She made history in the primary. Can Ysabel Jurado do it again against Kevin de León?

March 20, 2024 3 AM PT

When Ysabel Jurado invited me to her staff appreciation party this past Saturday, I expected to walk into a well-earned rager.

She was on the cusp of a huge upset, standing in first place in the District 14 City Council primary over the incumbent, Kevin de León, and a well-funded Assembly member, Miguel Santiago, with about 3,400 ballots left to be counted countywide.

The 34-year-old tenant rights attorney has never held elected office. If she moves on to the November runoff and beats De León, she will be the first person of Filipino descent on the council. The first non-Latino to represent the Eastside district in nearly 40 years. The first out person. She’s already just the second woman to make it this far since Gloria Molina in 2015.

Jurado would join Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez on the council as part of a progressive bloc that would have more sway over city affairs than ever.

So, yeah, Jurado and her crew had every right to party hard. What I found instead in the community room at Tokyo Villa was a humble, joyous kickback that reflected the woman of the hour.

Wearing mom jeans, a bright yellow sweater blouse and clogs, Jurado busied herself as about a dozen staffers rolled in. She laid out black-and-white cookies next to an Uno Attack card game and placed forks and knives next to the carnitas, chicken and tortillas that would be dinner. She tried out different YouTube cumbia mixes. At one point, Jurado left the room and returned with a purple-frosted Berry Chantilly cake from Whole Foods that read, “Yay Team Ysabel.”

The room was modestly decorated: purple and white balloons on the ground, gold confetti over fold-out tables covered in purple plastic tablecloths. Gold balloons that spelled out “WE DID IT” festooned one wall. On another wall was a banner reading “Break The Curse” — an unofficial campaign slogan decrying the corruption and controversy that have befouled most District 14 councilmembers for decades.

Folks ate and eagerly shared stories from the campaign trail. Albert Orozco of Boyle Heights talked about the Pozole Night his mom held at their house.

“My neighbors loved that she hung out way after the event actually ended,” the 22-year-old field organizer said of Jurado. “We’ve had Latino council members in the district forever — and look at how they turned out.”

Milagros Montalvo, who lives in Tokyo Villa and is Jurado’s scheduler, met her future boss at an event for queer women of color.

“I was taught to put politicians on a pedestal, even though they usually treat voters like we’re bottom of the barrel,” said the 27-year-old New York native. “Meeting someone like Ysabel made that distrust melt away.”

The only other person in the room besides me who was older than 40 was 68-year-old Hollywood resident Eliseo Oliva. The Salvadoran immigrant said he previously worked as a canvasser for the City Council campaigns of De León and Herb Wesson, and volunteered on others.

“If you talk to a politicians, they talk to you like for a minute then move on,” Oliva said in Spanish. “With Ysabel, she wants to continue to listen.”

After a few people stood up to praise Jurado, she raised a toast of sparkling cider to return the love. She turned off the cumbia mix, put the television on mute and began to play videos from her social media accounts.

“As we moved up, people kept saying we were getting lucky,” she said. “Well, the harder we work, the luckier we get.” She reminded everyone to rest up for the tough months to come, ending with a quote from the Netflix reality series “Love is Blind”:

You ain’t above me, you ain’t below me, because you all are with me.

Ysabel Jurado gives an interview in her family home

Before the party, I met Jurado at her childhood home in Highland Park, where she moved back in with her teenage daughter in 2021. Jurado’s UCLA law degree hung in the hallway next to family photos. Campaign lawn signs leaned against a couch.

“I talk to my elementary school classmates at St. Ignatius,” she said with a sigh, “and most of us either live with our parents or have had to move out of our neighborhood.”

When I first met Jurado in October, her chances to place in the top two seemed slim. But the desmadre that has long characterized the Eastside’s political life soon took hold.

De León, politically left for dead after his role in the racist conversation with other Latino politicos that was leaked in 2022, successfully campaigned for his electoral life.

Santiago, who outraised Jurado 2 to 1, sleepwalked through the primary like a prince who felt the council seat was his birthright. In November, Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo crashed into two parked cars, later pleading no contest to driving under the influence — she looks headed to a fourth-place finish.

