Winners:
United Democratic Slate
Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, Barry Snell and Natalya Zernitskaya decided to run as a slate for city Council. All four of them will be seated at the dias come December.
New Progressive Alliance
An alliance of progressive groups saw its first clean sweep victory as the “United Slate” earned early endorsements from Communities for Excellent Public Schools, the Santa Monica Democratic Club, Santa Monica Forward, Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, and Unite Here! Local 11 before the race even began in earnest. By getting on the same page early, it allowed the progressive slate to work together from an early date avoiding a repeat of how split endorsements in 2022 may have allowed Councilmember Lana Negrete to edge out two of this year’s winners in the last election.
Transportation Reform/Climate Activists
Anyone who supports a walkable, and bikeable Santa Monica, in which the quality of our city is not measured or by how quickly one can speed in a car across town but how accessible the city is for everyone, were big winners. The existing Council majority recognized how popular bicycle and pedestrian projects and planning are, but the new majority are true believers in creating a better, safer and just more fun transportation network.
With federal funding for these kinds of projects at serious risk, local leadership will be essential to create a safe Climate Resilient city.
The Incumbent SMMUSD School Board
The only challenger to the SMMUSD incumbent school board slate decided to not even run a campaign. The school board also saw the success of their ballot measure to raise money to upgrade and modernize campuses. A nice day’s work for the incumbent SMMUSD leadership.
Councilmembers Jesse Zwick and Negrete
Councilmember Jesse Zwick did a lot of the heavy mental lifting when crafting a proposal to raise the city’s private parking tax to fund transportation reform and safety projects; but it couldn’t get a majority of the votes from the City Council to be placed on the ballot. Councilmember Lana Negrete brought Zwick’s proposal back from the dead. Under her compromise proposal, instead of all the money going to transportation safety, half of it would be spent on “public safety.”
While the language of Measure K doesn’t include strict guardrails, the “advisory measure” PSK that accompanies it strongly encourages the Council to uphold that handshake agreement. This across-the-aisle agreement has turned into a win-win,
David White and city employees
At a meeting hosted by Northeast Neighbors where residents could meet their endorsed candidates, Mayor Phil Brock and Councilmember Oscar de la Torre mused about ways they could get around civil service protections for city staff by firing the current city manager and hiring a new one who would ask for the resignation of all city staff. Whether that was a true threat or idle musings doesn’t really matter. It’s not going to happen.
Jason Mastbaum and Jon Katz
After Mastbaum and Katz confronted de la Torre over charges he made anti-semitic comments at the last council meeting, de la Torre’s allies tried to paint Katz and Mastbaum as unhinged and angry after numerous confrontations between the two residents and Brock. A picture of Katz pointing and shouting from the public speakers podium was shared widely on social media posts disparaging the Dem. Club leader. However, this election night photo of a jubilant Katz and Councilmember-elect Hall tells a very different story.
Santa Monica Next
Ok, it’s a little tacky to call yourself a “winner” in your own column but for a news website that is often dismissed by critics because “nobody reads it” can anyone argue we didn’t have a major impact on how the race was covered in other publications? Oh, and for the record according to third party web tracker Seran/King Next had a larger audience than the Lookout for the last month of the campaign.
Losers
Safer Santa Monica Slate
Four candidates – Mayor Phil Brock, Councilmember Oscar de la Torre, Dr. Vivian Roknian and John Putnam – and none made it to the winner’s circle.
In years past, the more conservative tickets have been able to paint their campaigns as grass roots versus big money. But this time the political action committees and independent expenditure committees backing the Safer Slate outspent (at least according to the most recent reporting) the PACs/IECs that backed the United Democratic Slate
Blue Wave Democratic Club
The Blue Wave club was formed to provide endorsements with the word “Democratic” in them for candidates too conservative to pick up the support of mainstream Democratic Clubs in liberal West Los Angeles. It didn’t just back the Safer Slate (minus Putnam but including Ericka Lesley), but also went out of its way to endorse Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin DeLeon who disgraced himself by being caught on tape yucking it up with other Councilmembers while making racist jokes and trying to gerrymander a colleague out of her seat. Bad night for them.
Santa Monica Coalition
The organization founded to protest the city’s homeless policies that drew national attention for its “Santa Methica” banners on the Promenade was clearly supporting the Safer Slate, even though they took issue with Brock for living in reality.
The group targeted City Manager David White and has repeatedly called for his termination from office. That seems unlikely now.
Neighborhood Associations Except for the Ocean Park Association
A coalition of neighborhood associations banded together to put on the first candidate’s forum to feature all ten candidates. Given the open support some members of the committee had for the Safer Slate, there was open concern that the forum would end up having slanted questions designed to produce campaign materials supporting the slate. When the non-partisan Ocean Park Association was thrown off the committee, concerns only intensified.
In the end, the associations’ “lightning round” where candidates could only show “yes” or “no” support was a farce featuring questions that were nonsense or that required a lot more explanation than a yes or no. When, as predicted, the answers given were used in campaign materials supporting the Safer Slate and there was an attempt to paint the United Slate (which received the endorsement of the traffic safety group Streets for All) as opposed to traffic stops, it became a black eye for everyone involved in the forum.
After Northeast Neighbors endorsed the Safer Slate, they held an online “get to meet you” with the slate mates that produced the clips of Brock and de la Torre discussing ways to fire huge portions of city staff and de la Torre commenting that he didn’t know how to pronounce Natalya Zernitskaya’s name.
Three of the cities officially recognized Neighborhood Association’s lent their name to No on QS, and of course that measure passed easily.
Neighborhood Associations claim to be the voice of the people in city government. If that’s the case, why do their endorsed candidates and ballot measure positions lose all the time?
Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC)
Whether you want to call them “slow-growth” as they prefer or “no-growth” as their detractors claim, the SMCLC certainly loses more often than they win. For a group that claims to speak for “the residents” they’ve only had one successful election (2020 when they won three of four seats) in decades. The short period of time where they had the ears of a majority of the Council, they steered the ship right into the iceberg of state law leading to the Builder’s Remedy debacle. Their attempt to inject NIMBYism into this election by going after the United Slate over their support for a state housing law was another unsuccessful attempt to reframe the election.
Pulse Polls
I almost feel bad bringing it up. But Santa Monica’s least reputable public polling was laughably wrong again. Its September/October election poll showed a landslide win for the Safer Slate, and that County Measure A would fail with 96% voting against it. Measure A passed. Yet the Lookout will doubtlessly report the next poll’s findings as though it’s breaking news.
Both a winner and a loser
The Santa Monica Police Officers Association/ Firefighters Union – The public safety unions made headlines and raised eyebrows when they endorsed three of the four “Safe Santa Monica” slate members leaving out John Putnam but adding Ericka Lesley. Lesley, who had won races for Rent Control Board and had a base in the community, finished 9th overall, thousands of votes behind Putnam showing these union endorsements weren’t worth a lot of votes.
However, the union also backed Measures K and PSK pretty hard, all but guaranteeing more funding for more officers and firefighters and/or new and better equipment. Hard to call any union a “loser” when it helped secure more funding for their parent organizations.
