Election Analysis

By Jorge Casuso

Monday, May 3-- Candidate elect Richard Bloom won a lopsided victory in the race for a vacant city council seat April 24-25 by appealing to renters, as well as to homeowners in his Sunset Park neighborhood. The Santa Monicans for Renters Rights candidate swept every tenant precinct, including the renters bastions in Ocean Park and the Wilshire-Montana apartment corridor.

On the other hand, runner up Susan Cloke, who finished nearly 3,000 votes behind Bloom, failed to make inroads into her rival's voter base, despite trying to appeal to his liberal tenant constituency. Cloke won just six of the city's 34 precincts, all of them in affluent homeowner neighborhoods.

These are the conclusions of a Lookout analysis of the precinct results, which don't include 233 provisional and absentee votes cast on the final day of the two-day weekend election.

The final election results show Bloom winning with 7,848 votes, or 54 percent, to Cloke's 4,876 votes, or 33 percent. The margin exceeded by more than 1,000 votes Bloom's nearly 1,800 vote margin in the November election, where he fell just 92 votes short of winning one of three council seats. The other five candidates picked up a total of 1,836 votes, or 13 percent.

"SMMR has never had such a victory," said Steve Alpert, who has analyzed results for the tenants rights group for two decades. "The homeowners did buy into Cloke's message, but the tenants didn't buy it at all."

Cloke easily won six affluent homeowner precincts with 1,759 votes to Bloom's 762 votes. The other five candidates picked up a combined total of 338 votes.

Three of the six precincts Cloke picked up were in single family neighborhoods north of Montana, where she handily defeated Bloom 1,100 votes to 306. Two of the others encompassed college streets just south of Montana in the northeastern edge of the city, a traditional Republican stronghold that borders the Brentwood Country Club. There, Cloke won 432 votes to 270 votes for Bloom

The only other precinct Cloke won was another single family neighborhood by a golf course near the Santa Monica Airport, where she picked up 227 votes to Bloom's 186.

Bloom, on the other hand, nearly tripled Cloke's vote total in heavily tenant precincts. In Ocean Park, the seat of the Santa Monica's tenant movement in the city's southwestern corner, the SMMR candidate swept all six precincts with 1,525 votes to Cloke's 566. The five other candidates won a combined total of 324 votes.

Bloom also handily won the seven precincts in the heavily tenant Wilshire-Montana apartment corridor on the city's north side, where he picked up 2,075 votes to Cloke's 729 votes. The other five candidates won a combined total of 237 votes.

Bloom also picked up three of the four precincts in his Sunset Park neighborhood, where homeowners comprise a majority of the voters, picking up 983 votes to Cloke's 778. The five other candidates picked up a total of 321 votes.

Bloom's victory was sealed early, when he picked up 51 percent of the 4,810 absentee ballots that usually give an edge to conservative candidates. Cloke, whose absentee applications hit mailboxes just three days before the election -- much too late -- won 33 percent of the absentee votes. The other candidates picked up 16 percent.