I am glad that maybe if Nithya Ramanan's campaign disbands a little bit, that there's a little bit more to spread around between some of these races that still need to win in November.

Mike Bonin

Yeah. It's worth pointing out she got outspent by a ridiculous amount of money. The last campaign finance reports I saw, I think she had less than $75,000 she had raised. All the others had. Salmon and Manny both had several hundred thousand dollars and a dream two, three times what they had had.

Plus he had independent expenditures. She was on a total shoestring budget. Both she and Isabelle in CD 14, neither one of them did a single piece of campaign mail, which is wild. Isabel did some handwritten postcards to people, and I think they did a small letter on behalf of Jillian to the LGBTQ community in council district two, but they didn't do mail. This is an entirely different model that we've been seeing over the past few cycles where they don't do mail.

Heavy organizing, and a common denominator in all of this is focusing on renters. Renters are a big part of a progressive coalition in Los Angeles, and they're newly engaged and they're pissed off and they want better and they're turning out. The other thing that both of these grassroots candidates took advantage of is our matching system here in the city of LA, which I'm so thankful, you know, for folks who need the reminder. After you collect a certain number of donations of just $5 or more from residents in LA, after you reach a certain amount of that, it unlocks the city's matching funds. And what that means is that up to $129, I believe every dollar donated by an LA city resident gets matched six times.

Alyssa Walker

And wow, what a gift that is, right? For a shoestring budget to be able to multiply that by six and actually let that get you that paid canvassing staff that you might need to do the door to door work that, you know, it'll take to battle big money. So really thankful for campaign finance reforms like that that we have access to. And I guess that was my question for ten. Oh, sorry.

Godfrey Plata

But I guess that was, no, I. Was just going to say that's been. A big sort of common denominator in nithya's race, in ugo's race. Race. Kenneth mahia, it's been a game changer.

Mike Bonin

It's been a game changer. What were you saying, alyssa? That was my question about CD ten. Like I said before, it was heather hut, the incumbent, grace, you, who'd run for the seat before ara vasquez, who had also run for the seat before. Very good name recognition.

Godfrey Plata

And then eddie Anderson, who was progressive, also a great progressive candidate, endorsed by the La Times, had a lot of great endorsements but didn't have matching funds. Is that correct? So it's like that can really make the difference in what you were. I mean, is that your read on maybe what happened there? Because he came in third, he has 18% right now, and I don't think he's going to edge out.

Alyssa Walker

Grace, you yeah, I think there's probably a lot of things, right. It's a battle of big names already. I remember the major candidates in the council district ten race, which include a former assembly member, Reggie Jones SAWYER Right.

Of course, he's literally at the bottom of the five, which is wild to me and something maybe to talk about, I don't know. But I remember him saying on an endorsement panel when it was the five of them, that the thing that we don't have in council district ten is a dearth of riches. Right. Like he saw the value in each of these candidates that stepped forward to run on behalf of their community, and each of them absolutely did have community to run and represent. And back them.

It really could have been anybody's game. And I believe Ara Vasquez, who is right now sitting in know and Eddie Anderson, potentially split some folks on the left. And in the progressive wing, Outa did unlock matching funds, if I remember correctly. Did I received stuff from Outa, right. Like she was running like a campaign that spent its resources to build its megaphone.

I didn't experience that as much in Pastor Eddie's campaign. And I do think that six to one matching might have helped. And at the end of the day, Grace Yu is a really strong fundraiser, has name recognition already from two previous races. And of course, council member hut is the incumbent, albeit appointed and still the incumbent nonetheless. So it's not completely surprising who is ending up in the top two.

I think the biggest surprise is, frankly, assembly member registrant Sawyer being at the bottom. Yeah, I mean, that is a theme, right? Like that assembly members or people coming back from not. And that's been like, who has made up a lot of our council in previous years? That's been like the move.

Godfrey Plata

So it's interesting for me that's been. One of the surprises is for so long, for a decade now, assembly members essentially walked into council, you know, Paul Kakorian, Gil Sedillo, not that they didn't have actual races when they first ran, but it was a pretty well trod path. Paul Caretz, so many of them came that way, and most of them were victorious. And that definitely, with the exception of Adrena Zarin, did not happen this time. And I was really surprised to see Reggie come in fifth.