The chaos left an opening for Jurado to grind past everyone. In the latest returns, she was ahead of De León by fewer than 400 votes and ahead of Santiago by more than a thousand.

In an interview with The Times, Carrillo commended Jurado for plugging into an “energy” for new leadership that she feels voters were looking for. De León sent a statement expressing “profound gratitude and humility” to the constituents who are giving him another shot. Through a campaign representative, Santiago declined to comment.

Jurado’s surprise triumph humiliated labor, which funded the bulk of the nearly $700,000 in independent expenditures for Santiago, and further shattered the idea that Latinos want one of their own to represent the Eastside. It’s the first time a Mexican American candidate doesn’t have a chance to represent District 14 since longtime Councilmember Art Snyder ran unopposed in 1979. It’s also a big win for the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, which counts Jurado as a member and which helped Councilmembers Hernandez and Soto-Martinez pull off their own electoral earthquakes by beating incumbents in 2022.

Over honey citrus ginger tea and Filipino polvorones, Jurado tried to soak in what she and her supporters have done.

“I was like, ‘OK, we have a fighting chance here. We’re doing all the work,’” she said slowly. “But I also know that we were going up against three incumbents. I knew we could go toe to toe, but to finish number one? That’s the part that really blew my mind.”

Her warm, self-deprecating persona belies a sharp thinker who can cite a Nicki Minaj lyric as easily as she can detail the problems facing her district. Housing affordability. Gentrification. Environmental racism.

How did her team do it?

“What’s the secret sauce? Nothing. It was listening to voters, talking to people one on one, listening to communities and uplifting the ones that are most marginalized. Which, in this district, after decades of failed leadership, ended up being a lot of people.”

Door-knocking and attending events around the district, Jurado went through two sets of insoles that she joked were “the real MVPs” of the campaign. Whispers from opponents that her democratic socialist identity would hurt her in a blue-collar district didn’t pan out because “we had a message that resonated with people that are not with DSA,” she noted.

There was no conquering queen tone in her voice, especially when she mentioned the many residents in CD 14 whose feelings for De León and his predecessors remain complex and whom she’ll have to win over.

“The people in the district are like, ‘I knew [them] growing up. I knew them when they started out. I just don’t know what happened.’ … You can go into politics for the right reasons. The building itself [City Hall] is an ivory tower, and it lures people in,” Jurado said. “And that’s where power is. That’s where people begin to change.

“Or at least that’s what you begin to think,” she continued. “When for me, the power has always been outside, with people.”

I asked where she got her progressive beliefs.

“The switch came on” in 2016 when she was about to start law school, she said. Her mom had died of cancer a few weeks earlier, and Jurado worried about how to navigate UCLA, working and raising a daughter on her own. She then recalled what her grandmother and aunts — both single moms — said when she gave birth as a teenager.

“They were like, ’You don’t have to do this all alone.’ And I just kept thinking of how, like, that is just so different to how we operate here in Los Angeles, in the United States — this harsh individualism. We should be able rely on one another.

“And so for me, when it comes to leadership, it’s like, ‘I am not doing this alone,’” she added. “This [council seat] is a relationship between the person governing and the people that are being governed. And it goes hand in hand.”

Her father, Carlo, entered the living room looking for a toolbox. I had seen him earlier walking around the backyard wielding a weed wacker, which turned out to need a new spool of trimmer string.

“Dad, say ‘Hi’ to everybody!” Jurado said.

“Hello, everybody.”

She praised his resourcefulness for turning some of her campaign signs into shade for the outdoor bed of their pit bull, Olga.

“That’s what you call budgeting.”

I asked how he felt about his daughter running for City Council.

“Great. Wonderful.”

He played the role of a stern, sotto dad, but his sly smile gave away his fatherly pride. A retired workers’ comp claims examiner, Carlo busies himself as a handyman and gardener. He and his wife were undocumented immigrants from the Philippines who later became citizens.

What was he going to do the rest of the afternoon?

“Just fixing stuff that needs to be fixed.”

Jurado laughed as he ambled away, then beamed.

“Well,” she said, “now you know where I get it from.”