Election night was not good news for Chiu or Lee

By Tim Redmond

JUNE 4, 2014 — The big news from last night’s election is that there isn’t any big news. There were no surprises. The local election pretty much went as I had expected – and that’s good news for David Campos and bad news for Ed Lee.

The results also set the stage for a very interesting fall campaign between Campos and David Chiu: Both candidates have taken their best shots at the other, and Chiu, the frontrunner, was unable to deliver a knockout. So it’s not clear how much more in the way of attacks either side can mount, and the fall general election may be more about the ground campaign and competing visions for the city.

Campos started off this race at least ten points behind – no surprise, since he’s a district supervisor and Chiu is board president and has already run a citywide race (for mayor).

Very low-turnout races (and this one was VERY low-turnout) tend to favor the more moderate candidates, so the June election was Chiu’s to lose.

As I have said repeatedly, and many others have agreed, Chiu needed to come in far ahead to be able to declare a real victory – and that didn’t happen. The results as of midnight showed Chiu with a five percent edge (about 3,000 votes) – which means he actually lost ground from when the race started earlier this year.

Given the makeup of the electorate, that puts the November race at pretty much a dead heat.

That’s a long way off, and if Chiu had emerged with, say, a 10-point margin, Campos might have had trouble raising the kind of money it’s going to take to keep fighting. At this point, though, nobody can say either candidate goes into the fall with a real advantage.

Except: Chiu and his allies outspent Campos more than 2-1. For that, starting with a big lead, they got essentially a tie. And they flooded the city with attacks based on the Ross Mirkarimi vote – which didn’t have the kind of impact that they must have hoped for.

That’s a problem, since you can’t keep repeating the same attacks over and over; people start to shrug it off. It’s likely that the Chiu forces focused their negative mailers on the people most likely to vote in June, and will have something of new audience in November, but still, the damage is mostly done – and it wasn’t fatal.

The last-minute money that came in against Campos was, the result show, largely wasted: Nearly 60 percent of the ballots were cast by mail, which meant that by the last week of the campaign, when my mailbox was flooded with attack pieces, most of the voters had already made up their minds.

In fact, I was a bit surprised that both sides spend so much money on mail that hit in the final days; only eight percent of the registered voters went to the polls on Election Day. We’re talking 36,000 people, with only about half in the 17^th Assembly District. So all of that mail, and all of that money, had an impact on about 18,000 voters – and since the “swing votes” in this race were small to start with, most of them had already made up their minds.

So a pair of tech billionaires spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a few thousand votes.

This one’s by no means over – there will be hundreds of thousands more raised and spent by November 4. But it seems as if the tech moguls will have to come up with more than one vote (on the sheriff) if they want to keep attacking Campos.

Supporters of Prop. B were getting nervous as Election Day approached, but I wasn’t that worried. This one naturally cuts across political lines – 60 percent of a conservative electorate approved of the idea of giving the voters a say in waterfront development. Even a last-minute push by developers didn’t make much of a difference.

Mayor Lee stayed out of this one, although the Chron and others called on him to lead the opposition, mostly because there was no upside for him. But still, Prop. B was in part a referendum on overall city development policy, on whether City Hall – that is, the Lee Administration – can be trusted to oversee wise decisions on urban development.

And the voters overwhelmingly said: We don’t think so.

That can’t be good news in Room 200, City Hall.