Mike Bonin

Reggie was attacked mercilessly by independent expenditures from law enforcement units. Reggie has been chairing the public safety committee in Sacramento for several years now and has been really pushing hard to address police abuses, to take on things like qualified immunity, third rail, police reform issues. And they were gunning for him. They came for him big time. And they were basically implying that he was trying to let serial rapists into your kids playgrounds.

I mean, it was really some lurid and disgusting stuff, and it was really pretty bad and bad treatment for him. But like you said, this was a really strong field of candidates. Everybody here had something to offer and was really rooted to the community. And it's going to be an interesting race between Heather and Grace. Grace, I should note, was the only one of these five candidates who refused to come on and talk to me.

Heather came to my house and we chatted for a while about a lot of stuff. Grace is, this is her third time running in this seat. I believe this is her third time. You're right. Yeah.

She was in a runoff with Mark Ridley Thomas a couple of years ago. She's got a sort of base of support. She's definitely got a following in the korean community, which she's been a spokesman for and an organizer in. She's also probably one of the more conservative candidates in a runoff anywhere in the city. She was very involved in opposing the bridge shelter that Herb Wesson tried to get open there that gave birth to ktown for all.

I believe she supported the AHF no development initiative back in 2017. Measure s. Boy, whatever it was, measure. S.

There's a big difference between these two. And be interesting to see how this one plays out because this one stayed under the radar compared to the other. Well, I think. I think compared to what we just talked about in CD two and CD 14, where there were candidates with really hefty grassroots, door to door campaigns, I didn't experience that as much. I'm a CD ten resident myself.

Alyssa Walker

I always want people to come to my door, knock on it, leave a door hanger. It never happens. I'm pretty sure I'm a high propensity voter and it hasn't ignited quite that way yet. And maybe it will this time. Between councilmember Hut and Grace Yu.

I'm sure Grace Yu is thirsty right now for this seat. This is the third time, right? So if council member Hut wants to keep her seat, she's got to really push it here. There are still people who don't know who their council member is. That's by virtue of our giant districts.

But would love to see this become more of a conversation in public and really aim for the hearts and minds of council district ten residents. It's a fascinating district. It is one of the most La districts of the 15. It is incredibly diverse. I don't think there is any ethnic group that is a majority.

Mike Bonin

It's just incredibly diverse. It's got communities as distinct as Lemurt park and Koreatown. It even takes in piece of palms and I think Cafe Circle and it's just an incredible beautiful district that'll be an interesting one to follow. And just thank God they got to elect their own council member.

Godfrey Plata

A moment of silence for the constituents that have been waiting for a really long time to actually vote for who represents them. Any other races that surprised either of you? I wanted to talk about the DA race only because I guess in some way it has similarities to 14 in the opposite way. I guess like the incumbent performing only getting about 25%. He did finally get there, George Gascon, and also has elements of the money organizing against the progressive.

So it has kind of like a bunch of different threads that we've kind of been pulling this whole time. He's headed to a runoff now, which against somebody who is probably the best person for him to go up against, because it will be a Republican. It won't be one of these, I say democratic with quotes around it, maybe pseudo Democrat challengers. But there was a lot of conversation here, too, about him getting knocked out in the primary. There was just a lot of worry about, I think there's a lot of people pointing out that, like, 75% of the voters were not voting for the incumbent, which is a big thing to overcome.

Just wanted to get your thoughts, I guess, about what happens since this heads to a runoff. I was glad he got to 25%. I think that's pretty good. Yeah. No, given the firepower that has been going up against George Gascon since before he took office.

Right.

Mike Bonin

I'm glad that mean, they tried to recall know before he'd even put his hand down from taking the mean. And he has been the victim of a really national attack on criminal justice reform. And it's deeply funded and it's really pretty insidious. And they repealed, or they recalled the district attorney in San Francisco a couple of years ago blaming him for all sorts of things. Turns out all the things they blamed him for are actually worse now under his tough on crime successor up there.

