The New Republic - May 18, 2005

DAILY EXPRESS

 Inconclusive

ast night Antonio Villaraigosa became Los Angeles's first Latino mayor in more than 100 years. In the coming days, his win will no doubt be seized upon by liberals as evidence of a growing alliance between labor and Latinos. This notion has some credence in Los Angeles itself, where Latinos have been growing in demographic strength and politics has moved leftward in recent years. Yet it would be a vast overstatement to ascribe national implications to Villaraigosa's victory. There is little reason to believe that he symbolizes the future of Latino politics at the national level; and even in Los Angeles, the lessons that it is possible to draw from yesterday's election are tempered by the circumstances surrounding this particular race--namely, the incumbent mayor's extreme unpopularity. All of which is to say that Democrats, ever hopeful that Latinos will someday save them from political exile, should not read too much into Villaraigosa's win.

Villaraigosa, beloved as he is in the parlor left circles in Hollywood and the city's west side, did not run as either a labor or left-wing candidate. Instead, he ran a remarkably tepid, amorphous campaign, presenting himself as a candidate who could unify Los Angeles. At the end of the day, virtually the entire local political establishment, from right to left--including former mayor (and Republican) Richard Riordan, former mayoral hopeful Bob Hertzberg, and virtually every leader of the city's black community--rallied to Villaraigosa's banner. Indeed, his landslide victory last night was truly pan-ethnic. He apparently won big on the white liberal west side and likely did well in African-America areas of South Los Angeles. (We don't have the exit polls yet, but reports here are that Villaraigosa won almost every area of the city.) His victory, more than anything, was really Mayor Jim Hahn's defeat, the culmination of years of dull, uninspired leadership, marred by corruption probes and worsened by Hahn's own clumsy political machinations. "Four years ago Antonio Villaraigosa was seen as the standard bearer of an ethnic and ideological movement," notes Gregory Rodriguez, author of an upcoming book on the history of Mexican-Americans. (Disclosure: Rodriguez and I are both fellows at the New America Foundation.) "This time he ran as a pan-ethnic, non-ideological candidate." In fact, the one power bloc that supported Hahn was organized labor--honoring the wishes of AFL-CIO leader Miguel Contreras, a Hahn ally who passed away two weeks ago.

One other factor helped seal Villaraigosa's victory: the ambivalence of moderate to conservative voters in the San Fernando Valley (roughly equivalent to Queens in New York) who helped elect Hahn four years ago but were turned off by his ruthless campaign against their attempt to secede from the city. Villaraigosa may have been too left to appeal to this bloc of voters, but they were not sufficiently inspired by Hahn to turn out in large numbers.

So there's good reason to wonder whether Villaraigosa's victory forecasts the future of local politics here or was the result of circumstances particular to this race. But the reasons to doubt that his win is symptomatic of national trends among Latino voters are even more compelling. Unlike African-Americans, who tend to vote solidly Democratic, Latino voters break down into a number of subgroups--some of which tend to be very liberal, while others tend to be far more conservative.

This should be obvious to anyone who followed last year's presidential election in which George W. Bush received roughly 40 percent of the Latino vote. These voters, notes Kerry pollster Mark Mellman, tended to be second and third generation Latinos, many of whom now live in the increasingly multiracial suburbs. They voted quite differently from urban Latinos, most of whom are renters, recently naturalized citizens, and live in overwhelmingly Latino neighborhoods. The first group seems to have split their ballots about evenly while the latter group went 70 percent for Kerry. This applies as well in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, running against a Latino candidate, did best among Latinos in more suburban areas, like the fast-growing San Bernardino-Riverside, and far worse in the barrios of the big cities.

A major factor in explaining these outcomes lies in the ethnic differences among Latinos. In many ways Latinos, like whites of European ancestry, identify not with their language or race but with their home countries. Urbanized and largely working class Puerto Ricans in New York, the base for Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's bid for mayor, vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Cubans, on the other hand, remain a bastion of Republican strength, particularly in Florida.

While Los Angeles does have pockets of middle-class Latinos, most Latino voters here are urbanized and a high proportion are immigrants from Mexico or Central America. Many, suggests University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers, have not yet achieved the dream of homeownership, retain close ties to their countries of origin, and tend to be poor and undereducated. "Many Latinos go somewhere like the city when they start and when they move up, they go to other areas," Myers says. In Southern California that usually means the sprawling suburbs of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, Orange County, or the San Bernardino-Riverside region. And many leave California entirely, most notably for lower-cost cities like Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, Reno, and even Boise. There, they have a better chance to own a home and start a business than in overpriced cities like Los Angeles or New York.

These voters, as Mellman and his boss discovered, often tend to become more conservative. In places such as Phoenix, Latinos voted 40 percent or more for Bush, far more than in places like Los Angeles or New York. In low density environments, Latinos vote more like their Anglo counterparts; in denser, urban places, they simply add to the deep blue hue of the local politics. The fact that, like other Americans, Latinos are rapidly suburbanizing is not a promising trend for Democrats. Already, roughly half of Latinos living in metropolitan areas of over 500,000 live in the periphery--compared, for example, to only 40 percent of African-Americans. By the end of the decade, there could be more Latinos in the Inland Empire (Los Angeles's suburbanized east periphery) than in the city itself.

Complex factors--naturalization, suburbanization, the growth of second and third generation populations--will define Latinos' role in American politics. Right now, both political parties tend to project their fantasies on to them. Republicans, pointing to Latinos' robust religious orientation and often conservative social values, see a potential base for themselves, or at least an even split of the Latino vote. Democrats, on the other hand, point to Latinos' lower-than-average economic status and their general approval for higher social spending as signs that they will become another faithful liberal bloc, like gay or African-American voters. To them, the Villaraigosa victory--followed perhaps by a Ferrer toppling of Michael Bloomberg this fall--could help usher in a new Democratic epoch.

The politicos can have their fantasies. But Latinos, like other immigrants to America, are likely to forge their own political course. And it may well prove more diverse and less predictable than either party now expects.

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