Valley’s White Conservative Voter Bloc Backs Soboroff

To Kevin Phillips of Granada Hills, public service boils down to this: “Get in, get out, and give someone else an opportunity.”

So Phillips, a Republican insurance salesman, plans to vote Tuesday for Los Angeles mayoral candidate Steve Soboroff, the real estate broker who casts himself as an alternative to career politicians.

“I don’t think politics should be a career,” Phillips said. “It’s a community service.”

For Soboroff, a first-time candidate, conservative white San Fernando Valley residents like Phillips are a crucial voting bloc in the mayoral primary, one whose strong support is critical to gaining a spot in the June runoff.

At supermarkets, on the golf course, at the post office and on ball fields, white conservatives interviewed in Sunland, Porter Ranch and other north Valley communities underscored that they are the driving force behind Soboroff’s rise to the ranks of top contenders for mayor.

By holding their support, the only Republican among the six major candidates has consolidated the same slice of the electorate that voted most heavily for Mayor Richard Riordan. In 1997, more than 90% of white conservatives--the bulk of whom live in the Valley--supported Riordan, a Los Angeles Times exit poll found.

Still, whites are a shrinking portion of the Los Angeles electorate, in an era when Latinos and other ethnic groups are gaining. Soboroff’s standing reflects, in part, the peculiar dynamics of a multi-candidate race.

With a field of six, one solid bloc of voters--combined with even light support among other groups--can propel a candidate into the runoff. That has had the effect of heightening the power of white conservatives, who are among those most likely to turn out at the polls.

A generation has passed since the Valley spawned the Proposition 13 tax revolt and the crusade to stop school busing, but there remains “an active conservative undercurrent to Los Angeles politics,” said Mark Baldassare, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank based in San Francisco.

“It remains a very potent and energized segment of the electorate,” Baldassare said.

Two-thirds of the city’s white conservatives live in the Valley, an area that has undergone major demographic shifts in recent years. With a sharp rise in the Latino population, whites in fact are no longer the majority of the Valley’s 1.4 million residents, according to 2000 census data. Rather, the Valley is home to a nearly equal number of Latinos and whites.

But the Valley does have a higher proportion of whites than the rest of the city. Whites make up about 42% of the population in the Valley and 23% of the rest of Los Angeles. Three in 10 Valley voters are white conservatives.

Early in the campaign, mayoral candidate Joel Wachs, a city councilman, was widely seen as a potential favorite of those conservatives. But Soboroff, according to a Times poll published this week, has pulled well ahead of Wachs among that group. Among all likely voters, Soboroff is in a tight race with two other leading candidates, City Atty. James K. Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Soboroff has taken pains to appeal to a wider spectrum of voters, campaigning in South-Central Los Angeles and trumpeting populist proposals like a ban on road construction during rush hour. His goal is to broaden his base--a must in a runoff--to more Democrats and moderates, just as Riordan did.

“Steve’s following the same path,” said Soboroff pollster John Fairbank.

Soboroff has had little success yet in reaching beyond his base, but the Valley’s conservative voters are sympathetic to important parts of his platform. He is the only candidate, for example, who opposes the federal court consent decree to curb misconduct by Los Angeles police officers. Traditional police defender Wachs, in contrast, has talked about reforming the department and has said he intends to replace Chief Bernard C. Parks.

Soboroff’s theme strikes a chord with Dave Jollota, a Granada Hills Republican who is chief operating officer of a software company. Reform is “the last thing they need” at the LAPD, Jollota said.

“They need support,” he said. “Two or three get in trouble for doing bad things, and 8,000 get vilified for it. It’s a shame.”

GOP Endorsement Aids Candidate

Among voters, a big advantage for Soboroff is his endorsement by the state Republican Party, which has sent out mailers attacking his rivals. One GOP flier landed in the mailbox of Sharon Anderson of Northridge, a bookkeeper at a Ralphs supermarket in Sylmar. She is picking Soboroff out of party loyalty.

