By Jim Miller
Nobody thought this was going to be easy.
Back in July, at the height of the Filner debacle, I predicted a dire outcome, noting that “in a recall or special election in an off year, the electorate is guaranteed to be more conservative and definitely not favorable” for a progressive replacing Bob Filner because, “Faulconer would have a huge fundraising advantage garnering support from all the usual suspects downtown and benefit from an energized base geared up to hand it to the liberals, unions, minorities, and other foul ‘special interest groups’ that they’ll blame for bringing us the evil that was Bob Filner. With the Democrats dispirited, humiliated and divided, it might not even be much of a fight.”
As it turned out, David Alvarez stepped up and offered progressives hope, and the labor movement surprised everyone by actually being able to raise more money than the Faulconer forces.
Thus, for a time, it seemed we might be able to do what nobody thought could be done: redeem the promise of the progressive agenda that Filner betrayed. Indeed, after the big upset of Nathan Fletcher in the primary, I was hopeful that what my gut told me in July was wrong as I wrote, “That would be some crow I’d enjoy eating and washing down with one of our fine local IPAs.”
Sadly, on Tuesday, many of us were crying in our beer instead.
On election night, the optimism of the will manifested by local progressives met the hard reality that San Diego was not ready for its first Latino mayor, nor would it follow in footsteps of New York and Boston and go with a populist who speaks openly about inequality as one of the central issues of our time. Instead we got Kevin Faulconer, a Republican in sheep’s clothing who, as many here and elsewhere have observed, will surely return us to business as usual.
Welcome back to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.
Predictably, many in the local media were quick to blame Alvarez and his supporters in labor for campaigning too far to the left and/or catering to ideological purity rather than the bland centrism supposedly required to win in a special election. Over the last week, many also took to Twitter and other forms of social media to refight the primary.
Thus, the conventional wisdom goes, the “left” blew a winnable election first by rejecting the more electable Fletcher and then by running an openly progressive campaign. While I understand it’s always gratifying to use hindsight to confirm your pre-existing biases, the problem with that is that it doesn’t illuminate much.
The electability argument with regard to Fletcher is dead on arrival as Fletcher disproved that himself when he lost in a primary where he was the odds-on favorite and had more money than either of his opponents (not to mention that he lost in the last mayoral election in the primary as well).
In politics, you get attacked. If you can’t sustain the attacks, you lose. End of story.
If you don’t think the Lincoln Club had even more up their sleeves if they had met Fletcher in the run-off, I have a bridge to sell you.
Fletcher collapsed like a paper tiger under attack in the primary revealing his fundamental weakness as a candidate, not to mention a lack of principle from a progressive standpoint. Bottom line: winning this election in the wake of the Filner scandal was a very tough task no matter who was running and to suggest otherwise on the basis of hypotheticals is a fantasy-based analysis.
As for the second point about Alvarez running too far to the left, what none of the analyses blaming the “left” or “unions” explains is the gap between the pre-election polling and the actual results. Indeed, both the public polling and the internal polling inside the pro-Alvarez camp showed that the race was a dead heat going into the election.
Our polling on the labor side also showed that the messaging going after “corporate special interests” and elite insiders was helping to counter the relentless anti-union message coming from the Faulconer forces. With both the anti-union line from the right AND the anti-corporate message from the left polling well, the end result was that they effectively negated each other.
Indeed, all the talking points from the labor camp with regard to the minimum wage, outsourcing, etc. were thoroughly poll tested. And the Labor Council’s independent campaign, Working Families for a Better San Diego, hired Kaufman Campaigns (who have a solid winning track record) as their primary consultants. And the Kaufman team relied on pollsters with a good national reputation for their data. So, on their own, there was nothing wrong with the issues that Alvarez championed. In fact, they poll well and will continue to be popular with the public.
