The ballots have been cast and officially counted in CA-32.  The final numbers by percentage:

Judy Chu 32.64%

Gil Cedillo 23.23%

Emanuel Pleitez 13.4%

Betty Chu 10.44%

So…what’s the aftermath and what can we learn–besides, of course, that Judy Chu will defeat her distant cousin easily on July 14?  Postmortem below the flip.

The first thing to note is that this campaign was over before election day because, as previously reported, the Judy Chu campaign did an excellent job in collecting absentee votes.

Over one-quarter of the ballots cast in this special election were cast by mail early enough to be counted in the initial tally at the beginning of election night before the poll results started coming in–28.12% of the vote, to be specific–and Judy Chu won a hair short of 42% of those absentee ballots.  The Cedillo campaign was counting on high election-day turnout among less experienced voters to make up the difference, but there just wasn’t enough.

Most notable, however, is that if the election had been decided strictly on the poll vote, Judy Chu would have won anyway.  Crunching the numbers based on the absentee results and full results mention earlier, Judy Chu won a plurality of votes cast on election day: 11,273 out of 38,900, or just shy of 29%.  Cedillo got 25.56%, while Pleitez got 15.47%.

So, the big question, given those numbers, is: did the Pleitez candidacy ruin the chances of the “preferred” Latino candidate, Gil Cedillo, to retain what Congressman Joe Baca famously referred to as a “Hispanic seat”?  This narrative of Pleitez’ ethnic disloyalty is, apparently, running some nerves raw in the Cedillo camp, according to the postmortem of the race in yesterday’s L.A. Times:

Within the Cedillo campaign, there was a strong belief that Pleitez “has cost us a Latino congressional seat and that has stirred up a lot of feelings,” said a campaign staffer who requested anonymity because no one was authorized to speak publicly about the loss.

I am going to ignore here the idea–distasteful to some, I am sure–that Congressional Districts, including minority-majority districts, ought to be represented by a person of the majority ethnicity in the district.  The thing I’d like to focus on is that the aforementioned belief about Pleitez being a spoiler is almost certainly not true.

We’re just a few days removed from the election–and owing to that, there is much exact data about vote breakdowns by region, new voter registration, etc. that we just don’t have to be able to draw a conclusion one way or the other.  But we’re going to focus on what we do know.

If one ignores the potential spoiler role played by Betty Chu–who probably got a lot more votes than she deserved owing to confusion among the voters–it is definitely true that if Pleitez’ vote and Cedillo’s vote are added, it exceeds the vote for Judy Chu.  So, yes, the two Latino candidates combined got more votes than the Asian candidate.  The problem is that calculating things this way naively and automatically assumes that everyone who voted for Pleitez would have voted for his fellow Latino Cedillo if Pleitez had not been on the ballot.  We can dispel that assumption for a few reasons.

First, as the aforementioned article mentions, Pleitez ran very strong in his home neighborhoods of East Los Angeles and El Sereno.  These neighborhoods were Pleitez’ core base, which is why Cedillo sent his first outrageous mailer against Pleitez to Latinos in that area.  The interesting question is, what would those voters have done if Pleitez had  not been on the ballot?

Interestingly, another L.A. Times editorial about the race–this one ironically written by the mother of one of the young African American women featured on the infamous mailer, and worth a full read–adds to the clues of the mindset of these voters.  It’s obvious that the Cedillo campaign’s mentality in going against Pleitez in these areas was that these voters were going to vote for a Latino candidate, so it was worthwhile to make sure that Cedillo portrayed himself as the only Latino candidate worth voting for.  And in fact, Pleitez makes official what respected Calitics commenter Seneca Doane first noticed in the story I wrote here about the initial mailer.  Again, from the most recently mentioned L.A. Times, editorial:

“We’re throwing up the peace sign,” Pleitez said Thursday of their hand signals, frustration evident in a voice still soaked in disappointment from his third-place finish.

“To try to say that I’m romanticizing gangs, to try to make college students look like thugs. . . . They tried to find pictures with white and African American women, and only mailed them to Latino households.”

But regardless of the Cedillo campaign’s efforts to portray their candidate as the only respectable Latino in the race, it’s a sure bet that many of the voters in these communities were voting only because Pleitez was on the ballot–after all, he was the local kid who made good–like the article said, what just about every parent in East L.A. wishes their son would achieve (which is why going negative in the fashion that Cedillo did was, simply put, not only offensive, but stupid).

