District-Only Races Lead to New Focus

Although the most dramatic effects are perhaps yet to be seen, San Diego’s shift to district-only City Council elections has already significantly altered this fall’s races, forcing candidates to rely more on personal campaigning and less on costly media ads to carry their messages to voters.

In transforming the way the San Diego City Council has been elected for the past half a century, the move to district races has prompted candidates to rethink traditional strategies, added weight to neighborhood-oriented issues, affected fund raising and left other indelible marks on the campaigns for the four council seats at stake in the Sept. 19 primary.

With door-to-door campaigning and community forums having gained increased strategic significance--in contrast to the largely symbolic roles they played in past council races--candidates have had to become conversant about often exceedingly parochial projects and problems.

Indeed, judging from the forums to date, voters this year seem more interested in the candidates’ views on topics such as how to finance a community swimming pool in Rancho Penasquitos or a park in Serra Mesa than in their philosophy on growth, crime or other major citywide issues.

“A lot of people’s interest stops at their neighborhood boundary,” said longtime Scripps Ranch activist Bob Dingeman. “That’s partly human nature. But the district elections have reinforced it because they were sold as a way to make the council more responsive to communities. So it’s understandable that people are saying: ‘I don’t care what you’re going to do for the city. What are you going to do for us here?’ That’s one of the biggest changes I’ve noticed.”

Even so, the candidates and their strategists believe that the political transformation will become even clearer in this fall’s runoffs, when the major structural change imposed by Proposition E--the district-election initiative narrowly approved by San Diego voters in November--comes into play.

Under the city’s former two-tiered election system, the top two vote-getters in each council district primary faced each other six weeks later in an at-large runoff--putting a premium on the costly TV and radio ads needed to reach a citywide audience.

Can Win Outright

Beginning next month, however, candidates not only can win outright in the primary by receiving more than 50% of the vote, but also realize that, even if they are forced into a runoff, that election also will be confined to the district.

By virtue of the runoffs’ smaller geographic area, sheer hard work and grass-roots organization--while perhaps not the equals of big campaign contributions--at least enable candidates to be competitive with well-heeled opponents.

“Now it’s a new day in San Diego politics,” said former City Councilman Floyd Morrow, who is attempting to regain his 5th District seat. “When the runoffs come around, it’ll be a new era. Money is less important, and plain old hustle is more important.”

Arguably the most obvious change attributable to the election-method shift is that at least half the council races are not expected to advance beyond the primary, in which four incumbents face nine challengers in contests that will determine the makeup of half the eight-seat council.

Two Likely to Be Settled

Simple mathematics, combined with political realities, make it appear likely that two of the races will be settled in the primary. In the 7th District contest, Councilwoman Judy McCarty faces only token opposition from retired San Diego firefighter Kenneth Key, making a 50%-plus victory in her bid for a second four-year term a virtual certainty in the northeastern San Diego district.

In the Mid-City 3rd District, Councilwoman Gloria McColl faces real estate broker John Hartley, whom she defeated in 1983, and small businessman Charles Ulmschneider, a long shot who drew only 3.6% of the vote in last year’s San Diego mayoral race. If Ulmschneider receives a similarly negligible percentage of the vote next month, either McColl or Hartley is likely to top the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

The two other council incumbents seeking reelection--Abbe Wolfsheimer and Ed Struiksma--both face multiple serious challengers, minimizing the possibility of an outright primary victory in those races.

Wolfsheimer, who is running for a second term, faces University City community activist Harry Mathis, and Bob Trettin, a former county supervisorial and City Council aide, in the 1st District, which covers northwestern San Diego. Both Trettin and Mathis are relatively well-known and have mounted well-funded, aggressive campaigns expected to receive sufficient votes to deny a majority to any candidate.

In his campaign for a third term in the northern 5th District, Struiksma faces four opponents: former Councilman Morrow, lawyer and county planner Mike Eckmann, former Wolfsheimer aide and land-use planner Linda Bernhardt and educational marketing official Bob Switzer.

Content Has Changed

Although Struiksma has heavily outspent the four other candidates combined, even he concedes that the prospects of surpassing 50% in a five-candidate primary are slim.

Given that council primaries have always been limited to districts, next month’s election appears on the surface to be, in Mathis’ words, “sort of the same old ballgame.”

But if the structural form of the elections has not yet changed, most candidates agree that the content has, starting with, in some cases, their simple presence on the ballot. Were it not for the shift to district-only races, several candidates--acknowledging their poor chances in a citywide race in which incumbents’ money and higher name recognition often swamp challengers--said they would not have run.

“There’s no way I could have raised the kind of money needed to run citywide,” Bernhardt said, echoing a common theme among the challengers.

“I’m enough of a realist to admit that, if we still have citywide elections, I’d probably have been wasting my time,” said Trettin.

Focused Energies, Issues

District elections have also focused both the candidates’ energies and the issues most commonly debated in the respective campaigns.

In the past, even as candidates worried about surviving the district primaries, they had to concern themselves with the practical difficulties--finances, manpower and myriad others--of mounting a citywide campaign in the runoff. In particular, candidates typically strove to end the primary with money in their campaign treasury, recognizing the severe time limitations upon their fund raising in the runoff.

