By HANK WRIGHT
The NFL season ended.
Election season starts now. Last Saturday was the deadline to file for Mayor, CD11 council, and LAUSD board. I gathered signatures for Councilmember Traci Park.
I have worked two local campaigns (The first was in 2017 for Allison Pohill-Holdorff when she ran for Los Angeles Unified School Board). The second was in 2022 when she ran for Councilmember.)
Here’s what I learned. The mailers lie. Not spin. Not exaggeration. Lies.
Allison was liberal. The mailers called her a Trump plant. They said billionaires were profiting from charter schools. Private charters are banned in California. The billionaires were helping failing schools in poor neighborhoods. The mailers didn’t care.
I attended every debate. Four were vying for the LAUSD seat. Seven candidates were trying to make the cut for Council District 11. I watched the candidates answer hard questions. I saw who knew their job. I saw who performed.
Then the LA Times endorsed Erin Darling for City Councilmember for CD11. I thought he was the least qualified. It didn’t matter what I thought. The endorsement moved him to first place. Everyone else fought for second. The primary race was over. Thankfully Traci Price was second and then defeated him in the general election.
Here’s what I learned about information flow. The system that used to work doesn’t work anymore.
You get mailers. They’re paid propaganda. You see endorsements. They reflect institutional interests, not candidate quality. You read summaries. Someone else decided what matters. The shortcuts are broken.
But the tools exist to do it yourself. There are debates on YouTube and forums on Zoom. Candidate websites have their records. You can watch at 1.75x speed. Three hours of your time. Less than you spend choosing a phone.
The candidates who won? Nick and Traci focused on their actual jobs. School board members talking about schools. Council members talking about streets and services. Not performing about federal issues, they can’t control. Not blaming other levels of government. Doing the work.
The candidates who lost did the opposite.
If you’re unhappy with how things are going, here’s what works: 1) Get informed through multiple sources. Watch the debates yourself. Check the candidates’ records. Don’t delegate judgment. 2) Throw the mailers in the trash. All of them. 3) Vote.
The work takes time. It’s worth it. We’ve seen what happens when we take shortcuts.
Our neighborhoods show the cost. You want different results. You must do something different. The debates are online. The information is there. No one can do this work for you.
We’re not in Kansas anymore.