Volunteers Targeted Southeast : Early-Morning Calls Got O’Connor Army Moving

An hour or so after dawn Tuesday, it began to awake and mobilize--an army of nearly 300 Maureen O’Connor loyalists determined to deliver a mayoral victory.

Their battleground was Southeast San Diego, a traditional stronghold for Democrats. Their target was 7,587 blacks and Latinos the O’Connor camp had identified as “sometimes” voters, Democrats who only cast ballots in presidential elections.

O’Connor and her strategists believed it would be these voters, often overlooked by pollsters and ignored by politicians, who could provide the margin of victory in Tuesday’s primary election. The Southeast operation, they said, was a microcosm of a new kind of local campaign in which thousands of volunteers--not high-priced television and radio ads--would be the key ingredient to win public office.

They figured wrong. It wasn’t enough.

O’Connor’s volunteer effort was unable to capitalize on her popularity and give her more than 50% of the vote in the primary election, which would have meant outright victory. She captured 46%, and the Southeast army turned out only 4,475 reluctant voters.

Despite those results, O’Connor and her strategists Wednesday expressed satisfaction with their efforts in the Southeast area and citywide, and they vowed to continue to lean on volunteers in the runoff against Councilman Bill Cleator.

At a press conference Wednesday, O’Connor underscored her commitment to the volunteer campaign by pointing out that she spent about $1.50 for each of her 80,860 primary votes. In contrast, Cleator spent about $6 a vote and dark-horse candidate Floyd Morrow, credited with taking crucial votes away from O’Connor, spent $5 a vote.

And her chief strategist in the Southeast operation said that county voter records show that O’Connor’s efforts in the minority community turned out more total voters in council District 4 than voted in the 1983 mayoral primary. Every other council district but one turned out fewer voters on Tuesday than three years ago, city records show.

O’Connor said she was pleased with the Southeast operation, although it fell short of its goal to get 7,500 reluctant voters to the polls. “It was short of their goal, but my internal goal for them was 5,000, and they almost made it,” she said. “So, no, I’m not disappointed in their effort at all. I think they did an excellent job.”

O’Connor’s emphasis on volunteers is a conscious attempt to change her lingering public image as the millionaire’s wife who pumped $560,000 of her own fortune into an unsuccessful 1983 mayoral campaign against Roger Hedgecock.

“The reason why I didn’t get over the top last time, I’m convinced of it, is I got hung with the negative label of trying to buy the election for myself as a toy,” she said in an interview before Tuesday’s election. “This time when I go out to the community, I say, ‘It is your election. You’re the one that’s going to have to acquire it for you. You want it, we all have to earn it.’ ”

By relying more on volunteers, she said, “what we’re going to prove with this campaign is the old campaigns are finished. There’s going to be spending limits. They are going to have to involve people again in the process and when you start involving people in the process, you start restoring their confidence in government. It’s not going to be a half-dozen people calling the shots.”

Thus, the O’Connor campaign, which is based in a storefront warehouse on Pacific Highway, has shied away from the glitzy and expensive media appeals that are the backbone of most local campaigns. Instead, she has used about 700 volunteers to staff telephones at headquarters or at home to contact thousands of potential voters--mainly registered Democrats and independents--throughout the city, said LaDonna Hatch, O’Connor’s campaign manager.

By Tuesday, Hatch said those volunteers had called more than 65,000 people, a feat that required three to four times that number of telephone calls dialed because of wrong or disconnected numbers.

However, the citywide effort reflected what most political experts considered a truism about O’Connor: she can capture around 45% to 47% of the votes any day of the week. The problem of the campaign, then, became how O’Connor could capture that winning margin.

She turned to Marshall Ganz, a 42-year-old former organizer for Ceasar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, for help.

Ganz was first introduced to O’Connor in the 1983 campaign and organized volunteers to get out the Democratic vote in Southeast in time for the general election against Hedgecock. His efforts covered 122 Southeast precincts and are credited with helping increase turnout from 32% in the primary to 44% in the general election. What’s more, the percentage of people there voting for O’Connor increased from 59% to 77%, records show.

Before she announced her candidacy in 1986, O’Connor said she made sure that Ganz would try to repeat the special Southeast operation for the primary election.

“Basically, we set up a mechanism which allowed people and encouraged people to participate and they responded,” said Ganz.

“Certainly, this is an important part of the strategy,” Ganz said, in an interview before Tuesday’s vote, about O’Connor’s decision to once again go after voters south of Interstate 8. “They count on the low-income, minority voter not voting. By they, I mean the other side. They count on them (minorities) dealing themselves out of the process. And Maureen’s saying this is an opportunity to get into it. Yeah, it’s pretty critical, both for her candidacy and for the community’s involvement.”

Cleator’s campaign took a different approach going into the stretch for the primary.

