What went wrong?
Newsom's vulnerability and the validation of district supervisors are the bright spots in an otherwise gloomy election.

By Tim Redmond

SOMETIME AROUND 9 :30 p.m. on election night, with the TV set in the corner of the room showing the national results on CNN and the big screen in the center displaying the San Francisco votes, the people watching the returns in the North Light Court at City Hall began to realize that things were going badly wrong.

John Kerry was trailing in the electoral vote and running out of potentially blue states. Ohio – a recession-wracked place where the Democrats had done unprecedented organizing and get-out-the-vote work – was slowly but inexorably falling into the George W. Bush column. The Republicans were picking up seats in both the Senate and the House.

And in San Francisco – liberal San Francisco, a city where some 83 percent of the voters supported Kerry – an affordable-housing bond aimed at helping homeless and low-income people, and a pair of tax measures that would help the city avoid major service cuts, were heading for defeat.

It was odd too: for once, the taxes and the bonds had the support of almost everyone in town, from Sup. Tom Ammiano and the city employee unions to the Committee on JOBS and the Chamber of Commerce. Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose popularity in recent polls has soared as high as 70 percent, had put his political weight behind the tax and bond measures. With turnout expected to exceed anything this city had seen in a generation, both the progressives and allies of the mayor were baffled: what happened?

• • •

Before we start analyzing what went wrong, I want to interrupt the hand-wringing to talk about the good news – and there's some very good news to talk about.

The Nov. 2 election in San Francisco was a clear, resounding victory for district elections. In District 1, downtown and the hospitality industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on nasty, misleading hit pieces aimed at ousting incumbent Sup. Jake McGoldrick.

The supervisor had infuriated big businesses by supporting the local minimum-wage law. Equally important, he was often at odds with Newsom – and Newsom's political operatives saw him as vulnerable. Knocking off one of the progressive supes, and replacing him with a Newsom ally, would go a long way toward helping the mayor's agenda. (It would also send a message to several other supervisors, who represent more moderate districts where the mayor is popular, that if they defy his will, they could face political extinction.)

But the all-out assault didn't work. With a grassroots campaign and the backing of labor, McGoldrick not only survived but also finished the first round with 9,192 votes – more than any other district candidate except all-but-unopposed Sups. Aaron Peskin and Michela Alioto-Pier. Jim Stearns, McGoldrick's campaign manager, said the campaign had identified 9,000 McGoldrick voters and used an extensive grassroots get-out-the-vote operation to beat back the well-funded challenge.

The same thing happened in District 11, where incumbent Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who often sides with the progressives and against the mayor, withstood a withering assault of savage attacks, including hit pieces with swastikas on them and accusations of racism, to emerge the victor.

The clear message that came out of those two races: the mayor of San Francisco no longer has any real influence over who gets elected supervisor. That puts the legislative branch of local government on a far more equal footing with the executive.

"The good thing about district elections," Calvin Welch, who has been watching and analyzing local politics for more than 30 years, told me, "is that it's made the Board of Supervisors the center of progressive politics in this city."

The district system also allows candidates without big institutional support to run effective campaigns. In District 5, Green Party member Ross Mirkarimi received almost twice as many votes as his closest challenger, tenant and labor organizer Robert Haaland, who had the city employee unions, the Democratic Party, and a long list of elected officials backing him.

It was a win for electoral reform too: ranked-choice voting, after all the controversy of the past two years, turned out to be a relatively simple matter, with a process and results nobody is likely to successfully challenge. "People understand it, and the candidates who won clearly had majority support," Caleb Kleppner of the Center for Voting and Democracy told me.

• • •

The big loser, of course, was Newsom.

The mayor put a lot of political capital into this election, pushing hard for the defeat of McGoldrick, helping his handpicked school board candidate Heather Hiles, starring in TV ads promoting the tax measures, and sending out his own personal slate card. He had lined up downtown to support not only the tax measures but also the affordable-housing bond, which he touted as a key part of his homeless policy.

