S.F. Voters Cast Ballots to Fill Seat in Congress

Voters in the 5th Congressional District went to the polls Tuesday in spectacular Bay Area weather to choose a replacement for Rep. Sala Burton, who died Feb. 1.

The county registrar’s office hoped that the weather would increase turnout among the district’s 278,000 voters to about 36%, up from its earlier prediction of 32%.

There were 14 candidates on the open special primary ballot. If no one received 50% plus one vote required to win outright, then the top finisher in each party would appear in a runoff on June 2. Since Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district by 3 to 1, the Democrat with the most votes Tuesday would be virtually certain to win a runoff.

Democratic activist Nancy Pelosi, the front-runner in recent polls, had a large get-out-the-vote operation in the streets, as did her nearest competitor, Supervisor Harry Britt.

“Our vote is out there, and we think we’re getting it to the polls,” Pelosi said as volunteers swirled around her headquarters near the Moscone Convention Center.

Britt, who hoped to become the first openly gay person elected on his first bid for Congress, also was counting on a large absentee ballot vote.

The registrar of voters said that 27,000 absentee ballots had been turned in and that would constitute almost a third of the vote.

“We think we will do well among the absentees,” Britt’s campaign manager, Dick Pabich, said, adding that his campaign handed in roughly 7,000 absentee ballots.

Britt was counting on a heavy turnout of gays, who make up 15% of the voters in the district. All of the candidates promised to make increased federal funding to combat AIDS a top priority if elected. But it was a special issue for Britt, who noted that he has already lost many friends to the disease.

The six Democrats in the race disagreed on few issues. They all oppose U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, oppose offshore oil drilling and have called for cutting military spending.

The race was a test of how much politics has changed in San Francisco since the death in 1983 of Democratic Rep. Phillip Burton, who had held the 5th District seat since 1965.

For years, Burton’s influence in the City of San Francisco--three-fourths of which is in the 5th District--was so dominant that no one sought the offices of mayor or supervisor without talking to Burton or his allies.

Burton’s influence was felt even in this election because he drew district boundary lines in 1980 to ensure that his brother, former Rep. John Burton, won election in the neighboring 6th Congressional District. But in doing so, Phillip Burton made his own district somewhat more conservative by moving large blocks of liberal precincts out of his district and into the 6th District. Those included voters in the Haight-Ashbury District and a slice of the predominantly gay Castro Street area. Both would have been Britt strongholds.

Powerful San Francisco Democrats who lined up behind Pelosi in Tuesday’s special election included Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a longtime Phillip Burton ally, and also Assemblyman Art Agnos and Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy.

Changes in Electorate

In the old days that would have been enough to virtually put Pelosi in office, but changes in the electorate that were evident even before Phillip Burton’s death made the special election much more difficult to predict.

Soaring housing prices and a loss of manufacturing jobs drove out many of the solid labor votes that the Burton machine had counted on. Replacing these voters were more independent, affluent young professionals. Britt and Pelosi waged a major battle for those voters.

Also, homosexual and renters’ rights groups have become increasingly involved in the city’s politics, and many of them saw Britt as more likely to back their agenda as a congressman than Pelosi, who boasts of her close contacts with national Democrats, many of whom she has raised money for over the years.

Pelosi made a special effort to reach older ethnic voters by stressing her role as a mother of five.

For gays, Tuesday’s election was an important test of their political clout. Britt raised money from gays all over the United States.

“We won’t have a chance like this in a long long time. Now is the time to do it,” said Ben Gardiner, a Britt volunteer. “There is no place in the country where we have this concentration of gays.”

Top Priority

For many of San Francisco’s gays, AIDS is the big issue, the reason both to vote and volunteer for Britt, who promises to make AIDS research funding his top priority. AIDS research is especially important here, where 1,844 people have died of AIDS, another 3,086 have AIDS and several thousand others have AIDS-related conditions.

“Having a seat in Congress, that could be quite important,” David Burlew said after leaving a voting booth in the Castro District, home to many of the city’s homosexuals.

Three people in his small apartment building have acquired immune deficiency syndrome, he said.

The final hours of Britt’s campaign focused on getting out the vote in districts such as the Castro Street area. Teams of get-out-the vote volunteers hung door signs in the early morning hours urging voters to go to the polls and returned in the afternoon to urge potential voters just getting off work to vote.

Britt, whose campaign raised about $250,000, received last minute contributions of $1,000 each from actress Jane Fonda and her husband, Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica).

Pelosi’s coffers were far fatter, close to $1 million. Her last-minute contributions included more than $10,000 from a variety of organized labor groups, plus $5,000 from the American Medical Political Action Committee. Assembly Speaker Brown and Richard C. Blum, Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s husband, both donated $1,000.