GOP Fights Uphill Battle for S.F. Voters

Campaign season has just begun in the most electorally lopsided county in the state, where “two-party politics” means Democrat and, well, Democrat, and the Republican Central Committee recently met to make its big quadrennial decision: which Democrat to endorse for mayor.

Hard on the heels of the Pledge of Allegiance, addressed to the kind of miniature flag that sticks out of graves on Memorial Day, the committee launched into fight No. 1 at a recent meeting: whether to allow the only Republican running for San Francisco’s highest office to even plead his case that night.

“As the only Republican, he deserves maybe 10 minutes,” argued one supporter. So they voted. And he lost. Eventually he was allowed to speak--after two major Democratic candidates--but it didn’t matter. There was no way sincere but oh-so-green David Martz would get the nod of his very own party.

“I told him that unless he raised sufficient money, no one would vote for him,” said Donald A. Casper, Republican Central Committee chairman, “and if we endorsed him, we’d be dancing on the edge of irrelevancy.”

A Compromise With Conviction

Such a frustrating fox trot is hard to avoid in a city that hasn’t had a Republican mayor in 35 years, that has only one Republican currently in elected office (a Bay Area Rapid Transit District commissioner), and where affiliation with the Grand Old Party damaged the chances of at least two candidates in recent years.

So how do you juggle compromise and conviction, remain true to your principles and still wield influence? By quashing divisiveness within its own ranks, practicing moderation and reaching out to the opposition, the San Francisco Republican Party has managed to matter in occasional elections and hopes to influence future races.

Starting with this fall’s mayoral campaign. With his ratings at an all-time low and a widening FBI probe into the city’s housing department, Mayor Willie Brown appears more vulnerable than ever. Challengers Clint Reilly and former Mayor Frank Jordan are working to exploit Brown’s weaknesses, and both are appealing to GOP voters.

But it’s a tough battle; even if Brown were unseated, the Republicans would simply be helping to install yet another Democratic mayor. In fact, many big-money members of the local GOP avoid the difficult local fights and focus their efforts instead on state and national races.

“The Republican Party in San Francisco has specialized in not trying to win elections,” said Joe Shumate, a GOP political consultant in Sacramento. “I think we should be in the business of enlarging our base and winning elections, not backing Democrats so we can get a few appointments.”

Republicans aren’t even the No. 2 party in the two-party system here. San Francisco is the only California county where voters who describe their political allegiance as “decline to state” outnumber registered GOP voters. The breakdown: Democrats, 59%; decline to state, 21%; Republicans, 15%.

Still, some members of San Francisco’s Republican Party like to think they could teach a thing or two about strategy to the fractured statewide GOP organization, which continues to reel from the Democratic rout of 1998: how to survive behind enemy lines and sometimes even have an impact.

“The [statewide] party is trying to redefine itself. Northern California may be a model . . . not our ideology but our tactics,” said Arthur Bruzzone, former chairman of the Republican Central Committee here and host of a local cable television show called “SF/Politics.” “Guerrilla warfare . . . live off the land, blend into the countryside,” Bruzzone said.

A one-party political system does not serve a community well, said Richard DeLeon, author of “Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco” and chairman of the political science department at San Francisco State. DeLeon believes “there is a lot of political disorder in San Francisco because there is no competition that can link San Francisco to what is going on in mainstream American politics.”

The result is an obsessive focus on personalities, such as Willie Brown. In fact, this autumn’s mayoral election has degenerated into a referendum on the flamboyant Brown, with Jordan and Reilly, a millionaire and former political consultant, mining a significant “anyone but Willie” vein.

The two major contenders decry what they call the mayor’s machine politics and accuse him of adding more than $1 billion to the annual budget and padding payrolls to the point that San Francisco has more municipal workers per capita than any other city in the country.

“Willie Brown made the comment a couple of months ago that democracy would be best served if he ran unopposed,” says Jordan. “The flamboyance is one thing; the arrogance is something else.”

Although Brown has been lagging in polls, Reilly and Jordan face uphill battles. Reilly has little name recognition and has never served in public office. Jordan, elected mayor in 1991 with the help of Republicans and moderate Democrats, lost to Brown in 1995.