What hurt Alvarez was not his platform; it was his race and the Lincoln Club’s skillful use of race-coded politics. That’s the ugly truth that none of the local pundits want to talk about. And the fact that many in the press and elsewhere would rather attack progressives and unions than talk about the use of race in the election says a lot about our local political environment and media landscape.
In mailer after mailer the Lincoln Club relentlessly hammered away at Alvarez as a guy from “Southeast” who looked like a gangster and was going to walk away with your suburban piece of the pie and take it back to Barrio Logan. Alvarez was not a mayor for “us” he was a “they” who wanted to take from “us.”
Robert Reich described precisely the kind of phenomenon we saw in this election in a recent column where he noted:
The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe — and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,” presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.
The central political question faced by any nation or group is where the borders of this sphere of mutual responsibility are drawn.
Why in recent years have so many middle-class and wealthy Americans pulled the borders in closer?
Here in San Diego the use of this kind of rhetoric resulted in some nasty stuff, but it worked.
Score one for TJ Zane, the guy smirking just behind Kevin Faulconer on the dais at the U.S. Grant Hotel as he celebrated his electoral victory on Tuesday and talked about bringing all San Diegans together. Score another one for Pete Wilson who maxed out for Faulconer in the campaign’s last days and in whose legacy the Lincoln Club’s fear of a brown city hatchet job stands.
With this in mind, it’s clear that the gap between the polls and the election results is a classic example of what is called the “Bradley effect,” (coined after the front-running in the polls but ultimately failed African American gubernatorial candidate, Tom Bradley) when white voters give inaccurate answers to pollsters because they may feel the desire to avoid the appearance of racial bias.
On election night, as the big discrepancy between the polling and the actual results became clear, I was depressed but far from shocked. As someone who has studied the history of race and class in San Diego, I knew that we weren’t that far from the days of outright public racism and that the legacy of that history informs the present.
When I asked Isidro Ortiz, a professor of Chicano Studies at the University of San Diego about it, he agreed that the Bradley effect was evident in the election and offered some thoughts as to how race was used in this contest:
Yes, I believe there was a Bradley effect in the mayor’s race. The discrepancy between pre-election polls and actual election results strongly suggests that “social desirability” was at play, i.e. potential voters, primarily white, when polled expressed what they thought was the socially acceptable thing, namely that they supported and would vote for David Alvarez. This phenomenon is not unknown in elections where race is one of the factors at play in the race. Voters can provide the seemingly socially desirable thing, get themselves off the racial hook, and then vote in a way that reproduces the racial hierarchy.
Blatant race-baiting in the mayor’s race did not occur, as was the case back in the battle over Prop 187 in 1994, but race was at play via the commercials that invoked images of “us” vs them, the hit pieces that included the shorthand racial code words in San Diego such as “southeast,” and the interjection of the news about the alleged illegal contribution from the Mexican businessman, a curiously timed news occurrence that played on what has been described as long-standing “Mexican phobia.”
I am not suggesting that something sinister and dastardly was at play; it was just racialized politics as usual, a type with deep roots and appeal in California. In this context offering the socially desirable opinion may have seemed easy, logical and to many it certainly might have seemed the expedient thing to do.
And what this “Alvarez effect” shows us is that, in some ways, San Diego is still in the political bush leagues, where a good number of voters are not yet able to imagine the city as the kind of diverse place that it really is and will be in the years to come.
That uncomfortable reality combined with the equally important fact that labor and its community allies, despite an incredible effort by an army of committed activists, were not able to get out the vote as needed in Democratic strongholds sealed the deal against Alvarez. He could not sustain the attacks because we didn’t bring out enough Democratic voters to win. We failed on that front. Period.
The lesson of this should not be that we have to sacrifice principle, triangulate, and capitulate to the “racialized politics” that Ortiz describes (with bland white suburban standard bearers for instance) to win future elections, but that we need to double down on the kind of work that Rising Majority and others are doing in registering and mobilizing working class voters of color in San Diego.
