San Diego Mayor Race: O’Connor Sees Happy End

Despite narrowly missing total victory in Tuesday’s, mayoral primary, Maureen F. O’Connor confidently predicted Wednesday that she will win the June 3 runoff.

O’Connor and some of her top aides nevertheless expressed concern over “giving the other side another shot.”

O’Connor, a former San Diego councilwoman, will face City Councilman Bill Cleator in the runoff.

A key reason for her confidence, O’Connor said, is that 19% of Tuesday’s 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 argue that Morrow’s votes are more likely to go to O’Connor than to Cleator, a Republican.

O’Connor on Tuesday topped Cleator, 80,861 votes (46%) to 52,940 (30%), but fell short of the simple majority needed for outright victory, thus necessitating a runoff between the two top vote-getters to determine who will succeed former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who resigned last December after his felony conviction on campaign-law violations.

In 1983, O’Connor narrowly lost the 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.

But O’Connor disagreed, saying, “The story’s going to have a different ending this time.”

Cleator partisans argue 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 there was a 36% turnout.

“It’s a new ball game in June,” Cleator said.

Cleator, 58, has a strong pro-development record during his six years on the City Council, although both he and O’Connor, 39, are viewed as environmental moderates--a key distinction in environmentally-conscious San Diego, where growth-management issues have dominated local elections throughout the past three decades.