“I’m a Republican, and when I don’t know who to vote for, I go with what my party does,” she said.

For other white conservatives, it was Riordan’s endorsement that led them to choose Soboroff, a former senior advisor to the mayor.

“I think so much of Riordan that, OK, if he supports this guy, he must be good; otherwise he wouldn’t say so,” said retired construction contractor Adrian Visser of Sun Valley.

Also important to Visser was Soboroff’s profile as a businessman seeking public office for the first time.

“We’ve had about enough of politicians,” Visser said.

Other conservatives echoed the same theme. Budd S. Guttman, a Porter Ranch security consultant, admires Soboroff for putting $687,000 of his own money into the race--a move that has come under fire from the other candidates.

“It’s wonderful, somebody who would spend their own money to run for office,” he said.

Elisabeth Loth, a Tujunga insurance agent, expects Soboroff to bring business savvy and “fresh ideas” to City Hall.

“It seems like he’s not beholden” to special interests, she said.

But Loth worries that as a newcomer, Soboroff would have a tough time pushing his agenda through the City Council.

“It’s kind of hard to get things done if you don’t have friends,” she said.

Loth, a Republican, used to like Wachs, who has the endorsement of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. She lives in the Studio City councilman’s district. But Wachs lost her support by calling for an end to the Boy Scouts’ free access to city recreation facilities because the group bans gay Scout leaders.

“It’s the only good thing for boys, and they take it away,” she said. “It’s stupid.”

Perhaps the most surprising development among Valley voters has been Wachs’ failure to galvanize wide support among white conservatives. Wachs, an independent and former Republican, has been on the council for nearly 30 years and has run twice before for mayor and has often railed against taxpayer subsidies in a fashion that would seem to attract conservative voters.

Yet the Times poll found that 55% of white conservatives favored Soboroff, followed by Hahn at 12% and Wachs with 8%.

If small, Wachs’ following is at least loyal. Judy Campbell, a Shadow Hills Republican, said she and her husband, Chuck, will vote for him because Wachs fought developers who threatened the rural character of their neighborhood on the edge of the Verdugo Mountains. But Soboroff would be fine too, she said.

“He’s a businessman, and L.A.’s a big business, so I’m not going to be unhappy if he wins,” she said. “I think Soboroff can run this city like a business.”

Barbara Zellner, a Tujunga accountant, sees Wachs as a good councilman, but said he doesn’t belong in the mayor’s office. “I just don’t really see him as the mayor,” she said. “I don’t know why I feel that way. I just do.”

At the Knollwood Country Club in Granada Hills, golfer Norah Schumacher, a voter deeply skeptical of politicians, said she considers Wachs “the most authentic” candidate, but “he could prove me wrong.”

“He hasn’t played in that league long enough to be corrupted by the system,” she said, alluding to Wachs’ maverick status at City Hall.

“He’s not afraid to upset special interests.”

To Schumacher, politics is about “who’s in bed with whom.” Of all the candidates, she was most disdainful of Hahn, the front-runner. “There’s been tons of lobbying money sent his way over the years,” she said.

As the election nears, however, moderate Democrat Hahn is posing as much of a threat as Wachs to Soboroff’s effort to solidify the white conservative bloc. Jeff Cooke, a Sunland Republican who owns an animation and graphics company in Burbank, said he feels safe with Hahn because of his experience as city attorney and city controller.

“The guy’s got a lot of time on the job,” Cooke said. “I’ve got to give him that.”

Tony DeSantis, a Sunland Republican who repairs refrigerators and air conditioners, said he was leaning toward Soboroff. As he climbed into the white van that he drives to repair jobs, he recalled Soboroff’s promise to ban road construction during rush hour. That, he said, could be the deciding factor.

“I’m on the road a lot,” he said. “The traffic situation is unbearable.”

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Times Poll Associate Director Jill Darling Richardson contributed to this story.