Riordan won a non-partisan election.
A Giuliani-type could win in NY under the right circumstances.
Everyone know Riordan was a Republican. Also, just rereading OP again, while I can see the parallels between Riordan and Giuliani, LA's politics have never really been defined by "ethnic whites" - most of the city's literal development happened off the backs of protestant Midwesterners, not European immigrants. Yeah, there were groups of Jews and Italian Catholics, but they never occupied the same place in the city's political imagination like their counterparts in New York did....