Had south of I-8 turned out at the same rate as north of I-8 did, Alvarez would have won the election, as he would have during a presidential year. If we don’t take this as a key long-term goal, we will continue to lose. If we embrace this effort and mobilize the new San Diego more effectively in the future, we will turn the tide sooner rather than later, particularly in presidential election years.
To all of my friends and allies in labor and the community who worked tirelessly to elect David Alvarez, the young people in particular, I say thank you and keep your heads high. We stood on principle and that’s what matters in the final analysis. We’ve begun to change the narrative in the city. While it’s hard to lose a race like this, we should all know that the work we did this time planted seeds that will bloom in the future.
As devastating as this last year has been for all of us, we need to remember that hope, as Percy Shelley once said, is a moral obligation.
The fact that Alvarez stood on principle and did as well as he did bodes well for the future. As you said, Jim, the most important thing is getting out the vote.
Jim, The race card…….really?? I think the voters wanted a change from the young idealists that people like you seem to be training. San Diegans give enough of their hard earned dollars to governments to want to keep the bleeding going with another person who was sure to create more of the same.
Just sayin’
Yep, San Diegans have voted on what to do with their hard earned dollars–hand them over to government to pass on to private interests to create more of the same–a new Chargers Stadium, expanded Convention Center, maybe even a World Cup venue. Just sayin’
David Alvarez and his campaign did very, very well against the Republican machine, which set the level of debate below the abyss and in that fetid pool combining racism, thuggery and a pure white knight Faulconer. The sheer falsity of that culture turned off voters.
Anyone who visits the beaches and Balboa Park and Mission Bay, who rides a bike around the town, who takes a walk on Harbor Drive… in short, people who live life publicly and are not isolated … can see this city no longer belongs to the Father Knows Best school of government. If I were a Republican I’d be arguing for the secession of North of I-8; call it Rancho GOP.
This is a very perceptive analysis of how this last Mayoral election in San Diego went. I have to agree with Isidro Ortiz and Jim Miller that it was more than likely that “The Bradley Effect,” indicated by the big discrepancy between the closeness of most polls going into the actual day of voting and the 9 percent difference between the two results, was a real aspect of this campaign. Furthermore, the covert strategy of using code words like Southeast San Diego and nasty gangsterish pictures of Alvarez fondling lots of cash, as well as blatant omissions in statements by Alvarez by the Faulconer Campaign in re to Federal Development Grant money going to the three neediest areas of San Diego as if he meant that he would be a Mayor for these three areas alone, all indicate that “racism” was an inherent part of the winning strategy, particularly as carried out by the Republican’s Lincoln Club.
Given this strategy against him, the continued emphasis on his boyish appearance, and the divided circumstances of the Democratic Party following the exit of Filner from the scene, Alvarez needs to be commended for doing as well as he did.
Beside voting “Yes” for the Barrio Logan Plan and Linkage Fee increases, the main issues David Alvarez voted “No” where the effective 5% Hotel Tax Increase without a public vote, and Redevelopment Agency (RDA) financial issues.
However, David Alvarez did not bring forth any solutions to his “No” votes during his Mayoral campaign. David, or any City Council member, could have brought a 5% TOT increase to a maximum of 15.5% up for a public vote on June 3, 2014 or November 4, 2014 ballots, as an alternative to the shady 2% TMD and 3% Special Tax for the Convention Center Phase III Expansion.
For the Redevelopment Agency deals, it was great that David voted against many deals. However, he did not bring forth any solutions.
http://www.tinyurl.com/20140127a
David Alvarez could have been Mayor of San Diego if he came up with solutions.
Yeah, the advertising side of the campaign seemed to have been run by the same shop the Lincoln Club used; only the names and faces were changed. The mailers were great voids of faces smiling or scowling, bringing us men “for us all,” or tools of special interests, depending. Obama could have won the race against Faulconer using those tactics, but it would have been close.
I wonder when bigtime political consultants are going to get around to talking sense to people who grew up a long time ago, or even just last year.
