In October 2017, Culver City began the process of consolidating its elections with the national general elections. Previously, Culver City had held its own elections in April of even-numbered years and voter turnout was shockingly low, averaging below 20% for the last four elections before 2017. Because this schedule effectively disenfranchised a majority of residents, the State required Culver City to consolidate its elections so that everyone who turned out to vote for President, Senator, Governor, etc. would also see the local candidates and measures.
The local establishment considered defying the State. I don’t know how that strategy has fared historically, but in the past few years it has been unsuccessful. Santa Monica’s City Council, dominated by a conservative majority elected in 2020 (and defeated this year), refused to create a housing element that complied with State requirements and was briefly subject to the Builders’ Remedy, meaning that they lost their right to regulate construction of any building that was at least 20% affordable housing. Sixteen massive projects were immediately announced, then the City submitted an acceptable Housing Element and negotiated with developers to reduce or cancel nearly all the projects. In January 2022, Culver City Council Members Albert Vera Jr. and Göran Eriksson voted against Culver City’s Housing Element. If they had prevailed, Culver City would also have faced the Builder’s Remedy. More recently, joined by Member Dan O’Brien, Vera and Eriksson voted to violate the terms of a grant from LA Metro by removing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure from Washington Blvd.and Metro now wants $435,000 of their money back.
At the October 9, 2017 Culver City Council meeting, Eriksson and then-Mayor Jeff Cooper were the principal voices against consolidation, with Meghan Sahli-Wells the main advocate and Jim Clarke and Thomas Small cautious supporters. On November 6 the Council voted to put a consolidation measure on the next year’s ballot, with Cooper and Eriksson opposed. In 2018, after stern public statements on election law enforcement from then-Attorney General Alex Padilla, all five Council Members signed the argument in favor and no opposing argument was filed. The argument in favor mentioned the likelihood that, if the City did not consolidate, the State would sue, win, and the City would be forced both to consolidate and to pay the State’s legal expenses as well as their own.
Voters approved consolidation in November 2018 by an overwhelming 83%, with 74% turnout. Culver City has since had voter turnout of 86% in November 2020, 63% in 2022, and 79% this year. For comparison, overall LA County turnout was 76% in 2020, 44% in 2022, and 66% this year.
The most public written argument against consolidation was made in the April 26, 2018 Culver City Observer by former Mayor Paul Jacobs. He presented two related points: that consolidation would lead to a focus on non-local issues, and that the increased cost of reaching a larger electorate and of competing with County, State, and Federal candidates for attention would make it harder for people who were not part of what he called “a Democratic slate” to run. I do not know if the title “DEATH OF NONPARTISAN LOCAL ELECTIONS?” came from Jacobs or the Observer.
Jacobs’ letter concluded with an endorsement of Council candidates Albert Vera Jr. and Marcus Tiggs, because they were committed to defying State law and fighting consolidation. It’s not clear when the April 26 Observer appeared, but Vera and Tiggs were defeated by Alex Fisch and Daniel Lee in Culver City’s last unconsolidated election, which had been held April 10.
Jacobs argued against partisanship because he believed that partisan national issues were not relevant to the everyday running of the City and that a person’s party affiliation did not reflect on their ability or character. He listed “health care, taxes, immigration policies, gun control regulation” as examples of issues which are outside the scope of local government. This was plainly false in 2018 and is even more so now. Regarding health care, local responses to COVID were a matter of life-or-death. Taxation is essential to running a government, and we saw the local establishment line up against tax and fee reform Measures RE and BL, which saved the City from COVID-related layoffs and eliminated most of its CalPERS shortfall.
Culver City became a Sanctuary City for undocumented immigrants in March 2017. This has required regular vigilance to maintain and, not only have police since defied it it by licensing technologies such as Automated License Plate Readers and dash and body cameras from companies that share their data with organizations who may share it with ICE, but the original resolution contained a giant loophole: that Culver City will not share data unless required to by Federal law. Since Trump has promised mass deportations will be carried out with help from local police, it’s past time to codify that our City’s staff, data, and resources will categorically not participate. Declining to share information voluntarily will not be enough to protect undocumented people, those seeking abortions or gender-affirming care, or political dissidents. Every aspect of information gathering, storage, and sharing must be critically reviewed. As a former librarian, I recall my profession’s sometimes-heroic responses to the PATRIOT Act.
