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.