“Even at this stage, you’d be spending a lot of energy campaigning and raising money elsewhere in the city, because there’s too little time between the primary and runoff to start from scratch,” said Morrow, who represented the 5th District from 1965-77.

Candidates often complained that the city’s former election system centered on an inherent political paradox that allowed candidates months, sometimes years, to organize a district campaign, then compelled them to expand their efforts citywide in only six weeks. As a result, the day after the primary, candidates’ months-long district efforts became relatively inconsequential, as they touched only about one-eighth of the citywide electorate.

Now, however, the organizational groundwork laid by candidates in the primary could pay significant dividends in the runoff, simply because both campaigns cover the same territory.

A More-Direct Reward

“By going back over the same turf, you build on what you do in the primary,” said Hartley, McColl’s opponent. “There’s more of a direct reward for your efforts in the primary.”

At the same time, candidates also are less fearful of ending the primary without a nest egg. Formerly, candidates realized that, no matter how much money they spent or how many votes they drew in the primary, a citywide runoff would follow. Under the district-only system, an all-out financial effort in the primary could preclude the runoffs--eliminating the incentive to carefully husband campaign dollars, especially in close races.

Moreover, even those candidates who expect to compete in a runoff recognize that the November races will be much less costly than the former citywide contests.

The reduced scale of the elections is expected to produce a commensurate reduction in their price tag, in large measure because the TV and radio ads that dominated past council races--substantially driving up costs in the process--have all but disappeared this year.

As the primary enters its final month, no candidate plans to run any TV ads, and only a few are even considering “light” radio buys. With candidates no longer needing to appeal to a citywide audience, political consultants argue, TV and radio ads simply are not cost-effective. Why pay a premium to transmit a countywide message when only a small percentage of the listeners or viewers can vote in each district race?

Cheaper All Around

While $200,000-plus campaigns were commonplace in past council elections, few will approach that level this year. Led by Struiksma, who had raised $221,586 and spent about $145,000 as of Aug. 5, all four incumbents have built six-figure treasuries--in Wolfsheimer’s case, because of $95,000 that she loaned to her own campaign. Trettin had raised $84,243 as of two weeks ago, the most of any challenger but a modest amount contrasted with past races.

In many of this year’s council campaigns, mailers targeted to likely voters have supplanted TV and radio ads as the political weapon of choice. Even the mailers’ costs, however, are lower this year, primarily because a typical district mailer costs $6,000, contrasted with the $40,000-plus price of a citywide mailing.

“What it comes down to is, it’s pretty difficult to spend more in a district race than a citywide one,” said consultant David Lewis, whose firm is advising both Struiksma and Mathis.

During last fall’s Proposition E campaign, opponents argued that a district-only system would encourage a myopic outlook in which council members and constituents alike might focus more on parochial concerns than sweeping, citywide issues.

Though the candidates deny that citywide topics such as growth, sewage and crime are getting short shrift, they concede that narrower issues--often of major concern to only a single community--have dominated the campaigns.

“People definitely seem more interested in their own back yards this year,” Bernhardt said.

Some Are Disturbed

Struiksma agreed: “Generally speaking, people want to know more about that park down the block or that pothole around the corner than they do about some of the bigger issues that preoccupy City Hall.” As an example, he noted that, while he campaigned door-to-door recently, a man told Struiksma he “could earn all five votes inside the house” by solving--not crime, not growth, not the city’s budget woes--but a standing water problem on the man’s street.

“Needless to say, that standing water will be gone by Election Day,” Struiksma said, laughing.

Scripps Ranch leader Dingeman, meanwhile, said he was disturbed by the overly parochial tone of a forum there last week, at which many questions dealt with minutiae such as plans for a water pipeline through the community.

“I’m afraid that a narrower and narrower focus is what we’re going to see,” Dingeman said. “It’s not even confined to just districts anymore. Now it’s getting down to the individual neighborhoods within the districts.”

Occasionally, however, district or neighborhood concerns overlap with major citywide issues. In the 5th District, for instance, proposals to build a new commercial airport at the Miramar Naval Air Base have generated controversy to the extent that, in Struiksma’s analysis, “it would be political suicide” for any candidate to favor the plan. Similarly, people in the 1st District, an area that has absorbed most of the city’s recent growth, perhaps have reason to be more concerned than most San Diegans over growth-management policies.

“I think we still have a good balance between citywide and district issues,” McColl said. “Neighborhood subjects might get a little more attention; but that doesn’t mean the citywide ones are being ignored.”

As she campaigns, Wolfsheimer said, she has detected a growing recognition among community organizations of their added clout under a district system, which, by reducing the total number of votes at stake, enhances the power of groups within the districts. However, repeating an argument heard in last fall’s campaign, Wolfsheimer said that satisfaction is partly offset by voters’ realization that, although they may have a greater voice in the election of their own council representative, they no longer have a voice in picking the panel’s seven other members.

“Some of those who thought that district elections looked like a rose garden are finding that those roses have thorns,” Wolfsheimer said. “When this election is over, we’ll find out whether people still think that garden looks attractive.”