By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 16,
2022
Just how wild will this year’s midterm
elections turn out to be? The most right-of-center option in the Los Angeles
mayor’s race, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, could well end up winning and
is ahead by one percentage
point in the most recent poll.
California holds its primaries in about
three weeks, and under the state’s unusual rules, all candidates, both party
members and independents, participate in a non-partisan primary. The top two
vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election;
this is how two Democrats, Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez, faced off in the
November general election for U.S. Senate in 2016. (This led to many Democrats
arguing that Senate elections were inherently unfair because their party
received many more votes in the Senate elections nationwide than Republicans,
glossing over the fact that in California, Democrats received 12.2 million
votes and Republicans received none.)
In addition to the congressional
elections, Los Angeles will hold its mayoral election. Incumbent mayor Eric
Garcetti, the Democrat well known for holding his breath around Magic
Johnson, is term limited. (Biden nominated Garcetti to be the U.S. ambassador
to India in July 2021, and he is currently awaiting a confirmation vote in the
U.S. Senate, a confirmation vote that does not look like a sure thing.)
Back in 2015, city voters approved a
city-charter amendment moving mayoral elections from odd-numbered years to
even-numbered years, aiming to increase turnout; this means that Garcetti’s
second term has been five and a half years instead of the usual four. The
city’s turnout in the 2017 mayoral election was an abysmal 20.1 percent; the
expectation is that this year’s turnout will be significantly higher.
If no single candidate gets a majority of
votes, the top two finishers advance to the runoff, which will be held on
November 8. The most
recent Berkeley-IGS Poll is intriguing because it has Caruso at 24 percent, Representative Karen Bass at 23 percent, city councilman Kevin de León
at 6 percent, and six other candidates in the low single digits, with 39
percent of voters undecided. If all the undecided stayed home, the primary
election would end with Caruso at 39 percent and Bass at 37.7 percent — a strong
finish for the latter that would, at minimum, give her a good shot in the
runoff. The question is, can Caruso and his relentless television-advertising
campaign win over enough of the remaining undecided voters to put him over 50
percent and avoid a runoff?
Los Angeles is beset by the same problems
as many other big American cities — rampant homelessness, increasing violent
crime, scandals and corruption in city government, droughts and other natural
disasters. But Los Angeles’s general sense of lawlessness and societal
breakdown is vividly exacerbated by piles of trash in the streets, the sight of
ransacked freight trains, and a
progressive district attorney who has ceased prosecuting certain crimes. Los Angeles
County sheriff Alex Villanueva said that his office presented 13,238 cases that the district
attorney’s office ultimately declined to prosecute under District Attorney
George Gascón’s new soft-on-crime special directives. “These are people that
did bad things that left a victim, have the evidence presented, and they said
‘don’t bother.’” Oh, and being the
epicenter of the nation’s supply-chain problems isn’t helping the city, either.
Unsurprisingly, the severe downturn in
quality of life has Los Angeles voters contemplating new options — including a
billionaire developer who is somewhat conservative — or at minimum,
conservative by Los Angeles standards.
Caruso is on
the board of trustees for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and
Institute. In addition to playing a big roll in his
own family’s charitable foundation, he has served on various governing boards
for the University of Southern California, Pepperdine School of Law, Loyola
High School, and St. John’s Hospital. He endowed the USC Caruso Department of
Otolaryngology at the Keck School of Medicine, as well as the USC Catholic
Center.
In April 2020, President Trump
appointed Caruso to his “Great American Economic
Revival Industry Groups Task Force Committee,” a task force aiming to mitigate
the economic impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. A few days later,
California governor Gavin Newsom appointed Caruso to his own “Business &
Jobs Recovery Task Force.”
As a politically active Los Angeles
real-estate developer with an estimated $4.3
billion net worth, Caruso has a long history
of political donations to
candidates in both parties — including rival Bass in 2011. He’s donated to
Republicans such as House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, former senator Dean
Heller, former congressman Joe Heck, the National Republican Congressional
Committee; and he’s donated to Democrats such as Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom,
Xavier Becerra, and Ted Lieu.