Godfrey Plata

Great job. And George got, I think, as you said, the best opponent he could get. He does have a tough re elect, and he'd be the first to concede that. And he's got to make the case to the voters about what he has been doing and why it's good and how it provides for public safety. He says that it's smart justice that they're dispensing.

Mike Bonin

But Hawkman was the republican candidate for California attorney general. This is a real Republican, a real. Conservative.

A much bigger turnout in the fall and a much more democratic turnout in the fall. So it's the best odds, I think, that George could face. This is going to be a really hard one, not just because of all the pressure against him, but how hard it is to campaign for this kind of race. Right. This is the entire county.

Alyssa Walker

Like, that's 10 million people, 5.6 million possible voters that could get out here. And it never gets to 100%. But it's still millions of people who need to hear why Gascon ought to stay. And that's like a message that his team will really need to prove both in action, in the news, in ways that maybe the Biden administration is actually making use of right now, knowing that they've still got a hill to climb till November. Like Gascon has got to play a similar game for LA county and ensure that the Demp party and all the demp clubs are with him along the way and amplifying whatever good stuff he is bringing to LA county.

Mike Bonin

Yeah, there's a lot of folks, even the big criminal justice money, folks who criminal justice reform money, folks who sort of kept their wallets closed and their powder dry in the primary. I think a lot of them were wondering, well, is Chemerinsky, who is also a Democrat, is he going to be in there? And then can we get someone who may believe in what we believe, but doesn't have the negatives get him in there? He's not. Now, it is a real bad, tough law and order bad guy versus the sort of shining example of smart criminal justice reform on the ballot.

Hopefully now they throw in and make it a fair fight. But there's another positive sign for George, something I know you wanted to bring up, Godfrey. It's the showing that public defenders have just made in the Los Angeles Superior court judicial races. Yeah, 1000%. Alyssa, were you going to jump in with something?

Godfrey Plata

No, I was saying this is your thing. When I was looking at the results coming in, I was like, everything that Godfrey was talking about happening, I see it. Like defenders of justice, they're doing it. I'm really inspired by this expanded vocabulary that we're building as constituents in LA county around the lever, that our judicial system has to be able to help us reimagine our systems of mass incarceration. Right.

Alyssa Walker

Like, the people who send folks to jail and to prison are judges, so we should care more about them as levers. And something really surprising to me is every two years or so we have to reelect judges. That's what we do here in California. That's not true everywhere. And theoretically, we should have seen 105 judges up for reelection.

I guess I'm glad I didn't have 105 judicial seats on my ballot, but we only saw ten, and that means that 95 folks sailed right through and kept their seat in place. And the reason why we don't get any more judicial elections is because lawyers are trained to do their thing. They do law. They don't know how to run for office. Right.

They don't know how to campaign for 10 million people, 5.6 million people of which are voters. And so in these ten seats, it's incredibly important that LA county voters do use these seats to move the needle toward justice. And I think diversifying the bench, not only as public defenders, not only as civil rights attorneys, not only as folks who represent, are more representative of their communities, communities of color, local communities. That's incredibly important to get different perspectives in there. And we are sending, it looks like three public defenders into the runoff that have organized under a slate called the defenders of justice.

They are George Turner, Erica Wiley, and Lashay Henderson. Erica and George are coming in first in their races and continuing to pull away. And we can't take that for granted in November because they do have to run again. And this is a countywide seat, the same number of voters that George Gascon has to win. But it's incredibly inspiring to see them as first time candidates.

Folks who have felt the wrath of people for being a public defender. They've been called public, apparently. I've done so much learning about then, you know, in addition to those three going into a runoff, I think I would love to call it for Judge Kim Rapeka, who ran against current Judge Emily Spears, who the LA Times endorsed against. And that was the first time in 30 years that the LA Times endorsed against an incumbent judge. She faced ethical violations.

She wasn't showing up for work. I'm so glad that the LA Times put that on blast. Right? Because Kim Rebecca is a newbie to all of this. Not only is a public defender, but in running, her campaign didn't have the power of an organized slate of folks like Erica Lache and George did.

