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.

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.

This Gil Cedillo is really a miserable little person.  Over at Nuestra Voice you can hear him with LA radio DJ Mario Solis Marich answering questions about that ridiculous attack mailer on Emanuel Pleitez using Facebook photos to build a narrative of Pleitez as a scary drunken gang-lover who parties with white women.  In the transcript, you’ll notice Cedillo’s immediate reaction to bringing up Pleitez’ name:

SOLIS MARICH: There was some controversy over the past 2 weeks when your campaign decided to do a negative attack piece on newcomer Emanuel Pleitez. Many people who observe campaigns including myself took that as a sign that the young candidate was really eating into your base.

CEDILLO: Well, one we’re not sure we’d call it negative unless he calls it negative, the fact that he posted these photos on his Facebook.

Two, we recognize what his roll is in this campaign, to suppress the vote and to try to take away votes and we think the electorate has the right to know all the information, information that he’s made public, about the candidates. We put the record out there and let people decide if they want to elect someone who has 25 years of effective leadership or if they want to elect somebody who they may not have full confidence in.

So in other words, anyone who participates in a campaign to try and get elected is automatically “suppressing votes,” presumably votes from Gil Cedillo.  The backstory here is that Parke Skelton, Judy Chu’s campaign manager, and Eric Hacopian, Pleitez’ top strategist, have worked together on other campaigns, which is to be expected from two Democratic consultants in LA.  Off of that thin reed Cedillo spins a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that Emanuel Pleitez swooped into the race to suppress votes from the naturally chosen “one” candidate who is supposed to win the seat.  Now, if you were of a conspiratorial nature, you could say the exact same thing about Betty Tom Chu, the Republican Monterey Park City Councilwoman who entered the race late and will undoubtedly cause some ballot confusion given the closeness of names between her and Judy Chu.  But it’s this sense of entitlement on the part of Cedillo, this idea that he deserves that Congressional seat and no Hispanic should dare “suppress the vote” by, you know, running against him, that stands out here.  This is typical sleazeball identity politics, the idea that any Hispanic must vote for a Hispanic, and multiple Hispanics in the field dilute the strength of the vote, and they should line up and wait their turn behind the self-anointed savior.

Now, here’s the rest of the interview, where Cedillo becomes increasingly ridiculous:

SOLIS MARICH: So, you don’t think that using pictures of a person at a party where they were basically doing what many people of all different ages do, enjoying themselves…

CEDILLO: Dancing on tables and using gang signs that he published on his Facebook, we think, first of all, one, we do not romanticize gangs or gang violence. He and I grew up in the same neighborhood…

SOLIS MARICH: Senator, let me just correct something, before you go down that path, maybe your staff hasn’t told you but he was actually…the quote unqute gang signs…he was actually at a Voto Latino event…

CEDILLO: I know where he was, I know where he was.

SOLIS MARICH: …and he was standing next to a very very respected actress and Latina activist Rosario Dawson who was actually with him making the same signs. So, are you accusing Rosario Dawson of using gang signs?

CEDILLO: I’m saying that that’s inappropriate, I find it inappropriate…

SOLIS MARICH: For both him and Rosario Dawson?

CEDILLO: Yes.  I find it inappropriate, I find it offensive. I don’t romanticize that one bit…

Solis Marich doesn’t get it out, but the “gang sign” made by Pleitez and Dawson stands for Voto Latino.  According to Cedillo, any hand gesture made in a photograph automatically romanticizes gangs.  I’ll bet he doesn’t bring a sign language interpreter along for his speeches!

The dreaded dialogue continues:

SOLIS MARICH: So do you think Voto Latino should apologize?

CEDILLO: No. No, I support Voto Latino, I’ve raised money for them, I know their executive director, I know their executive director is not pleased with this or with Emanuel, but as I said, I don’t romanticize that, I don’t think people who know this experience do and I think that’s for voters to decide.

SOLIS MARICH: So, you don’t think it was inappropriate, Senator Cedillo, to use that photo but not also tell people that while he was doing that that’s Rosario Dawson, and he’s not at a gang event, he’s actually at an event designed to encourage young Latino voters.

CEDILLO: No. No I don’t.

SOLIS MARICH: So you stand behind that mailer 100%?

CEDILLO: Yeah, no, absolutely. Let me be really clear, OK? I do not romanticize gang activity…

SOLIS MARICH: Are you accusing him of being in a gang?

