Four years ago I pointed out that Imperial County tends to vote for candidates with Latino surnames. My example was the Lt. Governor candidate Liz Figueroa won only a small umber of counties. It might have been her home county of Alameda and Imperial.
I got nastygrams from multiple people that told me I was wrong, racist, and mean to the people of Imperial County.
Four years later I have another prime example of why Imperial County is not like the rest of the state.
Take a look at the race for Insurance Commissioner in the Democratic primary. Hector De La Torre won a single county by a wide margin. He won with 67% of the vote actually.
Was it Los Angeles county where he lives and people know him? That would be a good guess but wrong.
Was it Sacramento County where people know his opponent Assemblyman Dave Jones? That would also make sense if you have observed Jones but not correct.
The correct answer would be Imperial County where despite being crushed by Jones statewide by a margin of 61-39 he got more than 2/3 of the vote. The map is pretty easy to understand.
Imperial County is just different than any other place in California. Some voters look for ballot designation, some look for slates, those in Imperial look for the Latino surname.
June 19th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Imperial County is also VERY conservative on key State propositions.
In November 2008, Imperial voted 70% YES on the defense-of-marriage
Proposition 8, and 74% YES on parental notification before a minor can
have an abortion (Proposition 4).
June 20th, 2010 at 12:00 am
I would hope that nobody was so boorish as to send you a nastygram for this post, because your analysis is absolutely correct. Note too, that Imperial County gave Assemblyman Pedro Nava 22.5% of the vote in his race for AG while, statewide, he received less than 10%. Note also that someone by the name of Charles Pineda (I’ve never heard of him before) recieved a whopping 17.4% of the vote for Governor in Imperial County while statewide he received a mere 4% of the vote. On the Republican side, former Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia always did very well down there. In fact, in at least one of her elections, Bonnie received a higher percentage of the vote in Imperial County than she did in Riverside County.