SD-28: Ted Lieu Announces Run For Oropeza's Seat

Assemblymember Ted Lieu has announced his plans to run for the late Jenny Oropeza's State Senate seat in the 28th District. Sadly, Oropeza died on October 22, but was re-elected posthumously in the statewide general election on Tuesday November 1st.

Lieu currently represents the 53rd Assembly district, but will lose his seat on December 6th when Betsy Butler is sworn in to represent the South Bay-area district because Lieu decided to run for Attorney General this Spring since he was forced to leave the Assembly due to term limits. He lost in the Democratic primary in June 2010 to Kamala Harris, who is still in a too-close-to-call race with Republican Steve Cooley to be California's next Attorney General.

Another person who lost in the June 2010 Democratic primary, this time in the Lieutenant Governor's race (to Gavin Newsom) was Janice Hahn, who announced today that she would not run in the special election and endorsed Lieu. Another perso who may announce  a bid for the seat is Warren Furutani who represents the 55th Assembly district which covers part of the 24th Senate District. Furutani was able to win the 55th Assembly district when Laura Richardson gave it up to run against Oropeza in an August 2007 special election when Congresswoman Janice Millender-McDonald's 37th Congressional district opened up due to her untimely death. Richardson won that race and now represents CA-37.

Of course all these district lines will become open seats in the next election in 2012 when the lines are redrawn, thanks to Proposition 11 and Proposition 20 by an independent "citizen's" redistricting commission with data from the 2010 Census.

Furutani Wins 55th Assembly District Seat

The political dominoes continue to fall into place after the surprising sudden death of African American Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald and the election of Assemblywoman Laura Richardson to represent the the 37th District of California and serve out the rest of Millender-Macdonald's term. Yesterday, the Labor-backed and EQCA-endorsed candidate Warren Furutani won election to fill Richardson's 55th Assembly District seat and serve out the rest of her term. Both Furutani and Richardson are supporters of equal marriage rights for lesbian and gay men in California. Both the 55th Assembly District and 37th Congressional District are racially diverse districts with significant percentages of Black, Latino, Asian and LGBT registered voters. Furutani is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District.

CA-37: Laura Richardson Elected To Congress

One year ago, Laura Richardson was a member of the Long Beach City Council. Yesterday, she won the general election in the 37th Congressional district of California by winning 67.05% of the vote. Turnout was incredibly light, with only 8.19% of the 262, 746 registered voters casting votes on a hot summer's day. Richardson received 14, 105 votes. When she won her 55th State Assembly district race in November 2006, Richardson received over 50, 000 votes and in June 2006 when she won the Democratic nomination for the 55th Assembly district with 15,551 votes.

CA-37: Special Election Today

The special election in California's 37th Congressional District is being held today, Tuesday August 21, to fill the seat vacated by the sudden death in April of U.S. Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald. 45-year-old State Assemblymember Laura Richardson won a hotly contested primary election in June to become the Democratic nominee and thus the overwhelming favorite to be the next United States representative for the 37th Congressional District.



Mad Professah has been following this race for months and looks forward to seeing who will replace soon-to-be Congresswoman Laura Richardson in the State Assembly, as well as seeing whether she will agree to co-sponsor important federal legislation like H.R. 3326 (Early Treatment for HIV Act), H.R. 2221 (Uniting American Families Act), H.R. 2015 (Employment Non-Discrimination Act), H.R. 1592 (Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act) and H.R. 1246 (Military Readiness Act).

CA-37: A Primary Win for Black, LGBT Communities

In the hotly contested special primary election in to fill the congressional seat of Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson) in the 37th district Assemblymember Laura Richardson defeated State Senator Jenny Oropeza yesterday by nearly 2000 votes out of almost 30, 000 votes cast, a turnout of a measly 11.14%.

Candidate            Votes           Percentage
Laura Richardson     11,027         37.76%
Jenny Oropeza        9,144          31.31%
Valerie McDonald     2,743          9.39%

This is a win for both the African American and LGBT communities. Although previously
Mad Professah had described this election as pitting the Queer vs Black vs Latino communities, because the gay-friendly African American candidate (Richardson) won over the homophobic Black candidate (McDonald) the LGBT community gains a gay-friendly congressperson, retains a Latino gay-friendly State Senator (Oropeza, who is a co-sponsor of the marriage equality bill) and punishes the politics of homophobia!

Now, if openly lesbian Gerrie Schipske will run to replace Richardson's seat in the State Assembly, that would be fitting, although an openly LGBT Latino candidate would be even better.

Oropeza Receives Huge Independent Expenditure Boost

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Morongo Indians has independently spent $270, 000 to support the candidacy of State Senator Jenny Oropeza in the hotly contested 37th district Congressional race to replace the recently deceased Juanita Millender-McDonald. This single expenditure is more than the $219, 000 that Oropeza had raised for her own campaign and dwarfs the mere $105, 000 that Richardson had reported raising. The reason why the tribe is supporting Oropeza is that she voted for ratification of Indian gaming compacts that the tribes negotiated with the Governor of California which must be approved (but not modified!) by the State Legislature before they go into effect. Labor is not happy about the level of worker protections in the current version of the compacts since standard federal labor laws do not apply on sovereign tribal ground. Although Oropeza made a campaign promise to oppose the compacts, she voted for them when they cleared the State Senate. The measure is still pending in the Assembly, where Richardson has vowed to vote against ratification. Labor has thus mainly endorsed Richardson in tomorrow's Special Election.