CEDILLO: No. Let me tell you, I don’t romanticize gang activity, I don’t understand this fetish, or romanticizing or promoting that type of activity or emulating it in any circumstance or any environment, period.

SOLIS MARICH: So before we move on, just one final question, so you believe Rosario Dawson and Emanuel Pleitez were romanticizing gang activity at an event that was designed to encourage Latino voters?

CEDILLO: I believe that conduct does that, yes.

You hear that, Voto Latino?  Your efforts to register 35,000 voters in battleground states and produce videos that 5 million Americans watched during the campaign are USELESS when compared to the hand gesture you make signifying your organization, which kills children in drive-by shootings.

Calitics had the right idea when they suggested that CA-32 voters elect anyone but Gil Cedillo to replace Hilda Solis.  He makes that decision easier and easier with each passing day.

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.

Eight days before the special election, and the campaign activity is really heating up.  Today’s roundup includes the latest endorsements, media coverage, and, of course, your absolute favorite…more attack mailers!

This will be somewhat lengthy and slightly opinionated–so come beneath the flip.

All three candidates have some positive endorsements and media coverage to report.

Over the weekend, the Cedillo campaign announced a couple of media endorsements: the Senator received the endorsement of La Opinion, one of the L.A. area’s most prominent Spanish-language newspapers.  For those that can read Spanish, here’s the key graf:

Gil Cedillo es el candidato más adecuado para representar los intereses de un distrito con el perfil demográfico y socio económico como el 32. Tiene la experiencia demostrada y prioridades centradas en la reforma de salud, inmigración y en la sociedad privada-pública para el desarrollo. ¡Vote por Cedillo!

In addition to that, the Cedillo team also reports the endorsement of Eastern Group Publications, which, according to the campaign’s release, runs 11 bilingual community newspapers in the district.

Judy Chu has claimed some prominent endorsements of her own, including the endorsement of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.  Given how the Cedillo campaign reacted to Chu’s endorsement by Villaraigosa, combined with the fact that Congresswoman Sanchez has had a longstanding public feud with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus over Congressman Baca, I am eagerly licking my chops in anticipation of any release that Cedillo’s team sends out to countervail the Sanchez endorsement.

Chu has also obtained the very wordy endorsement of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.  Key graf:

We’ll lean toward the more policy-wonky candidacy of Chu, currently serving as an elected member of the state’s taxation body, the Board of Equalization. A math major and former professor of psychology, Chu isn’t as flashy as some. But she has garnered the endorsements of most area city council members because she served for 13 years on the Monterey Park City Council herself, and therefore knows our cities’ interests deeply, before her election to the Assembly. She’s close to Solis. Through her equalization position, she’s become an expert at getting revenues into government coffers – in these times, nothing could be more crucial.

The endorsement is very even-handed and worth reading.  It also takes a stab at the propositions, with some interesting and unique conclusions.  Editorial boards across the state are really all over the map on these things.

Pleitez also had a good media day–he and his campaign have received positive coverage on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.  The main gist of the piece is that Pleitez is running a spirited race who will be able to attract a number of votes significant enough to alter the complexion of a multi-candidate low-turnout election–though Cedillo’s campaign manager Derek Humphrey disagrees publicly with the assessments of the other political experts mentioned by saying that the only people who care about Pleitez are the “chattering class”–i.e. media.  Only the voters will get to determine who’s right.

Interestingly, the piece also takes note of the “party animal” negative mailer story that was first broken in a big way here on Calitics.  Here’s what the Times has to say:

Nonetheless, the Cedillo campaign sent out a mailer recently that featured photos of a partying Pleitez that it said it got from his Facebook page. “Should this man represent you in the House of Representatives?” the mailer asks, “Or in Animal House?”

Most saw the mailer as evidence that Cedillo is worried.

“If they didn’t feel he was a serious candidate, they wouldn’t be attacking him,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College who co-wrote “Epic Journey,” a book on the 2008 presidential election.

My take, of course, is the same take that I posted before in the first thread about this piece.  We in the “chattering class” may not consider a candidate who draws even 5% to be a serious candidate.  But in a special election like this where every vote matters, that 5% could be serious, especially if most of the votes that Pleitez gets are in the Latino areas of unincorporated East Los Angeles and El Sereno.

But now to the part you’ve all been waiting for…attack mailers!