She was running this on her own. And it was very much that slim budget campaign that we were just talking about earlier that she had to do for 5.6 million voters across the county. And she's over 50% at this point. She's been over 50% for two days. And so I'm hopeful that she gets to keep that after we still have 126,000 votes left.

But if these continue to lean progressive, I'm hoping that these last votes are people who did their homework and are voting Judge Kimberpeka into her seat. So super excited to see four out of. And that one's decided now, right? Whoever gets the 50%? Yeah, there's no runoff in that race.

I'm sure she's like, oh, my gosh. Last summer, I was just learning how to campaign for the first time, and now I'm a judge. So I'm sure she's facing different quandaries, right? Now, I think she's still holding her breath to make sure that all the votes come in, but super excited to see folks like these four throw their hat in the ring. There were five current or former public defenders on the ballot.

Mike Bonin

Three of them are advancing to the runoff, two of them in first place, and the last one, camera Peka, may just win outright. Right now. That's a big deal considering 78% of the 500 judges in Los Angeles county are former prosecutors. So if all four of them win, what, 76% of the judges will be prosecutors? It's the beginning of a shift.

Alyssa Walker

And the other thing that's called into question is not just our cultural knowledge of judges and what they can do, but it calls into question systems like the bar association's ratings, the bar association's ratings, or maybe not famously enough, weighted toward qualifying and, well, qualifying prosecutors more and more. And that's why public defenders have such a hard time. Kim Rapeka was rated unqualified against a sitting judge that was also rated unqualified. And the LA Times gave a glowing review of Emily Praka. Erica Wiley was rated qualified against other well qualified folks who just weren't public defenders.

Right. And now she's in first place. Was LA Times endorsed, Dem party endorsed, fed endorsed. Like, we need to reconsider what that bar association rating system does, how it does it. I hope there's a mirror being held up over there.

Godfrey Plata

Wow. So we've covered the blowouts. We've covered the nail biters. We've covered the surprises. I just wanted to end up by each of us highlighting a couple of races or results that we thought were important to note that we didn't get a chance to discuss or runoffs that we didn't mention that are races to watch in the fall.

Mike Bonin

Alyssa, you want to go first? Sure. I mean, I was watching the Lausd races.

Godfrey Plata

We don't have to go into all of the discussion here, but there were basically like two candidates that were hit by intense scandals after ballots had come out. And so we had in both. I'm going to flip to my spreadsheet information here. So for the LAUSD races, we had something really interesting happening here, which is that out of the four races that people were voting on, two of the seats, candidates were involved in pretty intense scandals, some of which happened after the ballots actually went out. And you had Khalid Aleem against Charlotte Hendy newbill in district one.

Old tweets, like, you're not scrubbing your tweets, guys, come on. Really bad. Like anti Semitic tweets that were unearthed by opposing campaigns. And UtLa had to undergo this really arduous, but I understand why they had to do it process to decide to not endorse him, which ended up like, I think the final vote was taken, like, the night before election day to actually decide not to endorse him. So he is in second place and he is going to go to the runoff.

New bill is on top. But that was just a really remarkable thing kind of in the final days of this campaign to watch happen. I mean, Utla acted quickly. He didn't pull out of the race, though, so he's going to advance. And then a similar thing happened in district five.

Carla Grigio. I don't know how Carla. Grego Griego. Yeah, sorry. Carla Griego.

And Graciella Ortiz, she was involved. Ortiz was involved in a sexual harassment situation that was again, like, it came up in the final days of the campaign, but she will also advance to the runoff. Carly Grego is winning by a wide margin. So it'll just be interesting to see that we're going to go to November with some of these scandals, like, kind of unfolding as we watch them. But that's what happens when you can vote for a really long time and vote by mail and do all these other wonderful things that we have as part of our democracy.

Mike Bonin

Well, and always interesting in school board races is the union charter dynamic. The newbill alalim race. District one, that's a seat that's currently held by George McKenna, who's been union friendly, who is retiring. And district five, the Gregor Ortiz race, that's a seat held by board president Jackie Goldberg, who is one of the staunchest supporters of the UTLA on the school board. And interestingly enough, this is a district that is heavily latino, including a lot of the southeast cities Sela, that are included in LAUSD and has been represented by a non Latina for a very long time.

