Money, Strategy Make Difference in S.F. Race

Heavy campaign spending and a strategy that frustrated a determined challenge by the homosexual community made the difference for Democrat Nancy Pelosi in Tuesday’s 5th Congressional District special election.

Pelosi spent $1 million, more than her 13 opponents combined; her sophisticated voter-turnout program was perfect for the small “universe” of a congressional district, and she benefitted from image problems that plagued some of the candidates.

Pelosi got 36% of the vote in the special election called to replace Rep. Sala Burton, who died Feb. 1. That made Pelosi the top finisher among the six Democrats on the open ballot. She will face Harriet Ross, the top Republican vote getter, and four minor party candidates in a June 2 runoff.

Agree to Debate

Pelosi is heavily favored to win the seat in a district where Democrats hold a 3-to-1 registration edge. Ross, who got only 2.8% of the vote Tuesday, said she hopes that Pelosi will debate her in the coming weeks, and Pelosi indicated that she will.

Gay activists here thought that this was their race to lose, given the large number of homosexuals in the district. Their candidate, Democrat Harry Britt, a San Francisco supervisor, did get out his supporters and finished a strong second with 32.2% of the vote.

But the combination of factors favoring Pelosi made it an uphill battle for Britt.

“Pelosi never had to deal with a two-person race, which could have helped Britt,” said Mervin Field of the San Francisco-based California Poll.

“Instead it was Pelosi against the pack and she benefitted because four of her opponents, including Britt, are supervisors and they are not held in very high esteem in San Francisco.”

Avoids Negative Attacks

Unlike many of her opponents, Pelosi refused to engage in negative attacks. Her manager, Clinton Reilly, intentionally kept the campaign low key, figuring that if Pelosi engaged in negative attacks it could only increase the enthusiasm in the Britt campaign, which was hoping to elect the first openly gay person to a first term in Congress.

Still, Field and other analysts said that perhaps the biggest factor was the huge amount of money Pelosi had to spend and the precise way she used some of it.

Much of Pelosi’s campaign expenditures went for targetting and then turning out those among the district’s 278,000 voters who were most likely to support Pelosi.

Such get-out-the-vote efforts are a part of almost every campaign, but their potential is highest in districtwide, rather than statewide, elections because the universe of voters is fairly small and identifiable.

Reilly hired professional organizers Marshall Ganz and Fred Ross, who had put together an impressive voter-turnout program for Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s narrow victory last November.

Put 27 on Salary

To decrease the dependence on volunteers, Reilly said, he put 27 people on salary for the Ganz-Ross voter-turnout effort.

“That’s where a lot of our money went,” Reilly said. “So what we did was identify 15,000 occasional voters who supported us but needed to be pushed out to vote. We got about 70% of them out, I think. We said at the start that we could win the race with 35,000 votes. We got 38,000, so I really think targeting those occasional voters and staying after them paid off.”

Britt made AIDS a major issue, and his promise to make that his top priority in Congress helped energize voters in the predominantly gay neighborhoods.

Turnout in the heart of the heavily gay Castro Street neighborhood was 54% on Tuesday. By contrast, when Sala Burton won the congressional seat in a 1983 special election, turnout in the same neighborhood was 28%.

For Britt, it seemed the perfect opportunity. Estimates are that roughly one in five voters is gay in the 5th District. No city in the nation has been worse hit by AIDS than San Francisco, where there have been nearly 2,000 deaths, and more than 3,000 diagnosed cases.

Key Gay Precinct

Pelosi, who also promises to make AIDS a priority, got 2,100 votes in the key gay precinct to Britt’s 6,200.

Pelosi, with endorsements from Mayor Dianne Feinstein and Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, was the Democratic Establishment candidate.

Britt’s campaign strategists said at the outset that they thought they could win by getting about 33% of the vote with a coalition of gay men, lesbians, renters, pensioners, environmentalists and opponents of the continued high-rise construction in downtown San Francisco.

Britt reached his vote goal, but that was not enough to win in the crowded field because of a poor showing by another candidate, Supervisor Bill Maher, a moderate Democrat.

Hoped for 20%

Britt had hoped that Maher might get as much as 20% of the vote, much of it in the more family-oriented neighborhoods where Pelosi also hoped to do well.

But Maher got only 14% in finishing third. He said Wednesday that he was able to raise only about $90,000, and that greatly hindered his candidacy.

Britt said he probably spent a little more than $400,000, much of it raised from gays around the country. That is a respectable sum in many congressional races, but was not enough in this one.

Pelosi, the wife of a wealthy San Francisco businessman, wrote her campaign a check for more than $200,000. She is also one of the national Democratic Party’s premier fund raisers and had the contacts and the favors to make a $1-million campaign possible.

Times Staff Writer Dan Morain contributed to this article.