By the time voters in Los Angeles go to the polls on Tuesday, billionaire property developer Rick Caruso is expected to have spent $100mn on his campaign to persuade voters to elect him as the city’s next mayor.
The flood of cash has helped Caruso gain ground in recent weeks against his opponent, California congresswoman Karen Bass, a progressive Democrat who has been endorsed by President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama. If elected, Bass, who is black, would be the first female mayor of Los Angeles.
Bass won the first round of voting in June by seven points, but Caruso — a longtime Republican who became a Democrat before entering the race — has chipped away at her lead after spending heavily on attack advertisements in English, Spanish and Korean this autumn. He has also hired canvassers to fan out across the city to knock on doors on his behalf, an effort that has been extremely effective, say political scientists.
Bass leads the contest by a margin of 45 per cent among likely voters to Caruso’s 41 per cent, according to a poll released on Friday by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times. However, Bass’s lead is within the poll’s margin of error and far less than the 15-point advantage she held only a month ago.
“It’s gonna be close,” said Fernando Guerra, a political-science professor at Loyola Marymount University.
A Caruso victory would be a major upset, he added. “There’s no reason why liberal, Democratic LA should not elect Karen Bass,” Guerra said. “If he wins it’s like, wow.”
The race to replace mayor Eric Garcetti, who is reaching the end of this term limit, has been dominated by debate over how to house the city’s estimated 42,000 homeless people and reduce its violent crime rate, which has reached 15-year highs. Bass, who was on Biden’s shortlist for vice-president, has called the race “a fight for the soul of our city”.
Another issue, Los Angeles’s simmering racial tensions, was thrust into the campaign last month after the leak of an audio tape in which Latino city council members used racist and derogatory language about black and other communities. One of council members, Nury Martinez, has resigned, and two others caught on the tape are under pressure to quit.
Beyond its inflammatory language, the recording reflected frustration among Latino politicians about their relative lack of representation. Hispanics make up about half of Los Angeles’s population, but only held four of 15 city council seats before the tape’s release.
It is hard to tell how — or whether — the controversy will influence the outcome of the mayor’s race, analysts said. “This is what Karen Bass is all about — she started her career as a community organiser bringing Latinos and blacks together,” Guerra said, though he noted she was slow to issue a response to the scandal.
Caruso has used the tape to help position himself as an outsider who will challenge the established order. “Caruso is saying the old politics and the old alliances have kept Latinos from having full representation, but that won’t be the case in my administration,” Guerra said.
Whether it ends up benefiting one of the candidates or not, the recording contributed to “a sense that the city is broken”, said Zev Yaroslavsky, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
“It’s worse than a malaise,” he said. “You have a government that can’t seem to address the issue of homelessness. There’s an inability to get its arms around the issues.”
Caruso, who has made his $5.3bn fortune developing upscale shopping centres, points to his experience as the city’s police commissioner from 2001 to 2005 as evidence of his crime-fighting bona fides.
He was instrumental in recruiting William Bratton, the former New York police chief and champion of “broken windows” policing to Los Angeles in the early 2000s and has pledged to add 1,500 more officers to the force if elected.
But Los Angeles has grown more liberal since 1993, when the crime-ridden city elected Republican businessman Richard Riordan as its mayor.
Sonja Diaz, founding director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, said she expected younger progressives who reject traditional approaches to policing and housing to drive voter turnout — and possibly help decide the election.
“LA is a global city that is Latino majority with a growing Asian-American constituency — two groups that are very young,” she said. “So you have pockets of enthusiasm based on first-time progressive voters turning out. They want change and don’t want to go back to failed policies.”
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