Yesterday was election day here in California, with the practical fate of state and local races decided by voters in the primary. As someone who thinks that California's most significant issues are housing and land use, I will admit that it was not a wonderful day for candidates who put forward robustly pro-housing agendas in the LA area. While pro-housing candidates running for state office continue to do fine, most pro-housing candidates on a local level here in LA lost, and most lost by a wide margin. In the races for city council, notably in City Council Districts 5, 9, and 13, pro-housing candidates finished far behind. In the city attorney’s race, the slate candidates I thought were most vocal about prioritizing housing as an issue appears poised to finish a distant 5th and 6th in the race.
Now, I am already seeing many narratives emerge about who were the “Winners and Losers” of yesterday’s election in broad Ideological terms. Some have argued that the election was part of a broader backlash to progressivism in California. After all, Rick Caruso finished with the most votes in the mayor’s race, Chesa Boudin got recalled in San Francisco, and two relatively “tough on crime” candidates finished in the top three of LA’s city attorney’s race. Others are claiming victory for progressives, pointing to the strong showings of Progressive candidates in the city controllers office and city council districts 1, 11, and 13. Finally, others will say that it's a victory for the established incumbents, pointing to the strong showing for Karen Bass finished 2nd in the mayor's race, and the wins incumbents got in City Council districts 3, 7, and likely in CD 1 as well.
All of these could make for exciting thought-pieces about the direction of politics in LA County. But these think pieces would be missing the biggest story of the primary: apathy. Look at turnout numbers:
As Tuesday's Primary Election came to an end, it was notably clear to poll workers and organizers working booths throughout the day that voter turnout was exceedingly low.
Of the nearly six million registered voters within Los Angeles County -- 5,690,637 -- just 822,545, or 14.45%, were said to have participated in the Primary Election.
With California’s vote-by-mail system, it is worth noting that these numbers could tick up (and the result of races could shift) as more ballots come in and are counted. But even accounting for that, this is a horrible showing of voter turnout. Traditionally municipal elections are low-turnout affairs, but there was hope that after the uptick in voter participation in 2020, there would be sustained engagement in politics. The lack of compelling statewide competition in most of California’s most prominent positions (Senator, Governor, etc.) certainly didn’t help. Still, it is hard to understate how far off these numbers are from what was hoped. Turnout is unlikely to surpass that in March 2017, an election with NO state or federal offices up for grabs and where Eric Garcetti had no real challenger in the mayoral election.
It's also worth remembering that registered voters are themselves only a fraction of the population: LA county has 10 million people, which means that only about 8.2% of the county participated in the election yesterday. There was an extreme disparity in turnout by Council District. For instance, compare Council District 11, located in the wealthy Westside around Bentwood, Venice, and Marina Del Ray, versus Council District 9, which is in the lower-income Southeast part of the city:
Now while the population is about the same in the two districts (~289,000 vs. ~269,000 in the 2010 census), there is a disparity in registered voter totals in the two districts, explained mainly by age and immigration status (council district 11 had ~171,000 registered voters in 2017, versus ~91,000 in district 9). But even that 2x registration disparity does not fully explain the fivefold difference in how many people voted:
The 6500 voters who voted in CD 9 represent only 2.5% of all residents in the district and only 7% of registered voters. I think this speaks to the real, very understandable apathy that exists about politics, especially in working-class neighborhoods in our city.
When I teach entrepreneurship classes, one of the ideas I pull on is the concept of the “Blue Ocean Strategy,” which you can see explained below:
Blue Ocean Strategy states that if you are trying to start a sustainably successful business, it is often ill-advised to go and outcompete existing companies with well-established markets. For every successful disruptor who manages to beat an incumbent at their own game, thousands of companies die in their early days because the task was too challenging. History is littered with entrepreneurs who want to start lovely little coffee shops that can be better than Starbucks, only to realize that Starbucks is an incredibly efficient business that will eat your lunch if you try to copy them. This phenomenon is evocatively illustrated by a red ocean, where the competition for “food” is so fierce that the ocean is red with blood.
Contrast this now to a company that discovers an unmet customer need that is so large and poorly served that you can create a whole new business while avoiding (not fighting) the competition. Think of how the Marvel Cinematic Universe created an easy entertainment onramp for tens of millions who didn’t care about comic books and superheroes. Or how Chipotle succeeded by popularizing a kind of “fast-casual” style of restaurant that was higher quality than fast food but not as pricey as a full-service restaurant. These business strategies are illustrated by the peaceful Blue ocean, which rightly sounds like a much more attractive place to be than the bloody red ocean! This strategic insight can be counter-intuitive at first but is widely accepted as gospel truth in the startup world.
National politics in America in 2022 is a red Ocean. Even non-voters have heard constant political debates and probably have well-established views on essential issues. People occasionally change their minds, but the margins for such changes are relatively small. Campaigns are successful when they employ some mix of persuasion and mobilization (though I think research shows persuasion is more important), which moves the needle by a couple of percentage points in each election.
