The Santa Monica Democratic Club takes our endorsement process very seriously. We are a grassroots organization, and our membership determines all endorsements. We are the ONLY organization where only registered Democrats who live in Santa Monica are able to vote on Santa Monica endorsements. We want to ensure we endorse the candidates who are the best fit for the Club’s values and will represent us well in office.

For this year’s City Council endorsement process, we began in June by doing outreach to all candidates known to be considering a run. We reached out to all confirmed, rumored, and speculated candidates, regardless of their political alignment as long as they were registered Democrats. We sent out an email to our Club members asking to help us surface candidates we may not have known about. We made sure to clarify that you could seek our endorsement even if you were still undecided about running. Several candidates participated in the process whom we had never met before.

We asked all candidates to complete an extensive written questionnaire. They had two weeks to complete the questionnaires, and 24-hour extensions were granted if requested. You can read all of the submitted questionnaires here.

We then conducted 30-minute recorded interviews via Zoom with all local candidates. The questions were posed by our Executive Board. You can view all of those interviews here.

We then held candidate debates for each of the local fields, including City Council. Six Democratic candidates participated in this stage of our process (all others had been invited and declined, including the incumbents). The entire unedited debate is viewable on YouTube here.

After the debate was concluded, the Executive Board convened and recommended a series of candidates. These recommendations served only as non-binding suggestions; only the Membership has final say. The video was distributed to all members along with the previous materials, and at a subsequent meeting, the members met to vote on our endorsement. The election was administered through the site ElectionBuddy.com, and it was conducted entirely by secret ballot. As per the endorsement rules prescribed in our Club Bylaws, any candidate with at least 55% support was then endorsed.

The endorsed City Council candidates are Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, Barry Snell, and Natalya Zernitskaya.

If you have more questions about our process, email [email protected].