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SY: So with no experience you were able to win this election. Now how, what do you attribute that to? Was it their expertise?

GN: Their guidance, yeah. I followed their guidance because they're the ones who had the experience and they knew how to win races.

SY: And what was, what did that entail exactly?

GN: There were three things. Number one, you need to raise an adequate amount of money so that you're able to send out an adequate number of mail pieces to the voters. And number two, get a decent number of endorsements. And an endorsement doesn't win the elections for you; it merely qualifies you as a candidate. It indicates that people endorse you because they feel, there's some confidence that you can do the job, so that's what endorsement does for a person.

SY: And do you remember who endorsed you that, in your initial run?

GN: Well, I couldn't get a single person on the city council to endorse me, so I was a pure outsider. But I did get a lot of the community leaders in Torrance, homeowners' association presidents, to endorse me, and a lot of city commissioners. So that's where the bulk of my endorsement came from.

SY: And the third thing was...

GN: And then the third one is to walk precincts. You need to go face, go out in the community face to face, and in most cases they won't even ask you about issues. It's their first impression that they have of you when they first meet you is what carries over. If it's positive then they would most likely support you on the election day. And so, also, the precinct walking was done very strategically. Number one, Helen and I, my wife and I, walked the precincts where they had the highest number of voters. Areas that tend to be more affluent in general tend to have the higher percentage of people who vote, and also you need to distinguish the fact that there are people who only vote in a national or state election but they never vote in a local city council or school board election, so the focus needs to be on the people who do vote on the city council elections. And there are consultants that have all that information, and so when you do walk precincts you don't blindly just go to one house to another. You handpick those homes that you go to where the people who do vote in city council elections are living, and so you focus on those people.

SY: Very strategic.

GN: And so Helen and I would go where the high voter turnout is, and then we also needed to get the Asian voters to come out, especially the Japanese Americans that live in north Torrance, so we would use the Asian precinct walker for those areas. And I think that election we probably covered about sixty percent of the area in Torrance. There were eleven candidates running; there were three offices that was open, only one incumbent was running for reelection. And at that time we raised nineteen thousand dollars, which was on the higher end compared to everybody else. There were two people, the incumbent and another candidate, who raised more money than I did.

SY: So, and you were what percentage of the vote?

GN: I came, well, when the counts were coming in during the election day I was in the lead, and then when the last count came in, the incumbent, the only incumbent that was running for reelection, he beat me by a hundred and thirty-five votes.

SY: Wow. That's an amazingly successful campaign. We're, I think we're gonna need to take a break --

GN: So it just kind of tells you, even though if you don't have the endorsement, if you do those other things and do it right then you can kind of overcome that.

SY: Very good.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.