LOS ANGELES, May 18 -- In its final exuberant days, the campaign of Antonio Villaraigosa was electrified by the buzz of history in the making, polls outlining his strong shot at becoming the city's first Latino mayor in modern times. But as the results came in late Tuesday, the high school dropout-turned-state Assembly speaker had made history of a completely unexpected kind.
For in a metropolis fragmented by ethnicity, geography and social class -- where candidates have struggled to patch together a winning coalition -- Villaraigosa won big. He won the Latino vote -- and the black vote, and the white vote. He won the working-class neighborhoods, and the prosperous San Fernando Valley. The longtime liberal even captured much of the Republican vote.
Villaraigosa's landslide victory over one-term incumbent James K. Hahn, a fellow Democrat -- capturing nearly 59 percent of the vote to the mayor's 41 percent in the nonpartisan election -- left many of his supporters giddy about his potential to unify a city where so many groups have long been at odds. The mayor-elect spoke to that promise at a visit Wednesday to a job-training center in the predominantly African American south end of town.
"I intend to be a mayor for all Los Angeles," Villaraigosa, 52, said, after expressing pride in his Mexican heritage. "In this diverse city, that's the only way it can work."
But in successfully appealing to so many voting blocs -- with different and conflicting demands -- Villaraigosa provided few specific clues to how he plans to deal with the complex woes of the nation's second-largest city.
"Right now he's many things to many people," said Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New America Foundation who has written extensively on L.A. politics. "Presumably he'll have to define himself more clearly."
Villaraigosa's victory catapults him onto a national stage, as one of the country's top Hispanic elected officials. Los Angeles becomes only the second U.S. city of more than 1 million to elect a Latino mayor, after San Antonio, where Ed Garza is completing his second two-year term. (Henry G. Cisneros, the nation's first big-city Latino mayor, won office there when San Antonio was much smaller.) Twenty other Latinos are mayors of U.S. cities larger than 100,000. There are two Latinos in the Senate -- Mel Martinez (R) of Florida and Ken Salazar (D) of Colorado -- and one governor, Bill Richardson (D) of New Mexico.
Villaraigosa's success has been heralded as a measure of the rise of Latino political power in Los Angeles, where residents of Hispanic origin make up more than 46 percent of the population. Yet Latino voters accounted for barely a quarter of Tuesday's turnout, requiring Villaraigosa -- like many other Hispanic politicians -- to appeal to a much broader base.
In 2001, when he first ran for mayor, he bolstered his base of working-class Latino voters with the support of wealthy liberals from the city's posh west side, many of them titans of the entertainment business. But after coming out on top in a crowded first ballot, he lost in the runoff to Hahn -- a white city prosecutor who drew the support of both law-and-order-minded white conservatives and black voters loyal to his late father, a longtime county supervisor and civil rights pioneer.
Hahn's administration, though, was soon wracked by two issues that alienated many of his supporters -- his fight to stop the Valley from seceding, and his decision to dismiss the city's African American police chief, Bernard C. Parks. Though Villaraigosa was widely regarded as the candidate of greater charisma, he benefited strongly from voter discontent with Hahn, whose city hall was also the target of investigations into alleged campaign and contracting improprieties.
"There are a lot of people around who didn't want to say they were for Villaraigosa but were fed up with Hahn," said Joe Cerrell, a veteran Democratic consultant, who was not involved in the race. "Hahn is about as honorable a politician as I've ever met, but [voters perceive] that where there's smoke there's fire."
Fernando J. Guerra, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who conducted exit polls here, said that Villaraigosa's wide support will give him an unusual ability to govern the city. (Asian American voters, according to Guerra's polling, were the only major ethnic group to turn out for Hahn.) "No one group can claim that they were the deciding factor, so he is not beholden to one geographic or broad demographic group," Guerra said.
But Rodriguez said that the new mayor could be just as hobbled by the unofficial alliances that fueled his ascent. Villaraigosa, he noted, has yet to take a hard stance on some of the issues that divide his new base of support -- among them proposals to expand Los Angeles International Airport and the use of injunctions against gangs, a practice that some contend violates constitutional rights.
A glowing but visibly weary Villaraigosa got an early start on the job Wednesday. He met with Police Chief William J. Bratton to pledge more manpower and more African American recruits, then greeted students at a job-training center. He cut his visit short, though, to rush off to a Valley high school where tensions between black and Latino students had erupted into a riot -- one of a few such melees in the city recently.
Back in South Central, one voter expressed hope in Villaraigosa's ability to heal some of those divides. M.S. Mitchell, an African American retiree, said she had switched her support from Hahn this year hoping the Latino politician could solve her neighborhood's crime and traffic problems. "We need all kinds of different people, all kinds of ethnicities," she said. "We need all kinds of different people to make it work."
Villaraigosa Elected L.A. Mayor