Mad Professah has been blogging about this race for weeks as it pits the Black, Latino and LGBT communities against one another since the district which the candidates are vying to represent (the City of Long Beach and its environs) has a very diverse demographic profile, with significant populations of LGBT, Black and Latino voters.

Sunday's Los Angeles Times carried an op-ed article ("The delicate balance of black and brown") by Harold Meyerson which argues that the racial tensions between Black and Latino voters are actually less than one would expect.

In a city like L.A., one would expect the city's black and Latino political communities to have clashed more frequently than they have. Liberalism may be their common ideology, but the economic interests of the black and Latino working classes have at times come into conflict as the Latino presence in the city grew. For example, Latinos have largely taken the janitorial and hotel jobs that blacks held 25 years ago. In the poorest quadrants of the city, violence between black and Latino gangs rages.

And yet L.A.'s black and Latino political elites have tended to avoid conflict more often than not. In the 2005 mayoral election, for example, both groups largely supported the candidacy of Antonio Villaraigosa. Multiracial coalitions have been, if not the norm, at least frequent in city politics — surprisingly frequent. Generally, as once heavily black parts of the city have become plurality or majority Latino, the elites have worked together to limit the possibility of Latino candidates winning elections in districts historically represented by blacks.

There are rumors on various blogs that Richardson's polling puts her up by 9 points while Oropeza's polling has the races her slightly ahead but within the margin of error of the poll.

Web Coverage of Debate in CA-37 Special Election

There was a debate between the eleven Democratic candidates running to replace recently deceased Juanita Millender-MacDonald on Thursday June 14th. I missed it too, but happily, dday from Calitics posted a link to where you can view the entire debate online.

Even better, dday also posted a rather complete play by play of the debate, from his very specific "Progressive Democrats of America" perspective. I will just reproduce his summary of each candidate's two-minute opening statements:

Ed Wilson: former mayor of Signal Hill, a small city in the district. He immediately went after the whole ethnicity issue, saying "this is not a black seat or a white seat or a Hispanic seat, it's your seat."

Peter Matthews: He's the PDA-endorsed candidate who has run for office many times, including challenging Millender-McDonald in a primary in 2006 (and getting 10,000 votes). Matthews is running on the progressive issues on getting us out of Iraq, closing the inequality divide, providing single-payer universal health care, and restoring tax fairness.

Jenny Oropeza: The state Senator was strong on the war, saying "we need to get out of Iraq now." She talked about the environment, health care, revising NCLB, and needing to "turn around trade agreements" that sacrifice American job (that was cheering). She closed with "You know my record," playing off her experience serving the area.

Laura Richardson: Assemblywoman Richardson is also running on her record. She kind of messed up her move from talking about Iraq to domestic issues, saying "I want to talk about the war in America" and then claiming that Al Qaeda is running rampant (I think she meant in Waziristan, not Long Beach). Didn't seem like much of a public speaker.

Valerie McDonald: The late Congresswoman's daughter talked about her ties to the area, the need to keep families together in the black community, and the importance of education.

Bill Grisolia: He's a longtime employee of Long Beach Memorial Health Center, so universal health care was one of his themes. But he was at his most powerful discussing the war in Iraq, and his desire to cut funding except to bring our troops home. He also tried to blunt the experience argument by saying "What have the electeds done for you?"

Mr. Evans: I forget his first name and it doesn't matter. He's a far-right immigrant-hating loon who somehow was let into the Democratic primary. He proudly namechecked Lou Dobbs in the first sentence of his statement and called himself a closed-borders candidate. There is a sense in the black community that immigrants are in competition with them for low-paying jobs, but this was the most extreme out-and-out black bigot I've seen.

Alicia Ford: Spent her entire statement talking about something she did a decade ago that ABC7 didn't cover, which made her bad. Also actually said "In Compton, they are without... a lot of things." Stirring.

Lee Davis: Her whole statement decried the front-runner assumptions of the media, and said that "if the top three had any self-respect they'd leave this stage right now" to allow for equal access, and then actually WAITED for them to leave the stage. They, er, didn't.

George Parmer: a truck driver from Long Beach, the first to actually call for impeachment and call out the Democratic leadership for their sell-out on capitulation in Iraq.

Jeffrey Price: Talked mainly about lobbying and ethics reform.

Albert Robles: a write-in candidate in a 17-candidate field. Best of luck to you. I mean, if you can't get the papers in on time...

The special election is Tuesday June 26th, with a run-off between the top two vote-getters scheduled for August 21 if no one gets 50% +1 vote.

Judging from their websites, I would say Jenny Oropeza has the edge over Laura Richardson. If Valerie McDonald has a website, it's well hidden! Peter Mathews' was a plaeasant surprise.