Posted on 12/11/2003 2:41:49 AM PST by Pharmboy
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 10 — The Democratic Party avoided an embarrassing defeat on Tuesday, winning election of a Democratic businessman, Gavin Newsom, as mayor of San Francisco by having played to the party's organizational strengths in a city it has long dominated.
The 36-year-old Mr. Newsom pushed back a powerful challenge from Matt Gonzalez, a former public defender who, according to unofficial final results, fell fewer than 12,000 votes short of becoming the first mayor of a major American city from the Green Party. Those results showed Mr. Newsom with 118,651 votes to Mr. Gonzalez's 107,030, or 53 percent to 47 percent, in a runoff.
"Both sides did well," said David Binder, a San Francisco pollster, "but the money and organization the Newsom campaign had as an advantage is what prevailed."
In the waning days of the race, Mr. Newsom's camp decided to embrace its institutional advantages rather than apologize for them, said his campaign manager, Jim Ross.
That meant ceding some ground to Mr. Gonzalez, particularly among voters who were seeking big changes at City Hall, but also a shoring up of Mr. Newsom's support among mainstream Democrats.
"We made the decision that if we are going to be painted with being the Establishment candidate, we might as well take the advantages of the Establishment," Mr. Ross said. "We've already been painted with that brush to such an extent that you can either run away from it or you can run toward it."
The ultimate demonstration of that strategy was the appearance of former President Bill Clinton at an election-eve rally at Newsom headquarters. As Mr. Gonzalez's campaign was raising money at a "Punks for Matt" concert with the onetime Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, Mr. Clinton was charming hundreds of Newsom volunteers before a bank of television cameras.
Mr. Newsom first set his sights on the mayor's office two years ago, with the encouragement of the incumbent, Willie L. Brown Jr., who must step down because of term limits. He carefully plodded his way toward the finish line, sponsoring popular get-tough ballot initiatives on homelessness and panhandling and, with Mr. Brown's help, picking up powerful ethnic, business and labor endorsements.
About 54 percent of the city's registered voters are Democrats, while barely 3 percent are members of the Green Party. Further, it was only in August that Mr. Gonzalez, a former Democrat, joined a field that already had eight candidates. And according to expenditure estimates of the two finalists and their supporters, he was outspent by Mr. Newsom 10 to 1.
Even so, Mr. Gonzalez, 38, managed to tap into discontent with the city's political elite in an economically sour time, running a defiant and unapologetically radical campaign of the left. In the last mayor's contest, four years ago, Mr. Brown held the progressive candidate to his left, County Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a Democrat, to 39 percent of the vote.
Mr. Gonzalez actually attracted more voters to the polls on Tuesday than did Mr. Newsom, but could not overcome Mr. Newsom's lead in absentee ballots, which favored the Democrat by 65 percent to 35 percent. Had the election been decided only by votes cast on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzalez would have won by 53 percent to 47 percent, according to an analysis by Mr. Binder, the pollster.
"The Democratic Party and other parties," Mr. Gonzalez said in a concession speech, "have to acknowledge that people voted for a candidate outside their party because that candidate represented the values of democracy."
Mr. Gonzalez said the shift would be long-lasting. "There's a certain inevitability to what it is that we are trying to accomplish," he said.
Although the mayor's race is officially nonpartisan, the Democrats were unsettled during the campaign by opinion polls that showed Mr. Gonzalez drawing so many of their voters. But Mr. Brown, beaming on Tuesday night in Mr. Newsom's triumph, played down the Democratic defections. "One vote gives you a mandate in a democracy," he said at the Newsom victory party.
Oddly, though, the Democrats owe at least some of their good fortune to the Republicans, whose own candidate had failed to advance to the runoff. Though the city's Republican Party did not officially endorse Mr. Newsom in his run against Mr. Gonzalez, it worked on his behalf, staffing a phone bank and sending out a mailer that made it clear Mr. Newsom was preferred. The wealthy owner of a wine shop, restaurants and several other businesses, Mr. Newsom is popular in the city's small-business community, which has many Republicans.
Nearly 19,000 Republicans applied for absentee ballots, and nearly 13,000 of them had returned the ballots by Tuesday, said Jim Fuller, a vice chairman of the local party. Further, he said, an informal survey of Republicans, both those casting absentee ballots and those at the polls, indicated that 85 percent voted for Mr. Newsom.
"If it hadn't been for us," Mr. Fuller said, "he wouldn't have won it."
Keep hope alive!
This just says so much about what our fellow conservatives out there are facing day-to-day.
I was just thinking that, except that those exceptionally long lived San Francisco "residents" are now in Colma stacked six deep.
There is an interesting message here that should not be missed: Conservatives ought to realize bow deep is the disaffection against Democratic Party elites within its own ranks and take advantage of it. The odd thing is that many conservatives share a lot in common with them, including a disaffection for corporate racketeering. We are stupid if we don't take advantage of it. In general, we don't know how.
Arnold successfully tapped into some of that, but it only worked because the people weren't familiar enough with him to realize that the role he was playing posing as an outsider was only that. Now that he has appointed his transition team and much of his staff it has become obvious that they came from those same Democrat and Republican Party insiders, although the droids around here are still in denial. Democrats, being more often in tune with power politics and the inner workings of government (because so many are professional bureaucrats), are not so easily misled in that respect, however stupid they might be in other respects.
Great point and worth repeating (I love good news).
I wonder how many absentee ballot votes the Democraps manufactured to get their guy in.
Excellent point, which deserves to be repeated -- though overall the loss of support among Democrats to the Greens in Nancy Pelosi's hometown bodes well for Bush nationally. It's hard to imagine the Dems in worse shape at this stage of the election cycle.
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