A day after Democrat Gavin Newsom won the mayoral election here, surprise over just how close this hard-core Democratic city came to electing a Green Party mayor lingered.
Matt Gonzalez, the Green candidate, won 47 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election compared with Newsom’s 53 percent–a showing by the Greens that analysts say is strong enough to make Democratic Party leaders jittery.
With Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial win, the Democrats were in no mood to give the Greens a platform in a major California city. The Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Terry McAuliffe, feared another defeat in the state. “The race was a priority for Terry McAuliffe,” said Bob Mulholland, a spokesman for the California Democratic Party.
Newsom attracted a parade of national Democrats to his side during the campaign, including former President Bill Clinton.
And the state party contributed to his coffers.
Newsom, a wealthy entrepreneur, spent $4 million on his campaign. Gonzalez, a former public defender with a Stanford University law degree, spent $400,000.
“This election has brought us to an important crossroads in San Francisco and I think in California,” said Ross Mirkarimi, chief strategist for the Gonzalez campaign. “We’ve proven that we can build alliances and run very a strong and effective campaign.”
He added, “Progressive Democrats–who are plentiful–have a lot more in common with the Green Party than with the conservatives in their party.”
Only 3 percent of the city’s 461,000 registered voters identify themselves as Green Party members. About 54 percent are registered Democrats and a Republican hasn’t won a mayoral race here since 1964.
“With the recall, the hold the Democratic Party has over California looks much more tenuous,” said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “Adding to that tenuousness is the constant threat that liberal Democrats will cross the thin green line and go over to the Green Party.”
The national Democratic Party is worried on two counts, Cain said: that Green voters will be election “spoilers,” causing Democrats to lose in close elections; and that it may be difficult to unify Democrats because of dissatisfaction on the left from those who say their party too closely resembles the GOP.
“There’s no question that among the hard-core liberal Democratic voters there is unhappiness about what the movement of the party to the middle has brought them,” Cain said.
While Gonzalez and Newsom are both in their 30s, Gonzalez ran as the anti-establishment candidate and argued that Newsom was too close to business interests. Gonzalez’s Election Day headquarters offered vegetarian cuisine and free valet parking for bicycles. Newsom, who hobnobs with the billionaire Getty family, treated his victory party to PlumpJack 2002 merlot and chardonnay from one of his businesses, PlumpJack Winery. .
One contentious campaign issue was what to do about the homeless who sleep on sidewalks throughout the tourism-dependent city. Gonzalez, president of the 11-member legislative Board of Supervisors, planned to create housing for the homeless that would include on-site mental health and drug-treatment services.
Newsom, a member of the Board of Supervisors, advocates a program called Care Not Cash that would reduce General Assistance grants from $410 a month to $59 and use the savings to improve social services for the homeless population.
For Newsom, now comes the hard part of governing: working with a contentious Board of Supervisors led by his opponent.
“The Democrats pulled it out,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “That’s like saying the Republicans won in Texas–it tells you they were in trouble.”
