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Compton City Councilman Isadore Hall III withstood a nasty campaign fight wedged by candidate Lynda Harris Forster to dominate the race for 52nd Assembly this week.
With a low voter turnout and vote calculations trickling in, Hall maintained an enormous lead over his closest rival with a commanding 9,499 to 4,122 lead over Forster late Tuesday evening. Diane J. Martinez was third with 2,574 and Deborah J. Leblanc had just 513 votes with all of the precincts reporting.
As he arrived at his victory party at the Crystal Park Casino where many of his supporters gathered for the celebration, he first went to his hotel suite to exhale and contemplate what had just happened.
After all this was a historical day for African American politicians, especially after Senator Barack Obama had pushed ahead towards the Democratic Presidential nomination.
For Hall, his victory shared with that of Obama was particularly sweet because he carried the same theme for change as the first Black presumptive Presidential candidate in the history of America.
“I was in the kitchen at my campaign headquarters preparing a speech and was writing the first page when I was informed by my field director of the preliminary numbers and I almost dropped my coffee,” Hall told the Sentinel.
Hall said that he was in a land of uncertainty and received a boost of confidence from Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.
“Karen and I were watching Barack Obama’s speech and we both looked at each other and said it was time for change, and Karen said she wanted me on her team for change,” he added.
With the November election as only a formality, when he faces a Republican opponent, Hall appears well on his way to Sacramento to fight for that change.
Hall, 36, has become one of the fastest rising Democratic politicians in the region since ascending from the ranks of Compton School Board President onto the Compton City Council and now to the Assembly.
He acknowledges that his responsibility as a member of the Assembly is much larger than any task he’s faced.
“It’s huge, it’s huge! You’re actually making decisions for a state that has the seventh largest economy in the union that’s a lot of responsibly. But not just a lot of responsibility from that perspective. It’s a large responsibility because now we’re fighting a governor with a massive deficit with 30 percent proposed cuts in education, which leaves an already disenfranchised further disenfranchised,” he stated.
Hall said that he never took anything for granted and therefore he spent money and campaigned as if he was the underdog although his name brand resonates with the vast citizens in the Compton, Watts/Willowbrook and South Los Angeles regions.
Those efforts paid off and he won the election easily.