Our first offering comes from Judy Chu, attacking Gil Cedillo not only on using campaign money for travel, but also for being absent on such travel–specifically, being in India–while the legislature was working on the budget situation.  You can see the images from these below.  Cedillo has defended himself on the matter of the campaign contributions–I happened to interview him on the day that the original L.A. Times story broke–but I am hoping for a response from the campaign regarding the accusation about the timing of the travel as well.  I have a call into the campaign, and am expecting a response tomorrow, since I have no way of knowing whether this was a legitimate fact-finding trip that other legislators went on or what the purpose was, both of which would be useful to know before providing any further commentary.

India mailer 1

India mailer 2

India mailer 3

Cedillo’s team has dropped more negative literature of its own.  This one, again, explicitly accuses Judy Chu of “pay-to-play” regarding the Chu’s votes to grant tax refunds to corporations that gave her contributions.  The language is pretty explicit, as you can see:

Whirlwind 1

Whirlwind 2

Whirlwind 3

Whirlwind 4

Whirlwind 5

I do have a problem with this.  And it’s not that it’s negative.  I’m expecting negative mailers as a prime campaign strategy.  The problem is that this seems to be the Cedillo campaign’s main attack against Chu–it’s not the first time that the campaign has attacked along these lines.  And, as the L.A. Times has documented, it’s patently false:

The “tax breaks” cited in Cedillo’s mailings are actually refunds of tax overpayments by corporations, according to Board of Equalization records and documentation the Cedillo campaign provided to The Times.

Most, if not all, were routine, noncontroversial matters approved by unanimous vote upon recommendation of the agency’s staff, according to Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the Board of Equalization.

Gore said it is common practice for some corporations to pay more taxes than they owe — sometimes as a hedge against inadvertently paying too little and being penalized — then seek refunds for the overpayments. All refund requests are carefully vetted by the staff, Gore said.

The Cedillo team’s attacks, after all, aren’t just questioning the integrity of one public official–they’re questioning the entire reputation of the state’s tax collecting authority.  And even the refutation of the refutation leaves a little to be desired:

Abalos also said making a distinction between “tax breaks” and “tax refunds” was not as important as Chu’s voting on the matters.

If honesty is a value, it actually is.  If I file my return and I’ve overpaid taxes, I get a refund.  That’s not a tax break.  A tax break is a special favor.  A tax refund isn’t.  In the same article, another high-level person in the Cedillo campaign called the refunds “tax relief.”  Sorry, but no, they aren’t.  “Tax relief” is a Luntzian expression for a tax cut.  An overpayment refund isn’t a tax cut.  Now, I’m willing to listen to the argument that Chu should have excused herself in order to avoid even the appearance of conflict-of-interest.  But that’s not the case the campaign was originally making.  Of course, the voters of the district are going to read the mailer far more than they’re going to read Calitics or the political section of the L.A. Times, so…I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what constitutes a good campaign strategy.

The Chu campaign has also submitted an official response, which I quote in part:

Despite the fact that Cedillo’s claim that Judy Chu has voted for tax breaks for corporate contributors have been thoroughly discredited, Cedillo devotes a panel of his latest hit mailer to recycling them.

Cedillo is however now calling the tax refunds “tax favors.”  (A tax refund is a favor?) Cedillo claims that Judy Chu should have abstained on the tax refunds (Apparently he thinks everyone should abstain on votes.)

And that’s what I’ve got for today, with the promise of more tomorrow.  If you’ve made it this far, I salute you.

Over the past couple of days, my email box has become a lightning rod for supporters of various candidates in in CA-32 special election, many of whom have been communicating alternately their approval or dismay at my post concerning the recent mailer from the Cedillo team.

I was also contacted by Gil Cedillo’s campaign manager Derek Humphrey, who provided me with this quote in defense of the mailer:

A number of people contacted our campaign about the Pleitez facebook page.  I think they were really shocked to see these pictures of him partying and drinking on what is essentially an extension of his campaign website.  These are recent photos that any internet user can easily access.    

I am sure it’s common place for a 26 year old recent college graduate to post photos to their facebook page that glamorize drinking, partying, and dancing on tables.  But, members of Congress and elected officials are role models for young men and women in their community and their behaviors reflect their character.

But you know what I really like to get in my inbox?  The ones that provide me PDF’s or images of the mailers that other campaigns are sending out–because those provide me not only more material to cover for the race, but in some cases an increasing amount of hilarity.

So without further ado, below the fold I present you…

CA-32 mail-a-palooza!  Images and mild commentary below the fold.

