Election desk

CONFUSED ABOUT THE issues and the candidates? Problems with your polling place? Just want to talk through the Bay Guardian's endorsements? Our election desk is open Election Day, March 5, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to answer questions. Call (415) 255-3100 and ask for the election desk.

Independent? You can still vote for Britt ... Under California election law, voters who aren't registered with any party can vote in the Democratic primary. That means independent voters can vote for Harry Britt or for Dan Kelly for state assembly. Just be sure to ask for a Democratic Party ballot when you go to the polls.

Last-minute intelligence

Britt surging and Leno fading, Shelley cruising for dollars, why Prop. A makes sense for progressives, and more – the inside scoop on the March 5 election.

By Savannah Blackwell

Harry Britt, the former supervisor and now progressive candidate for state assembly, calmly took the microphone Feb. 21 and began to address a crowd of 50 at the Hiram Johnson State Office Building. It was a friendly audience – a forum sponsored by the San Francisco Tenants Union, which had already endorsed Britt – and Britt, always an accomplished orator, was on top of his game.

He described housing as a basic human right, akin to water, and explained how for years the state of California has subsidized suburban development at the expense of urban residents.

"There's still a frontier mentality about California's housing policy," Britt said. "The market just won't provide housing for people of low income.

"How do you provide a home, a place to be, to have your friends over?... It's as if some person who owns the one well in the desert has the right to ship you somewhere else and get someone who can afford more."

With just two weeks to go in a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination in the state assembly 13th District, Britt sounded relaxed and upbeat. And for good reason: labor leaders have told the Bay Guardian that a recent poll by a statewide labor group, the Opportunity Political Action Committee, shows the gap between Britt and Sup. Mark Leno, his leading rival in the four-way race, has closed dramatically. Leno's lead, once as high as 15 points, has dropped to only about 1 point – meaning that, for all practical purposes, the race is a dead heat.

"It's becoming clear to us that once voters hear about the progressive leader that Harry has been – that he helped create rent control and equal pay for women in city government and led efforts on important environmental issues – they come over to his side in large numbers," Sal Roselli, president of the Healthcare Workers Union, Service Employees International Union, Local 250, said.

Britt has been helped immeasurably by a huge push from labor. The combined efforts of the San Francisco Labor Council's Labor Neighbor program and state-level labor groups, including those representing teachers and state employees, have spent at least $100,000 on several campaign mailers, including a letter of support from Assemblymember Carole Migden. Thousands of phone calls have gone out to voters. There's also an active precinct-walking operation.

"We had 80 people walking precincts for him [on Feb. 16]," Rich Waller, director of the Labor Neighbor program, told us. "We've got 15 to 20 people out every day and at least 30 or 40 people phoning every night."

In addition, the Britt campaign is getting a lift from supporters on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, including Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, who've been walking precincts for him on the weekends and handing out literature.

"I thought the response was great," said board president Tom Ammiano, who walked the Castro with Britt on Feb. 16. "People recognize him and come up to him. There were hugs and kisses and handshakes."

And Britt, who has never been known as a great fundraiser, is getting a boost from at least one wealthy backer: on Feb. 20 former mayoral candidate Clint Reilly held a fundraiser at the Merchants Exchange Building downtown and brought in $50,000 for Britt.

Meanwhile, Leno's campaign seems to have hit a plateau. Campaign observers say that may be in part because he's banking on support from mainstream Democratic leaders such as Sup. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Those endorsements have value, of course, but they tend to appeal to voters who have already made up their minds. Leno isn't making inroads into the sizable undecided bloc – including many of the younger voters in the state assembly 13th District, observers say.

And the stress on Leno is showing: he seems to be losing the soft-spoken and pleasant demeanor for which he is known.

For example, on Feb. 19 in the corridor outside a meeting of the Alliance for a Better District 6, Leno lit into Debra Walker, the president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club, attacking her for writing a letter to the Bay Guardian in which she expressed support for Britt.

