San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Nonwhite candidates see slow gains in local offices
Within eights months of swearing in Fremont’s first-ever Black City Council member last November, the council voted to make Juneteenth a paid holiday starting in 2022. It was the council’s new Black voice, Teresa Cox, who led the effort.
“I took the action, I did the referral and, in fact, I drafted the whole write-up that went out to the public,” Cox told me. “I saw it as a chance to join hands and acknowledge a period of history that has shaped and continued to influence our society today.”
Cox is part of a slow, sweeping wave bringing more diversity to local politics. According to new statistics from the Bay Area Equity Atlas, a progressive data
analysis group, the share of elected officials who are people of color jumped from 26% in 2018 to 34% in 2021. These folks include mayors and council members in 101 local municipalities, as well as the county supervisors and district attorneys for the nine Bay Area counties.
The subtle shift comes at a frightening time in American politics. Voting rights, the fabric of American democracy, are under attack. California is speeding toward a recall election that, at times, feels more like a fever dream than reality. Amid this state and national tumult, the Bay Area is seeing its political landscape inch closer to reflecting its demographic reality. But can it last?
I discussed this with Dyana Marie Delfín Polk, a thirdgeneration Mexican American and a prominent political adviser in the East Bay. She’s more hopeful than I am.
As the Bay Area becomes more diverse, so will the quality of local political candidates, she said.
“Consider me one of probably very few optimists,” she told me with a laugh. “I feel like this local change in seeing more BIPOC people elected is a long time coming . ... I don’t see that stopping overnight, no matter what we see happening in other places.”
The growing political diversity didn’t happen in a vacuum. More people of color started winning local elections once more cities switched from atlarge to district-based elections. District-based elections allow candidates to run smaller campaigns tailored to the constituents in their respective districts, thus protecting marginalized communities from having their voices diluted. Over the past decade, 33 Bay
Area cities have made this transition.
Livermore, for example, made the switch in 2020 and saw a 50% jump in candidates of color, according to the Bay Area Equity Atlas. Overall, cities that made this switch saw a 30% increase in candidates of color.
This is good news. But there’s still plenty of work that needs to be done.
In 66 cities and towns in the Bay Area, there are no Asian American elected officials, Bay Area Equity Atlas data shows. San Jose is home to 20% of the region’s Asian American residents, but does not have an Asian American City Council member.
The percentage of elected Latino officials in the region has climbed from 9% in 2018 to
13% today, yet the growth is uneven. One in 5 Latino residents currently lives in a municipality without a Latino representative.
The ratio is similar for Black people. Around 88,000 of us live in a city without a Black representative.
White people remain overrepresented, holding 66% of elected positions while accounting for 40% of the populace in the region.
It makes me wonder: Is the Bay Area’s greatest misnomer that Black, Asian and Latino voices matter in politics?
Courtney Welch, who is hoping to become Emeryville’s first Black, female City Council member in more than 30 years, said the gulf in representation has partly to do with recruitment. This can create a pipeline
for people of color to reach higher offices.
“I know for a lot of us, especially women, we often aren’t being brought into these networks where people are encouraging us to run,” she said. “A lot of Black and brown people just decide to do it it, and there’s plenty to figure out along the way.”
One of the things they have to figure out is political fundraising, Delfín Polk explained. BIPOC candidates often don’t have the personal wealth or fundraising connections to compete, particularly in cities without district-based elections.
“The campaign process is often stacked against BIPOC candidates because of the amount of money that you have to raise just to be able to run,”
she said. “Sometimes this means we have to cater our messages to white voters.”
According to the Bay Area Equity Atlas, expanding the prevalence of at-large elections, switching to publicly funded campaigns and focusing voter outreach efforts in marginalized communities would help level the regional playing field.
Sure, California’s political future is murky and the Bay Area still has a long way to go to achieve racial equity in politics. But it’s hard not to see some small racial progress amid the chaos as something worth fighting for.