THE POLITICAL MAKEUP cial city task force on homeless issues during the early 1990s.
“Parking and traffic are much more hot-button issues than whether I’m going to vote for George W. Bush and someone else is going to vote for Al Gore,” she said.
Despite his ideological differences with the majority of residents, Kronovet said he considers the city to be very tolerant of the followers of other parties.
While Abrahms, the president of the Republican Lawyers Association for the county, would agree with that assessment, he has run into some issues in the past, starting with the door bell.
“Certain neighbors have complained about the fact that my doorbell rings with a patriotic song,” he said.
A wooden sign that read “God Bless America” disappeared from his door knob on Independence Day last year.
He has also received some derogatory comments whenever he wore his Ronald Reagan T-shirt up and down the Third Street Promenade.
Though his car has never been keyed, Abrahms said he has heard about such incidents occurring. It’s the reason why he doesn’t put a Bush-Cheney sticker on his vehicle.
“I like my car and I like it with all the paint,” he said.
But Abrahms said he wouldn’t consider Santa Monica to be an unfriendly city toward republicans, adding that the majority of people here are tolerant and willing to engage in a civil discussion.
“I find that more often there’s a lot that we agree on than disagree on,” Abrahms said.
Out of the more than 58,000 registered voters in Santa Monica, approximately 10,000 are signed in as republicans, nearly 31,000 as democrats while the remainder are unaffiliated or registered with third parties, according to Los Angeles County Clerk records updated as of Dec. 17, 2007.
In Los Angeles County, there are a little more than one million registered republicans, reflecting 26 percent of registered voters in the county, according to the County Clerk’s Office.
Approximately 33 percent of registered voters in the state are republicans, compared to 43 percent for democrats, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office, Kronovet believes the republicans in California as a whole tend to be more socially liberal, reflecting the diversity and tolerance of the state’s residents.
“California is a very tolerant state,” he said. “In Santa Monica, there’s a great tolerance toward being different.”
Given the liberal demographics, Santa Monica isn’t normally a city that republican candidates for national offices target for campaigning purposes, Hoffenblum said.
Late last year, republican candidate Rudy Giuliani made a brief campaign stop at The Counter in Sunset Park during the afternoon late lunch traffic, shaking hands with patrons in the restaurant. Several supporters of the former New York City mayor showed up to get a picture with him.A reporter there asked several to comment on the record about their support for the candidate, but most did not want to give their names out of fear that it would somehow hurt them and their businesses because they are located in liberal Santa Monica.
“They won’t target (Santa Monica) any-more than they would target California,” Hoffenblum said of republican candidates.
While there isn’t a local Republican Party in Santa Monica, there is the Santa Monica Republican Women Federated, a branch of the national organization.
The club, which Benson-Brown heads, has about 75 members.
The club president has lived in Santa Monica since 1970, moving to the area after graduating from college in the San Francisco Bay Area.
For Benson-Brown, the reason why she aligns herself with the Republican Party instead of their donkey counterparts is because of her beliefs in the individual.
“The republicans, as far as I have seen, believe that more decisions about big things and small things belong to the individual and not the big brother sitting somewhere in Sacramento or Washington saying you must do this because we feel it is best for us,” Benson-Brown said.
When it comes to campaigning in Santa Monica for republican causes, Benson- Brown said the organization just keeps doing what it can given the circumstances.
“You play the hand you’re dealt,” she said. “You do with what you’ve got.”
The renter population in Santa Monica leans heavily democratic as well as the demographics in the Sunset Park neighborhood, which has a lot of single-family residences, Zane said. The north of Montana neighborhood is where the majority of the city’s republicans reside, he said, adding that the ratio of democrats to republicans in the affluent neighborhood is about 50-50. In the 2006 election, City Council SMRR candidates won nearly ever single precinct in Sunset Park except for one — a precinct near Marine Avenue.
So will Santa Monica ever lean to the right? Probably not, Hoffenblum said. “(Santa Monica) went from a homeowner dominant voting bloc to (renters) being the dominant voting bloc,” he said. “It brought in a younger and more progressive voter into Santa Monica.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 26, 2008. Read the original PDF.