It is true that otherwise, Cedillo ran strong in the Latino communities of unincorporated East Los Angeles and the small cut of Los Angeles proper that lies within the district.  But it also seems true that many of the voters that the Pleitez campaign engaged would not have voted at all had it not been for Pleitez getting them to vote.

But even more damning for this line of evidence is the simple math.  Let’s assume the untrue, for the sake of argument–that every single supporter of Pleitez would have cast a ballot for either Judy Chu or Gil Cedillo had Pleitez not appeared on the ballot.  Even if 85% of Pleitez’ supporters had chosen Cedillo instead  while only 15% chose Chu, Cedillo still would have lost by 15 votes.

And how likely is that scenario?  Well, the evidence provided by the L.A. Times, as well as the anecdotal evidence provided by the Cedillo campaign, seems to speak to this question.

Latinos make up nearly half of the district’s registered voters, while Asians — Judy Chu is Chinese American — account for an estimated 10% to 13%. Chu appears to have won about one-third of the Latino vote, preliminary analyses indicate, plus virtually all the Asian vote and most of the white vote…

Pleitez appears to have done well among younger voters and English-speaking Latinos, including many who probably would not have voted for Cedillo even if the younger man not been in the race, several political analysts said.

Bottom line: Chu won a third of Latino voters regardless, and Pleitez won a chunk of the white vote, as well as a portion of the English-speaking Hispanic vote–which is why the Cedillo campaign sent a second mailer in English only to Latinos in the San Gabriel Valley.  Both of these demographics were groups that were less likely to support Cedillo, making it highly, highly unlikely that Pleitez played spoiler by taking 90% of his votes away from Gil Cedillo.

But just as important is the question of what the Latino political elite is going to do with Emanuel Pleitez.  The truth is that Pleitez had the most head-turning third-place finish in recent memory: he, as a 26-year-old, built a campaign essentially entirely off volunteer assistance from dedicated youth activists, raised an exceptional chunk of change using new media tools despite having no endorsements or institutional support, and caused one of the most prominent members of the Latino political elite to go into the gutter to try to counteract his momentum.

As the editorial about the mailer so aptly points out, the upcoming political generation–of which I am a part–is not inclined to wait its turn for someone to tell us we’re ready, given the tools, networks and experience we now have at our disposal.  And given that reality, the Latino political elite in Southern California–and any other political elite group faced with this same dynamic–is going to be forced to make a choice.  They can either seek to punish Pleitez and turn him into an outcast for not following the preordained orthodoxy, or they can take a look at what he was able to accomplish without them and say, “wow, we need more of that.”  For the sake of young voters and the Democratic bench, I sincerely hope they choose the latter.

If you’ve been following the CA-32 coverage on Calitics, you might have noticed that most pieces in traditional media outlets have portrayed the race as a toss-up between Chu and Cedillo.  But now, that coverage is apparently starting to change: the apparent strength of Chu’s absentee voter operation, combined with the surging Pleitez campaign that experts are estimating will drain more votes from Cedillo than Chu, have caused recent news about the race to cast Judy Chu has the frontrunner.  From The Hill:

Endorsements, a hefty war chest and an effective absentee ballot program appear to have put California Board of Equalization Vice Chairwoman Judy Chu (D) in position to succeed former Rep.-turned-Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (D-Calif.).

In earlier coverage, I reported that as of Wednesday, 29% of the 12,000 or so ballots cast were cast by voters of Asian-Pacific Islander descent, according to Chu campaign consultant Parke Skelton.  Skelton must be even happier now:

Skelton said that as of Friday, between 16,000 and 17,000 voters had returned absentee ballots and 31 percent of those were Asian – far higher than the 18 percent of Asian voters in the district. He expects that there are another 4,000 absentees that were returned over the weekend, and expects to do well among those as well.

“We had a very substantial door-to-door campaign generating absentee ballots,” he said.

Similarly, NPR’s political blog, Political Junkie, is even more explicit:

California’s 32nd Congressional District, just east of Los Angeles, is about 63 percent Latino, 22 percent Asian. It is the seat held since 2001 by Hilda Solis (D), now the secretary of labor. Prior to that, it was held for 18 years by Matthew Martinez, a Democrat, who lost to Solis in the 2000 primary at the age of 71 amid charges that he was ineffective and invisible.

But if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, this overwhelmingly Hispanic district may send an Asian woman, Judy Chu, on her way to Congress in Tuesday’s special primary.

So, if Emanuel Pleitez is eating away at Cedillo’s base and Judy Chu is making the Asian vote perform, two questions arise: 1) how does Chu lose, and 2) how does Cedillo win?

