For a non-election year, 2023 proved to be a momentous off-season for local democracy – deciding minimum wages, municipal run-offs and recalls – with, in one case, an unprecedented legal debacle and major upset of political expectations.
It was the year of special elections in Seal Beach, Anaheim and Santa Ana.
Along with recall efforts in Anaheim and the Orange Unified School District.
It’s just a taste of next year’s presidential election, but it’s also opening new insights.
The lesson in Santa Ana?
Expect anything.
It’s a predominantly immigrant, Latino and working-class city – one that, on top of being population dense and built out, sits in the political, governmental and geographic heart of Orange County.
And heavy political spending by developers and the police union often dominated its citywide elections, which had for years elected lawmakers opposed to policies like rent control.
That was until a new political faction took hold after 2020, and in short order approved the county’s first citywide rent control ordinance in 2021.
That vote – along with high-profile resistance to the powerful police union – prompted a recall effort against Councilmember Jessie Lopez this year, and kicked off a political environment of heightened tension and bickering that put the City Council’s ideological split into full view.
[Read: Santa Ana Debate Over Rent Control and Noncitizen Voting Tears Open Council Split]
Then came an 11th hour wrench no one was expecting:
Just weeks before the recall election that petitioners successfully prompted for November – and after ballots had already been mailed out – the county’s top elections official revealed potential legal issues with the electoral map that recall proponents used in gathering signatures from Lopez’s ward.
[Read: Santa Ana’s Police Union-Backed Recall Election Could be Stalled]
The map issue deepened the city council’s chasm over the recall when three police union-backed council members – Phil Bacerra, David Penaloza, and Mayor Valerie Amezcua – refused to supply the needed votes to cancel the election, as had been called for by Lopez’s supporters.
Later, an OC Superior Court Judge made a similar determination not to cancel the election, after a lawsuit had been filed.
Lopez supporters – many of them young, progressive Latinos – then braced for an election in which the odds seemed to be stacked against them.
Standalone special elections often see marginal turnout compared to presidential elections.
Special Elections See Low Voter Turnout
In Anaheim – just a few weeks prior – low voter turnout was blamed for the rejection of a ballot measure that would have raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour for hotel workers in OC’s most profitable tourism center: The Disneyland resort.
As the results came in, proponents of the measure blamed City Council members – a majority of whom were backed by resort interests in their campaigns – for holding a standalone special election, when turnout was sure to be much lower, against the wishes of labor organizers, who called for the ballot question to come up during a general election.
And in Santa Ana, a chief concern was not only low voter turnout, but low voter turnout among young people – a demographic that progressives especially rely on.
But then came the results: Lopez had prevailed, leaving in place – for now – the City Council’s narrow majority that kept laws like rent control and stricter development fees on the books.
Despite being heavily outspent by landlords and the police union, Lopez had survived an effort to tip the city’s balance of power.
Community organizers, at the time, remarked it “flipped the script” of the city’s political environment, leaving only one question:
What happens next year, when four City Council seats open up?