This might be the first time that they actually get a Latino representing a district with a student body that is overwhelmingly latino. But the dynamics you just talked about, those last minute surprises, that takes a couple very union friendly candidates sort of off the board. And in district one, the one you were mentioning with the tweets, Alalim came in first on election, the early votes he carried and the votes that came in later after the stuff was exposed, that's when he started tanking. So I think you can kind of predict how that will play out. Godfrey, what else are you looking at?

Alyssa Walker

Yeah. So for folks who don't know me, I'm Filipino. And I'm really interested all the time in what it means for AAPI candidates to put themselves out there, especially when they are running to represent areas of town that have a big API population. And so I got really curious and dug into some data last week in two different overlapping areas. One is the overlap between council district ten, which we just talked about earlier, and Assembly District 54, which is a race between John Yee and Mark Gonzalez, and then California congressional seat 34, which is a rematch of Jimmy Gomez and David Kim.

And where these three districts overlap is the Koreatown area. And I was really curious to see what happened in an area where there were three major korean candidates running to represent an area that does have a substantial korean population. And at the time last week, I'm going to update this data this week to see if this still holds. But the big story coming to this election was how low turnout it was. And in the overlap specifically of these three districts with three korean candidates, korean voters were the least low, I.

E. Closest to the 2020 voter turnout, which was historically high at that time because of the presidential election. So I think it's really fascinating to see that. And I saw that play out also in Eagle Rock, the overlap between council District 14, we just talked about Isabel Herado, Queer, Filipina, single mom. There's an assembly district race in that area.

Assembly District 52, which was crowded, and a filipina candidate in that district was also running and took first place. We'll be going into the runoff, and I noticed that as of last week in the overlap of these two districts, council District 14 and Assembly District 52, that all of the major racial and ethnic groups actually slid way underneath the 2020 voter turnout. Like, they went the opposite direction from La county, were below the averages in La county in terms of turnout. The only one that actually went above average, approaching the 2020 rates for turnout, was the Filipino votership, where these two candidates were running. And so super fascinating to keep an eye on that.

Again, in both of these areas, the korean votership and the Filipino votership are not large enough to carry a race. And so I'm not suggesting here that they could, because there are other voters that share that space. And it is fascinating to see the rates of turnout change when you have folks who represent a particular identity. Wow. I think that is all that, again, points to the need for reform.

Godfrey Plata

It's almost like we should have more council districts to be able to capture some of these nuances, or even when we are talking about what we have, this wealth of candidates, like a really great candidates running for the same seat who have so much to offer.

It's a shame we can only vote for 15 people when there are maybe 29 great people that could be in office. Well, thanks for that data and that analysis, Godfrey. There's a couple of races I just want to highlight. Two wins that I thought were important that didn't get much coverage. One of them because it's not in the city of Los Angeles, in the city of Long beach, there was a citywide ballot measure, RW, which is raising wages in that city for hospitality workers, hotel workers.

Mike Bonin

On election night it looked real close. Now it's about six points apart. It's like 53, 47. That ₩1. It's a really big deal.

And soon I'll be having the new executive director of Los Angeles alliance for New Economy on to talk about that and what else Lane is doing. Also, another really big, highly watched race was the congressional District 30 that was to succeed Adam Schiff, who of course is now likely going to be the next US senator. Large crowded field of candidates in that one, a great progressive mobility advocate, Laura Friedman, has come in first by a very large margin in that vesting some big figures like Mike Fewer and Anthony Porntino and Nick Melbourne and others. And she is going to be facing in the runoff in what I hope is a safe democratic seat. A really batshit crazy right winger who Alex Balikian, who has been tied into those same two candidates who are running for the Glendale school board.

He does a podcast. Anybody who does a podcast, it must be bad news, of course. And he really is just a professional platformer of crazy conspiracy theories, anti vaxxer. Just bad, bad guy. We've got to make sure Laura wins that one.

