Wrigley Association boardmember Colleen McDonald tells LBREPORT.com that the event will use the group's traditional format (applied in prior elections.) The candidates will present opening statements, respond to questions written on cards submitted by audience members in person before the event (not online beforehand or during the event) and the candidates will wrap-up with closing statements.

Ms. McDonald notes it will be a forum, not a debate, no planned candidate follow-ups or interactions/exchanges. A moderator will pose the audience-card-submitted questions after review by a Wrigley Association panel at the event. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. (period for submitting questions.) The event (part of the Wrigley Association's monthly meeting) will begin at 7:00 (with no questions submitted after the event begins.) Wrigley Association candidate events have traditionally extended into the 8 p.m. hour to about 8:30 (time approximate.)

As we have in previous Wrigley candidate fora, LBREPORT.com plans to provide extended video/audio coverage ("C-SPAN style" at length and without comments.)

The morning after the March 26 runoff election outcome, LBREPORT.com offered to host and provide webcast access to a debate [meaning verbal interaction] between the candidates on terms to be mutually agreed. Mr. Guerrero accepted; Ms. Gonzalez's campaign hasn't responded; our offer remains open. LBREPORT.com, now in our 19th year of providing independent news in Long Beach, has no ownership or operational ties to any development or special interests, or stands to benefit from City development decisions or holds an appointed position on any City Hall chosen body or has made any campaign contribution(s) to any candidate on whom we report.

The winner of the June 4 special election will soon cast Sacramento votes on measures including proposed revisions to Proposition 13, overrides to local land use/zoning/density (SB 50) and changes to state criminal laws.

Long Beach Council incumbent Lena Gonzalez, a Democrat, has represented LB's 1st Council district (north of downtown, Central and WLB) since mid-2014 and has cast Council votes generally supportive of positions advocated by LB Mayor Robert Garcia on taxes, ballot measures, homeless issues, spending and development. She's stressed equity issues and generally aligned herself with current Sacramento policies.

Cudahy Councilman Jack Guerrero, a Republican, elected in 2013, is a Stanford (Economics) and Harvard (MBA) trained CPA. In public fora, he's stressed fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, parental choice in schools and urged changes in current Sacramento policies.

The state Senate seat became vacant when state Senator Ricardo Lara (a Democrat) was elected state Insurance Commissioner in November 2018. In the initial March 26, 2019 election to fill the vacancy (with a multi-candidate field, mostly from cities outside LB), Long Beach accounted for more than half the votes in all the other S.E. L.A. County cities combined: 17,322 votes from Long Beach compared to 16,858 from all of the district's smaller cities. If that voter turnout pattern repeats, Long Beach voters could basically determine the election outcome in June.

In the March 2019 special election, LB voter turnout (ballots cast vs. registered voters) was low but not tiny; it was nearly 9% (8.8%) in LB and 9.5% in Lakewood and 10.2% in Signal Hill. That's not much different than the 11% in LB's April 2018 regularly scheduled citywide election that brought Robert Garcia a second term as Mayor and 0% turnout to re-elect Gonzalez because there was no 1st district election when no 1st district resident stepped forward to challenge her.

In the March 2019 initial race in a multi-candidate field, Gonzalez finished first with about 30% of the vote and Guerrero finished second with about 15% of the vote.

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So what might these numbers portend for the June 4th runoff between Gonzalez and Guerrero?

In the current voter climate, a moneyed, mechanical, mercenary campaign with supposedly influential incumbents' endorsements doesn't necessarily deliver an overwhelming win. If it did, Councilwoman Gonzalez would today be Senator-elect Gonzalez and she's not. A few months ago, the money-plus-endorsements formula failed at the opposite end of the political spectrum in NYC when former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated an incumbent favored by Dem party operatives.

And it just failed again in S.E. L.A. County where Jack Guerrero, a Harvard-Stanford degreed CPA from an immigrant family, elected to the City Council in working class Cudahy, advanced to a runoff with nearly no campaign contributions in a Dem majority registered voter district offering an unflinching alternative to Dem party orthodoxies.

He's now pitted against a major-moneyed Long Beach Council incumbent who's velcro'd herself to Dem party Sacramento stances and whose voting record as a Long Beach City Council incumbent has to date not faced a meaningful election challenge.

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If the parties were reversed, and a Republican candidate had the oil/corporate/developer resources and a Democrat without the resources and registered voter advantages had done what Guerrero just did, it would make headlines as a political upset. Whether Guerrero can now convert his March 26 runoff into a bigger June upset depends in large part on Long Beach voters.

The four top-vote-drawing Dem also-rans (Saleh, Quintana, Solache and Diaz) drew 3,274 collectively in Long Beach. If all of the LB votes they drew had gone to Gonzalez, she would have had 13,826 votes, which still would have left her with only 40.4% of the vote. And those 3,274 votes were Long Beach votes specifically against Gonzalez, so it's not clear to what extent she can expect to get them now.

In addition, there were 2,213 "hometown" votes for the top four vote drawing smaller city Dems and it's not clear what percentage of them will feel sufficiently motivated to turn out and vote in the runoff, so Gonzalez can't count on all of them either.

At the same time, the roughly 1,365 votes that Republican Flores Gibson drew in Long Beach are very likely to go to Guerrero.

We believe that Guerrero has an uphill battle but at this point we don't believe Gonzalez has a lock on a June 4th win...and the outcome may depend in large part on how Long Beach votes.

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It's predictable that the Gonzalez campaign may try to tie Guerrero to President Trump, paint him as a fearsome GOP gargoyle and try to avoid discussing a number of Gonzalez's Long Beach Council votes. But it's Gonzalez who's created the exposure by tying herself to Sacramento stances that Guerrero opposes. In addition, a number of votes she cast as a LB Council incumbent were genuinely unpopular or flatly opposed by a number of grassroots Dems and independents in Long Beach. To date, no candidate has raised these Long Beach issues in the campaign that might move Democrat and independent votes in Long Beach.

In addition, Guerrero's views and the manner in which he conducted himself in two candidate fora are closer to an intellectually-based conservative on economic and fiscal matters than crony-capitalist Republicans and their mirror-image corporate-coddling Democrats. We saw a number of people nodding their heads in agreement as Guerrero delivered a stem-winding opening and fielded questions at a Feb. 27 candidate forum in Long Beach. To hear salient portions, click here.

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Councilwoman Gonzalez wasn't present at the Feb. 27 candidate forum; her campaign later told us her candidate absence resulted from her City presence in Vancouver, Canada with a City of LB trade promotion/business development delegation. Accordingly, the next day (Feb. 28), LBREPORT.com offered Gonzalez the opportunity to answer by email the questions posed to Guerrero. We're still waiting for her answers on those questions, which we've since expanded to others.

We believe Long Beach voters of varying political strips (Dems, Repubs and indies) are waiting for her answers. and his, on a number of Long Beach impacting matters that may decide how Long Beach voters vote which may decide the outcome of the state Senate race.

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