Post-Election Day Blues Often Linger for Losers

The scene was Election Central downtown, just before midnight on June 3. Nearly all of the votes had been counted--enough to make it clear that former San Diego City Councilwoman Maureen O’Connor, not Councilman Bill Cleator, would become the city’s 31st mayor.

With hundreds of campaign volunteers serving as a backdrop--the victors cheering and wildly waving their candidates’ signs, most of the vanquished quietly milling around--the two former mayoral adversaries hugged each other, Cleator offering congratulations and O’Connor, condolences.

“It’s hard to lose,” O’Connor told Cleator. “I know. I’ve been there before.”

For the second time in three years, Cleator thus found himself rejected by his fellow San Diegans--a bitter dose of political reality that O’Connor had tasted herself in the 1983 mayoral election that she narrowly lost to Roger Hedgecock.

“Is there disappointment? You bet there is,” Cleator said two days after the election. “You run because you think you have a contribution to make. You’re offering your services to the public. When you find out that maybe the people don’t want your services . . . it’s not that great of a feeling. No one likes getting turned down for anything.”

The unpleasant possibility of public rejection, however, constantly faces politicians, whose fortunes in every race are judged against the maxim articulated by Adlai Stevenson: “Second best in an election isn’t good enough.”

For losing candidates, coping with loss of an election is certainly no easier than dealing with other personal setbacks--and, for some, is perhaps more difficult simply because of the publicity, a much-sought commodity during the race that becomes an unwelcome spotlight when a campaign ends unsuccessfully.

Indeed, most non-politicians’ career setbacks or personal disappointments generally are shared only with family and close friends. In politics, however, one’s failures appear on Page One and the nightly television news.

“It’s like making a marriage proposal in public and having the whole city know that the woman told you no,” said lawyer Michael Aguirre, who lost a 1982 Democratic congressional primary to then-County Supervisor, now-U.S. Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego). “It’s very, very embarrassing. I wanted to hide.” In fact, Aguirre did just that, remaining home for three days “in bed with a quilt over my head” before he finally “snapped out of it and went back to work.”

While long shots usually are able to easily shrug off predictable losses, defeats can be devastating to candidates who go into Election Day either as favorites or strong contenders.

“Even though any sane person would continue to tell herself, ‘You may not win, you may not win,’ when it happens, it’s still like the death of someone in the family who’s been ill for a long time,” said Lynn Schenk, a state cabinet member under former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. who was defeated by Susan Golding in a 1984 county supervisorial race. “No matter how much you’ve tried to prepare yourself for that possibility, there’s a wash of fresh emotion that’s very painful.”

“On Election Day, a very big bubble bursts and there’s a real deflation of one’s ego,” added Dick Roe, a former Del Mar mayor who was defeated in 1982 by Assemblywoman Sunny Mojonnier (R-Encinitas). “An election is basically a popularity contest, and it’s not easy to have to admit that you didn’t win.”

Steve Vaus, an unsuccessful candidate for the San Diego city school board, recalls Election Night “as one long, bad dream.” Not only did Vaus, considered one of the favorites, fail to qualify for one of the race’s two runoff spots, but he finished a distant fifth in an eight-candidate contest.

“I couldn’t believe the (vote) numbers that were coming in--I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you’re running but not getting anywhere,” Vaus said. “I kept wanting to shake somebody and say, ‘Hey, some precincts must have been lost because I’m supposed to win.’ I drove home in a fog and was in a state of shock for about the next day and a half.”

Accustomed to months of 16-hour campaign days, losing candidates find their initial numbness and acute disappointment compounded by a void stemming from the abrupt transition from candidate one day to also-ran the next. Until Election Day, a reality-- I am a city councilman --or at least a possibility-- I’m going to be a city councilman --stands; when the returns come in that night, however, that notion is shattered for the losers.

“I really think I understand what it’s like for a woman to have a miscarriage,” Vaus said. “You go along for so long--in my case, eight months--nurturing this dream, then all of a sudden, it’s just not there anymore. You’re left with an emptiness that’s very hard to deal with.”

Phil Connor, a lawyer who lost to Ed Struiksma in a 1981 San Diego City Council race, says that he was “somewhat disoriented, thrown off balance” by the sense of rapid cessation of the campaign that he experienced the day after that election.

“One day you’re making 10 campaign appearances and the next, nothing,” said Connor, former chairman of the San Diego County Democratic Party. “The swirl of attention just disappears and you kind of wonder what to do with the rest of your life.”

The obligatory concession remarks on Election Night and in the days ahead pose a challenge “where you’re trying to look your best under the very worst of circumstances,” Aguirre said.

“You want to be sure that you don’t come up with a Nixon-type line,” Schenk said, referring to Richard Nixon’s infamous remark--”You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”--to the press after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election.

Grace and dignity in defeat, however, are not easy accomplishments, because, as Aguirre notes, “Part of you wants to scream, ‘You fools--you elected the wrong guy!’ ”

“There is a difference between what you say, knowing that it’s for public consumption, and what you feel in your heart,” Schenk added.