The first question can be answered with a name you’ve probably heard before: Betty Chu (if you haven’t, here’s some background.)  In such a low-turnout special, voter confusion could matter–and Betty Chu appears to be taking full advantage.  From The Hill:

Complicating matters further for Judy Chu, Betty Chu chose to have her name transliterated into Chinese on the ballot, opting for a symbol that bears a striking resemblance to Judy Chu’s Chinese character.

As Parke Skelton, Judy Chu’s top strategist, deadpanned: “It’s kind of a problem for us.”

Skelton countered the issue by playing up the difference in the two Chinese characters. Since Judy Chu’s character means, in part, “heart,” Skelton sent mail to Asian voters with an Americanized heart symbol around his candidate’s name, hoping to remind them to remember “heart” in the voting booth.

Hardly a coincidence, I would imagine.  But the second question…how can Cedillo win?  That question actually has two answers.  The first, as mentioned before, is an extensive ground game:

Cedillo’s camp, however, isn’t giving up any ground. Derek Humphrey, Cedillo’s campaign manager, believes he has a superior Election Day get-out-the-vote campaign in place.

“We’ve got three campaign offices, five or six staging locations,” he said. “We’re everywhere in the district.”

But apparently, the Cedillo campaign has another secret weapon…the Los Angeles Lakers!

Seriously.

No word on whether Kobe Bryant is going to walk any El Monte neighborhoods before the game–or whether the Cedillo campaign got (or needed) permission from the NBA to use official affiliate logo on its campaign materials.

I was invited yesterday by Emanuel Pleitez’ press secretary Emily Dulcan to come to the office to interview Emanuel Pleitez and some members of his team on the second day of GOTV weekend.  By chance, campaign consultant Eric Hacopian, who has been the center of a manufactured controversy recently, happened to be in the office, so I got a chance to interview him as well.

The office was lively, with about two dozen phone bankers of all ethnicities and ages working the phones from the campaign office.  According to the field directors, they currently had 55-60 volunteers canvassing neighborhoods from that office at the time.  For space, the recap of the interviews is below the flip.

When I talked with Hacopian, the subject I was most interested in was his take on Cedillo’s strategy–and Hacopian struck an affable but mildly derisive tone.  But in the end, it came down to the idea that Cedillo’s mail team was completely incompetent:

They’ve raised close to a million.  We’ve raised nearly $300,000.  And we’ve either outmailed them or it’s even.  If we had their money, we would have sent out 25 mail pieces, instead of the 15 that we have.

Eric told me that the main objective of mail is to develop a narrative about the campaign–that mail pieces aren’t just extemporaneous, but that they’re carefully designed to build in the minds of the voters a story about who the candidate is and why he or she is better than the opposing candidate.  Eric told me that one of the Cedillo team’s main problems is that their mailers hadn’t done that:

…but Gil hasn’t done that.  It’s all, endorsement, endorsement, endorsement, and, oh, the other two candidates are evil.

But what Eric really pointed out was that Cedillo’s latest mailings that we have been covering have not been centered around advancing the narrative of the campaign at all, but rather toward what appeared to be staunching the bleeding:

So, the first mailer [that Cedillo sent against Pleitez] went out to Latinos in [East L.A.].  But the second one–they took out the Rosario Dawson picture and then sent it to the whole San Gabriel Valley.  Now that should tell you something.

It should tell you what I wrote a few days ago:

There are two ways to look at this: one is that Cedillo’s campaign is bleeding educated Latino voters in the SGV.  The other is that the Cedillo campaign has so much money left to spend in the days before election day that they figure they may as well.

And, for good measure, I asked him about the conspiracy theory that Pleitez only got in the race as a pawn of Mayor Villaraigosa to take votes away from Gil Cedillo:

Emanuel announced before Gil did, so it’s pretty difficult to be a stalking horse for someone who’s not even in the race yet.  Of course I know Parke [Skelton, consultant for Judy Chu].  There are only 7 or 8 guys who do what we do in L.A.  But you ever notice how all these conspiracy theories involve meeting in public places?  The last one I heard was about how we all had a meeting at a CPK.  If we were going to plot a conspiracy, you think we’d do it at a CPK?  It’s all ridiculous.

And last point from my conversation with Eric–I asked him about the description of Pleitez in a few publications as a “web candidate.”

