Los Angeles DA Race Up For Grabs?

In about a month, Los Angeles County voters will have the chance to oust the egregious George Gascon from his perch atop the demoralized county District Attorney’s Office.

But will they?

If money and poll numbers are anything to go by, that answer remains an amorphous maybe.

According to a California Elections and Policy Poll – conducted for CalState Long Beach, Cal Poly Pomona, and USC released Thursday, Gascon has the support of 15% of LA voters.

That is a number he should be very familiar with, as previous polls – both public and private – have put him at about that figure for the past three months.  In other words, as the campaign has progressed he has neither gone up or down noticeably.

That is not surprising, as his unfavorable ratings have consistently topped 50%, as they did again in the latest poll (51%) and typically about double his favorable rate.

That two-to-one bad-to-good ratio is a very tough number to overcome and while about another 25% of the electorate is in the “don’t know favorable or unfavorable” camp, that’s not good either.  As the incumbent, even if people say they “don’t know” it can be assumed that most of them – push comes to shove – will not end up supporting Gascon. 

The poll also showed that 64% of voters have yet to decide on a candidate, most likely due to the large candidate field and sample/mail-in ballots only going out next week which will focus voters to a greater extent.

But as with favorable/unfavorable, the currently undecided will most likely not break towards Gascon significantly, definitely comparably not more than his existing support.

In other words, Gascon’s vote ceiling for the March jungle primary should be that 20-25% figure (it can be assumed those who like him will stick with him and there is a certain incumbency advantage, no matter how awful the job that has been done.)

So, is that a low enough figure to bounce (sort of – the top two finishers in the March vote will move on to a November runoff and Gascon can remain DA until a new one is officially elected in the fall) next month?

Quite possibly, no.There are 10 other candidates vying and none of them have yet to truly break out of the pack. That could mean Gascon – even with only about 20% of the vote –  could end up facing Candidate X in November (note – all polling so far shows him losing that head-to-head to pretty much any other candidate.)

The other issue is turnout. The “top of the ballot” races are for the Senate and the presidential primaries. On the Senate side, there is definite drama as Democratic Rep. Katie Porter and Republican Steve Garvey are neck-and-neck for that coveted second place finish and November runoff spot.

That could drive some additional Republican turnout.

But on the presidential side, both parties pretty much already have their guy so that will not increase turnout; in fact it will most likely deflate it across the board.

Does Gascon benefit from a low or high turnout?  In a head-to-head, he definitely benefits from high; in a jungle primary, though, the issue is less clear as it comes down to motivation – will Gascon’s minions turn out in maniacal droves or will there be a surprisingly large number of sane people who turn out to specifically vote NOT for him?  And if the latter is the case, how dispersed amongst the challengers will that be?

As to the challengers, the latest poll has only 5 candidates getting more than 1% support:  Jon Hatami polls 8%, Nathan Hochman pulls 4%, and Jeff Chemerinsky, Craig Mitchell, and Maria Ramirez are each at 2%.  The remaining candidates, the poll states, are all below one point.

But with two-thirds of the electorate is still undecided and that means that any of the other challengers – Debra Archuleta, David Milton, Eric Siddall, Daniel Kapelovitz, John McKinney –  can leap forward in the coming month.  Siddall, in fact, has led a previous challenger poll, as has Hochman, so those numbers are fluid.

And how those numbers flow could in part be impacted by the finances of each of the campaigns.

The Globe previously reported on the fundraising and spending that took place in January.  But due to an oddity in the finance reporting cycles, the 2023 total numbers were not available until last Thursday.

In 2023, the challengers pulled in and spent (both rounded) the following:

• Judge Debra Archuleta – $235,000 in, $80,000 out.  She did pick up donations from both the Burbank and the Glendale police officers associations.
• Judge Craig Mitchell  – $155,000 in, $70,000 out.
• Retired Judge David Milton – $4,000, $28,000 out (he did rise about $80,000 in January.)
• Attorney Danile Kapelovitz – $12,000 in, $6,000 out.
• Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall – $373,000 in, $285,000 out, including a few “Hollywood” donations, such as a $1,500 contribution from the late Norman Lear.
• Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami – $535,000 in, $152,000 out, including a donation from the El Monte police officers association.
• Attorney Jeff Chemerinsky – $801,000 in, $312,000 out, with the largest donation from his dad, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky who chipped in $41,000.
• Deputy District Attorney John McKinney – $316,000 in, $195,000 out, with about two dozen smaller donations from other deputy district attorneys.
• Deputy District Attorney Maris Ramirez – $252,000 in, $229,000 out, with a donation from the Glendale police officers.
• Attorney Nathan Hochman – $1,300,000 in, $286,000 out, including $3,000 from the CEO of Lions Gate Jon Feltheimer.

A number of smaller Hollywood-related donations were scattered amongst the candidates as well (to see all of the numbers in detail, you can visithttps://efs.lacounty.gov/public_index.cfm?idd=1&more=1)

As for Gascon, he raised $266,000 in 2023 and spent $243,000, leaving him with smallest amount of “cash on hand” (save Kapelovitz) at the end of January.

Political action committees played an outsized role in Gascon’s 2020 election victory.  As for this year, it is possible that “criminal justice reform” PACS will step up again – the decarcerationist Grassroots Law PAC and the Real Justice PAC are both tied to Gascon but exactly how much they have spent and where their money has come from for this election period is rather unclear.

A PAC supporting Chemerinsky was started on Jan. 31 with $35,000 in initial funding from a Charlene Marsh of Dallas, Texas. Archuleta also has a PAC backing her – $20,000 spent so far, – and both Hochman and Hatami have PACS paying for “slate mailers” for them to the tune of $156,000 and $48,000 respectively.

It appears that the giant Soros-tied money has not reared its ugly head…yet.

The vote is March 5 and mail ballots start going out Monday.