Runoff Time Again for O’Connor--but With Different Odds

Three years after winning San Diego’s mayoral primary and then losing the runoff, former San Diego City Councilwoman Maureen O’Connor confidently predicted Wednesday that “the story’s going to have a different ending this time.”

While O’Connor and some of her top aides expressed concern over “giving the other side another shot,” she added that she views her June 3 runoff against City Councilman Bill Cleator as simply “a positive wrap-up . . . to what began” in Tuesday’s primary, when she narrowly missed total victory.

A key reason for her confidence, O’Connor explained, is that 19% of the primary vote went to her fellow Democrat, Floyd Morrow, who finished third in the 14-candidate race. Because the mayoral race is nonpartisan more in theory than in fact, most political observers believe that Morrow’s votes are more likely to go to O’Connor than to Cleator, a conservative Republican.

In Tuesday’s primary, O’Connor topped Cleator, 80,861 votes (46%) to 52,940 (30%), but fell short of the simple majority needed for outright victory. So there will be a runoff to determine who will succeed Roger Hedgecock, who resigned as mayor in December after his felony conviction on campaign-law violations.

“Even if we split Floyd’s vote 50-50--or even if I only get about a quarter of his votes--that’s more than enough,” said the 39-year-old O’Connor, who would be the first woman mayor of California’s second-largest city. “I don’t expect to automatically get Floyd’s votes. But I know they’re all not going to go to Cleator. That’s just not logical.”

The Cleator camp, however, took heart from the knowledge that O’Connor narrowly lost the 1983 mayoral runoff against Hedgecock, 52% to 48%, after having bested Hedgecock in the primary, 36% to 30%.

“What happened in ’83 certainly can happen again,” said Don Harrison, a top Cleator campaign aide. “Any football fan knows that you can take a drubbing in the first half and come back and win the game in the second half. That’s what we’ll be trying to do.”

O’Connor responded: “This isn’t going to be a case of deja vu. There are some similarities between ’83 and this time, but the circumstances are different and the result will be too.”

While O’Connor now confronts the same difficult task that faced her in 1983--trying to attract a majority vote in a city that traditionally votes Republican--differences between this election and the one three years ago could make that job easier, political observers say.

One of the major differences is that O’Connor’s 46% performance Tuesday--10 percentage points better than her showing in 1983--means that, as she pointed out, “there’s a much shorter distance to travel” to surpass 50% in the runoff.

In addition, the votes of the also-rans in Tuesday’s race were substantially different from those three years ago. In the 1983 mayoral primary, Cleator finished third with 25% of the vote while another Republican councilman, Bill Mitchell, was fourth with 5%. Most of their support coalesced behind Republican Hedgecock, quickly transforming O’Connor from primary victor to runoff underdog.

This year, however, the “swing” votes in the runoff are those of Morrow, a liberal who generally is regarded as being closer philosophically to O’Connor, a political moderate, than to Cleator, arguably the most conservative member of the City Council. While Cleator has a strong pro-development record during his six years on the City Council, both O’Connor and Morrow are viewed as environmental moderates--a key distinction in environmentally conscious San Diego, where growth-management issues have dominated local elections for 30 years.

“Three years ago, Maureen was in a position where she looked up at that tote board and said, ‘I have to run a campaign aimed at getting Bill Cleator’s voters to vote for me against Roger Hedgecock’--a very difficult task, impossible, really,” said Dick Sykes, O’Connor’s campaign consultant.

“Mr. Cleator now looks at that board and realizes that he has to design a strategy that allows him to get Floyd Morrow’s vote against Maureen O’Connor. If her task was hard three years ago, his task is that much harder. It’s just a really difficult scenario to imagine.”

Another factor working in O’Connor’s favor is that Cleator, in the words of Nick Johnson, a local campaign consultant to Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, is “no Roger Hedgecock when it comes to campaigning.”

Meanwhile, Morrow, who described himself as “mighty pleased” that his 19% total was more than double his standing in pre-election polls, argued that neither of the mayoral finalists “can count on just snapping up” his former supporters in the runoff.