And then a couple of runoffs that I just think are really important to pay attention to are some state assembly seats. I want to be spending some time talking to the state assembly candidates during the runoff because those are really important races that get almost no attention. But in Assembly District 52, Jessica Colosa is a generally progressive backed former public works commissioner in the city of Los Angeles, appointed by Mayor Garcetti. She's going to be in a runoff against Frankie Carrillo, who's an incredible criminal justice reform activist and advocate who wants wrongly served time. He's a fascinating guy.

That's going to be a very interesting race. Assembly District 54 is going to be a face off between John Yee from LA Walks, who is a great mobility advocate in Los Angeles, versus Mark Gonzalez, who is the current chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. That's interesting. For a number of different reasons. It's also two lgbtq candidates facing off against each other, so that'll be interesting.

80 57. Which is the last assembly seat I want to mention, is shade. El Haware is going to be facing off against Efron Martinez in the seat to represent South Los Angeles. Shade comes from the community coalition. Karen Bass, Marquise Harris Dawson Multiracial Coalition Network.

Efren Martinez lives in one of the southeast cities, which I'm drawing a blank on because it's late and represents sort of a very different approach to politics than sade does. So we'll see how that one works out. Efren came in first so far, and then in one state Senate seat that is really worth paying attention to is the one currently represented by Steve Bradford. And that is Senate District 25, where former scandal plague congresswoman Laura Richardson is currently in first but will be facing off against Michelle Chambers, who is sort of the progressive choice in that race. Only a few points separating them right now, and that's going to be a very hard fought one going up until November.

So those are my races to watch. And Mike, I think it's that state Senate 35 35, not 25. 25 is worth mentioning, too, because Sasha Renee Perez will probably be the new state senator there, beating billionaire, self funded Ivan you in that process. So super excited that you did actually slip and put 25 in there. Thank you for the correction and the addition.

I love that when you record at 11:00 at night, it takes teamwork. So we've been at this for a while. I'm definitely going to chapter this podcast episode so folks can go to the sections that they want before we just sign off. Alyssa and Godfrey, where can folks find you and follow you? I am Alissa Walker in LA.

Godfrey Plata

If you want to sign up for my launching soon newsletter, you can go to awalkerinala substack.com, although it's not going to be on substack, so surprise. You'll be surprised when you open the first email because it won't be from substack, but please go sign up there or you can see it pinned on all my socials and really looking forward to. I guess we'll come back in November and talk more about how all this panned out. We're going to talk every step of the way, Alyssa, for sure. Every step of the way.

Alyssa Walker

We're going to stress together. I know I need my support groups and my Godfrey. How about you folks can find me on Instagram or Twitter at Godfrey Plata Godfreyplata. And my day job. I get to support organizing work at an amazing organization called LA Forward.

You can follow LA Forward at LA. Forward, and I, of course, am on most of the socials at Mike Bonin. And unlike Alyssa, I am still on Substack, Mikebonin substac.com, and, of course, on this podcast. So please go ahead, follow it, subscribe, whatever the hell it's called, and spread the word and let people know that does it for this special late night election wrap up edition. Holy shit.

Mike Bonin

Some amazing things have been going on. In the great title. Maybe you should. This is how Anderson Cooper feels on election night, y'all. This is how he feels.

Does that make you my Andy Cohen? Oh, no. Who am I? Wait, which Andy am I? We got to figure that out, Mike.

Alyssa Walker

That's a controversial question. Cannot be solved on this podcast. And that would make Alyssa Kathy Griffin. Oh, my. Let's all host a new year's special and drink together.

Mike Bonin

If there's enough support for that, we'll do our New Year's special next year. All right, that is it for this punch drunk episode of what's next in Los Angeles. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, Alyssa and Godfrey, for joining me. Thanks for listening.

Until next time, take care and peace.

Blowouts, Nail-biters and Big Surprises: Primary 2024

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1: Introduction

2: Analysis of Election Results

3: Strategic Campaigns and Voter Reactions

4: Influence of External Political Groups

5: Looking Forward

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