Municipal politics in Los Angeles does not always fit neatly into the same Democrat versus Republican spectrum you see at the state and national level. Some local concerns that can be viewed through this lens, but many of the most important local issues are party-neutral. There is no Republican or Democratic platform on filling potholes, for instance, or picking up garbage, or putting up a stop sign in a school zone. In Los Angeles (and, I suspect, most other cities) there’s a somewhat different dichotomy at work. For years I’ve had trouble pinning it down, giving it a name, or feeling like I can explain it simply --but over the last couple years a new dynamic has revealed itself, and I’ve come to find it helpful in describing the Los Angeles voter.
Advance warning: this piece is going to bounce around a bit, specifically between Los Angeles and New York City, because it was my first post-covid trip to New York that helped crystallize this for me. (I’m sure New Yorkers are going to love me parachuting into their town for a few days and drawing a bunch of superficial conclusions on a limited sample size of observations, but hey, right back atcha, I guess.)
I had the great good fortune to be in New York City during the week of their municipal election last month. The local news was plastered with campaign ads, thirty-second spots telling me everything I needed to know about the candidates for comptroller (one graduated from Harvard Business School!), district attorney (one worked for Eric Holder!), and, of course, Mayor. Watching local New York City news is a caffeinating experience, especially when watched in a hotel room. It’s a mainline injection of the personality of the city, beloved and honest and a little manic. Local New York City news during an election is that, but in its most exalted form.
A New York City municipal election is American democracy at its rawest. It is politics of the street, where labels brawl with identities, patronage is inescapable, and violence can still play a role like it did in the old days. New York City itself is this territorial game board, like Risk!, where constituencies pool up in distinct areas and fight each other for ground along the borders.
If you are familiar with New York City, some neighborhoods correlate to their preferred candidate exactly as you might guess:
Maya Wiley, endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was the preferred candidate of Williamsburg. Kathryn Garcia, the administrator who keeps the garbage trucks running on time, won almost all of Manhattan downtown from Harlem. Eric Adams, a former cop, won the outer boroughs. The map also reveals new information I’m still trying to process. Yang outperformed in Queens and half of Brooklyn? Okay, sure! I have no idea what that means. And look at that frisée of Wiley voters along the uptown border between Garcia turf and Adams turf. What does that mean?
As I watched the New York City vote results trickle into the local news, I scrolled through Twitter (like one does on an election day). Alex Pareene and Matthew Yglesias had just got themselves into a good, old fashioned blog fight (like the ones that used to happen all the time in the late-aughts) about what the New York City election results meant. Yglesias saw the success of Adams as a reaction to last year’s protests. Pareene saw no such message in the tea leaves. Pareene called Yglesias a “savvy guy” who made “fallacious arguments.” Yglesias called Pareene “hostile.” I found this all absolutely delightful.
Pareene and Yglesias were on opposite sides of an online media scrum playing out that week. Eric Adams got the most first place votes, and half the internet saw this as a rebuke of “Defund the Police,” while the other half argued no relation between the Adams numbers and any messaging from the Black Lives Matter movement. The tone of all these articles was vociferous. Had this been Tammany-era New York City, Pareene and Yglesias might have each led a mob armed with meat hooks.
I found myself agreeing more with Yglesias, not because of any argument he made (fallacious or not), but because of Joe Buscaino. Joe Buscaino is the Los Angeles City Councilman from San Pedro, Watts and the Port of Los Angeles who is running for Mayor. His platform could have been written by an AI trained on Los Angeles Nextdoor. Check out his own political ad (which I’ve only seen on Twitter and not yet on the local news in Los Angeles, which I rarely watch anymore):
Talking points: Joe Buscaino is going to clean up our streets. Joe Buscaino is going to sweep up the homeless problem (but with compassion!). For Joe Buscaino, crime is the top priority in this election. Joe Buscaino used to be a cop.
Eric Adams also used to be a cop. It is interesting that he and Joe Buscaino have that in common. Given the vitriol directed at police departments in both New York City and Los Angeles over the past year, one might assume no candidate affiliated with American policing could be a viable candidate for Mayor, who in both New York City and Los Angeles is the boss of the local police chief. One might be tempted to call Joe Buscaino the Eric Adams of Los Angeles.
I am not familiar with the Nextdoor pages of New York City’s game board of neighborhoods. But I know enough about the various Nextdoors of Los Angeles to suspect Joe Buscaino will be popular among some of their more vocal, stereotypical users. Los Angeles Nextdoor is often a place for certain kinds of hyperlocal complaint: “Watch out for this stranger with a crowbar photographed by the Ring camera on my porch!” “Three cars on my block had their catalytic converters stolen this month.” “I oppose the new park because, uh, we don’t want this place to attract the wrong sort of people, if you get what I’m saying.” “Why won’t anyone sweep the homeless encampment from the empty lot across the street?”
If you are familiar with Los Angeles Twitter, the reaction that some users had to Joe Buscaino’s campaign video probably comes as no surprise:
There are a number of Los Angeles Twitter accounts that act as almost a group microblog for the new, recently-activated left. @GroundGameLA, @Ktownforall, @PplsCityCouncil, @NOlympicsLA, @KnockDotLA, @LACAN and @DSA_LosAngeles are just a few of them. These accounts reach between 10,000 and 30,000 followers each, which may not seem like a lot --but when you consider that only 24,000 people voted at all in the 2015 Council District 4 race, and only 19,500 voted in the 2011 Council District 4 race, the combined following of the LA Twitter Left suddenly looks consequential.
