New D.A. Breaks Down Old Stereotypes

Bonnie Dumanis knows how odd it can sound if you toss together some of the labels describing her. She is, after all, the lesbian Jewish Republican district attorney of San Diego County.

“I’m a contradiction,” Dumanis said with a smile, while reflecting on her November election. A gay political action group said she is the first district attorney in the nation who is openly gay or lesbian.

Contradiction, indeed. A pro-choice, union-backed, former drug court judge, Dumanis won in a county with deep fundamentalist Christian and military influences. Conservative Republican challenger Bill Simon Jr. trounced Gov. Gray Davis among voters in San Diego County.

Dumanis’ win in such a conservative area shows the increasing degree to which openly gay candidates can appeal to a broad voter base, say national gay political activists. “San Diego is not Manhattan; it’s not San Francisco. It is not what one would consider one of the centers of the gay universe, and that is significant,” said Jason Young, spokesman for the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a Washington-based political action committee funding gay candidates, including Dumanis.

Dumanis, 51, narrowly defeated two-term incumbent Paul Pfingst, winning by about 3,500 votes of more than 570,000 cast. Although the race was nonpartisan, both Dumanis and Pfingst were well-known locally as moderate Republicans.

With few ideological differences between the candidates, the race focused largely on Pfingst’s record. Especially harmful to the incumbent was a no-confidence vote in 2001 by a majority of the prosecutors in his office. Dumanis, in turn, was endorsed by the deputy district attorney’s union.

Dumanis was not publicly attacked for her sexual orientation. Thomas C. Shepard, a Republican political consultant in San Diego for more than 30 years, said the local party itself likely would have made such attacks in the past. “The party chose not to be involved in any negative campaigning, which is a change from a decade ago,” Shepard said. Then, anti-gay campaigning would have been “standard policy,” he said.

“We’ve reached a critical mass” among San Diego voters, Shepard said. “More voters are turned off by an attack [based on sexual orientation] than are moved by it,” he said.

Dumanis agreed most in San Diego are now tolerant of gay and lesbian candidates, but she charged that Pfingst raised her sexual orientation at fund-raisers and small meetings with voters. The Christian Coalition also sent a campaign mailer that mentioned Dumanis was supported by gays and lesbians.

Pfingst and his campaign have repeatedly insisted they never raised Dumanis’ sexual orientation during the campaign.

Dumanis believes she was able to win over voters averse to a lesbian candidate through direct contacts. “When people get the opportunity to meet you, their stereotypes and prejudices are replaced by their individual feelings toward you,” she said.

In office since Jan. 6, Dumanis said she has a few innovations in mind for her office -- she plans to start a “cold-case” unit to examine long-unsolved homicides, and a white-collar crime unit to probe political corruption and conflicts of interest.

She has tried to ensure that promotions and new assignments for the office’s 300 lawyers are based on merit, not political paybacks, said her spokeswoman Gail Stewart. Division chief jobs have been opened to anyone who wants to apply, including those who backed Pfingst, Stewart said.

Accommodating differences is something Dumanis said she practiced as a child in Brockton, Mass. She grew up in a religious household, and wanted to be a rabbi for much of her childhood. But her parents and neighborhood were so open-minded that she attended Hebrew school, while occasionally tagging along with friends to a Greek Orthodox church.

Dumanis’ parents are lifelong Democrats. When she was growing up, her father, a truck driver, was both a Teamster and, as a clarinet and saxophone player, the president of his musicians union local. Her mother spent 20 years working for a government program that assists poor women and children.

When Dumanis first became a prosecutor, she proudly mailed her father a business card. He had the cards reprinted with a union seal and returned them to his daughter.

Despite her parents’ Democratic leanings, Dumanis said she was “never very political.”

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, she studied sociology and engaged in social work -- tutoring prisoners and teaching advocacy skills to welfare recipients.

She moved to San Diego to attend what is now the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, working as a clerk in the county Welfare Department and then the district attorney’s office, before becoming a prosecutor.

Dumanis said she had considered joining the Democratic Party, but decided to become a Republican as a young lawyer. “What attracted me were the principles -- holding people accountable, realizing the impact of crime, fiscal responsibility,” she said.

Dumanis spent 12 years as a prosecutor before becoming a Juvenile Court judge for four years. She ran successfully for a Municipal Court judgeship and was appointed a Superior Court judge by then-Gov. Pete Wilson in 1998.

Until Dumanis’ election, according to the Victory Fund, there had never been an openly gay or lesbian district attorney anywhere in the country. Among the handful of openly gay Republican elected officials, Dumanis holds the office representing the most voters, said Young, the political group’s spokesman.

Dumanis thinks her victory in San Diego yields an important message for the national Republican party. “If they removed issues like choice [on abortion] and sexual orientation from the dialogue,” and focused on what Dumanis calls “the true, original message of the party,” including individual rights, “they would be much more successful,” she said.