Imagine if Los Angeles fully activated the voting power of its Latino majority

How liberal is Los Angeles?

Even at first glance, the answer is: very. No Republicans hold city offices, and the Republican Party has ceased to play any meaningful role in Los Angeles governance or politics. The last Republican to be elected mayor was Richard Riordan, and he was reelected in 1997, nearly 30 years ago. 

In fact, the city is even more liberal than its recent history suggests. Even Democrats are being pulled to the left, with recent council elections going to more liberal contenders and Democratic Socialists. Mayor Karen Bass would be the liberal, Democratic mayor of any American city, but in Los Angeles, she’s a moderate.

And there are signs that the city’s leftward shift still has room to grow. A recent poll of Latinos nationwide, with breakouts of California and Los Angeles, demonstrated a well of untapped liberal politics waiting to engage in state and local elections.

That survey, conducted by BSP Research and commissioned by civil rights organization UnidosUS, found that Latinos nationally continue to identify most strongly with the Democratic Party and its candidates, including roughly 60% who favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. While many registered complaints about President Joe Biden, they aren’t the complaints of Republicans: Fully 46% of those polled said they were dissatisfied with Biden because he was not progressive enough. 

And while the economy and inflation topped the list of issues Latinos are most concerned about, two-thirds agreed with the statement that prices are increasing “because corporations are raising prices and making record profits” as opposed to just one-third who said that the cost of living was increasing “because Joe Biden has not taken enough actions to lower our costs.”

In Los Angeles, those numbers are even more lopsided, with Latinos in the nation’s second-largest city more supportive of Biden, more inclined to blame corporations for inflation and more likely to back Harris over Trump. 

Most of that is no great surprise. Latinos in California have tended to support Democrats at least since 1994, when Gov. Pete Wilson antagonized many Latinos in California by supporting Proposition 187. That ill-considered measure, most of which was ultimately thrown out by the courts, sought to deny undocumented residents benefits such as vaccinations and access to public schools.

What’s notable today is that even 30 years later, Latinos also remain underrepresented — and under-appreciated — by the Democratic Party and liberal activists. Asked whether they had been contacted by any candidate, party or civic organization to vote in November, half of Los Angeles Latinos said they had not. 

Imagine what LA’s electorate would look like if those potential voters were being encouraged to participate.

That’s true across California, where increases in Latino voting could affect the outcomes in a number of Congressional races, particularly in the Central Valley. But even in already-liberal Los Angeles, where Latinos are now a majority of residents, a jump in liberal voters could have significant effects in the long-term as well as this election.

Local measures on the November ballot include the extension of a county sales tax to pay for homeless services. Two-thirds of the people surveyed said they would support such a tax. The city and county each have government reform measures on the ballot, and Latinos again expressed support, with 53% saying that they favor the county measure to expand the board of supervisors to nine members and create an elected countywide executive (Only 7% opposed that measure. They were not polled on the city ethics proposal.).

There is also a contested race for district attorney of Los Angeles that could be affected by Latino turnout. In that contest, Nathan Hochman is challenging incumbent George Gascón, with Hochman leading in the polls. Although it is a nonpartisan contest and Hochman is running as an independent, he was the Republican candidate for attorney general of California two years ago, and his campaign has attacked Gascón from the right, arguing that Gascón has been too lenient in prosecuting criminal offenders. 

That gave Hochman a clear path to the run-off, but it could leave him vulnerable to a surge in liberal voters. Gascón has plenty of problems in this race — many liberals are fed up with him, too — so demographics may not save him. But huge turnout from Latino voters would certainly give him a better chance. 

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the newly elected president of the Los Angeles City Council, knows his way around the politics of Los Angeles. I asked him last week about the electorate’s ideology, and he agreed that even recent increases in voter turnout may not yet have produced a voting pool as liberal as the city itself.

“The electorate has shifted,” he said. “And the electoral apparatus is still focused on the entities that dominated the old electorate.”

Elaborating, he noted that “it’s relatively easy to communicate with homeowners.” Political consultants amass addresses and can, with enough resources, deluge a homeowner with messages and reminders to vote.

By contrast, “it’s not easy to communicate with renters,” who move more often.

Similarly, retirees are easy to contact. They tend to stay in one place, are often interested in protecting their interests, and have time to weigh candidates and ballot measures. Parents of young children, on the other hand, are busy getting kids to school and hustling off to work, making it harder to convince them to take the time to study their political options and vote.

It is only a matter of time, however, until political communications catch up with those voters. Too much rides on their participation.

Los Angeles politics will increasingly reflect their views — younger, less affluent, less settled in their homes. That will make an already liberal city even more so. The only questions are how soon and how much.