May 19, Special Elections Day in California & a Few Last Words on Judy Chu for Congress

[Previous entries in the Run, Mama, Run series on Judy Chu for Congress here.]

Today's Special Election will elect a replacement for the House seat once occupied by Hilda Solis representing California Congressional District 32, and determine whether ballot initiatives addressing our state's enormous budget deficit will go forward or be rejected.

So please do vote today--it's a low voter-turnout election. According to @lacrrcc, (Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's twitter handle), as of May 18, 2009, "With 273,418 by mail ballots returned, we are just over 6% overall voter turnout for tomorrow's election and 36% returned of ballots issued."

If you'll indulge me in some meta-commentary about the Chu-Cedillo race--some of the punditry has framed the 63% Latino/22% Asian/15% white/other 32d Congressional district as Latino candidate State Assembly person Gil Cedillo's race to lose. It's both a recognition that Cedillo's been active in local and state politics since 1970, but also predicated on the notion that Latinos vote for Latinos in a sort of simple identity politics paradigm. This also assumes that a near-complete turnout of Latino voters will largely go to the best-known Latino frontrunner, Cedillo, and make a runoff election unnecessary. (Whoever takes the majority on May 19 will be named the winner; if no one takes the majority, top finishers from both parties participate in the runoff in July.)

Pundits who take this line are following the lead set by Cedillo supporters, such as Joe Baca, who has declared CA CD-32 "a Hispanic seat. We should not lose that seat."

Even if ethnic voters solely supported candidates along racial lines, what these identity politics pundits seem to overlook is the fact that numerous other Latino candidates, including upstart Emanuel Pleitez brandishing his own Obama-style outsider narrative, might split Latino voters. Cedillo also has to the right of him a few Republican Latino challengers.

Other watchers of this congressional race have not yielded to that framing. A number of commentators have named Chu as the frontrunner by virtue of her superior endorsements from labor unions and local city councils. In this understanding of the race, the ability to draw a coalition of Latino, Asian, and white supporters--women and men--to the polls makes Chu the frontrunner. (She has spoilers of her own to contend with, namely a distantly related-by-marriage Republican candidate named Betty Chu.)

According to The Hill, Chu's already mobilized many mail-in ballots from the Asian American community.

...local observers have been particularly impressed by Judy Chu’s campaign to make sure Asian voters, who often vote by absentee ballot, have mailed in their ballots.

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.

As a resident of the district for more than twenty years, unlike carpetbagger Cedillo, Chu's roots in the community and close work with former Congresswoman Solis when Chu served in the State Assembly make her a formidable candidate with her own political capital among diverse communities within CD-32.

It therefore seems remarkable to me that simple identity politics--especially in California--is a meaningful narrative to anyone in the aftermath of the presidential election, where Latino voters nationwide were supposedly "hesitant" to vote for an African American candidate but instead voted overwhlemingly for Obama.

Have mainstream pundits learned nothing from the past national election? Or are they hedging their bets that Obama's transformational qualities are particular to him, and unwilling to see that coalitional politics can work at the state and local levels with talented, experienced candidates who nevertheless have plenty of personality and service to offer?

Identity politics may yet manifest. We'll only know after the polls close tonight at 8 pm. But I'm willing to bet that voters know if candidates hear them and respond on the issues, or if they hear mostly negative campaigning.

Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k. She's not a voter in CA CD-32, but hopes to see coalitional politics and a progressive, pro-choice candidate win the day.