Matt's momentum
The Gonzalez campaign could represent a pivotal moment in the fight to take back San Francisco – if the new generation of activists stays active.

By Tim Redmond

THE FIRST THING I noticed Tuesday night when I arrived at the Matt Gonzalez victory party – and it was a victory party – was the ID-check table. It took me a second to realize what was going on, but there it was: at an election-night event in San Francisco, someone was issuing little bracelets to make sure only people 21 and older were getting drinks.

I've been covering local politics for 20 years, and I've never seen an ID check at an election-night party. And as I wandered around the packed room, I realized why: I've never been to an election-night party where there was actually a significant number of people under 21.

But then, I've never been to an election-night party, ever, that was anything like the Gonzalez event.

In the end, by the numbers, Gavin Newsom was elected mayor. He'll take office Jan. 8, and we'll all be living with his administration for the next four years.

But in a larger political sense, Gonzalez didn't lose – and the movement his campaign represents was a huge winner. The Gonzalez army is poised to change San Francisco, to move the progressive agenda forward on many fronts. According to some observers, that change has already started.

"We've already won," Sup. Chris Daly told me early on election night. "No matter what the final numbers show, we've energized the left, and everyone in city hall has noticed."

His point: Newsom isn't taking office with a huge mandate for his attacks on the poor and opposition to taxes on the rich. He had to spend a small fortune, call in every big gun in the Democratic Party, and resort to some truly sleazy, nasty attacks to squeak out a victory against an underfunded Green Party candidate who didn't even enter the race until August.

And more important, Newsom will be facing a Board of Supervisors that isn't sympathetic to his agenda – at a time when it's abundantly clear that the progressive movement in this city is alive, well, and growing.

That's crucial: If Newsom wants to get anything done, he's going to need the support of the more centrist supervisors. And instead of moving to the right and supporting the Newsom agenda, they may see it's in their interest to pay attention to the young, active voters whom the Gonzalez campaign has brought into political life.

In 1999, Sup. Tom Ammiano ran for mayor as an upstart write-in candidate – and lost by a decisive margin. But the political energy his campaign created carried over into the next year and helped ensure the election of the most progressive slate of supervisors in modern history, among them Gonzalez.

If the Gonzalez army stays active – and that's a big if – it can have an impact on the next four years of San Francisco politics that eclipses even the Ammiano factor of four years ago.

"If we start turning out 100,000 people [who voted for Gonzalez] at any of these hearings or to combat whatever the Democrats, Committee on Jobs, and downtown are going to be doing to push Gavin's agenda – they ain't gonna [be able to] do it," Paul Boden of the Coalition on Homelessness said.

Gonzalez strategist Ross Mirkarimi was more direct: "We've birthed a movement," he told the Bay Guardian. "Now we have to make sure it survives."

By the numbers

More people actually voted in the December runoff than voted in the November general election. That's unusual – normally voter turnout drops significantly in runoffs – but it's not unprecedented: turnout also increased in the 1999 mayoral runoff. And with few exceptions, the greatest increased turnout came in Gonzalez strongholds.

Although the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Election Day that turnout in the Haight Ashbury was only moderate, the final figures show otherwise. A Bay Guardian analysis of the results shows that turnout in the Haight was not only relatively high – 57.6 percent, or 8,708 voters – but that it also increased dramatically over November, when only 48 percent of the Haight's registered voters (7,148 people) went to the polls.

The 21 percent hike in voter turnout in the Haight wasn't even the highest in the city: turnout jumped 24.3 percent in the Mission District and 23.6 percent in Potrero Hill. In fact, all across the city's east-side neighborhoods, where Gonzalez ran strongly, voter turnout rose.

So did voter registration – and that could have a more lasting impact. Overall, 6,914 new voters registered between the general election and the runoff, and almost half of them live in five neighborhoods: the Haight, the Tenderloin, the Mission, the South of Market, and the Western Addition.

Voter registration also significantly jumped in some Newsom strongholds – the Marina-Pacific Heights area and the Richmond District together accounted for almost 1,000 new voters. That reflects the work that Newsom's campaign did to identify, register, and turn out supporters.

In fact, Newsom's well-funded voter ID program made the difference in the race. Newsom lost the Election Day vote, although narrowly; he made up for that difference in absentees.

Absentee votes are traditionally more conservative, but in this race the results were dramatic: Gonzalez won only 34.5 percent of the 71,000 absentee votes cast before Election Day. Newsom in effect started the race almost 20,000 votes ahead.