There is no such thing.  The internet has never won an election.  It has helped.  It can give you an additional edge, which is what we’re seeing, but that’s it.  This doesn’t happen without the people running the field and running the mail.  The web has been great for raising money–about 80-90% of contributions are online–and those people may have written checks, but the web just makes it that much easier.

I also talked for a few minutes with Emanuel himself.  There has been so much coverage of the campaign already that I decided to focus on what happens after tomorrow.  First, I asked him what he intended to do next if he didn’t advance to the July 14 runoff.

I’m not worried about that…I’ll be fine.  The people I’m worried about are the 60 full-time volunteers, some of whom have refused paying jobs to be able to work on this campaign.

I also asked him if, given recent events, he would have a hard time endorsing the Democratic nominee if he doesn’t succeed, depending on how the vote tomorrow goes.

It’s customary for that to happen, and I am a Democrat and I would support the one Democrat against the one Republican, for sure.  It would matter more if it were a 50-50 district instead of a really Democratic one, because the Democrat is going to win.  Now, how much of my time and resources I would commit to helping would be something I would need to figure out.

I certainly wasn’t trying to ask “gotcha” questions, but I also asked Emanuel agreed with the recent characterization of Congressman Baca that the CA-32 was a Hispanic seat.

Well, the district was originally carved in the 1980s to be a seat with a a large Hispanic population, and the district is 60% Latino.  And I knew that when I got into the race a lot of people would accuse me of [splitting the Latino vote].  A few elected officials told me that I would stay out of the race if I wanted to continue a career.  But I ran anyway because I wanted to offer the voters of the district a different choice.

Emanuel was heavily focused on the idea that his campaign could set a model for how insurgent or nontraditional campaigns could be run in the future.  He repeatedly stressed the idea that he did not have the most money and did not have any prominent endorsements, which required him to run an outside-the-box campaign using dedicated and passionate volunteers doing outreach to their friends and family, both online and offline.

My thoughts?  Emanuel’s success–or failure–will provide an example for whether the type of campaign that he is running will become a model for the future.  If Emanuel finishes anywhere besides third–or even if he has a strong showing in third place behind the two heavyweights he’s opposing–he will send a message to other young insurgent candidates that there is a new model of campaigning out there that could spur them to electoral success.

First of all, forgive me for not posting an update about the CA-32 race yesterday–I happened to have the honor of being a volunteer driver in Vice President Biden’s motorcade during his recent stay in Los Angeles.  Mr. Dayen did an admirable job of picking up the slack.

In addition, I wish to issue a correction today.  In Wednesday’s roundup, I made a factual mistake in implying that if Judy Chu were to win the CA-32 race, that there would be a special election to replace her.  This is not true.  The California Constitution specifies that in the event of a vacancy on the Board of Equalization, the Governor appoints a replacement subject to the confirmation of a majority of the Assembly and the Senate.  It would be interesting to ask whom Schwarzenegger would appoint in that scenario, as well as to see if the Democratic Legislature would permit the Governor to appoint a Republican to fill a strongly Democratic Board of Equalization district.  In any case, I apologize for the error.

Now then–main event below the flip.

I want the readers of Calitics to understand something perfectly clearly.  As the Editorial Board made clear before I joined it, the editors on this site did not have it as their objective in any way to influence the upcoming election in CA-32 one way or the other, given what was surmised as the quality and depth of the Democratic field in this race.  But Gil Cedillo’s campaign changed that.  We first got a hint of the tack that campaign was taking when his team responded to Mayor Villaraigosa’s endorsement of Judy Chu, and we’ve seen it continue in the negative campaign strategy and apparent sense of entitlement that have been profiled on our site’s coverage of this race.

Now, it seems, Senator Cedillo is pulling out all the stops in this effort.  If you thought it was ugly before…now it’s really ugly.

First, Cedillo’s campaign has dropped yet another negative mailer against Emanuel Pleitez.  According to sources in the Pleitez campaign, this mailer was sent to Latinos in the San Gabriel Valley–and apparently the Cedillo campaign is expecting the targets of this mailer to be English-speakers, because the mailer is not bilingual.  To be sure, I completely understand why the Cedillo campaign would seek to suppress and persuade Pleitez’ home turf of unincorporated East LA, but it’s a different matter to be sending out an English-only mailer to the San Gabriel Valley.  There are two ways to look at this: one is that Cedillo’s campaign is bleeding educated Latino voters in the SGV.  The other is that the Cedillo campaign has so much money left to spend in the days before election day that they figure they may as well.  After all, the mailer is basically a carbon copy of the previous attack against Pleitez–without, of course, the Rosario Dawson photo that gave the campaign a black eye–except with new text, as you can see below.

