In This Issue

IF YOU'D TOLD me six months ago that the San Francisco mayor's race would be a near dead heat between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez, I would have said you were nuts. Back then it looked like Angela Alioto and Tom Ammiano were fighting for second place – and a lot of pundits were saying Newsom would cruise to victory over either of them.

But Gonzalez did something he's good at: he surprised us all. And now, in the final week of the race, it's entirely possible he could pull off what would be one of the biggest upsets in San Francisco political history.

But that will only happen if a lot of people who sat out the November election take half an hour out of their lives and go to the polls.

Look at the numbers:

Newsom got 87,196 votes in the general election. I'd guess that 70,000 of them are hardcore supporters who've been identified and targeted by his extensive, paid campaign staff and will certainly vote in the runoff. Then Newsom will get almost all of the Tony Ribera vote (5,015), half of the Susan Leal vote (8,820), and at least a third of the Angela Alioto vote (11,037). That puts him at 94,000 votes, maybe as many as 100,000.

So even if Gonzalez (who had 40,714 votes) winds up with 90 percent of Ammiano's votes (that's 19,306) and two thirds of the Alioto vote (22,074), he's only at 82,000 – quite a bit behind. But imagine if every single voter who supported Gonzalez in the general election got one – just one – friend who didn't vote that time to come to the polls Dec. 9. Suddenly, Gonzalez is at 122,808, with a huge, landslide victory, numbers Newsom will never touch.

OK, that's an optimistic assumption. So say that half the Gonzalez voters get one friend to the polls. That's still enough to put Gonzalez well over 100,000 votes, and almost certainly ahead of Newsom.

And that doesn't even count the new votes the energetic Gonzalez field operation is identifying.

Maybe Gonzalez will get the vast majority of the Alioto and Leal votes; the polls suggest he's getting a lot of them. Maybe he's only a handful of votes behind. Even so, it's going to be close – and every new vote matters.

But this race can be won. Make sure your friends vote.