On November 3, Council District 9 will choose its first new councilmember since 2013. Curren Price has hit his term limit, and the runoff to replace him is between Jose Ugarte, a longtime deputy of Price’s who has his endorsement, and Estuardo Mazariegos, a co-director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE.
Between them, the two have raised $909,553 from donors their campaigns listed by name through September 19. We estimate that about $36,000 of it, roughly 4 percent, came from people who live in CD9. Nearly everyone else who paid for these two campaigns won’t be voting in this race.
CD9 runs through Historic South-Central, South Park, Florence and Central-Alameda, and about 105,000 people there are registered to vote. In June, 23,130 of them turned in a ballot, and Ugarte finished first with 8,054 votes to Mazariegos’s 5,351.
Donors
The two candidates raise their money in very different places. About half of Ugarte’s came from outside the City of Los Angeles altogether, including $31,580 from Beverly Hills and $22,900 from Sacramento, and his two biggest ZIP codes are in Encino and Beverly Hills. A lot of it also came in big checks. Council candidates can take up to $1,000 from a person for each election, and 444 of Ugarte’s 1,109 contributions were for $900 or more. Those checks brought in more than two thirds of his money.
Mazariegos raised 71 percent of his money inside the city, mostly in smaller amounts, and his median contribution was $100. The ZIP code that covers Echo Park and part of Silver Lake gave him $19,817, more than twice what he raised in all of CD9, and the ones around Los Feliz, Highland Park, Mar Vista, Brentwood and Venice each gave him more than $7,000.
Past races
CD9 campaigns have raised money this way for as long as the district has had its current shape. Since the lines were redrawn in 2012, eight CD9 campaigns have raised $150,000 or more, and none of them got even 6 percent of it from inside the district. Price came closest, with 5.5 percent in his 2022 reelection. Terry Hara raised 1.3 percent at home in 2013, and Dulce Vasquez raised 0.7 percent when she ran against Price in 2022.
Citywide
Every council district gets money from outside its borders, but none gets as much of it as CD9. Across the 147 council campaigns since 2000 that raised at least $150,000, the typical one raised 13 percent of its money in the district it was running in, and only five raised more than half. In Council District 11, which takes in Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Venice and Westchester, the typical campaign raised 41 percent at home. CD9’s typical campaign raised 2 percent, the lowest in the city.
The order roughly follows income. CD11 has the highest median household income of the 15 districts, $139,796, and CD9 has the lowest, $57,430. Across all 15, the correlation between a district’s income and the share of its campaign money raised at home is 0.72, and it stays between 0.57 and 0.79 no matter which district is left out.
Residents of the two districts give very differently, too. In the three city elections since 2022, people who live in CD11 have given about $3.3 million to council campaigns across the city, and people who live in CD9 have given about $233,000.
Matching funds
The city also puts its own money into these races. Under its public matching program, a council candidate who qualifies gets $6 from the city for every dollar a Los Angeles resident gives, on up to $143 from each donor, so a $143 contribution is worth $1,001 to the campaign. Ugarte has received $324,430 in matching funds and Mazariegos $363,852, which is more than Mazariegos has raised from donors.
The match isn’t tied to the district, though. To qualify, a council candidate needs contributions of at least $5 from 100 people who live in the district. After that the city matches residents of any part of Los Angeles, so $143 from Silver Lake brings in the same $858 as $143 from Historic South-Central. By our estimate, about nine of every ten dollars the two campaigns could have had matched came from Angelenos who live outside CD9.
Both campaigns qualified, so each has at least 100 donors who live in CD9, and many of them don’t show up by name in the filings. Of the roughly 1,800 donors the two campaigns listed, we estimate about 100 live in the district. Campaigns don’t have to list contributions under $100 one by one, and Mazariegos reported $61,904 in contributions he didn’t itemize, compared with Ugarte’s $10,247. There’s no way to know where that money came from, but even if every dollar of it came from inside CD9, the district’s share of what the two raised from donors would be about 11 percent.
Outside money
Then there’s the money that never passes through either campaign. Independent committees have spent $1,653,308 on the race so far, and $1,335,366 of it went to helping Ugarte. The biggest single spender is a committee sponsored by Airbnb, which has put $302,000 into helping Ugarte, and the California Apartment Association’s committee is next at $232,522. Unions are on both sides. A committee sponsored by IBEW Local 18, the electrical workers’ union, has spent $183,870 for Ugarte, and nearly all of the $220,521 in outside help Mazariegos has had came from one sponsored by United Teachers Los Angeles and ACCE. The Los Angeles Police Protective League’s committee spent $97,421 against Mazariegos before the primary.
Counting the city’s matching funds and the outside committees, about $3.2 million has gone into the race on behalf of the two candidates. Donors who live in CD9 put up about 1 percent of it.
Councilmembers vote on the whole city’s budget, so it isn’t surprising that people all over Los Angeles care who represents CD9, and the matching program was built around city residents rather than district ones. Still, the people paying for this race and the people deciding it are almost entirely different groups. On November 3, only the second group gets a vote.
Method
The donations come from the City Ethics Commission’s contribution records, downloaded October 5, and include everything the campaigns listed by name through September 19. Filings only give a donor’s ZIP code, so when a ZIP code crosses the district line we split its donors by the share of its residents who live in CD9. Our matching estimate counts the first $143 each Los Angeles resident gave a campaign in each election. The citywide figures cover the 147 council campaigns since 2000 that raised at least $150,000.