Click to view attack mailer

Now, last time I checked, Pleitez has been representing himself as a member of the Obama-Biden Treasury Department Transition Team who took that gig after leaving the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.  I didn’t know he was an unpaid mail room intern!

Well, in something that should come as no surprise, Gil Cedillo’s campaign is lying, and he’s hoping that the voters he’s targeting don’t pick up on that fact.  See, anyone who knows how to use Google would be able to find out relatively quickly that Emanuel Pleitez is listed on change.gov, the official site of the Obama-Biden Transition, as a member of the Treasury Department Review Team, along with 22 colleagues.  Something makes me think that the unpaid mail room interns aren’t listed on change.gov.

As a matter of fact, some of Emanuel’s fellow team members who are listed on that page include some big names in the financial sector, including some who have provided quotes in support of Pleitez’ work on the team as well as his candidacy.  Names like Ed Knight, who used to be General Counsel for the Treasury Department in the Clinton Administration.  As a matter of checking the veracity of the full statement, I contacted Emanuel Pleitez to get the story about whether he was paid or unpaid as a member of the Transition Team.  Pleitez informed me that owing to a budgetary problem with the Transition Team, he was in fact not paid for his work, and left after finishing the performance of his duties to run for CA-32.

The mailer also scorns Pleitez as being merely Mayor Villaraigosa’s driver–and it is hardly a coincidence that a mailer associating Pleitez with Villaraigosa would appear in the mailboxes of voters in the San Gabriel Valley, where the mayor is hardly a popular figure (see the aforementioned response to the endorsement of Chu by Villaraigosa for a taste of that rift).

As part of my conversation with Pleitez, I asked him to provide me the full record of his paid work for Villaraigosa.  According to Pleitez, he worked as a Council Aide in his neighborhood of El Sereno for then-Councilmember Villaraigosa during the second half of 2003, and also worked as a Personal Assistant whose duties included driving, scheduling and advance work for Villaraigosa during his second mayoral campaign culminating in April 2005.

Bottom line is this: the accusation that Pleitez was nothing more than a driver and a “mail-room intern” is atrociously false and misleading.  But we have come to expect nothing less from the Cedillo campaign.

And as much as it pains me to say it, I’m just halfway done.

If the Cedillo campaign has one fatal flaw, it’s one of exaggeration and overkill.  When they attacked Mayor Villaraigosa, they went too far.  When they questioned Pleitez’ character, it backfired.  When they questioned Pleitez’ experience, they distorted the truth in a fashion that would embarrass Baghdad Bob.  The mailers accusing Judy Chu of pay-to-play were misleading, to put it kindly.  And now, the Cedillo campaign is doing its best to cast doubt on the Judy Chu’s loyalty to the United States.  Check out the latest mailer from Cedillo’s camp against Judy:

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There comes a point at which you just don’t know what to say.  The backstory here is that this Helen Leung character donated a certain amount to Judy Chu’s campaign in 2001 and 2002.  In 2003, she was indicted on suspicion of passing classified documents.  So far, we’re in accordance with the mailer here.

But what the mailer doesn’t tell you is that, according to the Chu campaign, her BoE campaign at the time returned the contribution as soon as they found out it came from a tainted source.  But what’s particularly disgusting about this particular piece is that the narrative it builds in attempting to question Chu’s patriotism is itself based on a narrative that has already been debunked.  I reference in particular the second page of the mailer–in particular the last two paragraphs that imply that if Chu was playing pay-to-play with corporate contributors, then she might owe something to Chinese spies!  Problem is, of course, that as has been documented over and over, the pay-to-play allegations are demonstrably false, according to the L.A. Times and the Board of Equalization itself.

The Cedillo campaign must not have much negative to go on against Judy Chu if the best they can do is build a narrative of suspicion of treason based off a returned campaign contribution from seven years ago.  But even richer is the back of the mailer–viewable at link 4 above.  The endorsement quote, from American Liberty Foundation PAC, goes out of its way to further question Judy Chu’s loyalty to the United States.  But what exactly is American Liberty Foundation PAC?

If your first thought was, “wow, that sounds like one of those right-wing think tank groups!”, well, consider your suspicions correct.  If you google “American Liberty Foundation” you’ll get a bunch of links to sites and spinoff organizations that are relatively minor and all support the policies of Ron Paul–such as this one, which used to be a libertarian organization devoted to eliminating the income tax, getting guns for everyone, and documenting the pre-emptive war in Iraq.

