The local Jewish vote, traditionally cast for Democratic candidates, may have played a key role in the election Tuesday of the first Republican mayor of Los Angeles in more than three decades.
According to tracking polls, 40 percent of the Jews who voted in the election cast their ballots for multimillionaire Richard Riordan, a political newcomer who combined a call for economic recovery and a tough stance on crime with a long record of generosity to inner-city schools.
He defeated two-term City Councilman Mike Woo, a liberal Democrat who pitched his message of multiethnic coalition building to the same voters who elected and supported Mayor Tom Bradley during his 20-year tenure.
Going into the election, the Jewish vote was considered by many to be the swing vote in what appeared to be a neck-and-neck race.
It might have seemed a given that the Jewish community that had so strongly supported Bradley and had cast some 80 percent of its vote for Bill Clinton in November would stand behind Woo and his progressive social agenda.
In the end, however, it was some of those same long-time Democrats who rallied behind the 61-year-old Riordan.
They did that, said political scientist Joel Kotkin, for the same reason other voters did. Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based senior fellow with the Center for the New West, a Denver think tank, said Riordan represents change, and in a city still reeling from last year’s riots and caught in a painful economic slump, that promise carried enormous weight.
‘SICK AND TIRED OF CRIME’
“What we may finally be seeing is that urban Jews have joined the ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’ crowd,” Kotkin said the morning after the race. “They’re sick and tired crime, of being strangled by business regulations, of dysfunctional schools.”
The comparatively high number of Jewish voters who went for Riordan — only 20 percent of Los Angeles Jews voted for George Bush — has implications beyond this particular race, he said.
“What you’re seeing is that the Jews are no longer being swayed by traditional sort of liberal rhetoric, particularly in hard times. I think it’s the beginning of an evolution of the Jewish community away from its overwhelming attachment to liberal Democratic politics.”
Even though the mayoral race was officially non-partisan, no one truly expected it to evolve that way, and thus expected that Woo would easily be able to beat a Republican in a largely Democratic city.
And even though two-thirds of the city’s voters are members of minority groups, the same percentage of registered voters are white, which may have aided Riordan.
“I think that the city really needed to be turned around and move in a new direction,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee. “There was a sense that Riordan was better able to do that and that Woo represented, to a certain extent, politics as usual.”
Riordan’s promise to find the funds to put 3,000 more police officers on the street may have had particular resonance for Jewish voters.
“Safety is an issue that’s more important to minority communities, according to polls,” Greenebaum said.
NO LONGER HAVE ‘NATURAL ALLIES’
During the primaries, neither Riordan nor Woo paid particular attention to Jewish voters, assuming that Jews would back City Councilman Joel Wachs or State Assemblyman Richard Katz, who captured third and fourth place respectively, and who are both Jewish.
But as the race progressed and the candidates neared the finish line, they clearly realized that the undecided middle class — to which most Los Angeles Jews belong — would determine the outcome.
In turn, both courted the Jewish vote heavily, attending numerous Jewish events and celebrations around the city.
Despite those intense efforts, many Jews clearly remained torn between the two candidates until the end.
“I heard many saying they were choosing the lesser of two evils. They didn’t feel good about supporting Woo or Riordan,” said Greenebaum.
Now that Riordan is in office, it remains to be seen what sort of relationship he will forge with the city’s Jewish population.
“I think that the Jewish community, at least certain parts of it, are going to feel a partnership with Riordan as L.A. starts to re-create itself in various ways,” Greenebaum predicted.
Carol Plotkin, associate director of the American Jewish Congress in Los Angeles, on the other hand, believes that the Jewish community, particularly its more liberal elements, may have to work harder than it has in the past to establish an alliance with city leadership.
“We don’t have the natural allies we once had there in City Hall,” she said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
