Hello Angelenos! Are you generally happy with the direction Los Angeles is going? Do you like the thrill of living paycheck-to-paycheck, juggling part-time work with side gig hustles, and watching rent climb faster than your wages? Are you content with the growing number of unhoused Angelenos and the criminalization of poverty? Are you pleased by the prioritization of gridlock-producing, people (and city) killing private automobiles over effective, efficient, sustainable active and modern mass transit? Does it gladden you that, after decades of improvements in air quality, you find yourself coughing and getting ill more often than you used to?
If your answer is “yes,” to all of the above — then you should vote for the incumbents because by all indications they will continue the direction in which we’re moving. That’s what the Los Angeles Times editorial board endorsed. I’m honestly baffled by their logic. Perhaps they’re consoled by the current government’s penchant for progressive speech so much that they don’t notice that we’re not just maintaining the status quo but actively sliding backwards. If not, you should, in the words of an angry Joe Biden, “go vote for someone else.”
Chances are you don’t vote in local elections. You should. You have MUCH more power to effect change at a local level than you do at a national one. Our president, after all, is not elected by you but rather by 538 electors — none of whom you know. I don’t blame you. It’s often difficult to get to a polling place on election day whilst the polls are still open and the local media would forever prefer to focus their attention on slebs (they’re slebs), sports (some teams won, some teams lost), traffic (it’s bad), and weather (it’s probably sunny and hotter than it was last year).
This year is different. It’s the first year that city elections will take place on the same day as the general elections. Most Angelenos are registered Democrats and many vote for incumbents because they are nearly always themselves Democrats and they vote straight party. However, those running against them this time are nearly all Democrats and in nearly every case, grass roots progressives vastly preferable to the developer-backed Neo-liberal corporatist Democrats they are running against. There are, in some races, several candidates who are vastly preferable to the incumbents. The good news is, if a Los Angeles City Council candidate doesn’t get 50% of the vote, there’s a run-off election — so you can comfortably vote your conscience instead of trying to calculate how best to defeat the incumbent.
Click here to see a list of polling places or here to see a map of polling places.
Here are my endorsements, for what they’re worth.
LOS ANGELES COUNTY SUPERVISOR
District 2: Holly Mitchell
District 4: Janice Hahn
District 5: Darrell Park
LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL
District 2: No endorsement
District 4: Nithya Raman (second choice – Sarah Kate Levy)
District 6: Bill Haller
District 10: Aura Vásquez (second choice – Channing Martinez)
District 12: Loraine Lundquist
District 14: Cyndi Otteson
LOS ANGELES DISTRICT ATTORNEY
Rachel Rossi (second choice George Gascón)
LOS ANGELES SUPERIOR COURT
Office 42: Linda Sun
Office 72: Myanna Dellinger
Office 80: Klint James McKay
Office 97: Sherry L. Powell
Office 129: Kenneth Fuller
Office 145: Troy Slaten
Office 150: Tom Parsekian
Office 162: David D. Diamond
LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT
District 1: George McKenna
District 3: Scott Schmerelson
District 4: Jackie Goldberg
District 7: Patricia Castellanos
GLENDALE CITY COUNCIL
PASADENA MAYOR
Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, essayist, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”
Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft Contemporary, Form Follows Function, Los Angeles County Store, the book Sidewalking, Skid Row Housing Trust, and 1650 Gallery. Brightwell has been featured as subject in The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, and on Notebook on Cities and Culture. He has been a guest speaker on KCRW‘s Which Way, LA?, at Emerson College, and the University of Southern California.
Brightwell is currently writing a book about Los Angeles and you can follow him on Ameba, Duolingo, Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Mubi, and Twitter.
Eric Brightwell 