A Guide to Gwyneth Paltrow's Mindfully Conservative Voting Guide

Gwyneth Paltrow has built a hugely successful brand around giving advice. Until now, that advice has largely been on matters of the private sphere (quite literally in the case of the $55 jade eggs she recommended people put in their vaginas), but Paltrow has recently ventured into areas of public interest.

Back in March, she released a video endorsing billionaire mall tycoon Rick Caruso for Los Angeles Mayor, despite the fact that he registered as a Democrat shortly before entering the race, after years of donating to opponents of abortion. Then on Thursday, she posted a voter guide, where she managed to endorse a rundown of Southern California’s worst candidates. It made plain what has been obvious since at least her role in Iron Man (2008) — that Paltrow is just a conservative with dewy skin.

In the caption, Paltrow called the upcoming midterms our “most critical election in recent times.” And while the electoral superlatives are starting to get old, it’s true that this one could be pretty dire for anyone who cares about voting rights, abortion, or climate change. But to offer some of our own advice: Do not vote for (almost) any of these candidates.

CITY OF LOS ANGELES

Mayor

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Rick Caruso❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅ Karen Bass✅

Caruso is a billionaire who made his money developing luxury real estate around Los Angeles, including some of the gaudiest outdoor malls known to man, and who bought his way onto the ballot by shoveling some $62 million of his own money into his campaign. Caruso has run on a conservative “tough on crime” platform, backing the failed recall attempt of progressive prosecutor George Gáscon and promising to crack down on homelessness, in a city where being homeless is already all but criminalized. That’s all a bit rich, given that Caruso didn’t seem too concerned with crime when he helped cover-up gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall’s sexual abuse scandal at USC. Pass.

His opponent, former Rep. Karen Bass, a one-time candidate for Biden’s vice-presidential pick, is not an ideal alternative. But she’s better than Caruso.

City Controller

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Paul Koretz ❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Kenneth Mejia✅

Paul Koretz, a termed-out alum of the scandal-plagued Los Angeles city council, has spent the past few years opposing affordable housing and public transit, while consistently voting to expand police funding and surveillance. His opponent Kenneth Mejia is a former tenants union organizer with actual financial experience (he’s a CPA). Meija has run a progressive, grassroots campaign — raising more in small-dollar donations than every other combined — but he has also used his data background to explain wasteful city spending to the public. As a result, he’s crushing in the polls and even got an endorsement from the borderline conservative Los Angeles Times.

City Council

DISTRICT 5

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Sam Yebri❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Katy Young Yaroslavsky ✅

Katy Young Yaroslavsky is a lawyer who spent years at an environmental non-profit and working for a state assembly member on public health and renewable energy policy — some of which has proved very effective. Gwyn’s pick, Sam Yebri, is the pro-cop candidate beloved by business lobbies and landlords, who once tweeted that “the Jew hatred of the DSA would make the Jew haters of Hamas and the KKK proud.” Okay.

DISTRICT 13

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Mitch O’Farrell❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅ Hugo Soto-Martinez✅

Gwyn’s pick Mitch O’Farrell is one of the least sympathetic people on the city council, and that’s a high bar, given that multiple members have been ousted recently over federal indictments or overt racism. He has a cruel record on homelessness — having, at various times, tried to ban food distribution in his district, summoned an army of 400 LAPD officers to evict an encampment at Echo Park Lake last year, and backed the controversial amendment 41.18(d) that effectively made it illegal to sleep in public across vast swaths of the city.

Hugo Soto-Martinez, by contrast, is a union organizer and prominent local activist, who has built a robust grassroots campaign with thousands of volunteers and a substantial list of endorsements from local leaders. He also bodied O’Farrell in the primary, outranking him by some nine percent of the vote.

DISTRICT 11

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Traci Park❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Erin Darling✅

Gwyneth’s pick is a Venice-based attorney, who only registered to vote in Los Angeles County when she decided to run for office. She claims to support efforts to construct or repurpose buildings for temporary and permanent housing in LA, but has actively fought against them, whenever proposed in her district. She has aligned herself with both the police union and the controversial county sheriff. KnockLA called her a “Trojan horse Republican.”

Darling is a former federal public defender-turned-criminal defense attorney, who was born in the district and has lived there for years. Housing is the top concern in increasingly unaffordable Los Angeles; Darling, who used to work for the Eviction Defense Network, has run as “the candidate with experience keeping people in their homes.”

City Attorney

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Hydee Feldstein Soto❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Faisal Gill✅

Feldstein Soto, like Caruso, has a track record of donating to Republican candidates, many of whom oppose abortion rights. A Knock LA investigation into her donation history, found $250-$1,000 contributions to Sen. Pat Toomey and Rep. Liz Cheney, and $4,200 to a PAC that supported Sen. Rick Santorum and Rep. Marsha Blackburn. The PAC was run by her former employer, corporate law firm Paul Hastings LLP, where she spent years defending corporations from employee lawsuits. She opposes policies designed to expand LA’s housing supply, and her financial disclosure, one of the most extensive in this election cycle, details the millions she holds in stock, much of it in oil and gas companies.

Gill, meanwhile, has promised to turn the role into something like the city attorney version of a progressive prosecutor — with a more limited pursuit of misdemeanor charges and a more aggressive response to LAPD misconduct.

L.A. COUNTY

Sheriff

• Gwyn’s Pick: ✅Robert Luna✅
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Robert Luna✅

Gwyn’s right on this one. Incumbent Alex Villanueva is one of the worst sheriffs in the country.

