S.D. Mayor Reelected With Ease

In the most one-sided mayoral election here in a decade, Mayor Maureen O’Connor swept to an easy reelection Tuesday against relatively minor opposition, garnering more than a majority of the votes to avoid a November runoff.

Becoming only the fourth mayor in the City Charter’s 56-year history to win election outright in the primary, O’Connor easily outdistanced former San Diego City Councilman Floyd Morrow and three minor candidates on the ballot--semi-retired public relations official John Kelley, City Hall gadfly Rose Lynne and businessman Charles Ulmschneider.

Slight Interest

The 41-year-old mayor’s lopsided victory was the all-but-predictable outcome of a race in which her only major challenger was Morrow, who finished a distant third in the 1986 mayoral election. With San Diegans showing little interest in the city’s fourth mayoral race in five years--counting primaries, the seventh race overall--Morrow’s uphill campaign never advanced beyond its initial image as an exercise in political futility.

Despite warm, sunny weather Tuesday, the voter turnout was only about 40%, a relatively low figure that election officials attributed to the absence of drama in most local races, the presidential primaries and statewide contests.

From beginning to end, this year’s mayoral campaign was a race more in name than in fact. In stark contrast to the high-profile, multimillion-dollar races of recent mayoral contests, this year’s campaign was barely visible, drawing only cursory attention from the public and news media--primarily because O’Connor was, from the outset, an overwhelming favorite.

The campaign’s outline was cast--and, some might argue, its outcome all but preordained--early this year when several potentially strong candidates opted not to challenge O’Connor in her bid for reelection to the $60,000-a-year post that she won in the special 1986 race necessitated by Roger Hedgecock’s felony conviction. In particular, county Supervisor Susan Golding and City Councilman Ed Struiksma carefully weighed their chances but ultimately opted to remain on the sidelines.

Not Seen as Serious Threat

That left Morrow, a former three-term councilman and former local Democratic Party chairman, as O’Connor’s only major opponent. But few political observers viewed Morrow as a serious threat to the better-known, better-financed O’Connor, with the mayor herself noting that, even if Morrow doubled the 19% of the vote that he drew in 1986, “it still wouldn’t be enough.”

Adopting a common front-runner’s strategy, O’Connor refused to participate in the series of debates that marked recent mayoral races, prompting Morrow to grumble that she was treating the campaign “more like a coronation than an election.” Other staples of past mayoral races--TV and radio ads, glitzy brochures--also were rarely seen this year, as O’Connor and Morrow spent only slightly more than $100,000 between them, considerably less than what is usually spent by City Council candidates.

Running under the slogan “Still Nobody’s Mayor But Yours,” an updated version of her 1986 theme, O’Connor, to the limited extent that she did campaign, argued that she had restored stability to City Hall after Hedgecock’s forced resignation and other scandals, enhanced average citizens’ access to City Hall, strengthened growth-management policies and made progress on other fronts.

‘Kept My Promises’

“I’ve kept my promises and made a good beginning . . . so why change now?” O’Connor asked.

In his answer to that rhetorical question, Morrow, a 55-year-old lawyer, characterized O’Connor’s brief tenure as “two years of treading water or backsliding” on many major issues. However, with only a few notable exceptions--among them an O’Connor-backed plan for the city to build a $1.5-billion secondary sewage-treatment plant--the two Democrats presented similar views on most major citywide issues.

Seeming almost to relish his underdog status, Morrow doggedly attended dozens of community meetings, luncheons, rallies and sporting events throughout the campaign. Persistently upbeat despite the fact that conventional political odds seemed stacked against him, Morrow often predicted an upset, but even he seemed to sometimes treat that as more rhetoric than reality.

In his 1986 mayoral race, for example, Morrow spent nearly $80,000 of his money. This year, however, he spent only about one-fourth that--a fact widely interpreted in political circles as evidence that he recognized the daunting odds he faced.

‘Non-Campaign Campaign’

With Morrow unable to shake O’Connor from what he derisively dismissed as her “non-campaign campaign,” the race never overcame its lackluster origins, in many ways more closely resembling a small-town election than a contest for the top elective post in the nation’s seventh-largest city.

Perhaps the most accurate description of the race came from political consultant Nick Johnson:

“To even say the race has been boring is too generous. It hasn’t been that exciting.”