How a New City Council Map of L.A. Turned Into a Political Brawl
"Blatant political gerrymandering occurs in cities across the country, many of them run by Democrats. In Los Angeles, a scandal over a racist recording was only the tip of the iceberg.
By Jill Cowan, Serge F. Kovaleski and Leanne Abraham
In the aftermath of a secret recording that showed brazen plotting over Los Angeles City Council boundaries, reporters analyzed maps, census data and firsthand accounts to understand how politics trumped public process.
Nithya Raman turned into a political celebrity almost overnight when she emerged as the face of a rising progressive vanguard to campaign for the Los Angeles City Council in 2020.
With a master’s degree in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and experience working with slum dwellers in India, Ms. Raman zeroed in on the city’s soaring housing prices and promised to give renters and homeless people a seat at the political table — her seat.
Ms. Raman, 42, wound up receiving more votes than any council member in the city’s history and began to draw comparisons to the progressive New York congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “LAOC,” one local critic derisively called her.
Barely a year later, though, Ms. Raman ran into an adversary her grass-roots army was powerless to confront: the bruising power politics involved in running a city of 3.8 million people. The City Council had embarked on its once-a-decade redistricting process, and Ms. Raman, who had few allies among the city’s old-guard politicians, was threatened at one point with losing virtually all of the constituents who had elected her.
“I’ve been in politics for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything like this before in my entire life,” said Jackie Goldberg, Ms. Raman’s representative on the redistricting commission. “I’ve never seen a group of people come together and try to disband the City Council district of a woman who got more votes than any of them ever did.”
The redistricting battle in Los Angeles underscores how some big city leaders — often Democrats — have used gerrymandering for their political advantage, much the way Republican lawmakers have redrawn legislative lines to secure or expand their control over some statehouses. Similar fights have been waged in Boston, Miami and Chicago.
The conflict in Los Angeles became a national controversy last fall after audio was leaked that revealed the shockingly frank, racist language that politicians used behind closed doors to discuss where to draw district boundaries. Nury Martinez, the former council president, used slurs to describe the young, Black child of a white colleague, as well as Indigenous immigrants from Oaxaca, and was forced to resign.
But the uproar over the recordings obscured the more fundamental impact of Los Angeles’s 2021 redistricting process: the degree to which political interference by council members directly undermined some of the very goals the politicians said they were trying to achieve.
As the city prepares this fall to look closely at what lessons were learned from the scandal-ridden process, The New York Times conducted dozens of interviews with redistricting commissioners, council members, neighborhood leaders and experts on voting rights to understand the ultimate outcomes of the closed-door maneuvering. Maps of the various district configurations were analyzed to examine their impacts on race and other demographics.
In instance after instance, the review showed, the recommendations of the commission appointed to review district boundaries — advice based on months of neighborhood meetings, expert studies and comments from the community — were largely ignored as the council pushed through a map that would help re-elect the incumbents.
The council members on the audio all largely maintained their existing districts — Ms. Martinez’s constituency remained nearly 100 percent intact — as did at least six other council members.
The city made no progress at all on one of its chief original aims — to build fairer representation for Latinos, who currently make up about half the city’s population but hold about a third of the council seats.
A longstanding goal of unifying Koreatown, which had historically been split across four council districts, was accomplished. But many residents there who had helped elect Ms. Raman — an important base of the renters she wanted to mobilize — no longer had her as their councilwoman.
“This all felt counter to the political explosion that got me here in the first place,” Ms. Raman said. “Eleven months after a very democratic process, a very undemocratic process takes hold.”
Redistricting Mostly Preserved the Boundaries of City Council Districts
Maps show how much each district changed with redistricting. The percentage reflects the change in constituency."
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