"If we had started earlier, registered 30,000 new voters, and set up our own absentee program, we would have won," Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate for governor this fall and a strong Gonzalez supporter, told the Bay Guardian.

Camejo also points out that while some critics say Gonzalez's affiliation with the Green Party hurt him, "the fact that he was a Green was what got all those kids to come into the campaign, to volunteer and to vote. That was part of the excitement factor."

And indeed, if you look at the totals, it's likely the Republicans, not the Democrats, put Newsom over the top. There are about 58,000 registered Republicans in San Francisco, and Chris Bowman, a GOP political analyst, estimates that about 34,000 of them voted. Of those, he told the Bay Guardian, probably 80 percent supported Newsom. That amounts to 27,200 votes – or a differential in the Republican vote of 20,400 – and Newsom won the election by just 15,000 votes.

"It certainly was a major factor," Bowman said.

Mike DeNunzio, chair of the San Francisco Republican party, told the Bay Guardian it was the GOP vote that made the difference for Newsom. "The Republicans bonded with him back in the Care Not Cash signature-gathering days," he said. "I think he won at least 85 percent of the Republican vote, and there's almost no question that we put him over the top."

Of course, the money was a major factor too. Newsom spent almost $35 a vote, and Gonzalez spent about $3.50 a vote.

"Considering what they threw at us, in money and power, including a former president and vice president coming out here to support Newsom," Mirkarimi noted, "it's amazing that we did as well as we did."

The D.A.'s race

Newsom wasn't the only winner Tuesday night – Kamala Harris, a newcomer to electoral politics, defeated incumbent district attorney Terence Hallinan by a sizable margin, 56 percent to 44 percent.

Unlike Bill Fazio, a longtime prosecutor who ran against Hallinan four years ago on a law-and-order platform, Harris tried to portray herself as a liberal – at least, she did on the east side of town.

In more conservative areas, she stressed Hallinan's allegedly low conviction rate. One flyer put out by her allies attacked him as being too soft on the homeless.

The strategy worked: although Gonzalez endorsed Hallinan, a significant number of Gonzalez supporters backed Harris. In fact, she wound up with almost 3,000 more votes than Newsom. A fair number of Gonzalez supporters probably ignored the D.A.'s race altogether: Hallinan had only 103,000 votes, 13,000 fewer than Gonzalez.

Mayor Willie Brown played a huge role in Harris's victory, from helping her raise an unprecedented sum of money to putting his vaunted ground troops in place for her campaign. More than the mayor's race, Brown seemed to take this one personally: Harris was a close ally of Brown's for many years – and the mayor has clashed repeatedly of late with Hallinan.

Hallinan has indicted several officials with ties to Brown, took on the entire top brass of Brown's police department, and was quoted in the Chronicle at one point referring to a climate of systemic corruption in Brown's city hall.

While Brown was pulling out all the stops for Harris, Hallinan's campaign never really got off the ground.

Harris will take office with an ethical cloud already over her: she violated the city's campaign finance laws, breaking her promise to abide by a spending limit for which she was fined $34,000. She'll have an uphill struggle to convince progressives she's serious about political corruption.

The future

Newsom isn't going to get a honeymoon. So one of his first moves will no doubt be to consolidate and expand his power – and that may mean trying to unseat some of his foes on the board. Some key progressive supervisors, including Gonzalez, Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval, are up for reelection this fall, and all of them can expect to face Newsom-funded opposition. Gonzalez, who represents one of the city's most liberal districts, is probably about as safe as a supervisor can be, but the others are all potentially vulnerable.

The most immediate test for Newsom and the Gonzalez army will come in March when the mayor and his downtown backers try to win voter approval for the Workforce Housing Initiative. A bigger test will come in this fall's supervisorial campaigns. If Newsom's slate can be turned back, it will be a sign that the surge of activism around the Gonzalez campaign was more than a one-time event.

And that's critical. Because the fact is, for at least some of the Gonzalez supporters, this was a new and fun adventure, driven by an attraction to a young, charismatic leader. If it's going to mean anything a year from now, it has to be about more than Matt Gonzalez.

"We'll see at city hall in the next few months, if we see these people," housing attorney Randy Shaw said, as he gestured around Gonzalez's packed election-night party. "This is really fun. Sitting at a Planning Commission meeting is really boring."

Additional reporting by Niki Woodard, Tali Woodward, Rachel Brahinsky, and Savannah Blackwell.

E-mail Tim Redmond