The problem is, of course, that “American Liberty Foundation” changed its name to “Downsize DC” in 2004, and the actual search in Google of “American Liberty Foundation PAC” yields no results–though the closest is former Republican Ohio Congressman Bob Ney’s “American Liberty PAC” which funded Republicans in Ohio in 2004 and 2005.  Given the multiple disclosures that are required of PACs who donate to federal campaigns, it is quite surprising to see an official PAC name not return any results on Google, which suggests that the PAC either doesn’t exist, or, if it does, it was very recently formed, given the fact that the FEC’s list of Committees who have contributed to Cedillo’s campaign does not mention anything having to do with “American Liberty Foundation”–as a matter of fact, searching the FEC database for American Liberty Foundation PAC yields no results.

So, the Cedillo campaign is using what is at best a paper PAC to provide a quote for the purposes of impugning the patriotism and loyalty of its chief opponent.

Just when I think that Cedillo’s team can’t stoop any lower into the dregs of moral reprehensibility, there they go.  And, of course, the irony of this campaign using what sounds like a right-wing group to attack the patriotism of a competitor is very rich in irony, given the reputation Cedillo has in certain circles owing to his support (which I agree with, by the way) for rights and protections for the undocumented.

For the record, some members of the Chu campaign are also upset with Emanuel Pleitez for attacking along the same lines at a recent town hall event, using a Ciceronian-style praeteritio to reference the same allegations (cue the 17:00 marker).

Either way, the Cedillo campaign mail strategy is among the most ugly and dishonest I’ve had the misfortune to observe up close.  I can’t wait for this to be over so he can stop destroying his reputation, win or lose.

Five days left to go, and the news continues out of CA-32–mostly recaps and summaries.  And most of these articles are some of the prime examples of just why journalism is suffering–perhaps I should call it “the banality of balance.”  In the attempt to be as even-handed as possible, the truth is often a casualty.  But there are a couple of good, more detailed pieces about the election, which I’d like to highlight below.

For the sake of brevity, go beneath the flip.  I promise it’s worth the click.  There’s a lot of interesting material today.

Before I get started with the main event, I want to point out a couple of things.  First, the Huffington Post is joining a bunch of other publications, online and offline, in giving Emanuel Pleitez very positive coverage.  Regardless of the outcome of this race, there’s a bright future for Pleitez ahead, it would seem.  He’s making a lot of friends and few enemies during this campaign.

And speaking of Emanuel Pleitez: Gil Cedillo was doing an interview with progressive Latino radio host Mario Solis Marich today.  And according to a tweet from Mario, Cedillo defended the controversial mailer against Pleitez by saying that he and Latina actress Rosario Dawson were “glamorizing gang activity” by being photographed flashing the symbol for the nonprofit, nonpartisan voter registration advocacy group Voto Latino.  Memo to Gil Cedillo: if you want to consider it a mistake to flash a symbol for something because of the fact that flashing signs is often associated with gang membership, that’s one thing.  But equating that with “glamorizing gang activity”–which usually amounts to murder, robbery, assault and extortion–is something else entirely.  When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Now then.  Both Roll Call and Politico take up the issue of CD-32 in their online versions today.  Both of these treatments are far superior to the L.A. Times article I scorned yesterday. If you read them, you’re likely to get the same basic information, which could be summarized as follows:

• The district is mostly Latino, but Asians tend to be more active voters.

• Demographics would seem to favor Cedillo, but Chu is a good crossover candidate with good labor support and endorsements from many Latino leaders and electeds.

• Emanuel Pleitez has taken many by surprise by building a strong campaign, but he’ll be a spoiler at best.  Betty Chu might influence things by confusing people.

• Both the Cedillo and Chu campaign has gone negative, and Cedillo’s has gone negative against Pleitez, which indicates that it’s worried about Pleitez’ Latino support.

• Turnout will suck.

• Who will win?  Take a wild guess, and you’ll be as good a prognosticator as anyone.

That’s a fair summary of the race.  What I don’t like about these articles, though, is that neither of them take a stab at evaluating the truth and accuracy of many of the accusations that have been flying back and forth, despite the treatment of those pieces in major media outlets.  You can find a good recap of those issues by reading the Calitics coverage of the CA-32 race.  Nevertheless, both these articles have a couple of interesting tidbits, which I’d like to highlight.

