Nearly five weeks after declaring her candidacy, Republican Stacy Dash withdrew her race from the heavily Democratic House District race. The district encompasses much of South Los Angeles, including largely black cities and neighborhoods like Compton and Watts, and communities that are increasingly Latino.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama received high votes in the area for the last three presidential races, with Clinton receiving 83 percent of votes in 2016.
The district’s current representative Nanette Barragán, a Democrat, has announced that she is running for re-election. Aja Brown, a highly visible Democrat is among Barragán’s challengers. Brown became Compton’s youngest mayor in 2013.
Dash entered the political scene when she endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012. A Fox News contributor from 2014 to 2016 and an early supporter of President Trump, Dash’s endorsements of Republican candidates elicited attention, and backlash, in part because she is black.
In her statement on Friday, she argued that constituents in the 44th District had been forgotten by the Democratic Party. Politicians, she claimed, had come to accept high crime, decaying infrastructure and staggering high school dropout rates as the norm.