The point that La Playa Heritage makes might have helped David Alvarez’s Campaign, however it would have been hardly sufficient to overcome the other factors enunciated by Jim Miller who gives a very perceptive analysis of how this last Mayoral election in San Diego went. I have to agree with Isidro Ortiz and Jim Miller that it was more than likely that “The Bradley Effect,” indicated by the big discrepancy between the closeness of most polls going into the actual day of voting and the 9 percent difference between the two results, was a real aspect of this campaign. Furthermore, the covert strategy of using code words like Southeast San Diego and nasty gangsterish pictures of Alvarez fondling lots of cash, as well as blatant omissions in statements by Alvarez by the Faulconer Campaign in re to Federal Development Grant money going to the three neediest areas of San Diego as if he meant that he would be a Mayor for these three areas alone, all indicate that “racism” was an inherent part of the winning strategy, particularly as carried out by the Republican’s Lincoln Club.
Given this strategy against him, the continued emphasis on his boyish appearance, and the divided circumstances of the Democratic Party following the exit of Filner from the scene, Alvarez needs to be commended for doing as well as he did.
I was proud to support David Alvarez and his campaign for Mayor. His life is an inspiration and his future is the future of San Diego.
But now it is time for all San Diego Democrats to come together, and grow beyond our basic base of supporters. There are floods of Independents and Republicans out there disgusted with the modern Tea Party-dominated GOP.
The new Confederacy has taken hold of the Republican Party, leaving millions of Americans ready to join with the Democrats in reasonable dialogue and solutions to our nations future problems.
Kevin Faulconer proved that Conservatism is dying.
David Alvarez proved that Liberalism still has a way to go before being the majority.
Nathan Fletcher proved that there are millions of voters in between the two ideological ends looking for a home and leaning towards the Democrats if only we will welcome them into our party.
Ideological rigidity is not the way of America. Our values are inclusiveness and our principles are based on education, debate and seeking common ground.
That is the Democratic Party of FDR through Barack Obama and it is the party I am proud to call my own.
But I feel that if the only lesson learned from this race is “Democrats can’t win special elections” I think we will lose sight of what was really lost. We had the chance to broaden the Democratic base and kill the GOP-development cabal of Doug Manchester and his lackeys.
But the way the Labor Council threw Nathan Fletcher under the bus in the name of party purity was terrible. They didn’t just endorse Alvarez, but skewered Fletcher – basically doing the work Faulconer wanted done.
Now we have no leverage or voice in city hall and the establishment powers that have dominated local governance are emboldened. They think they have a mandate. It really is time for Democrats to stop fighting among each other and asking for proof of our loyalty, and instead go after the real enemy.
It was a close campaign for Alvarez. There’s no doubt he’ll be back. What’s surprising is that this election has created a media echo chamber of some kind of GOP resurgence story. If anything, it shows the dying gasps of the plantation. In the near future of San Diego, the old conservative shackles will finally be broken once and for all. But for a limited time, we’re going to hear a very hollow victory dance by the Chamber of Commerce and the old guard. Living in an “image is everything” kind of town heightens the effect. What’s real out there is that everyday people are going about their business and getting screwed by empty promises. There’s a lack of affordable homes – not a lack of crybaby developers regarding fees. There’s a lack of decent paying jobs, but no lack of higher executive payouts. There’s a lack of water, but plenty of golf! Democrats may have not come out to vote, but that doesn’t mean there not out there in our community. There is a next time.
The Voice of San Diego reported that two thirds of Obama voters in 2012, who probably voted as well for Filner, didn’t bother to vote in this election. If they had, Alvarez no doubt would have won.
Says everything about the misread of Alvarez’ campaign in this contest. It was Barack Obama that drove the people to the polls – not Labor-liberalism.
Jim:
Excellent analysis from an excellent writer. Of importance is whether activists will apply or at least study the message you have articulated in preparation for the next battle.
Louie