He relied more heavily on direct mailings and on television commercials and radio spots, aired at special times to reach older San Diegans because they have a greater propensity to vote.

Cleator’s director of field operations, Byron Wear, said the conservative, pro-development councilman also used volunteers and paid help to contact Republicans who vote often, a population that is found mostly north of Interstate 8. Wear said Cleators’ workers were to have checked polls in predominantly white neighborhoods of San Carlos, Navajo, Rancho Bernardo, La Jolla, Clairemont, Normal Heights and La Playa.

But Ganz and O’Connor were convinced that the political gold was to be found elsewhere.

In Ganz, who looks like an overweight version of Albert Einstein, O’Connor had a man with plenty of experience in organizing campaigns and union drives. He was affiliated with the UFW from 1965 to 1981, serving as Chavez’s organizing director and on the union’s national executive board. He taught classes on organizing at UC Santa Cruz in 1982 and 1983 before starting work on a book about the subject.

Under his direction, the shock troops were assembled for Southeast. Many of the people returned for a second tour, while others like Debbie Harris, a 27-year-old unemployed city garbage truck driver, were drafted. Harris said she signed up her mother, two sisters and boyfriend to help with the special Southeast voter drive.

“I came to volunteer for two hours,” said Harris. “I’ve been here 900 hours since.”

The Southeast operation was in place by Tuesday in neighborhoods from City Heights to San Ysidro, from Barrio Logan to Paradise Hills. Ganz said that there were captains and assistants in 97 precincts, who reported up a chain of command that led to him. Each captain was asked to open his home as a mini-O’Connor headquarters, and he was given a list of the voters in his precinct.

Captains were told to ignore voters who were crossed out in bold red marker. These were the people who always vote and should not be targeted for special attention.

Their quarry, instead, were voters whose names were highlighted in yellow. These were the “sometimes” voters, people Ganz identified because they voted in the 1984 presidential election but ignored the 1985 mayoral primary.

Ganz had figured that 180,000 people citywide would vote in the primary, and that O’Connor would capture 80,000. Therefore, he asked the Southeast operation to target and start working on an additional 10,000 sometimes voters with visits and over the telephone.

“Really, the main message is not so much one of issues and so forth, but the fact they have an opportunity to really make a difference in this election and to count,” said Ganz.

Instead of 10,000 sometimes voters, Ganz settled by Tuesday on a goal of 7,587--the number of sometimes voters who had committed to O’Connor.

At 7 a.m., the army began to mobilize.

Still weary from a late-night session that crept into Tuesday morning, they placed wake-up calls to each other. According to the Ganz plan, the precinct captains and their assistants met for coffee and doughnuts by 8:30 a.m. Then they would head to the polls by 10 a.m., the first of several planned poll checks during the day.

Their task was tedious. Every few hours, they checked a public list at each polling station to see how many of the people highlighted in yellow on their own lists had actually gone to vote. If they had failed to show, the sometimes voters were to be visited or called.

Ganz had established a headquarters in a downtown office suite, where white poster paper lined the walls of several rooms. He assigned organizers and coordinators to keep running line totals showing how many targeted voters had succumbed to O’Connor’s organization.

In precinct 35060, for instance, Henry Williams was responsible for making sure that his allotment of 94 sometimes voters kept their promise and went to the polls. Shortly before 1 p.m., the 72-year-old retired security guard left his Ocean View Boulevard home for a check of voters at his assigned polling place, the Greater Jackson Memorial Church of God in Christ.

The strains of loud revival music came through the doors separating the Sunday school room, where the voting machines stood, from the sanctuary, where a noon prayer service was winding up. Williams went to a corner and examined the poll list, which showed who had voted since his last check at 9 a.m.

Sixteen more sometimes voters had checked in.

Williams proved to be one of the best of O’Connor’s Southeast foot soldiers. He managed to get 70 sometimes voters to the polls.

But others were not nearly as efficient. And when the votes were tallied, the Southeast operation had delivered no victory but only 4,475 sometimes voters to the polls.

Still, Ganz said he is not disappointed. He said he believes that the special concentration of 300 volunteers in Southeast was responsible for helping Council District 4 turn out 13,674 voters Tuesday, an increase over the 12,959 who voted in the 1983 mayoral primary. Every other council district, except District 5, had fewer voters this primary than in 1983, he noted.

“It lays a very powerful foundation for the runoff,” Ganz said, noting that the Southeast effort was put together within three or four weeks. “Now, they have a very solid foundation with close to 94 precinct captains, close to 300 volunteers who worked on Election Day and a pool of identified voters. If they build on this investment, they’re going to have a powerful motivation to get out voters in the next election.”

O’Connor said Wednesday that she couldn’t say for sure if the special Southeast effort would be used in June, but she left the door open.

“It worked,” she said. “We’ve got to iron out some of the wrinkles, but on the whole, I’m 95% satisfied with it. And the next 5% we’ll get in June.”