Zimmer wrapped it up, with the generous help of United Teacher Los Angeles.
Unofficial results from the Los Angeles City Clerk show Zimmer with 56.13 percent to Mike Stryer's 43.87 percent in the election for Los Angeles Unified's Westside board seat.
Those figures do not include results from the city of West Hollywood or the small portions of Calabasas and Beverly Hills that vote in District 4. Los Angeles officials are also still counting provisional ballots, mail-in ballots that arrived on Tuesday and ballots with "snags."
In a post-mortem posted online this morning, the Los Aneles Times' Howard Blume takes a look at conflicts among the groups that supported Zimmer - especially UTLA, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the charter school contingent.
The union, in other words, accepted Zimmer's efforts to collect supporters whose priorities conflict with those of the union. With about 150 charter schools in Los Angeles -- and more on the way -- Zimmer was responding to a new political reality.
"In this campaign, every time someone would come on board, it would send some shock waves to other folks," Zimmer said, "because they weren't folks that usually worked together. But if this district is going to make it, everybody has got to pull together."On this round, the real political tug of war was destined not to occur at the ballot box but in the aftermath.
Leave a comment