Hello and welcome to L. A. on the Record, our local election bulletin. He is an emaciated Ben Oreskes who comes to see him live, albeit a little alive, from his home office. Julia Wick and Dakota Smith have been a big help this week.
It’s a speech that doesn’t mention Rick Caruso by name, but somehow, it’s all about him.
In front of a crowd of nearly 2,000 others Thursday night in Playa Vista, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt. ) endorsed Rep. Karen Bass as mayor of Los Angeles as he spoke about multibillion-dollar elegance and his alleged ethical bankruptcy.
With few mentions of homelessness or other key issues in the mayoral race, Sanders’ speech is more of a hard-hitting argument for voting midterm Democratic than a reel of cane about Bass’s merits.
And yet, his 25-minute treatise is entirely applicable to a race in which a candidate spends much of his own money seeking to be elected.
Sanders’ riffs on corporate profits, who owns all the cash, and attacks on reproductive rights landed because of Caruso’s wealth and his previous Republican record.
“When we talk about a colorful democracy, together we will have to end a corrupt political formula that allows billionaires to buy elections,” Sanders told the cheering crowd. “They’re looking to buy elections here in Los Angeles, and they’re looking to buy them all over the country. This is not democracy.
Caruso’s wealth has led to the politics of the airwaves, as Julia Wick and Jim Rainey explained this week. His attack of exposure on television, radio and virtual platforms is expected to exceed $53 million, enough to help outline career themes, but not necessarily enough. to sure victory.
Sanders’ comment about buying the election closest to him referred directly to Caruso. Instead, he let his congressional colleague attack him. Bass repeated a line about Caruso we heard earlier this week at an event highlighting his plan to tackle homelessness with union members of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters.
“He’s a developer who’s never built a singles housing unit,” he said of Caruso.
For his part, Caruso did not regret spending his own money, more than $80 million, on this campaign. He says that means he’s not beholden to donors, developers and others who he says constitute the “corruption” that has plagued City Hall for decades. .
Bass, for him, is just another in a line of politicians who constitute the prestige quo. (As if Caruso needed some other point of knowledge in this line of argument, the corruption trial of an associate of former accused board member Jose Huizar began Thursday. The guy is accused of trying to grease the city’s approval of an assignment by paying $1. 5 million in bribes to Huizar.
These attacks occur just over a week before Election Day, voting has been ongoing for some time. The race is headed.
Our friends at Political Data Intelligence, a for-profit crusading studies company, tracked the results across the state. By Thursday, 6% of all polls in Los Angeles had been returned, they said. PDI Vice President Paul Mitchell said it’s difficult to compare this Los Angeles election to others because of the shift to even-numbered year voting and the recent practice where every registered voter receives a poll that can be mailed or placed in a mailbox.
“We can take a look at number one out of 22, but we expect turnout in this election to far exceed the numbers, which I think were around 30% turnout. Maybe in this election, Los Angeles will have 50% or more,” he said. he wrote in an email.
“So far, looking for 2022 number one as a comparison, the Democratic results followed the number one vote, but now they are about 20,000 higher than number one. You also see more Republicans and independents, even if smaller raw numbers are above them.
Unsurprisingly, other people who voted like this are more likely to be white and older. Just over 60 percent of the ballots returned came from Democrats, which shouldn’t come as a surprise either. A key knowledge point is that only 19% of returned ballots come from Latino voters. It’s still early, but Caruso will want that number to increase significantly to win.
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Audio aftermath: With several municipal races close and a town angered by a recently leaked audio recording, Dave Zahniser and Julia write that left-wing political organizers see a possible turning point ahead of the Nov. 8 election. His grassroots movement is already gaining momentum, with many of his applicants striking first in the June primaries.
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced Tuesday that his branch is investigating the source of the leaked racist recording that propelled City Hall into the national spotlight. In an interview with The Washington Post, Caruso said he met with the former president of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation. Ron Herrera in the same room where he allegedly recorded the tape.
