Comments
PLANNING WATCH - There are no shortage of explanations for Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump, such as:
- Harris did not have enough time to fashion her campaign.
- The Democratic Party abandoned its working class base.
- Harris welcomed the support of the Cheney’s.
Despite these and other explanations, the mainstream rarely discusses low turnout, especially for Democratic voters. Trump had 2,000,000 voters less than 2020, and Harris had 14 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020. Overall, about 16,000,000 fewer people voted in the 2024 election than in 2020. Of the 265,000,000 eligible voters in the United States, 114,000,000 people did not bother to vote, about 44 percent. If we include third party candidates, like Jill Stein, the number of Presidential voters was 116,000,000. We also need to consider that as many of 10,000,000 voters did not vote for President, presumably because they did not like either candidate. This means that roughly 126,000,000 people did not vote for President. This is nearly 51 percent – more than half -- of the eligible voting pool.
How do we explain low voter turnout, as well as those who did not vote for a presidential candidate? In addition to voter registration barriers, I think these potential voters were either dissatisfied with the major political parties or the candidates themselves.
Why? The Democratic Party began its reinvention under President Bill Clinton (1993-2001). And, this includes state legislators and local office holders. The party’s leaders also marginalized progressives, like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders. Since then the power of the party’s leadership has increased. For example, even though 83 percent of identifying Democrats support a Gaza ceasefire, the Bident-Harris administration ignored their views. They repeatedly used their UN Security Council veto to protect Israel, while supplying billions of dollars in weapons to Israel for the bombing and shelling of Gaza’s people, infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and homes.
This shift to the right can also be seen at LA’s City Hall, where elected officials are non-partisan, but privately nearly all are Democrats. If you look closely at their record, it is hard to find anything progressive, especially their housing, climate, and infrastructure policies.
Homelessness is a chronic problem in American cities, especially in California, and local officials have made this crisis worse through their counterproductive policy of up-zoning. This bipartisan approach benefits real estate investors and contractors, not Angelenos who need affordable housing. Despite the obvious failure of this policy, LA’s elected officials, including Mayor Bass, have zero interest in restoring HUD and CRA public housing programs. Instead, upzoning raises land values and housing costs, forces people into overcrowded, overpriced apartments, live in their cars, turn to street drugs, or sleep outside.
Climate change: The Democrats who control LA’s City Hall are not overt climate change deniers. Instead they are climate change ignorers. For example, after two years in office, Mayor Karen Bass still relies on a 2019 climate change executive document prepared by former Mayor Eric Garcetti. It has had no public hearings, budget, monitoring, or City Council adoption votes.
Furthermore, California cities and counties must adopt an Environmental Justice Element in their General Plans, a legal requirement that Los Angeles has ignored. The State’s General Plan Guidelines also contain a chapter on Climate Change, which City Hall flouts.
Despite City Hall’s climate change denialism, we know what climate conditions lie ahead. The Los Angeles Times recently reported:
“In Los Angeles, average maximum temperatures are expected to increase by as much as 5 degrees by midcentury, along with an increase in extreme temperatures and extreme heat days, according to the state’s most recent climate change assessment.”
City Hall can continue to ignore climate change, but it does so at great peril.
Decaying Infrastructure. While Los Angeles has many new, expensive apartment buildings, the infrastructure that serves them is old and often fails. The adopted General Plan elements for Public Infrastructure and Public Services are 55 years old. They are also incomplete, unmonitored, and have no scheduled updates.
I am at a loss to tell readers how City Hall is updating its antiquated infrastructure. The closest effort is LA’s five-year Capital Work Program, maintained by the City’s Administrative Officer (CAO). This document, however, is not a plan; it is only wish lists from the City’s operating Department for public infrastructure projects.
Connecting the dots: While it might be hard for readers to connect the bi-partisan hawkish foreign policy of the Federal Government to the short-sighted governance of cities, like Los Angeles, there are at least two threads that tie them together.
First, as more of the Federal budget is devoted to past, present, and future wars, there is less money available for domestic needs. For example, between 1969 to 2019, Federal grants to state and local governments declined for education, social services, income security, transportation, and community and regional development. During this same period, military spending increased from $450 to $750 billion.
Since 2019, both trends have continued.
Second, as the international stature of the United States declines, an increasing amount of the Federal budget is devoted to war, especially those fought by proxies. Examples include the US funding for the proxy war in the Ukraine, which is $175 billion to date, while Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza war total $27.8 billion so far, direct and indirect. For both major political parties, these two proxy wars are a major political priority.
But there is a not well-hidden cost to these massive military outlays: the systematic disregard of homelessness, climate change, and urban infrastructure. As Angelenos we are painfully aware of this. Living conditions are getting steadily worse, with City Hall unable or unwilling to stem the tide.
(Dick Platkin is a retired LA city planner, who reports on local planning issues. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives. Please send any questions to [email protected].)
