What if they held an election and nobody came out to vote? Something like that happened in Los Angeles’s Tuesday election for mayor. According to the Los Angeles Times, the total number of votes in the mayoral race was only 250,188, in a city whose Census-estimated population in 2015 was 3,971,883. Perhaps that number will be updated (California didn’t report its final presidential vote until some time in December), and the low turnout may be due in part to the fact that the race for mayor was not seriously contested: incumbent Eric Garcetti was re-elected with 81 percent of the vote.
This low turnout is not an anomaly in recent years: when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was re-elected in 2009 with no serious competition, turnout was a comparable 274,233 (I’m using Wikipedia numbers here). But in historic perspective, it’s quite low — the lowest since either 1937 or 1925. In 1937, turnout was 245,419 in the initial election, but since no candidate won an absolute majority there was a runoff, in which the turnout rose to 315,937. You have to go back to 1925, when turnout was 160,399, to find lower turnout in a decisive mayoral election. Of course, Los Angeles had fewer people then: the decennial Census counts were 576,673 in 1920, 1,238,548 in 1930 and 1,504,277 in 1940.
Turnout in Los Angeles mayoral elections peaked in 1969, in the emotionally fraught race between incumbent Sam Yorty and Council member Tom Bradley. Yorty had been mayor during the Watts riot in 1965 and supported the longtime police commissioner William Parker; Bradley, black and a former police officer, offered a moderate critique of Yorty’s performance. Some 702,778 people voted in the initial primary, in which Bradley led Yorty by 42 to 26 percent. Even more, 839,409 voted in the runoff, which Yorty won, 53 to 47 percent.
Los Angeles is not unique for low turnout in mayoral elections in very large cities. When Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York in November 2013, turnout was the lowest since 1929. In an initial primary in March 2015 Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel received 218,217 votes—far below the 708,222 votes received by Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955, a number he put on his license plates ever after. Chicago’s population today is lower than it was in the 1950s, but New York’s population is the highest ever, 1.5 million more than it was in 1929.
Why is voter participation so much lower today in large cities than it once was? Evidently city politics and city government mean less to big city residents today than they once did. The 1969 Los Angeles mayor race, for example, came at a high tide of concern about riots, rising crime rates and civil rights. Feelings on both sides were strong. Los Angeles then was also a bipartisan municipality, with a large population of homeowners who regularly voted Republican. (Los Angeles County, more Republican than the city, voted 57 to 43 percent for Ronald Reagan over Pat Brown in 1966.) There are not many Republican voters left within the city limits, and not even that many in the county, today.
Other factors include the fact that many Los Angeles residents are immigrant non-citizens, legal and illegal, and ineligible to vote. But in addition, it appears that members of the gentrifying population, thick on the ground in many parts of the city, are simply not as engaged in the electoral process as those homeowners were 50 years ago.
Back then, public sector unions were not a major force; today they are, and one suspects that they are generating much of the turnout that exists. The public employee unions, in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York as elsewhere, are trying to determine who sits on the other side of the bargaining table—and to give those elected officials every incentive to grant their members generous pay and (ruinously for the long-term fiscal health of the city) pensions.
The low voter participation in big cities suggests not only that there is no organized opposition to this, but that it’s a matter of indifference to most large city residents. They’re happy to see the persistence of the “blue model,” as Walter Russell Mead calls it, even though it’s increasingly unsustainable. That’s a dangerous sort of indifference, for which someone—a great many someones—are some day going to have to pay.