According to Walker and other witnesses, Leno shouted an expletive and accused Walker of "taking a cheap shot" by writing that he told the club he would not take on battles he was likely to lose. (He made a similar statement to the Bay Guardian, though he later claimed we misconstrued his remarks.)

"His veins were popping out, and I thought his head was going to explode," Paul McConnell, a Democrat who is challenging Pelosi, told us. McConnell was standing next to Walker and Leno. "He kept yelling, 'I have fought for this, I have fought for that.' She was calm, but he totally lost it for about three or four minutes and then stomped off.' "

Walker confirmed that account. "I tried to tell him that this is my opinion, but he kept screaming," Walker said. "I didn't know what to do.... It shook me up a lot."

Leno didn't dispute the details of the event, only the interpretation. "You can't win with these people," he told us. "You're either described as a weakling who won't stand up for what you believe, or you share your opinion with someone and they call the press reporting an altercation."

Since the 13th District includes the city's most progressive voters, Leno is doing everything he can to appeal to the left. But his record is decidedly mixed: until the advent of district elections (when Leno faced a challenge from Ammiano ally Eileen Hansen), Leno was generally in the camp of Mayor Willie Brown.

In 1998, for example, Leno sided with Brown supporters on the Board of Supervisors in blocking Ammiano's living-wage ordinance by forcing the creation of a 15-member panel to study the issue. In 2000 he voted with the rest of the board on a weakened version. And he opposed Ammiano's proposal to limit ATM fees.

Although he supported public power in 2001, in 1998 he sided with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and opposed Proposition 9, the Ralph Nader-backed initiative that would have overturned utility deregulation.

"While Leno embraces the rhetoric of progressive values, his inability to take on hard fights subverts progressive objectives," Ross Mirkarimi, a spokesperson for the Britt campaign, said. "With Britt, his command of the issues and his undisputed history make him the kind of trustworthy legislator the progressive community is rallying behind."

Britt's supporters are worried that large development interests that have supported Leno, such as the Emerald Fund, will kick in tens of thousands of dollars in soft money to be spent on behalf of Leno and to attack Britt in the final days of the campaign.

Cruising for dollars

On Jan. 18, Assemblymember Kevin Shelley, who's running for secretary of state, received a $1,500 donation from San Francisco Cruise Terminal, the outfit that got the San Francisco Port Commission's nod to build a new cruise-ship terminal at Pier 30/32. That shouldn't be too surprising: Shelley shepherded the specially designed-for-SFCT state bill that allows the cruise-ship developers to duck state policy and build more than 300,000 square feet of office space and 200,000 square feet of retail space on waterfront property.

That's hardly the only special-interest money Shelley has received: the campaign of Michela Alioto, Shelley's main rival, has calculated that Shelley has taken at least $89,000 from energy-related interests, including Enron, PG&E, and Southern California Edison, since 2000.

Shelley's campaign press secretary, Josh Nanberg, said he thought the number was too high and asserted that no quid pro quo has occurred. "Kevin was one of the first state legislators to support public power. He certainly didn't do them any favors."

Given that one of the secretary of state's main duties is to advocate for clean elections, it still seems odd that Shelley would accept money from the likes of Enron (though he now says he's donated $6,000 from his campaign to the fund for Enron workers who lost their life savings in the company's crash).

As for the money from the cruise-ship developer, Nanberg said the bill "had nothing to do with developers at all" but was in response to a request from the city of San Francisco. Translation: Mayor Brown asked him to carry the water, and he did.

Teachers for Kelly

In January the California Labor Federation endorsed Sup. Leland Yee in his bid for the 12th District state assembly seat. But we hear from labor sources that the California Federation of Teachers, which is supporting school board member Dan Kelly, wasn't too happy about it.

In fact, political insiders have told us that the state teachers' union has refused to fund campaign mail put out under the Labor Neighbor program for Yee. The group's leaders have also made it clear that they don't want this mail going to any of their members. CFT representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment.

