America has long scouted Los Angeles for cultural signposts to the new. The results of last week's election may have put the city on the country's political cutting edge as well.
Analysts parsing the components of President-elect Barack Obama's decisive victory have begun to believe that the campaign ended in a "realigning election," reshaping the nation's political map like the ones that brought Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to power. If that is the case, then several of the trends that pushed Obama to victory showed themselves first in L.A.
One is the continuing movement of affluent, better-educated voters and suburban residents into the Democratic column -- a trend that has been visible in L.A. for years. Suburban voters went strongly for Obama nationally and overwhelmingly in Los Angeles.
Another clearly marked signpost to the future was Latino participation, which has been growing in Los Angeles for decades but which surged to historic levels across the country in this election cycle, according to an unusually comprehensive exit poll conducted by Loyola Marymount University's Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles under the direction of Fernando Guerra. No one predicted at the campaign's outset that more than six out of 10 Latino voters would cast their ballots for the first African American president, but they did.
The significance of that landslide was amplified by the fact that Latinos are clustered in the Western states that Obama pried from the red column. Seventy-three percent of Colorado's Latinos went for the Democratic candidate, as did 76% of Nevada's and 69% of New Mexico's. More striking, Latinos helped deliver to Obama two of the three Sunbelt states crucial to Reagan's first realigning victory. In California, 77% of Latinos went for the Democrat, as did 57% of Florida's. Even the third, Texas, seems to be teetering on the blue precipice.
It's hard to believe that little more than a decade ago, many analysts were predicting that Latinos, mainly Catholic and socially conservative, would be irresistibly drawn into the Republican orbit, much as Italian Americans of similar background had been after World War II in Eastern states.
So what happened? Two things: immigration and organized labor. Beginning in 1994, when then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, made support for Proposition 187 -- which denied health, education and other benefits to undocumented immigrants -- a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, Latinos across the country have been moving as far from Republican candidates as their legs will carry them.