Council District 4 is now, of course, the province of Nithya Raman, who, in the 2020 CD4 race, not only pulled off an extremely rare defeat of an incumbent (this has happened maybe twice in my lifetime), but also did so by winning the largest number of votes of any Council candidate in history. More than 130,000 people voted in the CD4 race last year, five times as many as the previous CD4 election. Three great forces conspired in Raman’s favor: First, the sheer force of her appeal, which attracted an enviable legion of volunteers and put them to work knocking on doors; Second, a council election that coincided with a national election for the first time in decades (so far more people were voting than usual, anyway); and Third, the groundswell social media-based promotional efforts of the recently-activated Angeleno left.
This groundswell included a high number of the more popular Internet comedians who live in what white people call the “eastside” of Los Angeles, which includes part of Council District 4. Historically, few comedians get involved in Los Angeles City Council races. In 2020, dozens did, and their online followers cross-pollinated with the followers of those activated left Twitter accounts mentioned earlier, resulting in an explosion of earned media that helped fuel Raman’s victory.
One of the foundational creeds of the LA Twitter Left seems to be a form of “think national, act local.” They are extremely vocal about the most pressing issues in Los Angeles right now, but they see these issues more through a national, systemic lens. Take graffiti, for example. To the LA Twitter Left, graffiti as a consequence of there being too few spaces for self expression, a crisis reflected on a national level in the gap between rich communities and poor communities. The stereotypical Angeleno Nextdoor User doesn’t see graffiti like this. They see it as vandalism, a threat to property values and a harbinger of crime. They’re not thinking about what graffiti means on a broader level. They’re thinking about what it means to them, right now.
The Los Angeles Police Department is another example. To the LA Twitter Left, the LAPD is built upon the same systemic racism as the entire American policing system, it should be defunded like the rest of them, and all cops are bastards. To the Angeleno Nextdoor User, however, the LAPD is who you call when someone breaks into your house, or when you feel threatened by someone lurking nearby.
The most crucial example, however, is homelessness. To the LA Twitter Left, homelessness is an affront to basic human rights. It reveals the failure of the American capitalist system to provide affordable housing and health care to Americans. It’s tied up in a dark and evil fashion with racism and sexual exploitation. To the Angeleno Nextdoor User, homelessness is certainly all of these things, but it’s also a nuisance (in the legal sense of the word). Most Angeleno Nextdoor Users will probably say they want a compassionate solve to the homeless crisis, but if something is an immediate nuisance they’ll favor abatement to compassion, at least in the short term. The notion that homelessness could ever be considered a nuisance is abhorrent to the LA Twitter Left, and they will castigate those who say as much, often in the form of a vindictive Twitter pile-on. This, in turn, causes a reaction among the more Nextdoor-minded, who don’t take kindly to being called a monster or a fascist, let alone by a lot of people all at once.
Joe Buscaino is decidedly, intentionally, leaning more toward Angeleno Nextdoor than the LA Twitter Left. That much is evidenced by the campaign video linked to above. I wrote earlier that one might be tempted to call Joe Buscaino the Eric Adams of Los Angeles. One might also be tempted to call Eric Adams the Nextdoor candidate in the New York City mayor’s race.
Back to election day in New York City. In second place, once all the in-person votes were tallied (or, more accurately, in second place among the first choice votes on the ranked vote ballot), came Maya Wiley. Maya Wiley was polling in the single digits before Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez endorsed her. AOC, it’s fair to say, is a member of the Twitter Left. She is a galvanizing force in American politics, extremely good at social media, so good in fact that calling her “Twitter Left” is probably reductive since the term doesn’t include Instagram and TikTok, nor does it capture, adequately, the impressive success she’s had at using all of these platforms to organize her supporters to affect politics IRL. Reductiveness aside, to the LA Twitter Left, AOC is a hero. Whatever the New York City equivalent is of the LA Twitter Left, Maya Wiley won that group when AOC endorsed her. If New York City’s election had been a normal, vote for one person kind of election, there would be a run-off vote forthcoming, with Adams versus Wiley in a Nextdoor versus Twitter primary. (This is the dynamic I think Matthew Yglesias was noticing in his Twitter defense against Alex Pareene.)
Los Angeles does not have a Twitter Left candidate in the Mayor’s race. I find that curious. I don’t know what it means. Perhaps the LA Twitter Left is so new that no would-be leader has had time to ripen. Perhaps, outside of Council District 4, Los Angeles is more of a Nextdoor kind of town, and everyone in local politics just kind of senses that. The LA Twitter Left is not going to support Joe Buscaino, but it doesn’t look like there’s anyone in the race they will rally around. Just last week they excoriated every City Councilmember who is considering a run for Mayor because they all voted to pass a Nextdooresque law on homeless encampments. I don’t see them getting excited about Mike Feuer, Rick Caruso or Austin Beutner. Who’s left? Wendy Greuel? I mean, maybe?
It seems to me that the LA Twitter Left is destined to play the role of social media backbencher for the next Mayor’s term in office. If they can keep their followers engaged, maybe a leader will emerge from the fire of their opposition. Or maybe they’ve already peaked.
Postscript. Literally as I was finishing this up, the Associated Press called the New York City mayoral primary for Eric Adams.
Second Postscript. After spending several days working on this, this happened:
Thats a great prism to see this through. Very interesting post!