Now, the first thing I should mention is that many Cedillo supporters–even those who agreed that the mailer by the Senator’s campaign was excessive–have pointed out that Pleitez’ campaign was the first to go negative and sent out an attack mailer against Chu and Cedillo.  Here, then, is that mailer:

Pleitez attack mailer

Now, it does disappoint me to see Democrats go after other Democrats–and faulting Chu and Cedillo for everything that’s wrong with California’s budget is an exaggeration, to put it mildly.  First, because Cedillo has been progressive–to my knowledge, at least–on budget issues, and second, because Chu doesn’t really have much to do with that as a member of what is primarily a tax collecting agency.  Does this negative political attack on the experience and legislative activity of Chu and Cedillo justify the more personal attack that was made on Pleitez?  That is something I wait for other readers to decide.  The only thing I leave you with is, yes, Pleitez attacked first.

I’ve also received a few complaints about another mailer from Pleitez.  This one’s not a negative piece, but here it is nonetheless, or at least the first page:

Pleitez Democratic mailer

The objection here, as you might surmise, is that the mailer seems to claim an endorsement from Obama, Clinton and Villaraigosa, whereas Obama and Clinton certainly haven’t endorsed in this race, and Villaraigosa has endorsed Judy Chu–and that has rankled some members of other campaigns.  I wasn’t sent the other side or internal elements of the mailer (if there are any) to see if that effect is mitigated or enhanced by any other part of the piece.

But I like to save the best for last: the attack mailer sent out by Judy Chu’s namesake and distant affine, current Republican Monterey Park City Councilmember Betty Tom Chu.  Here is is, front and back.

front

back

Now, since this mailer comes from a Republican, I have no issues with excoriating it.  Let’s take the front.  First, the line “how to spot a loser” is hilarious on its face for its lack of professionalism.  “Loser”?  But what’s even worse is the fact that moles appear to have been photoshopped onto Judy Chu’s face–making the use of the word “spot” quite ironic.

Next up, of course, are the negative characterizations of Chu’s activities on the board of equalization.  Such as:

Wrote a law to forgive tax cheaters

This, of course, is referring to Chu’s lead role in the tax amnesty bill, which allowed for a window for forgiveness of penalties on belated tax returns.  According to the BoE website, this was a huge success that brought in billions in previously uncollected revenue.

FAIL.

Next one is just as good:

Granted refunds to corporations that gave her campaign donations

This one is notable because, to be completely honest, Cedillo used the same misleading attack.  Yes, Chu voted for routine tax refunds of overpayments.  Businesses like the one I run are required to pay estimated taxes for the year on a quarterly schedule ahead of time.  If we pay too much, we get the excess payments refunded.

It’s an easy negative attack against Chu because while the content of the statement is true, the moral implications are absolutely false.

The other side is equally entertaining–especially the…interesting…picture of Mayor Venti, as well as the line, “Judy, on the other hand, has none of these qualities.”  That reminds me of the now-infamous line from the DailyKos hatemail Saturdays: The Lord Rebuke you!  Classic.

And for that reason, Betty Tom Chu wins the award for…WORST MAILER IN THE WORLD!!!

P.S. if anyone has any other mailers by anyone, for anyone, or against anyone in the CA-32 race, please send them my way:

hekebolos at gmail dot com

When I was with the East Bay Young Dems on Thursday night talking about my campaign and its potential to inspire more young working class folks to run for Congress in the 2010 mid-terms, one name came up a few times: Emanuel Pleitez.

The 26-year-old activist CA-32 candidate has been in the news this week as well, after coming under blistering attack from State Sen. Gil Cedillo. And what for? Because Pleitez has Facebook pictures that show him dancing, and with women. Calitics has done some great coverage on this hit mailer, which seems to be designed to destroy Pleitez in the Latino community as Cedillo faces a tough fight with Judy Chu.

I join Calitics in an unusual endorsement in this race: Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.

Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.

In my generation of digital natives, this is just the sort of smarmy, ridiculous and ugly kind of behavior we fear, and I will not take it. Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.

Worst of this is that the mailer suggests in the crudest manner that there is something wrong with Pleitez posting photos of himself with female peers. It is sickening and wrong.

Said the Pleitez campaign: “Cedillo is not only smearing the name of Emanuel, but defaming dozens of women who have no involvement with the campaign.”

Any Democrat but Gil Cedillo.

Adriel Hampton is a journalist, Gov 2.0 and new media strategist, public servant, and licensed private investigator. He is running for U.S. Congress in the 2009 special election for California’s 10th District.