But when I look at turnout numbers in LA, I cannot help but think that local politics is far more of a blue ocean. This is because so many people in our city have yet to be convinced that local politics matters in their lives and care to vote consistently in elections. And many of those who consistently vote are willing to change their mind: the same electorate where 80% of voters in 2017 (~330,000 people) voted for Eric Garcetti saw 42% turn around and vote for Rick Caruso in 2022 (~133,000 people).
Many brilliant pro-housing people spend considerable time on Twitter, arguing with housing skeptics. As someone who also enjoys my almost daily outings on Twitter, I do not want to say that the majority of this time is wasted: Twitter, for all of its flaws, can be a great place to get information and engage in “spirited” discussion. But it's also important to remember that the vast majority of the electorate looks nothing like Twitter. According to Pew’s 2019 survey, 22% of adults are even on Twitter, and of those on Twitter, 10% of users generate 80% of posts. That means that Twitter posters are less than 2% of the ADULT population. Findings also show that Twitter is, on the whole, younger, more educated, wealthier, and much more progressive than the median adult in the US. My church is an excellent example of this: as a primarily working-class church, most people never use Twitter. Most of those who use the platform tend to be more educated, but most don’t frequently post. The most prominent Twitter posters are both currently teaching at college (looking at you, Chase and Ji!)1 neither of whom would pretend their views are representative of the church community (and in case you were wondering, neither do mine).
But maybe most importantly, people who post and use Twitter tend to be highly active in politics and have well-defined views on politics. Arguing with them is unlikely to change minds because Twitter is a poor forum for debate and because the audience for those tweets is almost certainly harder to persuade. This isn’t to say zero persuasion happens on the platform, but instead that it's a poor place for persuasion. And worse yet, time spent online is a distraction from talking to the vast majority of our city that is unpersuaded that it is worth their time to vote in these elections. The main barrier to persuading these people is not Left-Wing nimbyism or right-wing nimbyism: it's Netflix, sports, and household responsibilities. Its the limitation of time and capacity and the overwhelming complexity of modern life. When your target audience is not even on Twitter, winning arguments with people on Twitter does nothing to overcome these barriers.
When it comes to local politics here in LA, I am primarily a pro-housing voter. I do care about other issues; I care profoundly about things like criminal justice, entrepreneurship, public transportation, jobs, and education, given how they impact working people in my neighborhood. But I think that progress on these issues is often downstream from housing: If we don’t fix the housing crisis, our progress on all these other issues will be rendered moot. The housing crisis is doing many bad things in society:
A lack of housing is holding back economic growth (centrists and business people care about this!)
A lack of housing has decreased the living standards of workers in service and trade unions (critical constituents of the Establishment Democratic party)
Restriction on housing narrows the freedom of homeowners and business owners to earn money using their property (Libertarians care bout this!)
A lack of housing leads to less family formation and lower birth rates (traditional conservatives care about this!)
A lack of housing density around transit is a massive contributor to the climate crisis (progressives care about this!)
Thus, pro-housing ideology is incredibly flexible: I think there are ways in which pro-housing people can work hard to appeal to conservatives, centrists, libertarians, establishment Democrats, and Progressives on housing. One can do that not only because housing is a flexible enough issue and not (yet) partisan enough to trigger partisanship the way immigration or guns do. San Diego has made progress on housing, partially because the city had a pro-housing Republican mayor, who a pro-housing Democrat recently succeeded. They differed on many issues, but they prioritized building more housing (with their ideological flavor and emphasis). There is no hard and fast reason that other cities cannot get to the same equilibrium! Neither of the top two mayoral candidates specified, in great detail, what they will do on housing; I think there is actual room for one (or both) to stake out the pro-housing ground before the fall.
But to get here, I suspect that pro-housing activists, regardless of which ideological camp they fall into, will need to realize that our target audience is not, and never was, the loudest voices on Twitter. Instead, they are the 90% of Angelinos who are either 1) apathetic and not voting, or 2) voting but not tuned into online discourse enough to be convinced were to land on the issue. Moreover, these voters are almost certainly a contradictory mix of ideologies: progressive, conservative, centrists, libertarian, etc. So we should all be familiar with arguments as to why the housing issue should matter to people of all ideological backgrounds as a rare point of common unity. And this is only going to come when we try to meet people where they are at: by having face-to-face conversations in their churches, their union halls, their small business, their school.
The goal shouldn’t be to make these people into housing Twitter participants: that is highly unrealistic and silly. Most people want to spend their Saturday afternoon with their friends or at their kids' sporting events, not sociopathically yelling through 140 character bursts. Instead, you need people who otherwise would not be super engaged to care about politics just enough, at least enough that when election season rolls around, they're willing to check the box for Pro-housing candidates.
Yes, this is a challenging strategy. But I think it is more likely to succeed in the long run than the alternative. It is tough to take someone who has been an activist for 30 years, ideologically opposing developers in their neighborhood, and actually, we're not building enough. But it is much easier to take the guy who works as a tradesman, who is annoyed he is paying so much in rent he cannot buy a house AND send his kids to college, and persuade him that candidate X is trying to do something about it, and then gently remind him to vote now and again. And I wish pro-housing people would try just a little harder to reach the latter group.
But to be clear, if you are reading, please do not stop tweeting. I enjoy your tweeting!