Each hopes to push Brown into a runoff. Both, however, are appealing to the same constituencies to get the job done: Republicans, Asian Americans, white homeowners, older white renters. Brown has a pretty good lock on the liberal coalition of African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians and young, white, Democratic voters.

Just who are San Francisco’s Republicans, the defenders of the party of Lincoln in the land of Harvey Milk? Generally speaking, says Democratic political consultant Jim Ross, “San Francisco’s Republicans are every other city’s Democrats.”

Some here would argue with that analysis, but listen to Casper on gun control: “I can’t believe the framers [of the Constitution] in the 2nd Amendment wanted to create a right to sport.” And Mike Denunzio, who plans to run for the Board of Supervisors in 2000, on the death penalty: “I believe you should never give the state the power to kill.”

San Francisco has about 450,000 registered voters. About half will show up at the polls on any given election day, so to win the nonpartisan mayor’s race, a candidate needs roughly 130,000 votes.

Enough Republicans to Have an Impact

About 65,000 Republicans are registered to vote, and they tend to go to the polls in greater numbers than others. So, figure 38,000 Republicans will vote Nov. 2--a quarter of the votes a mayoral candidate needs to win. “That’s a lot,” says Casper. “In some elections, we make a difference.”

In addition to helping get Jordan elected in 1991, San Francisco’s Republicans often have an impact, particularly on ballot measures such as Proposition G, which established district elections for the Board of Supervisors.

The district election plan carves the city into 11 voting regions, three of which many believe could someday send a Republican--or at least a more moderate representative--to the board. Exit polls showed that district elections never would have been approved without GOP backing.

DeLeon, who helped create the boundaries, remembers the intense opposition from many in San Francisco’s liberal core who did not want to offer conservatives any opportunity for representation. “They said, ‘The only good Republican is a silent one,’ ” he recalls.

Robert Barnes, a Democratic political consultant who is gay, fought district elections because he opposed anything that would erode the power of gay and lesbian voters. Barnes doesn’t care that there are so few Republicans.

“I don’t believe their values need to be at the table,” he said. “I believe that’s the sentiment of many San Franciscans.”

Damned by an Endorsement

In some neighborhoods, he might be right. In a tight 1996 race, a public defender, a deputy city attorney and a lawyer in private practice were vying for a Municipal Court judge’s seat. The day before the election, several neighborhoods were blanketed with big signs outing one of the candidates.

But it wasn’t your normal dirty tricks campaign. All three candidates were openly homosexual, but only one had been endorsed by the Republican Central Committee. The signs, plastered throughout neighborhoods such as the largely gay Castro District and progressive (translation: left of left) Bernal Heights, read: “The San Francisco Republican Party Endorses Ron Albers for Judge.”

Albers, who had neither hidden the endorsement nor talked about it much, lost.

“Just the association with the Republican Central Committee endorsing someone . . . can be absolutely damning,” said Tom Ammiano, president of the Board of Supervisors.

Barnes engineered the assaults on Albers and a Republican running for the Board of Supervisors, and delights in the success of his damn-them-by-association strategy.

In this city, even some Republicans won’t vote for anyone endorsed by their party, particularly the couple dozen members of San Francisco’s chapter of the California Republican Assembly--a grass-roots coalition of the GOP’s hardest-right constituents.

This month, when the Republican Central Committee met to decide on endorsements, there was Gail Neira in the audience with protest signs: “Political Transvestites Are Taking Over Republican Central Committee.”

Neira thinks it’s her party’s job to endorse Republicans no matter what. But the pragmatic Casper looks at the world differently. He doesn’t believe in bending his principles, but he desperately wants his party to matter. In San Francisco, that means working with the opposition.

“In politics, you have to win an election,” he said. “If you can’t win an election, you have to carve out enough influence so that at least part of your agenda gets heard.”

On this night, though, it really didn’t matter, because none of the possibilities--including Reilly, Jordan, Martz and “no endorsement”--got the requisite 60% of the vote needed for GOP backing.

When it came to the mayor’s race, the central committee could agree on only one thing: “We oppose the reelection of Mayor Brown.”