Glendale News Press, CA
April 17 2010

Armenian candidates split vote

Assembly hopefuls looked too closely at 1 constituency, experts say.
By Zain Shauk
Published: Last Updated Friday, April 16, 2010 10:09 PM PDT

As the final hours ticked away for Tuesday’s special primary election,
campaign workers in Glendale and Burbank were scrambling to make
last-minute phone pitches to prospective voters.

Volunteers at Democrat Mike Gatto’s headquarters in Burbank sat at
laptop computers, using a predictive dialing system to contact voters
who were most likely to answer the phone and participate in the
election to fill a vacant seat for the 43rd Assembly District, which
includes most of Glendale, Burbank and parts of Los Angeles.

The scene at Republican Sunder Ramani’s Glendale office was similar,
with dozens of volunteers spread around a second-floor suite,
chattering into cell phones and handsets.

But at the headquarters of Democrats Nayiri Nahabedian and Chahe
Keuroghelian, the strategy was clearly different. Campaign workers
were focused on targeting one of the region’s largest voting bases ‘
Armenian Americans, who are estimated to comprise about 30% of
registered voters in the district, according to campaign workers.

Campaign workers for Nahabedian and Keuroghelian were primarily
reaching out to Armenian residents over the phone, encouraging
prospective voters to go to the polls.

Nahabedian, whose $175,529 in campaign expenditures exceeded any of
the four candidates, printed campaign materials translated into
Armenian and mailed some pieces specifically to Armenian voters.

Still, the two candidates of Armenian descent ended up at the bottom
of the polls, with Nahabedian winning 22% of votes and Keuroghelian
taking about 14%. Ramani and Gatto, who made few efforts to reach out
specifically to Armenian voters, combined to earn nearly two-thirds of
all votes cast.

The result has raised questions about relying on campaign tactics that
have repeatedly failed in local elections where multiple Armenian
candidates appear to split the vote from their own ethnic community,
political observers and experts said.

Although campaign representatives for Nahabedian and Keuroghelian say
other factors affected the election results, their emphasis on
battling for Armenian American voters through campaign mailers,
television appearances, commercials and phone calls may have hurt them
in the race, observers and experts said.

`They would have been better off had they had an even broader
approach,’ said Leonard Manoukian, co-chairman of the Armenian
National Committee’s Glendale chapter, which endorsed Nahabedian, a
Glendale school board member.

But her political consultant, Eric Hacopian, said that her campaign
actively reached out to all voters, and that it did not place too much
of a focus on one community.

`We went after everyone aggressively, and we were the only ones who
did,’ said Hacopian, citing 24 mailers the campaign sent to
non-Armenian voters. Regardless, chief among the challenges for the
two losing candidates were each other, experts, observers and campaign
workers said.

With two Armenian Americans in the race, there was rampant speculation
leading up to the primary that their ethnic voting base would be
split.

Keuroghelian, an Armenian language television host who has failed in
his three bids for Glendale City Council, claimed he was pressured to
drop out of the race by Nahabedian’s backers because of fears that
Armenian American voters would split their support between the two
candidates and jeopardize the chances for one of them to win.

The Nahabedian campaign charged that Gatto recruited Keuroghelian to
do just that.

However it came to pass, the result helped move Ramani and Gatto into
a runoff election June 8 and left Armenian American voters somewhat
irrelevant in the primary, observers said.

`The calculus is that simple, isn’t it?’ Manoukian said. `Whenever you
split a voting bloc into two or three or four, the effectiveness is
dissipated.’

But without the drawing power of both Keuroghelian and Nahabedian,
fewer Armenian Americans would have voted, said Doug Johnson, a
Glendale resident and a fellow with the Rose Institute of State and
Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. For example, if
Keuroghelian hadn’t run, not all of his votes would necessarily have
gone to Nahabedian.

`The only way Keuroghelian cost Nahabedian the election is if 74% of
Keuroghelian voters would have voted for Nahabedian, and 0% of them
would have voted for Gatto, and that’s just not realistic,’ Johnson
said. `A large bloc of them would have sat out the race, and even if
Nahabedian would have won a significant majority of the rest, Gatto
and Ramani would each have won their share too.’

There have been exceptions, such as Ara Najarian, who once beat nine
Armenian American candidates to get elected to the Glendale City
Council by focusing on other constituencies.

While Nahabedian may have tried to do the same thing, her campaign
could have been overshadowed by a back-and-forth with Keuroghelian to
win the favor of the Armenian community, said Larry Zarian, a former
Glendale mayor and host of `The Larry Zarian Show.’

As the Armenian American community becomes more involved in local and
state elections, candidates will likely have to avoid getting caught
up in battles with their ethnic peers for the same voter base, said
Barlow Der Mugrdechian, coordinator of the Armenian studies program at
Cal State Fresno.

Instead, winning candidates will earn support for campaigning to a
larger community with issues that happen to also resonate with
Armenian Americans, Der Mugrdechian said.

`It seems to me the longer Armenians are in America, the more their
interests tend to be shaped by what are American issues,’ he said.