Jason Anderson reflects

Anderson, the Ontario councilman who finished a shocking fourth in the election, phoned this afternoon for a chat. He's still trying to figure out what happened, and so am I. But he offered a persuasive theory.

Bear in mind that Anderson and incumbent Sheila Mautz vote alike and both are untouched by scandal. (How many Ontario council members can you say that about?) Neither has a Latino surname, which would seem to argue against that being the deciding factor; after all, Mautz beat both Porada and Avila to be the top vote-getter while Anderson fell behind all three.

But Anderson is guessing that how each campaign treated first-time voters, many of them Latinos turning out to vote for Obama and against Proposition 8, may have made the difference.

"We targeted high-propensity voters," Anderson said of his campaign mailings, "and they were no-propensity voters." In other words, he didn't send mailings to every single registered voter, just ones who've voted before.

Did Mautz target everyone? "She did," Anderson said. "Her mailings went out to everyone in Ontario...That was a miscalculation on my part."

A deputy district attorney and single-term councilman, Anderson said life will go on without being on the council, although he's clearly hurt. Who wouldn't be? It's gotta be tough coming in behind Paul Vincent Avila, a school board member prone to tantrums and unusual behavior.

"Politics is a fickle business," Anderson said. "I can live with it. People call me up and they're more depressed than I am. I tell them, 'it's not that bad.'"