In the end, it wasn't even close. The LA Times' Michael Finnegan and Mark Z. Barabak report:

Antonio Villaraigosa romped past incumbent James K. Hahn to make history Tuesday, winning election as the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since the city's pioneer days.

Riding a huge wave of voter discontent, the challenger avenged his 2001 loss to Hahn, who possessed an iconic family name but never connected strongly with voters during a rocky four-year term.

Villaraigosa's landslide represented a crowning symbol of Latinos' growing clout in California, after decades of population gains that failed to produce a commensurate rise in political power. L.A.'s last Latino mayor, Cristobal Aguilar, left office in 1872, when the now-sprawling metropolis was a frontier outpost of barely 6,000 people.

The runoff contest also produced a striking parallel with the city's last breakthrough election in 1973, when Tom Bradley won a rematch against incumbent Sam Yorty to become the first black mayor of Los Angeles. That race also marked the last time a mayor was turned out of City Hall.

Will this election spell real change for the city of Los Angeles? The answer is unclear, given the fact that both Hahn and Villaraigosa are Democrats who substanatively agree on most issues. However, as a symbolic move, this could not be larger.

California no longer has a majority population, and within my lifetime, the same could occur in the nation as a whole. So for the second largest city in the nation to finally open its doors to a Hispanic mayor is highly important.

Freddie Ferrer is looking less and less likely to follow Villaraigosa's path to become mayor of New York, but a new generation of Hispanic activists across the country can be heartened by the fact that they are no longer shunned from office. So regardless of one's feelings about the immediate future for Los Angeles, one has to be excited by the fact that doors are now beginning to open for millions of Americans.