Cleator earned high marks for his performance on June 3, when he warmly congratulated O’Connor, thanked his own workers and pledged to put aside his differences with the mayor-elect to work together to better the city.

O’Connor herself had not been nearly so conciliatory toward Hedgecock after their often acrimonious 1983 race, saying that his 52%-48% victory represented “no mandate for anyone” and raising the prospect of a rematch the following year--a challenge that she ultimately chose not to pursue.

On the other hand, County Supervisor Paul Eckert predicted earlier this month that North County voters would soon regret rejecting his bid for a third term--remarks viewed by many local political observers as treading close to a Nixonian mind-set.

“The people have made a choice,” Eckert said the day after the election. “They’ve said, ‘We don’t want Paul Eckert. We want somebody else.’ I can accept that. But I feel totally exonerated for everything. They’re not going to be saying a year from now, ‘Oh God, isn’t it great that we got rid of Eckert?’ They’re going to say, ‘Oh, maybe we should have kept him around.’ ”

After the initial shock and intense disappointment caused by defeat passes--a period that generally lasts from a few days to several weeks--most candidates interviewed said that they entered what Aguirre termed “a phase of second-guessing and scapegoating.” During that period, questions such as, If only I could have raised more money, if only the press had paid more attention to me, if only I had ignored that consultant’s bad advice --run through the candidates’ minds.

“You’re looking for ways to rationalize and accept a result that you really don’t want to accept,” Aguirre said. “You don’t want to admit that you personally failed.”

Some candidates, however, insist that they immediately responded to their defeat with equanimity, not depression.

“I was shocked for about a second, then I closed the door on that chapter and began to look for how I would open another door on the next thing,” former two-term San Diego City Councilman Bill Mitchell said of his defeat last fall by Abbe Wolfsheimer. The “next thing” for Mitchell, who won this month’s three-candidate Republican primary in the 44th Congressional District, will be a race this fall against Bates.

“You have to let these things roll off your back like water off a duck,” added Mitchell, a power-of-positive-thinking advocate. “If your convictions are strong, you’re ready for anything. Even Chernobyl--if that was the end of the world, I was ready for it. When you have true faith in your beliefs, it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down.”

Similarly, Eckert professed that he was “not bothered at all--not even for a second” by his recent defeat.

“I don’t even view it in terms of losing,” Eckert said. “All I lost was having to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to drive to San Diego and spend long days at the county. I’ve got a business, I’ve got other things to do. I immediately started thinking about what I was going to do next and didn’t waste my time worrying about not being the top vote-getter.”

Whether it takes a second, a day or several weeks, however, candidates inevitably come to terms with their defeat. For most, that means focusing on the positive aspects of their candidacy, not merely the outcome at the polls, and returning their attention to personal and professional matters, often neglected because of a campaign’s time demands.

“If you wanted to, you could keep beating yourself over the head,” said Evonne Schulze, an aide to Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) who last year lost her third City Council race. “But you have to say, ‘Hey, I put myself out there on the line, and that’s more than 99% of the people have ever done.’ It’s like other things in life--the pain passes and the good memories remain. Your attitude has to be that tomorrow’s another day.”

Bob Filner, a former school board member who lost, 52%-48%, to Gloria McColl in a 1983 City Council race, regards that showing as a moral victory “in a city where Democrats rarely win,” and argues that his candidacy has affected McColl’s performance--notably, by causing her to pay closer attention to community groups.

“The need to start making money again,” as Roe bluntly puts it, also helps some losing candidates to put their political defeat in perspective.

Roe, for example, said that his campaign cost him about $40,000, a combination of money that he spent in his Assembly race and lost income. Aguirre spent about $70,000 of his own money on his congressional race--a price tag that would be much higher if the income lost from the time spent away from his law practice were added.

Meanwhile, Vaus, a recording studio owner who recorded the Padres “Talkin’ Baseball” song--one that local radio radio stations did not play during the campaign because other candidates conceivably could have demanded equal time--”cranked out” a new Padres song the day after his loss “just to get back in the swing of things.”

However, even as the former candidates struggle to return to normality in their lives, their past campaigns occasionally intrude.

“The sharp disappointment fades away, but the memory doesn’t,” Connor said.

Filner, for instance, acknowledged that he found it difficult to visit the City Council chambers for months after his loss to McColl. Many others conceded that, even years after their defeats, they succumb to momentary “What if?” thoughts when they see the candidate who defeated them quoted in the newspaper or appear on television.

And through it all, every candidate who loses hopes that, eventually, he will be able to be as philosophical and even-tempered about his defeat as former Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin (D-San Diego) is about his 1980 loss to Duncan Hunter.

Had he won that year, Van Deerlin says, the following term would have been his 10th and last in Congress. San Diego voters, he adds half-jokingly, simply decided to expedite his political retirement, an upset that prompted a Washington lobbyist to send him a telegram saying, “The people have spoken--the bastards!”

“Heck, I’d been planning to round my career off at 20 years anyway,” Van Deerlin said, chuckling. “The voters just decided to round it off at 18.”