Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva wants to unseat Supervisor Janice Hahn. Does he have a shot?

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s county reporter Rebecca Ellis with a dispatch from the spiciest Board of Supervisors race and city reporter Julia Wick with more headlines.

When Alex Villanueva announced his bid for Los Angeles County sheriff in 2017, the strategy was obvious: Trumpet his party affiliation.

“All we had to do was make McDonnell a Republican and Alex a Democrat,” a campaign strategist told The Times soon after Villanueva had clinched a historic upset against Jim McDonnell, a former Long Beach police chief and former Republican.

Six years and many scandals later, Villanueva’s path to victory is far less clear.

After losing his reelection bid for sheriff in November, Villanueva made a splash last month in the typically sleepy county supervisor races when he announced he would be going after the nonpartisan seat held by Supervisor Janice Hahn. Hahn represents the county’s 4th District, which spans more than 400 square miles in the southern and southeastern portions of the county.

It’s looking likely to be the most contentious county race — though not necessarily the closest. Villanueva made enemies of many powerful politicians during his single tumultuous term as sheriff. And he can no longer rest on his bona fides as a Democrat to snatch the seat.

After all, the L.A. County Democratic Party has since disowned him. His opponent this time comes from a dynasty of powerful Democrats. And he’s chosen a Republican political strategist to steer his campaign.

Tab Berg, a consultant for Villanueva’s campaign, said the controversial former sheriff is expecting to pull support from a different base this time around.

“He’s going to gain a lot of support from people that are center to center-right and probably in the middle,” said Berg, adding that he believed Hahn had aligned herself with the “woke progressive crowd.”

Hahn’s campaign shot back in a statement, calling Villanueva the “embodiment of the MAGA movement in L.A. County.”

“Alex is nothing more than a failed MAGA extremist who lost the last election by nearly 20 points in the 4th District — and we’ll make sure voters reject his MAGA agenda once again,” said Dave Jacobson, Hahn’s campaign consultant.

That’s about as spicy as the campaign has gotten, so far. Villanueva’s campaign website is bare. Berg said they started fundraising events last week. Campaigning so far has consisted mainly of tweets poking at Hahn for the county’s various failings: rising jails deaths, shortcomings of the board’s “care first” agenda, a spiraling homelessness crisis.

“There’s a pretty wide base of people who are frustrated with the level of crime, and the ongoing failure of the Board of Supervisors to deal with the homeless issue,” Berg said when asked where Villanueva expects to find votes.

A powerful incumbent, Hahn has already scooped up many of the major endorsements, including Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, L.A. County Firefighters Local 1014, and her four colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. Villanueva has not yet listed any endorsements on his website.

The Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, which represents roughly 8,000 deputies, has not made an endorsement in the race. Union President Richard Pippin said his group has heard “very little” from Villanueva’s campaign and believes, based on polling, that it will be “an uphill battle to make the former sheriff a viable candidate in Los Angeles County again.”

Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said that’s probably right.

“Look, if he couldn’t win reelection as a sheriff, what makes him think he’s going to win against Janice Hahn, probably the No. 1 political name in local L.A. political history?” Guerra said. “I don’t think he has a chance.”

Guerra estimates Villanueva would need a few million dollars to have a shot. It’s unclear how much Villanueva has raised for his campaign so far, since he entered the race after the most recent reporting deadline; Hahn raised roughly $390,000 in the first six months of 2023.

Guerra said he could see Villaneuva potentially gaining support with independent expenditures from conservative public safety groups. But, he says, that likely won’t be enough to get through to a significant number of the district’s 2 million residents, who live in one of the more expensive media markets.

That said, Guerra predicts it’ll still be a fun race to watch.

“I hope they debate,” he said. “It would probably be one of the best debates in the whole election cycle.”

State of play

— ULA VICTORY: An L.A. County judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging Los Angeles’ “mansion tax” on Tuesday, marking the end of a months-long legal challenge from the luxury real estate community that looked to declare Measure ULA unconstitutional. The ruling is a big win for housing activists, who say that L.A. desperately needs the money raised by the tax, as my colleague Jack Flemming reports. Mayor Karen Bass, City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto and the city Housing Department all applauded the decision.