And virtually everything he was working for tanked.

"This mayor has no coattails," Sup. Chris Daly told me on election night. "He may be popular in the polls, but he doesn't have it on the ground."

Welch, who was a key player in the campaign for Proposition A, the affordable-housing measure, went even further. "At critical junctures, he wasn't here," the longtime housing activist complained. "He raised money for A so late, it was almost unusable."

Newsom disputes that, saying that, in this political climate, any new revenue or spending measure was going to be difficult. "I'm disappointed, and I fought hard," he said at a postelection press conference. "Heck, I'm probably the only sitting mayor or elected official in the state that did a campaign ad for new revenue." He agreed, however, that his political clout with the voters was somewhat limited: "We have influence but not a lot of influence. This is not low-hanging fruit."

Downtown took a big hit too. It was the Committee on JOBS that pushed the somewhat regressive tax package, dragging the city employee unions and the progressive supervisors along reluctantly.

But progressives aren't gloating: after all, the city now has to cut $97 million worth of services over the next 18 months – and there's not a whole lot of fat left to trim at City Hall. These will be tough, ugly choices that won't reflect well on either the mayor or the new board.

• • •

So why did a revenue package and a bond act that had the rare advantage of being supported by both downtown and labor – not to mention an immigrant-voting-rights measure that should have passed overwhelmingly in this town – fail to win in what by all predictions was supposed to be a perfect year for local progressives?

One reason, surprisingly enough, may have been turnout. While long lines at some precincts got media attention, the turnout in some parts of the city was actually pretty bad. Some districts where there was no supervisorial election – and those included some of the most progressive-voting neighborhoods – came in below 50 percent.

As of press time, the turnout in Bayview-Hunters Point was a dismal 45 percent, and in South of Market it was a disappointing 56 percent. In Potrero Hill, only 65 percent of the voters went to the polls – 10 percent less than in the Haight and Bernal Heights.

With some of the 50,000 absentee votes still to count at press time, the turnout numbers will rise somewhat – but will still come in below the optimistic projections many were voicing before Election Day.

One possible reason: for the first time in decades, the Democratic Party had no formal GOTV operation in the city. Kerry was assured of victory in California; Sen. Barbara Boxer was cruising to an easy reelection. There was no high-profile citywide race like last year's mayoral contest to fund large-scale field operations.

"I think the final turnout will be at least 5 percent lower than expected," Welch said. "That would have been enough to pass Prop. A. And that's the absence of a GOTV operation."

Another factor in the loss of the key ballot measures was the amount of activist attention focused on the supervisorial races. A lot of the top progressive leaders in the city were either working full-time on one of the district races – or running for supervisor themselves.

• • •

The new Board of Supervisors, which will look a lot like the old Board of Supervisors, is going to take office in the middle of a fiscal crisis, with a fiscal bloodbath looming and the mayor unable to turn his poll numbers into a winning agenda. The next board president (and by most accounts, the leading candidate is Aaron Peskin) will need to set an activist agenda – to rally the progressives and the neighborhoods around real, concrete alternatives to the mayor's plans.

It's also not too early to start talking about an alternative to the mayor: Newsom is clearly not as politically invulnerable as he had seemed earlier this year – but it will take a strong consensus candidate with support from across the progressive spectrum to mount even a remotely serious challenge in 2007.

Right now consensus is a tough sell: after a fractious election, the San Francisco left still has to come back together. District 5 pitted Democrats against Greens (with the Democrats in the final days taking a swing at – and angering – Mirkarimi). There were tensions between the queer community, which largely supported Haaland, and the straight progressives. There are unhappy people on all sides – and in the next year, they're going to have to put this election behind them and work together. Mirkarimi assured me he would take the lead on mending fences, and that will be the first test of his political leadership.

And over the next three years, as the city struggles with money problems and tries to respond to the Bush administration's frightening agenda, the activists who have done so well in district races will need to work on building a citywide organization (outside the political parties) that can raise money and run campaigns – and win the big ones.

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

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