Well, that went even worse than I had expected.
I had figured that most of the people I supported in this election were going to lose.
When you take on a corrupt city, and pay-to-play politics, you often end up the big loser.
The Breakdown
Council District 2
Augusto Bisanis loss was not unexpected. Paul Krekorian is backed up by the Democratic Party and all the labor unions. And he uses the dark arts. Augusto Bisani did better than he did last time, but he was still nowhere close to winning.
Council District 4
The victory by Tom La Bonge here was also not unexpected. La Bonge has thirty years experience in the district. Still, it makes me wonder what might have been if Frank Sheftel and I had both stayed in the race and cut more percentage points away from Tom. Also noticeable here is the poor showing by Stephen Box and the surprisingly good showing by Tomas O'Grady. I think Tomas was able to get a lot of non-traditional city voters to the polls. But even if he had made a runoff, it is difficult to see him beating La Bonge. Still, I'm kind of glad I stayed out of this one.
Council District 6
Insane, and cruel, that Tony Cardenas, with his 4,000 measly votes, gets to continue to commit crimes against taxpayers here in the City. I imagine that most of his voters were City employees who were just voting to protect their paychecks and pensions.
Council District 8
I actually wanted Bernard Parks to win here, just because his opponent was a total nut who didn't deserve the job. I'm still mad at Parks for double dipping with the pensions, though. I guess Soulvine writer Betty Pleasant doesn't know what she is talking about when it comes to Parks.
Council District 10
For me, this was by far the most shocking result in the election. Herb Wesson, who is of little value, totally dominated and destroyed his opponents here. Facing a large crowd of opponents, Wesson wiped them out with little effort. I figured it was going to be easy for his opponents to force a runoff. What the hell did they do in their campaigns? Run and hide under their bed? This makes no sense. They needed 500 signatures to get on the ballot. Three of them didn't get 500 votes total. A real waste of time by them.
Council District 12
Mitch Englander took the handoff from Greig Smith, as expected. Brad Smith made a reasonable showing, but the others should probably stop trying to run for office.
Council District 14
Another shocker, as the Martinez campaign spent a lot of money, but barely did better than some of the underfunded candidates. Huizar can now continue his crime spree at City Hall.
In summary, the Clean Sweep happened as planned ...the incumbents wiped everyone out.
Ron Kaye and the Clean Sweepers backed some people who did very poorly.
They wouldn't endorse Augusto Bisani in CD 2, but he did better than multiple people that Clean Sweep did endorse. Very strange.
City activists can now take a break and try to figure out how to do better in 2013.
There will at least be some big changes then, as several members are termed out and others will probably run for Mayor.