Board of Supervisors

DISTRICT 3

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌ Bob Hertzberg❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Lindsey Horvath ✅

Hertzberg is a nightmare — who earned the horrifying nickname “Huggy Bear,” during his time as state senator, due to his habit of “unwanted hugs.” Those hugs were so widely offered they triggered a legislative investigation in 2018 (in concluded they were “uncomfortable,” but not “sexually motivated”). Knock LA has reported a comprehensive roundup of his sinister bedfellows, like the bail and fossil fuels industries.

His opponent, Lindsey Horvath, is a reliable progressive, more in keeping with the outgoing-supervisor, Sheila Kuehl.

Superior Court Judges

SEATS 60, 67, 70, 90, and 151

Gwyn’s Picks:

• ❌Abby Baron for Seat 60❌
• ❌Fernanda Barreto for Seat 67❌
• ❌Renee Chang for Seat 70❌
• ✅Melissa Lyons for Seat 90✅
• ✅Pat Hare for Seat 151✅

Gawker’s Picks:

• ✅Anna Slotky Reitano for Seat 60✅
• ✅Elizabeth Lashley-Haynes for Seat 67✅
• ✅Holly Hancock for Seat 70✅
• ✅Melissa Lyons for Seat 90✅
• ✅Pat Hare for Seat 151✅

Nearly all the Superior Court Judge seats this cycle boil down to showdowns between public defenders — many of them running on the progressive “Defenders of Justice” slate — and career prosecutors loaded up with endorsements from law enforcement groups. Gwyn has almost exclusively sided with the prosecutors. Baron, Barreto, Chang, and Lyons are all former prosecutors and all but Lyons scored big endorsements from cop groups.

Our picks — Reitano, Lashley Haynes, and Hancock — are all public defenders on the DOJ slate. We agree with Gwyn on Lyons only because her opponent, Leslie Gutierrez, is also a prosecutor and got all the police endorsements. Lyons, meanwhile, scored with local newspapers, more labor unions, and a long list of local Democratic clubs.

The outlier here, for Gwyn at least, is Pat Hare who is a former public defender focused on “bail reform, alternatives to incarceration, housing,” and mental health resources. His opponent, aptly named Karen A. Brako, was a prosecutor for years, working in the “Hardcore Gang Division” at the District Attorney’s Office. I’m sure you can guess who got the police endorsements. (It’s not Pat Hare).

BALLOT MEASURES

Measure A

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌NO❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅YES✅

This measure would amend the county charter to allow the Board of Supervisors to impeach the Sheriff with a four-fifths majority. As we already discussed, acting Sheriff Alex Villanueva is one of the worst sheriffs in the nation, and refused to resign when the Civilian Oversight Commission called on him to do so in 2020, and even after the state Attorney General opened an investigation into his department’s alleged use of “unconstitutional policing.” This is an obvious YES.

Proposition LH

• Gwyn’s Pick: ✅YES✅
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅YES✅

This measure would allow the city to build up to 5,000 units of low-income housing in each district, an obvious necessity. I’m sincerely surprised Gwyn endorsed it.

Ordinance ULA

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌NO❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅YES✅

In case you thought that was a good call, consider this wildly self-interested endorsement. This ordinance is essentially a tax on mansions to fund rent support and permanent housing for the homeless. Technically speaking, it would place a tax on properties worth more than $5 million — four percent for homes assessed at up to $10 million, and five percent for those worth even more — into an $875 million-a-year fund. It was endorsed by virtually every progressive housing group in the city. But Gwyn evidently doesn’t want to foot the bill.

CALIFORNIA

Gwyn’s picks for statewide races tend to toe the conventional Democratic line. She's got Gavin Newsom for Governor, Elena Kounalakis for Lt. Governor, Alex Padilla for Senator, Shirley Webber for Secretary of State, and Malia Cohen for State Controller. No big problems there — boring, imperfect, if preferable to their Republican opponents. But this one is telling:

Attorney General

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌Nathan Hochman❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅Rob Bonta✅

Here’s Gwyn’s pick Nathan Hockman on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle in April, blaming crime on Democratic leadership. And here he is on Fox and Friends in May, blaming an exodus of California residents on “lawlessness,” “looting,” and “riots.” Here he is on Fox again in October, trotting out the same few arguments. Sounds like a real sweetheart.

Bonta on the other hand, has been serving as interim A.G. for a year, and has gotten some actual wins for the environment, housing, victims of the opioid epidemic, and workers.

BALLOT MEASURES

Prop. 29

• Gwyn’s Pick: ❌NO❌
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅YES✅

This proposition would increase transparency from the dialysis providers — an industry that operates as a virtual duopoly, with two clinic companies accounting for over 75 percent of patient treatment. It would require clinics to always have a “physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant on site during treatment,” and require clinics to “disclose physicians’ ownership interests; report infection data.” It would also ban providers from discriminating against patients based on their insurance. Gwyn, unsurprisingly, is siding with the companies accused of offering bad health care.

Prop. 30

• Gwyn’s Pick: ✅NO✅
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅NO✅

Technically, we agree with Gwyn here, but likely for different reasons. This bill would fund electric vehicles by placing an additional income tax on millionaires (1.75 percent on anyone earning over $2 million) — a group of which Paltrow has long been a member. The cooler reason to hate this proposition is that it’s been heavily funded by Lyft! Last year, voters mandated that Lyft and Uber fully electrify their car fleets by 2030. The EV funding will help them offload their electric costs onto the state. No thank you! Let’s get some high speed rail instead.

Prop. 31

• Gwyn’s Pick: ✅YES✅
• Gawker’s Pick: ✅HMM✅

This proposition re-bans flavored tobacco in California. Technically, the state already banned it in 2020, but corporate lobbying got that one put on hold. There’s a lot of solid “science” to back up this prohibition, if you care about teen addiction, public health, corporate greed, and general deception. But on the other hand, they’re so tasty…