First, Judy Chu’s consultant Parke Skelton was misreported by both articles concerning the percentage of absentee voters of Asian descent–the Roll Call article quotes Skelton as saying that Asians make up 29% of the 12,000 voters that have returned absentee ballots, while the Politico piece quotes Skelton as calculating it at 37% of 10,000.  Thankfully, your intrepid CA-32 correspondent has obtained clarification from Mr. Skelton about this:

The numbers are, about 29% of those already voted are API [Asian-Pacific Islander].  About 37% of the field generated AVs [absentee voters] are API.

The number got mangled by one of the reporters.

The already voteds are heavily PAV [permanent absentee voter], the field generates come in later.

So what does that mean in practice?  It seems to be encouraging for the Chu campaign so far.  As a whole in the district, 29% of those who have already cast ballots are API, and those are heavily permanent absentee voters who are usually active voters.  A field-generated absentee voter is a direct product of campaign activity–getting a voter who is a supporter to register for an absentee ballot and turn it in to make sure that the campaign doesn’t have to worry about GOTV on GOTV weekend and election day.  If, in the whole district, 37% of field-generated votes so far are from the API community–twice the percentage of Asians registered in the district as a whole–it seems to indicate that the Chu campaign is mobilizing its ethnic base effectively with its absentee voter campaign.  To be able to counter this, the Cedillo campaign will need a very effective election-day mobilization strategy.  To their credit, that’s exactly what campaign manager Derek Humphrey promised to Roll Call:

Even without the labor federation endorsement, Cedillo, a former union organizer, has picked up some union support, and Derek Humphrey, his campaign manager, predicted the campaign would have “one of the most aggressive grass-roots [get out the vote] operations in Los Angeles County history.”

Turnout is also strikingly low so far–with 12,000 voters have returned their ballots so far, that’s less than .5% of the 245,000 voters (warning: PDF) that were registered in CA-32 as of the March 20 60-day close report.  My personal opinion is that the low turnout so far bodes well for Judy Chu, and seems to indicate what the two articles are stating: that the higher the turnout is, the more it favors Cedillo owing to simple demographic considerations.

Ethnic appeals in the campaign are also taking center stage, which makes perfect sense in this district.  Quoth Politico:

“The candidate who best identifies who their voters are, and gets them out to cast their ballot will win this thing,” said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan guide that tracks statewide elections. “It’s between Chu and Cedillo as the two main contenders, … and they all agree on the issues, so this race has come down to ethnicity and character.”

True enough.  And, in fact, the Chu campaign is in fact accusing the Cedillo campaign of ethnicity-based campaigning.  From Roll Call:

Chu’s campaign believes Cedillo made a subtle appeal to Hispanic voters when he sent out a mailer recently tying Chu to shady Chinese businessmen. But will more blatant appeals to ethnic pride follow?

The Chu campaign isn’t the only outfit that has accused the Cedillo campaign of making racially motivated appeals.  The Calitics Editorial Board did the same thing (N.B. that this was written before I joined the board), especially in the context of the Pleitez mailer, which seemed to coincidentally feature pictures of Pleitez with white and African American women.

But if the Cedillo campaign is to be defended against these accusations, the truth of the matter is that given the context of the campaign, they don’t really have a choice if they want to win.  The Cedillo campaign is wedged between a candidate of a different ethnicity with certain crossover appeal and key endorsements on one side, and on the other side by an aggressive young candidate who is eating into the base that Cedillo needs.  If Cedillo is going to win, he’s going to have to do it by being the candidate from and for the Latino community and getting those voters out to the polls, which is no easy challenge.  I make no bones about saying that the strategies that the Cedillo campaign has been employing are personally distasteful.  But I also understand that given the current climate, that’s the path to victory.

That’s the news for today.  I will be occupied for most of tomorrow and unable to post a roundup, but I will be visiting the campaigns of Cedillo, Chu and Pleitez before election day to give a report from the ground about how the three major campaigns are going.

Six days left to go, and the chattering class is paying attention.  Here’s what they’re saying.

• The Los Angeles Times is doing their take on the ethnic divide on the race, and presents something you probably never knew–that voters tend to prefer voting for candidates of their own ethnicity over those of other ethnicities!  I guess Avenue Q was right.  Especially telling is the final quote:

“Ethnicity is a factor,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC. “But it’s not the only factor.”

My world has been rocked beyond belief.  Sarcasm aside, though–if you’re going to do a piece on ethnicity in the CA-32 race, you could at least include some of the juicier, more intriguing aspects of the race–things like, what type of support will Emanuel Pleitez draw and how will that affect the race?  What will the impact of Betty Tom Chu be?  You know–more like our coverage.