Caruso has some experience in city
government; Democratic mayor Tom Bradley appointed Caruso, then 26, to the
position of commissioner for the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Then, in
2001, Mayor James Hahn appointed Caruso to the Los Angeles Police Commission for a five-year term, where he helped recruit William Bratton as
Chief of Police. Caruso was a registered
Republican until 2012, when he
switched to “decline to state.” Earlier this year, he registered as a Democrat.
In the most recent Berkeley-IGS poll, 61
percent of Angelenos named homelessness as one of their top two issues, and 38
percent named crime.
Caruso is a scathing critic of the
Garcetti administration on street homelessness, and points to massive amounts of public spending that yielded only a
few new housing options for those who are homeless. He calls for canceling “all
contracts for housing projects that have not been built and begin the process
to limit per unit costs to under $350,000 by ensuring we utilize modular
housing, shipping containers, and other innovative and cost-effective methods
that can reduce timelines and provide dignified housing.” Caruso says he will
also request the state controller to immediately conduct a full investigation
of all city construction contracts related to homeless housing to root out
waste and fraud. He pledges to create an additional 30,000 shelter beds in his
first 300 days as mayor.
But it is on crime where Caruso sounds, if
not outright conservative, then vehemently opposed to the shibboleths of the
woke Left:
Rhetoric about
‘defunding the police’ makes no sense when you consider that murders are skyrocketing and L.A.
is the most under-policed big city in America. Yes, we need to invest in more
training, both to reduce unnecessary use of force incidents and to eliminate
any elements of unconscious bias. But when an emergency strikes, we all
want our first responders to arrive quickly and to save lives, and we
need to show our support for them with respect and gratitude, along with a
constant and firm demand for excellence, fair treatment, and world class
professionalism. . . .
The
endless headlines around ‘smash and grab’ robberies around the holidays only
highlighted the lack of any real consequences for those who deliberately flout
our laws. We all see, feel, and know firsthand that property crime is not being
adequately enforced. We’ve all seen our neighbors’ homes burglarized or have
had our cars broken into, or worse yet, stolen. We need to make sure there are
consequences and fair repercussions for those who break the law.
Bass getting 23 percent in the most recent
Berkeley-IGS poll is also intriguing because she was at 32 percent in February
— meaning, if the poll is accurate, that she’s losing support as the election
approaches. Not too long ago, Bass looked like the heavy favorite. Ironically
once described as “the
anti-Kamala Harris,” Bass ended up on President Biden’s
short list for vice president along with Harris; from 2019 to 2021, she chaired
the Congressional Black Caucus. Interestingly, she also has a few conservative
admirers. George Will has praised her “even-keeled
disposition,” and Minority Leader McCarthy
called Bass his favorite Democrat. “She’s not one that you have to agree with 100 percent of the time or
she’s not going to work with you,” McCarthy told the Wall Street
Journal.
When asked about homelessness by Vanity
Fair, Bass responded: “Absolutely, elected
officials could have done more. I think a local billionaire could have done more too. Rick does give a
lot of charitable money—but he builds luxury housing!” Bass also told the
magazine that she was torn about leaving Congress to run for mayor. “This was
not an easy choice,” Bass said. “It wasn’t because I’m sick of D.C. at all, but
because I’m concerned L.A. could go in a very negative direction, because
people are very frustrated. We absolutely have an increase in crime, okay? But
I don’t believe the city is going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t. And I
believe very deeply that when you have campaigns that are based on fear, that’s
when you get people to go along with very bad policy.”
The problem for Bass is that Angelenos are
not in a particularly patient mood, having heard similar promises from a lot of
city officials for decades, and Bass has been representing L.A. in Congress
since 2011 and for six years in the California state assembly before that. This
is a race worth watching, even if you live far away from the city of angels.
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