The Los Angeles tech and non-profit is worth considering in the mayoral race

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

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Adam Miller is a serious candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. He has real business experience, a commitment to philanthropy and experience in the city’s most pressing issue, housing the homeless.

His political profile resembles that of San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie, whose tenure in California’s fourth-largest city has drawn attention for his willingness to break away, however subtly, from his most liberal impulses.

Los Angeles is five times the size of San Francisco. The challenges are far greater and the stakes far higher. Here, Miller is moving in a line of business leaders-turned-candidates that has produced mayors before, most notably Richard Riordan in 1993 and the near miss of Steve Soboroff, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2001. Just this week, Miller received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Daily News, an achievement that would once put him in the top tier of contenders, though he carries less weight today than in the past.

Still, businessman-mayors and near-mayors haven’t made much progress in Los Angeles over the past two decades. Developer Rick Caruso was clocked the last time he ran and was targeting a repeat before taking a pass in this year’s campaign. The city’s Republican base, traditionally a core for business-oriented candidates, has evaporated, making up just 15 percent of the city’s electorate today.

Miller is a Democrat, not a Republican, and could appeal beyond that part of the city’s voters. His business success—he founded an education technology company with more than 3,000 employees—and his creation of nonprofits to address disaster response and homelessness give him real credentials for the position he’s seeking.

But he remains barely on the edge of the city’s political radar – vote less than 10% — even as the race crumbles in the final weeks of what will likely be the first of two rounds. On June 2, voters will elect a mayor of California’s largest city; if no candidate gets more than 50%, as seems likely, the top two finishers will go on to a runoff in November.

In a recent interview, Miller was optimistic about his prospects. If he makes a runoff, he predicts disaffected voters in the city — more than half, according to some polls — will come to him, making him the winner.

He suggested a similar path for one of his opponents, Councilwoman Nitya Raman, saying she could also consolidate the vote against the incumbent if she ends up in a runoff with Mayor Karen Bass. But Raman is likely to do so by rallying a different set of voters as she draws support from the city’s left, mainly the growing number of democratic socialists.

Another opponent is Spencer Pratt, a temperamentally stunted challenger whose scandal-ridden memoirs should disqualify him from this office. He would lose in a head-to-head fight with Bass, Miller said.

Miller is right about Pratt offering Bass her easiest path to re-election. But Miller underestimated the mayor’s strength against her other rivals. She’s vulnerable, no doubt, but she’s leading the field, brandishing stacks of endorsements from former Vice President Kamala Harris to Sen. Adam Schiff, of Magic Johnsonand brings a strong base throughout the campaign city.

Still, Miller has a plan and a political line.

“People want results,” Miller said, noting that his campaign polled voters asking whether they would prefer a “strong progressive” or a “proven leader” and found that leadership trumps ideology this cycle.

“I come from the outside,” Miller said, “with a wealth of experience, with a lot of work in exactly these problem areas.”

As he explored these “problem areas,” Miller was both insightful and nimble. Sitting among a group of homeless people lined up for meals and showers on a warm morning in Hollywood, he criticized the Bass administration for solutions to the problem that he said were cumbersome and expensive.

The Bass administration boasts that it has reduced street homelessness by 17% over the past four years. Miller says he can do much, much better. “I think we should have a 60 percent reduction in street homelessness during my first term,” he said, “and I think we should see an 80 percent reduction in visible encampments.”

To do this, Miller suggests a kind of community-wide approach, with prevention, shelter, social services and housing contributing to reducing homelessness. The overall work will be to infuse technology to better track progress, connect those in need of services with providers and assign those in need of housing to available spaces.

In addition, he said, the city needs to track the problem more rigorously, abandoning the annual census that has for decades formed the basis of political discussions on the issue and replacing it with real-time tracking, such as the platform developed by his organization, Better Angels.

Turning to public safety, he acknowledged that violent crime in the city has decreased in recent years, but noted that few people are victims of violence. What plagues neighborhoods is property crime, burglaries, robberies, car break-ins. They may not carry the same personal weight as murder or assault, but they leave people in fear.

Miller didn’t mention James C. Wilson’s theory of “broken windows,” but he was speaking Wilson’s language, which is the one that was instrumental in urban renewal a generation ago. Wilson posits that property crime and disrepair create an atmosphere of neglect and that addressing these issues will lead to more serious crime. To a remarkable degree he was right.

So, Miller is tech-savvy, committed to the city, and conveys a seriousness of purpose combined with a bit of tech bro tinkering. The question for Miller, though, is whether he’s coming to the party too late to make the impact he’s looking for.

If he had started a year ago, he could easily compete now. But the late start gave Pratt — whose name is recognized from his role as a bad boy on a reality TV show — a chance to ignite the anti-Bassa vote and is now clogging Miller’s lane.

This creates a political paradox: Pratt leads Miller, with most polls showing Pratt by about 15% to 18% and Miller by more than 3% to 6%. But Pratt has almost there’s no way you can beat Bass. A loudmouth Republican who squandered a fortune on crystals is not what Los Angeles is asking for as mayor.

Miller, meanwhile, would have a much better chance of winning, but is stuck behind Pratt in the June ballot.

That hampers Miller, whose poll numbers were too low to earn him a spot in a recent mayoral debate and whose efforts may prove too little, too late to make it to a runoff in a crowded field.

That’s too bad, because he has a lot to offer this campaign: real ideas that are at the center of urban discourse whether they win or lose.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.