Los Angeles held a non-partisan mayoral election on March 5, 2013. Eight candidates were on the ballot. No one got as much as 50%, so there is a run-off on May 21. Dante Atkins has this article about the race at Calitics. The run-off is between Eric Garcetti, a current city councilmember, and Wendy Grueuel, the city controller. Probably most observers agree that the biggest issue in the election is what to do about city employee pensions.
Garcetti describes how Grueuel originally took a position on city pensions that was more favorable to city workers than the position of Garcetti. Therefore, the union that represents city workers endorsed Grueuel. Now, however, Grueuel has changed her position on the pension issue, for what appear to be opportunistic reasons. This tendency for candidates to reverse themselves on key issues is not solely a characteristic of non-partisan elections. It happens in partisan elections as well. Nevertheless, in a partisan election, a candidate is somewhat constrained to follow his or her own party’s platform. In the absence parties, there are no party platforms with any relevance in the race, and the opportunities for candidates to appear to have absolutely no fixed stands on issues are greater.
Another characteristic of this year’s Los Angeles election is the low turnout. At the March 5 election, only 292,760 ballots were cast, even though at the time Los Angeles had 1,817,107 registered voters. Partisanship, for all its flaws, does tend to stimulate better turnout. Most observers believe the May 21 run-off turnout will be equally bad.
ONE general election day per year.
NO caucuses, primaries and conventions.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
She spells her name as ‘Greuel’ In the first sentence of the second paragraph it is Atkins, rather than Garcetti describing Greuel.
There are 1,817,107 names on the voter registration rolls. The relatively high number of registered voters to estimated eligible voters and the low turnout in most Los Angeles elections indicates that the voter rolls are bloated with voters who have left the county. The very low percentage of permanent by-mail voters in Los Angeles County suggests that many voter’s registration dates from before when permanent by-mail became available.
Wendy Greuel appears to be an opportunist who has jumped from office to office. Eric Garcetti is the son of Gil Garcetti who was the Los Angeles County District Attorney at the time of the OJ Simpson case.
Judging from his other editorials on the Calitic site, Dante Atkins appears to be a partisan hack. He would of course resent that Greuel would reach out to former mayor Richard Riordan, who is a Republican.
Public sector unions and hacks like Atkins like the partisan primary system. They can differentially suppress turnout, getting union members to vote and telling them who to vote for in the Democratic primary, and then other Democrats vote for whoever has the party label next to their name – not because they read the party platform.
That is why the public sector union leaders were the lead opponents against Proposition 14, and the Oregon Education Association mislead its voters about who the proponent of the Top 2 proposal was in that State.