Jacobs did not arbitrarily include gun control. The Parkland shooting was February 14, 2018 and that night this Club held our City Council candidate forum. Candidates Fisch and Lee made impassioned speeches in favor of gun control while Vera claimed no further laws were required, simply better enforcement of those already existing. In contrast, the current platform of the California Democratic Party includes 26 proposals for improving gun policy, ranging from reviving the assault weapons ban to rewriting the Second Amendment. I do not know if Vera’s response that night cost him our endorsement or that election, but it showed a severe lack of knowledge, imagination, and compassion.
I have a stronger hunch about the moment that guaranteed Marcus Tiggs’ last place finish in 2018 and ended his political career. It was twenty-seven minutes into the KidScoop Media forum that March 8. One kid asked a question which the pretense of nonpartisanship had kept any adult from asking: who did each candidate vote for in the 2016 Presidential election? Tiggs, who was not invited to our forum because he was a registered Republican, came out as a Trump supporter. The children present gasped in horror. It is not irrelevant if someone voted for Trump, Reagan, Pete Wilson, etc. If a candidate cosigned racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, climate denial, the drug war, cutting social programs to give tax cuts to the rich, etc, that tells you something about them. To paraphrase Stanley Fish: there’s no such thing as nonpartisanship, and it’s a good thing, too.
Noah Zatz and I have looked at the results of the elections since consolidation and found that Culver City has consistently voted to the left of Santa Monica and West Hollywood on state and national issues. We’ve also had higher turnout, which confirms Manuel Pastor’s theory that greater participation yields more progressive results.
2020 & 2022 numbers are from lavote.net
2024 numbers are from politicaldata.com
While this year’s results have been regularly updated since Election Day as late-arriving ballots come in and ambiguous ones are “cured,” as I write this November 24, the County has not posted a new Statement of Votes Cast by Community, which breaks the results down by city, since the morning of the 6th. However, even that early count shows that Culver City resisted the “law and order” hype better than our more glamorous neighbors. DA George Gascón lost decisively countywide, but was up by 2% in West Hollywood and down only 0.7% here, while Culver City was the only westside city where Proposition 36 lost. Also according to that November 6 Statement, Kamala Harris did better here and Donald Trump worse than in Santa Monica or West Hollywood, but some of that is due to Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting more votes in those towns.
While the breakdown by city has not been updated, the results for the city-specific races have, and those have trended more progressive as more votes have been counted. The demographic breakdowns sent daily by politicaldata.com show that younger people voted later. Odds are very good that, once all the Culver City votes are counted, Prop. 36 will get a wider margin and Gascón will end up ahead of Nathan Hochman. Of course that will not change the County and State outcomes, but it shows who we are.
Jacobs made several predictions about the consequences of consolidation. Now that there have been three consolidated elections, how accurate were these warnings? First, he predicted “a loss of dialogue on local issues.” This obviously has not happened. However, national issues including those he listed: healthcare, taxation, immigration, and gun control, have become explicit topics here. Jacobs could not have predicted the calls for public safety reform which dominated 2020 and 2021 and continue to be a major campaign issue, although local activists including this Club had begun openly challenging police militarization by opposing the purchase of drones in early 2018 and of an armored personnel carrier in early 2020. The pro-housing movement also had not gained critical mass here by 2018. Conor Dougherty’s account of the emergence of California YIMBY begins in 2014, and State Senator Scott Weiner presented his first upzoning bills in 2018. These national issues, and those he did list, were always already present in Culver City politics but were not discussed because of center-right hegemony, maintained in part through low-turnout standalone elections.
Jacobs also predicted the cost of campaigning would double from his estimated $50,000 preconsolidation average. This appears to have been spot-on. Dan O’Brien’s 2022 campaign was the first to raise over $100,000, and Yasmine-Imani McMorrin and Bubba Fish’s 2024 campaigns had each raised over $90,000 by mid-October. However, Jacobs did not anticipate the explosion in independent expenditures. In 2020 the Culver City Police Officers Association raised and spent over $50,000 to support Vera, Eriksson, and Heather Wollin and to oppose McMorrin, Freddy Puza, and Darrel Menthe, including $8000 for the city’s first ever political billboards. In 2022 Michael Hackman, the landlord/developer of the Culver Steps, Culver Studios, and other properties, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain an obedient City Council, including almost $50,000 opposing Alex Fisch. Hackman gave Culver City Neighbors United $14,500 in 2022, 78% of their total donations that year, and spent a remarkable $171,000 on Denice Renteria’s unsuccessful run, over 3 ⅔ times what her actual campaign raised. This year’s final numbers are not in yet, but we know that Hackman spent big once again, along with other developers/landlords/realtors and the police.
