The Economist June 4th 2022 United States 33California primaries
Hey, big spender
A
n election inLos Angeles is not com-
plete without celebrities weighing in.
For the mayoral contest on June 7th, Snoop
Dogg, a godfather of gangsta rap, has en-
dorsed Rick Caruso, a billionaire former
Republican who has vowed to clean up the
city’s homeless encampments but offers
few details on how he will do so. Kris Jen-
ner, matriarch of the Kardashian clan, is al-
so stumping for Mr Caruso. Karen Bass has
Magic Johnson, a Los Angeles Lakers bas-
ketball legend, on her team. Ms Bass,
whom Joe Biden considered for the vice-
presidency, wants to leave Congress to set
up shop in City Hall.
The contest is arousing more interest
than usual, for two reasons. Eric Garcetti,
the current mayor, is term-limited, mak-
ing this the first open race since he took of-
fice in 2013. Second, turnout is expected to
balloon. This is not because the candidates
inspire particular devotion or ire, says Fer-
nando Guerra, director of the Centre for the
Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount
University (lmu). Rather, it is the first time
California has mailed ballots to all regis-
tered voters—and the first election in more
than a century that coincides with state-
wide races. Angelenos voted in 2015 to
move local elections to even-numbered
years from 2020, giving Mr Garcetti an ex-
tra-long second term.
This is a big change for Los Angeles. The
city’s leaders in the early 20th century set
up local elections to be non-partisan and
as isolated as possible from national poli-
tics, says Raphael Sonenshein of California
State University, Los Angeles. Some of that
non-partisanship remains. The top two
finishers on June 7th will advance to a run-
off in November regardless of their party
affiliation. Only if a candidate receives
more than 50% of the votes will they win
outright. The chances of that are slim. Poll-
ing from a pro-Bass political-action com-
mittee shows Mr Caruso and Ms Bass with
37% and 35% of the vote respectively. Kevin
de León, a city councilman and former
leader of the state Senate, is a distant third.
Electoral reforms a century ago also left
their mark in another way. New York City’s
charter gives to its mayor any powers that
are not assigned elsewhere, whereas Los
Angeles disperses power between the
mayor, city council and Los Angeles Coun-
ty—which is nearly the size of Connecticut
and home to a quarter of Californians. The
region’s sprawl and political fragmenta-
tion make tackling complex issues harder.
Consider homelessness, which has
dominated the campaign so far. About
66,000 homeless people—or 11% of Ameri-
ca's homeless—live in Los Angeles County,
many of them in tent encampments on the
streets. Angelenos are furious that the city
has been unable to house more people, de-
spite voting in 2016 to tax themselves to
create more housing for the chronically
homeless. Proposition hhh, a $1.2bn
bond, was supposed to help build 10,000
units; 1,500 had been built as of April.
Frustrations over homelessness, plus
spiralling housing costs and rising violent
crime during the pandemic, have cast a
pall over a usually sunny city. Last year, for
the first time since 2014, when lmubegan
polling, a majority of Angelenos thought
the region was heading in the wrong direc-
tion. “I think the city just feels harder,” says
Mr Garcetti. Nearly 400 people were mur-
dered in the city in 2021, the highest toll
since 2006.
Though grisly, that is still far below the
levels seen in the 1990s. Some 2,600 people
were killed in 1992, the year South laerupt-
ed after four police officers were acquitted
of beating Rodney King, a black man. Mr
Guerra sees parallels with mayoral elec-
tions that followed the Watts riot in 1965
and Rodney King riots in 1992. In 1969 An-
gelenos re-elected Sam Yorty, a race-bait-
ing incumbent with ties to the police. In
1993 they opted for Richard Riordan, a Re-
publican who has endorsed Mr Caruso.
“There are great similarities where the lib-
eral democratic regime doesn’t have an an-
swer to the question of public safety and it
opens the door for the opposition to make
a succinct argument and walk into the
mayor’s office,” says Mr Guerra.
Mr Caruso, who registered as a Demo-
crat in January, is betting that pattern will
continue. The property developer has
poured $37.5m of his $4.3bn fortune into
the race thus far, and suggests he willspend what it takes to win. His message is
simple: clean up encampments and get
more police on the streets. Ms Bass says
she decided to leave Congress to run, in
part, because she doesn’t want to see the
confluence of crises move Los Angeles in
“a conservative direction”. Voters cannot
punish Mr Garcetti at the ballot box—he
might quit laentirely if his nomination to
be Mr Biden’s ambassador to India comes
good—so they may take their frustrations
out on Ms Bass, who has represented parts
of Los Angeles in Congress since 2011.
The primary is just an appetiser for the
main course in November if Ms Bass and
Mr Caruso advance, as is probable. Even if
Mr Caruso eventually loses, the success of
his campaign so far suggests the lure of
progressivism fades when public safety is
the top concern. What does it mean for
Democrats that Los Angeles, a bastion of
the left, is seriously contemplating a bil-
lionaire ex-Republican as mayor? LOS ANGELES
The mayoral race in Los Angeles may
reveal the limits of progressive politics
Stars, or frustrations, aligning for Bass?Pro-choice clergyThe religious
majority
W
hen an episcopalpriest, Katherine
Hancock Ragsdale, was appointed
interim president of the National Abortion
Federation (naf) in 2018, her detractors
dusted down the insults they had thrown
at her when she declared abortion “a bless-
ing” outside a clinic in Alabama in 2007,
and when she was appointed the first
openly gay dean of an Episcopal seminary,
Episcopal Divinity School, in 2009. “High
priestess of abortion”, they called her, “ly-
ing baby-killing witch” and “fat, angry
dyke”—“to which I was so tempted to re-
spond, ‘I’m not angry’,” she recalls.
The Rev Ragsdale, who retired from the
naflast year, but remains on the board of
naralPro-Choice America where she has
been for 20 years, says she considers her
abortion-rights activism part of her duty as
a minister. There is nothing in the Bible,
nor most of the 2,000-year-old teachings
of Christianity, that proscribes abortion,
she says. There is plenty in both about
standing up for the poor, who bear the
brunt of any loss of abortion rights.
Opposition to Roe v Wade, the Supreme
Court ruling which in 1973 declared abor-
tion a constitutional right, has chiefly
come from Christian groups. If Roeis over-
turned soon it will be the result of half a
century of religious activism. Yet most
American Christians want it to stand. Data
from the Public Religion Research Insti-WASHINGTON, DC
A prominent priest is a reminder that
many clergy support abortion rights