Editorial:
It was a couple of weeks ago that the Chicano Democratic Club (CDA) hosted a political event to find out “What the Heck Just Happened?” with David Alvarez’s campaign for mayor!
The Alvarez campaign generated a lot of excitement within the Hispanic community and almost everyone involved including smart political observers expected an extremely close race. If it had been a close race, the Hispanic community would have represented the swing vote, and would have been the difference between Alvarez losing and winning. It was anticipated, or hoped, that the Hispanic community would come out in force for David Alvarez propelling him to a win, and putting an exclamation point on the growing Hispanic political clout!
To La Prensa it wasn’t a shock that Alvarez lost and was not elected mayor. The surprise to us was the margin of votes he lost by. The race was never close.
After a period of time to decompress, the CDA wanted to review to determine what went wrong? La Prensa attended the meeting based on that assumption. Unfortunately the meeting turned out to be more self congratulatory than political analysis and not about, “What the Heck Just Happened?”
Alvarez congratulated his volunteers, praised the “Go Teams”, and made note of his endorsement from President Obama and all the endorsements from the Democratic Party, including the Mayor of San Antonio. He spoke about his name recognition going from 4% to 92% in a very short time. This was all good, but we were hoping and waiting that Alvarez would have provided some analysts of his campaign, and defeat?
Then the attendees heard from Alvarez’s campaign manager, Gabriel Solmer who continued with the self congratulatory mood of the meeting, and then spoke about the effort put forth to get out the vote South of I-8. A couple of other speaks spoke, but none of them provided any real political analysis.
Unfortunately nobody spoke about the lack of fundraising. Facts are that the Alvarez campaign raised less than a million dollars, while that is a lot of money, it was not nearly enough to run a citywide campaign. This could explain why the campaign failed to bring out voters South of I-8. While this attempt to get voters out to vote should be commended, historically voter registration numbers south of I-8 have never reflected the eligible voting population, and historically have not turned out to vote.
Campaign Manager Solmer’s stated that Hispanic voter turnout was high, and Alvarez won south of I-8 by a good percentage. However the facts are that the precincts where Alvarez won had low voting numbers, while precincts that Faulconer won had much higher voting numbers.
What no one dared to mention was the elephant in the room, the role that Unions played in Alvarez’s election!
For Alvarez the role of the unions was a double edge sword. Without Union support and money he would not have gotten out the primary and into the general election. The $4-5 million dollars that the Unions spent helping to boost Alvarez name recognition, made him and his campaign viable. The flip side of this is that Alvarez had no say so in how the Union ran their campaign. New election rules dictate that there is no collaboration between a union’s independent expenditures and in this case Alvarez’s campaign. In essence what happened is that the Unions ran a parallel campaign, creating their own message that dwarfed everything Alvarez said or did.
To La Prensa there was no real in-depth political analysis at the meeting. The second part of the meeting was “What Now?” An agenda was presented that listed the next progressive issue/campaign with no mention of what the Hispanic community had to do to harness the newfound enthusiasm for political action.
Political action for the Hispanic community historically, has centered around one particular campaign or person and once that effort is done with, politics stop until the next campaign. It is a constant start and stop political effort.
Creating political power requires constant movement, that builds on voter registration, voter education, fundraising, and the development of potential candidates for the future.
We applaud the CDA for having the foresight to start the community wide conversation on politics. Now we hope that CDA takes the next step and focuses on those steps required to build a political infra-structure. Hopefully that will create a political base that the Hispanic community and its candidates can use in their political future. This is a monumental task to say the least, but one that has to be done and is needed if the Hispanic community is to realize their dreams to create political power in our community.