The former three-term councilman added that he hopes to meet with both O’Connor and Cleator in the next several days, and will press both candidates for a commitment on his proposal for a “Citizen Watch” program, in which a panel of scientifically selected San Diegans would advise the council on major issues. If neither candidate agrees to commit to such a panel, which Morrow describes as “a mixture of the quarterly town council and grand jury concepts,” Morrow said that he might wage a write-in candidacy in June.

“If I can get that program started, I’ll feel that we really did something great for San Diego in this race,” Morrow said. “How (Cleator and O’Connor) react to that idea is going to determine my next move.”

As Cleator partisans began pondering Wednesday how to make up a 16% deficit in three months, one factor that encouraged them is the oft-heard theory that the Republican U.S. Senate primary in June could benefit his candidacy by generating a substantially higher GOP turnout than occurred in Tuesday’s special election, in which 36% of San Diego’s 485,000 registered voters cast ballots.

“It’s a new ballgame in June,” said Cleator, 58, a wealthy Point Loma businessman, “and I’m going to be up there swinging.”

O’Connor, however, said that she is not bothered by the prospect of a large GOP turnout in June, noting that she carried more than three-fourths of the precincts Tuesday in three heavily Republican council districts. O’Connor said that, based on unofficial returns from the voter registrar’s office, she won 92 of 124 precincts in District 1, 75 of 83 precincts in District 2, and 85 of District 7’s 113 precincts.

“Those are not normally Maureen O’Connor areas,” O’Connor said. “Come June, I think people may vote partisan in party races, but they’re going to vote their neighborhood in the mayor’s race. They’re going to look at who’s best for the community, not the party labels.”

Cleator’s backers acknowledge that he not only must manage to attract the bulk of Morrow’s support, but also must, as Harrison put it, “peel away” votes that went to O’Connor in the primary “by finding a way to get people to take a second look at Bill Cleator and, for that matter, Maureen O’Connor.”

“No doubt about it, the mathematics are on their side right now,” Harrison said. “But we think that those numbers will change if we can get people to look at the candidates side by side and compare their records. We have three more months to get people to see that Maureen O’Connor is not exactly what she says she is.”

In particular, Harrison indicated that Cleator intends to continue trying to undercut O’Connor’s environmental record by stressing, as he did in the closing days of the primary, her involvement in the renovation of a Mendocino hotel owned by her husband, multimillionaire businessman Robert O. Peterson. Citing that project, Cleator characterized O’Connor as “a developer in Northern California and an environmentalist in San Diego”--a charge that O’Connor, who co-authored the city’s growth-management plan, dismissed as “absolute nonsense.”

Regardless, Cleator must pursue such an aggressive stance, other political observers said, in order to have even a chance of overtaking O’Connor.

“Bill has the greatest amount of work to do but has the greatest latitude in how to close that gap,” said acting Mayor Ed Struiksma, who withdrew from the mayoral race amid controversy over his falsification of city-reimbursed expense accounts. His advice to Cleator, Struiksma added, would be to “go after (O’Connor) in every way that he could.”

One facet of the primary’s outcome that particularly encouraged O’Connor backers is that she ran ahead of Cleator by a more than 3-to-2 margin while being outspent by him 2-to-1 in the 7 1/2-week campaign.

David Bain, O’Connor’s campaign treasurer, said that the former councilwoman spent about $120,000 in the primary--well below the self-imposed $150,000 limit that she established in what she called “a bold experiment . . . to end the craziness” of spiraling campaign costs. Cleator spent about $250,000, according to Harrison, while Morrow spent about $100,000, most of it his own money.

O’Connor said Wednesday that she plans to establish another voluntary spending limit in the runoff, “because I think the public is tired of million-dollar campaigns”--a trend that she contributed to by spending more than $560,000 of her own money in her 1983 race. Although O’Connor spent none of her own money in the primary, she said Wednesday that she is “still keeping that option open” in the runoff.

Earlier, O’Connor had suggested $225,000 as a possible runoff spending limit, but said Wednesday that “that sounds a little high” and expects to settle on a lower figure, which she hopes to persuade Cleator to accept.

However, Cleator rejected O’Connor’s spending limit proposal in the primary, and the odds of a mutual agreement in the runoff appear slim.

“I guess we could talk about it, but we’d still have some of the same questions that we did in the primary,” Harrison said. “Besides, it’s a little hypocritical for a candidate 16 points ahead to suggest an equal spending limit.”