The race to win a spot on the state Assembly representing
California district 47, the district containing UCLA, holds no
promise of being a tight one.
The district has an 83 percent Democratic registered-voter
makeup, according to the Web site of the County of Los Angeles
Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
The three individuals in the race for the California State
Assemblymember spot are Republican nominee Dale Everett, Democratic
nominee Karen Bass and Libertarian nominee Peter De Baets.
Some experts say it’s inevitable that districts are
dominated by one party.
No matter how district lines are drawn, there are areas in Los
Angeles where almost everybody is of one party, said Barbara
Sinclair, a professor of political science.
“There is a tendency for people who are similar in a lot
of ways, like their party preference, to live together,”
Sinclair said.
The state Legislature drafts the lines of the assembly districts
every 10 years.
“Republicans and Democrats pretty much come up with what
could be called a bipartisan partisan gerrymander,” Sinclair
said.
If that is the case, it isn’t stopping candidates who
aren’t Democrats from trying their hand at running for office
in a district marked by heavily Democratic leanings.
Republican candidate Everett is a board member of the Los
Angeles chapter of Log Cabin Republicans (a lesbian and gay
advocacy group) and a senior software engineer.
The only Republican to run in the March 2 primary, Everett
recently declined the endorsement of Log Cabin California and
returned their contributions to make it clear that he doesn’t
agree with Log Cabin’s anti-Bush stance, he said in his
statement on issues.
De Baets is the Libertarian candidate for district 47 and is
also a small business owner.
Bass, the Democratic candidate, is an instructor at the USC
medical school, a UCLA public policy fellow and founder and
executive director of Community Coalition, an organization aimed at
improving the quality of life in Los Angeles.
She captured the title of Democratic nominee after defeating
four other Democratic candidates in the March 29, 2004 primary
election, garnering 48.2 percent of the Democratic vote, according
to the Web site of California Secretary of State.
The three candidates vying for the spot are doing so only in
name when one realistically considers the heavily Democratic makeup
of the district, said Theresa Hayes, an administrative worker for
the Bass campaign.
“She’s going to win,” Hayes added.
The people who are “taking the chance and running”
are doing so at the behest of their communities and people they
know in the business community, Hayes said. The will of the people
plays a part, but “to a considerable extent, the people who
run decide on their own whether to run or not,” Sinclair
said.
Small-time candidates such as Everett and De Baets are
sacrificed by their parties with the knowledge that they almost
certainly won’t win, Sinclair said. She added that when the
vast majority of the voting population of a district is registered
as Democratic, no serious Republican politician is going to want to
undergo certain defeat, which opens the door for less well-known
candidates in those areas.
“You’re an ambitious Republican. Are you going to
really want to run in this district? The people who run in
districts that are very much stacked against them usually tend to
be people who don’t really have a chance anyhow,”
Sinclair said.
As to why Everett and De Baets would attempt to oppose a
Democrat in such a weighted district, “maybe they
haven’t got anything else to do with their time,”
Sinclair said. “Or maybe they just know so little about
politics that they don’t know they don’t have a chance
in hell of winning.”