“It’s so out of a movie set,” he told the Post. “I don’t know if I also recorded it. “
Animal discussion: While Los Angeles is criticized for the way it runs its animal shelters, Caruso toured one of the city’s services in Mission Hills this week. Shelters in the city.
Caruso, who showed up with his dog, Hunter, said he couldn’t do a crusade on a city property, so he visited the Mission Hills site. He said he would “consider privatizing” the city’s other six shelters, a proposal that would anger some of the village guilds, whose members paint on the shelters.
“It’s not about wasting unionized jobs,” he said, when asked about a possible withdrawal through unions. He added that he worked regularly with the unions and that it was a matter of locating “common ground”.
Police preview: Although the Los Angeles mayoral race has been presented as an ideological one between Bass, a progressive who is willing to take advantage of police opportunities, and Caruso, a more conservative pro-law and order candidate, their perspectives on public protection are not entirely different. Libor Jany of the Times explains why, in addition to the length of the apartment, Bass and Caruso are similar.
— Celebrity Carousel: Check out the featured faces of Bass and Caruso.
– More: Meet the USC professor who follows Caruso’s yacht.
— Latino or Latino: Columnist Gustavo Arellano spent time with Caruso in Boyle Heights this week and reports that “his appeal to Latinos is real. I knew that from the moment he entered the race in February, and he’s shown it ever since. “
— County Combat: The newly formed 3rd Surveillance District has approximately 43% white, 37% Latino, 12% Asian and 4% black. It covers 431 square miles and stretches from the west side of the San Fernando Valley and is home to one of the closest and most competitive races.
And in the outdoor news the countryside. . .
— KDL background: “Kevin De Leon began his political career in the 1990s as a supporter of immigrant rights after the electorate passed Proposition 187, which would have barred public access to undocumented immigrants,” writes CalMatters columnist Dan Walters. However, he became a careerist self-absorbing.
— Horrified housing: New York Times columnist Ezra Klein takes an in-depth look at why it’s so hard to build housing for the homeless here in Los Angeles. “The politics of the housing crisis are terrible,” he writes. “The politics of what you’d want to do to solve it is even worse. “
Just over two weeks after the release of the leaked audio recording of Herrera, De Leon and other council members Gil Cedillo and Nury Martinez, De Leon and Cedillo won the most powerful rebuke imaginable from their colleagues: censorship.
For Cedillo, who is unemployed in December, the stakes are low.
He looks like he left the office last month: he cashed a check and was out of sight. De León’s apology tour through the local media landscape continued, as he searched while he suffered to keep his job.
Just before Tuesday’s council assembly began, De Leon joined Tavis Smiley on KBLA-AM (1580), his first prevention on a black radio station since the leak. directed directly in this tape.
During that interview, Smiley asked de Leon if his constituents were well served through a council member who refused to resign but also showed up for meetings.
“I’m looking to leave some time to heal,” De Leon said. “I’m looking to leave some time so I don’t have some of the chaos right now. “
In an interview with The Times, Smiley said he lured de Leon to his exhibit by texting him.
“I just said, ‘How long are you going to talk to Black Los Angeles?De Leon sought out Smiley. Au to do the interview over the phone, but Smiley refused, but Smiley refused. I had to be in the studio, and that It had to be a total hour, without interruption.
The result was an interview that “exposed” him, Smiley said. The radio host said listeners and their friends told him the interview presented an unvarnished view of someone who had apologized but not quite the damage it had caused.
De Leon told Smiley that he gave interviews to Univision and KABC-TV Channel 7, among others, before speaking to a media outlet whose audience is predominantly black because it harms and embarrasses.
“No one bought his answer,” Smiley said.
Smiley then presented his perspectives on the sum and substance of the racist recording about what he had heard from listeners and other visitors on his show.
“What struck me is that, on the empathy front, the other people in this room, the 4, the force had been corrupting them for years,” he said. “What we hear in this tape is an expression of an empathy deficit born of a forcible ascent. “
(If you have one piece of advice you’d like to report for next week, drop it to us. )
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Benjamin Oreskes is a California bankruptcy reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
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