— NO MORE CITY VACCINE MANDATE? City Council President Paul Krekorian and Councilmember Traci Park introduced a proposal this week to repeal the mandate that requires city employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Such a move would align the city with county and federal policy, according to the motion.

— PUSH TO EXTEND RENT FREEZE: Landlords have been unable to raise rents in the city’s rent-stabilized units throughout the pandemic, but that freeze is set to expire on Jan. 31. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez is pushing to extend that deadline by six months.

— NINE’S A CROWD: Dist. Atty. George Gascón is facing one the largest primary fields in the history of the office, with a mix of former federal prosecutors, county judges and deputy district attorneys taking a run at him in 2024, as our colleague James Queally reports. Here’s his rundown of the nine challengers vying to unseat the self-described “godfather of progressive prosecutors.”

— LAPD OFFICERS OUT OF POLICY: Several Los Angeles police officers broke with department policy in the arrest of Keenan Anderson, whose death after a traffic stop in January reignited debates about the suitability of police for dealing with people in emotional distress, the L.A. Police Commission ruled Tuesday. Our colleagues Libor Jany and Richard Winton report that the commission found that officers deviated from LAPD policy on multiple occasions when they restrained and shocked the 31-year-old with a Taser while trying to take him into custody.

— RIGHTS ACTIVIST DIES: Longtime Jewish community leader David A. Lehrer died Wednesday at 75. Lehrer, a former regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, served as president of the Los Angeles Board of Library Commissioners under Mayor Richard Riordan. Lehrer helped draft California’s first hate crime laws, led legislative efforts to outlaw tax-subsidized discrimination at private social clubs, including the Jonathan Club, and confronted Neo-Nazi and other extremist groups in the West, my colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove reports.

Valley race gets more interesting

Jewish World Watch Executive Director Serena Oberstein filed paperwork to challenge Councilmember John Lee for his northwest San Fernando Valley District 12 seat and plans to officially announce her campaign next week.

There has been rampant speculation that the former Los Angeles City Ethics Commission president might enter the race since the beginning of the month, when the Ethics Commission accused Lee of an array of governmental ethics violations stemming from a 2017 Las Vegas trip. Lee has denied the allegations and accused investigators of ignoring “the statute of limitations to ensure their accusations line up with my 2024 reelection.”

“It seems like there’s a crisis of conscience in this city. I’ve spent my life working to create transparency and ethical systems and I think that CD 12 should have that in their leader,” Oberstein, a Northridge resident, said Thursday.

In a statement Friday, Lee extolled the safety of the district’s neighborhoods and its comparatively low homelessness rates.

“I was elected on a promise to protect our neighborhoods and deliver results,” Lee said. “That’s what I’ve done and why business owners, labor leaders, Republicans, Democrats and independents across the district are supporting my reelection.”

Loraine Lundquist, an educator and astrophysicist who ran against Lee and lost in a 2019 special election and 2020 regular election, told The Times that she does not plan to get into the race and will support Oberstein.

Oberstein also briefly ran for the seat in that 2019 special election, but a judge’s ruling ultimately barred her from running after a fellow candidate sued, arguing that she was ineligible because she’d recently served on the city Ethics Commission.

Oberstein described the ruling as a “moot point” regarding “an ambiguous part of the L.A. City Charter.” (The charter stipulates only a two-year period, so regardless of how the section is interpreted, it has no bearing on Oberstein’s 2024 run.) Oberstein also said she’d received informal advice from the city attorney’s office and the Ethics Commission “that it was kosher for me to run” in 2019.

Quick hits

• Where is Inside Safe? The program to combat homelessness had an operation in Mar Vista near the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Globe Avenue under the 405 Freeway that brought more than 50 Angelenos inside, according to the mayor’s office.

• On the docket for next week: Sunday morning is ArroyoFest, which will be celebrated for the first time in 20 years, shutting down part of the 110 Freeway to cars and giving pedestrians and bicyclists free rein. Tuesday is Halloween.