• If national media coverage won local Congressional elections, Emanuel Pleitez would be in really good shape.  Following up on the positive coverage in the Los Angeles Times about his candidacy, National Journal has what amounts to a glowing review of Pleitez’ online strategy in today’s online version.  While I think that calling Pleitez a “web candidate” in the title does him a little bit of a disservice, the point is that Pleitez has tried something relatively new for a Congressional seat: using social media to facilitate a more lateral structure as a major part of the organization.

To me, the most interesting part of Pleitez’ run against two much better known heavyweights is the fact that if the same race had been run five years ago, someone like Pleitez would have struggled to even get off the ground, much less be talked about in the same breath as the major candidates in this race.  But the creation of easy-to-use online fundrasing through ActBlue as well as the massive proliferation of social media has allowed for the creation of an entirely different element to politics that really used to only apply at a more national scale, starting with Dean and perfected by Obama.  The most interesting thing will be to see what happens when today’s Facebook generation become political heavyweights themselves–how will the traditional and currently non-traditional elements of politics interact?  I expect that at some point in the future Pleitez’ run for Congress will become a reference point for political experts about both the benefits and the drawbacks of dependence on social media as a key element in the campaign.

• Presuming that either Gil Cedillo or Judy Chu advances to the expected runoff and then proceeds to victory in July, the game of musical chairs will continue–either for Chu’s Board of Equalization seat, or for Cedillo’s 22nd District Senate Seat.  La Opinión is reporting (Spanish-language) that if it’s the latter, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ed Reyes (District 1) is going to take a shot at the seat.  That, of course, would open up a seat on the City Council as well.  Just one more reason for Democratic politicians to really support Democratic Presidents–it opens up all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.

• I’m glad we have better commenters than the people at Mayor Sam.  This nugget is particularly entertaining:

I could dream that 3 Dems could split the enough so that the R can win but that is dreaming. If we were competitive in urban areas that scenario wouldn’t be out of the question.

Some people just don’t understand that this is a consolidated Primary election.  Just to clarify: if nobody gets 50%, the top vote-getter by party will proceed to the July runoff.

When I got home last night I was intrigued to find waiting for me in my mailbox a piece from the Yes on 1A/1B campaign (hey Brian, where’s my direct mail?).  It’s apparently directed to Democrats, because the mailer is attempting to make the case that Obama supports 1A and 1B, and you should too:

1A/1B Obama mailer

Apparently, Obama’s not-quite-endorsement of the special election propositions came at a love-fest with Schwarzenegger a couple of months ago during the President’s visit to Los Angeles, during which I barely got out of downtown before they shut down the streets.

The mail piece quotes a piece by San Francisco Chronicle political writer Carla Marinucci, which basically describes a love-in of sorts between Schwarzenegger and Obama regarding the state and federal budget crisis:

Obama praised Schwarzenegger as “one of the great innovators of state government, somebody who has been leading California through some very difficult times, somebody who has turned out to be an outstanding partner” in economic recovery.

Schwarzenegger, who has prominently broken with some of his fellow Republican governors who have criticized the federal stimulus package as an example of bloated overspending, went the full measure on Thursday, praising both the president and his stimulus plan.

“It’s the greatest package,” he said. “I’m so happy we are getting these kinds of benefits from the federal government and President Obama.” He called the Democrat “a fantastic partner” and “our leader in economic recovery.”

During the event, Obama added a nod to “the initiatives” on the ballot:

Obama, addressing a question from a member of the audience regarding cutbacks in education funding, stopped short of a formal endorsement of the governor’s six ballot measures. But he told the audience at the Miguel Contreras Learning Center that he had discussed the issues with the governor.

“That’s why it’s so important for everybody to get engaged in the various initiatives that are going to be coming up, to make sure – that what you just articulated, to invest in our kids … is reflected in the state budget,” he said.

He warned that in the current economic situation, voters who want better schools, better roads and better infrastructure should know that “you can’t have something for nothing … you can’t ask local elected officials to balance the budget” and cut taxes and improve roads. “Somebody’s got to pay for it,” he said.

The Yes on 1A campaign is trying to get you to vote their way because of a tepid nod by President Obama.  But what’s really telling is the last paragraph, not the middle one. I fully agree with President Obama on that.  Now, if only we could get him to move past giving lukewarm nods to special election propositions that will have a bunch of negative consequences, what if we actually got him to support a sane constitution for this state instead?