Jacobs’ letter concluded: “This issue is very important to me because I do not want to see our city influenced by outside sources” before endorsing Vera and Tiggs, which makes it very ironic that the establishment he defended has since been sustained through massive donations from outside sources.
Finally, Jacobs warned about consolidated elections resulting in the dominance of “the Democratic slate,” by which he meant this Club’s endorsees. Of his preferred candidates, Vera was a donor to this Club but neither participated in our meetings nor won our endorsement, while Tiggs was an open Republican. Ironically, the last non-consolidated City Council election, in April 2018, was also the last time our endorsed candidates swept, with Alex Fisch and Daniel Lee victorious. Vera was elected and Eriksson re-elected in 2020, along with McMorrin, whom we endorsed. Eriksson edged out our endorsed candidate Freddy Puza by a heartbreaking 28 votes. Puza won in 2022, but so did non-Democrat Dan O’Brien, riding a wave of Michael Hackman’s money.
This year was the first time there were two Democratic slates. Our endorsed candidates: McMorrin, Bubba Fish, and Nancy Barba, faced Vera, Denice Renteria, and Jeanine Wisnosky Stehlin, a slate backed by the new “Culver City Democrats United” organization, which accepted thousands of dollars from corporations and PACs including the Police Officers Association, and whose logo appeared on Hackman-funded mailers. In a more rational society, these slates would represent two parties. Locally, apart from the name confusion, they effectively do.
I have written before about the rise of Caruso Democrats: Republicans who switched teams to improve their electoral chances while bringing their corporate donors and reactionary ideas with them. Jacobs was prescient to write “a Democratic slate” rather than “the Democratic slate.” Republican candidate Tiggs did not figure this out, but conservative scion Vera did, while Eriksson and O’Brien both won while registered as “No Party Preference.” If O’Brien seeks re-election in 2026, will he re-register as a Democrat to be eligible for Caruso Democrat endorsements?
This year the LA County Democratic Party backed Vera and McMorrin, the two incumbents, and Bubba Fish, who had raised the most money and had the strongest ground game of the other candidates. I do not believe the LACDP endorsements were decisive, but they did correctly pick the winners. Incumbency is powerful, and McMorrin additionally ran while Mayor, which boosted her visibility.
Although the three successful candidates raised the most money, spending alone does not explain the outcome. If it did, the massive independent expenditures by Hackman, the Police Officers Association, et al would have elected Renteria, Stehlin, and Wollin as they did Vera and O’Brien. However, funds raised by the campaigns themselves are a measure of their ground game and grassroots support, especially when those funds are from small individual donations rather than PACs, corporations, and billionaires. It’s also possible that the flood of ugly and dishonest mailers, social media ads, and push polls from various right-wing sources had the opposite of their intended effect.
Another explanation is that Culver City simply is a majority progressive city, as our votes for Gascón and against Proposition 36 suggest, and voters chose the candidates who reflected their values. However, Santa Monica voters replaced all their conservative City Council incumbents with a progressive slate backed by their Democratic Club. Why didn’t that happen here?
My theory is that Vera and O’Brien are special cases. Each of them accumulated so much good will in the community: Vera through his family’s decades of philanthropy and O’Brien by creating the Culver City (Unofficial) Facebook page, which is the city’s most active and most-read media platform, that voters overlooked their conservative leanings and intellectual shortcomings, and there is no local media with enough resources and readership to expose them.
I do not see any conservatives in the pipeline with similarly extraordinary reservoirs of credibility. Rather, I am cautiously optimistic that right-wing hegemony in this city is broken, that the road to power no longer runs through the Exchange Club and the Chamber of Commerce, and that the negative campaigning funded by Michael Hackman, the Police Officers Association, et al does not work.
We’ll see in two years!