Incumbent L.A. mayor to face Hispanic councilman

No Los Angeles mayor has been booted from office in more than 30 years.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Incumbent Mayor James Hahn survived a close call, making it into a May runoff against a Hispanic city councilman after the third-place candidate conceded defeat Wednesday.
The outcome of Tuesday's primary election sets up a rematch of the 2001 runoff, pitting Hahn, who has been weakened by corruption and other problems, against councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who is seeking to become the first Hispanic to win the mayoralty in the nation's second-largest city in more than a century.
Nearly 24,000 absentee and other ballots remained to be counted, but candidate Bob Hertzberg trailed second-place Hahn by 5,800 votes, a margin his campaign concluded was too great. "I called Mayor Hahn this morning and congratulated him on his victory," Hertzberg said during a morning news conference.
Slow returns
In 2001, Villaraigosa, a high school dropout who went on to become speaker of the California Assembly, was also the top vote-getter in the primary, but he lost the runoff to Hahn, 53 percent to 46 percent.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday, Villaraigosa led with 124,561 votes, or 33 percent.
The mayor tallied 89,189 votes, or 24 percent, while Hertzberg, also a former Assembly speaker, had 83,420 votes, or 22 percent. Villaraigosa would have had to get more than 50 percent to have won the election outright. "People want a fresh start, they want to get traffic moving again, they want to address the challenges that we face," said the liberal Villaraigosa, who opened his runoff campaign Wednesday with a symbolic visit to the San Fernando Valley, where moderate-to-conservative voters snubbed him in 2001.
Election officials blamed the weather for unusually slow returns.
No Los Angeles mayor has been bounced from office in more than 30 years. Hahn, whose family has been active in Los Angeles politics since the 1940s, has been beset by corruption allegations at City Hall and his own drab image in the most star-studded city in America.
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