A is OK

Aware of concerns in some progressive circles about instant-runoff voting, political scientist Rich DeLeon, a professor at San Francisco State University, has done a little numbers crunching to see how the candidates in November's city attorney's race would have fared if the same-day runoff system that Proposition A would implement were already in place.

After comparing voter turnout in some of the most progressive precincts with that in the some of the most conservative, he concluded that Dennis Herrera would have won – by an even larger margin.

DeLeon's point: conservatives still turn out in much larger numbers in runoffs. So the system that Prop. A would put in place would be good for progressives.

The ratio of conservative voters to liberal voters increased in the December runoff, DeLeon wrote in an analysis submitted to the Bay Guardian. "In November, the liberal/progressive candidates for city attorney won a combined 60 percent of the vote," he noted. "It is highly likely that nearly all of those votes in an instant runoff would have stayed in-house and transferred to Herrera. In the December runoff, however, Herrera won with only 52 percent of the vote. Thus, due to a proportionally greater decline in progressive voter turnout, Herrera probably lost approximately 8 percent of his potential vote, making the election close."

As for the results of the December 2000 supervisorial runoffs (in which several progressive challengers won surprising victories), DeLeon told us that it wasn't just a sudden surge in progressive voters that led to the dumping of so many incumbents on the Board of Supervisors. Rather, he said, other factors, such as "anti-Willie Brown backlash," the dot-com boom, and the return of district elections were responsible. "The exception is the exception; strategy and policy should be based on the rule," he concluded.

Corporations against Prop. A

Here's another reason to believe Prop. A will help progressives: the Committee on Jobs is against it.

Campaign mailers describing instant-runoff voting as a "risky experiment," paid for in part with a $25,000 donation from the committee, which represents the city's biggest corporations, have started hitting voters' mailboxes.

Jim Stearns, a campaign consultant working against Prop. A, told us that recent voting patterns show more progressives turning out for runoffs than in previous years – a direct challenge to political scientist DeLeon's conclusions (see above). "The fact is, it's the moderates who determine the outcome of elections," Stearns told us. "And the moderates drop off between the general [election] and the runoff. If we get IRV, that means middle of the road Milquetoast candidates like Mark Leno and Gavin Newsom will win every time."

But wait a minute – isn't that exactly what the Committee on Jobs wants? So why is the business group against Prop. A?

A likely answer: the consultants who work for the committee aren't sure how to manipulate an instant-runoff voting system. So they'd rather stick to what we have now.

Premature judgment?

Gail Dekreon, who is running for Superior Court, Seat 10, had an odd experience with the San Francisco Independent. The paper scheduled an endorsement interview with her – but two days before the meeting, the Independent endorsed her opponent.

Dekreon was scheduled to meet with an editorial panel representing both the San Francisco Independent and the San Francisco Examiner on Feb. 21, Jo Kuney, Dekreon's campaign manager, said. (Both papers are owned by the Fang family). But on Feb. 19 the Independent published its endorsement of Sean Connolly for that judicial seat.

"I was shocked and appalled to see the Independent chose to endorse one of my opponents before we even got a chance to make our case," Kuney said. "We were assured they would have an open mind, but clearly they didn't." Samson Wong, who handles political issues at the Independent, told us he had no comment.

Alice doesn't file here anymore

The Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club has been the conduit for a ton of soft money in the past, so a lot of activists are watching its finances as the election draws near. But there's one problem: Paul Hogan, Alice's cochair, told us the club won't file its reports in San Francisco, only in Sacramento. That makes it harder to keep track, but not impossible. Shortly before press time a late-filing report for the Alice slate card appeared on the secretary of state's Web site. The Committee for Urban Excellence, a statewide political action committee that is supporting John Burton's Proposition 45 (abolishing term limits) kicked in $45,000, San Francisco lobbyist Marcia Smolens gave $2,500, philanthropist Jim Hormel gave $5,000, and Kimiko Burton's campaign for public defender provided $3,500.

That money, of course, helps Mark Leno, who will be one of the main beneficiaries of the Alice slate-card mailing.

E-mail Savannah Blackwell at Savannah@sfbg.com.