District-Only Races Radically Cut Incumbents’ Security : Election: Grass-roots campaigning supplants costly, glitzy media drives as key to winning City Council seat.

After all is said and done about this year’s San Diego City Council election, Councilman Bob Filner believes that there is a simple explanation for the fact that Gloria McColl and Ed Struiksma will be leaving City Hall next month.

“They played by the old rules, but the game had changed,” Filner said Wednesday of his two defeated council colleagues. “They didn’t recognize that--or realized it too late--so they lost.”

Indeed, the game in San Diego City Council campaigns has been dramatically changed by the shift to district-only races. If there was any doubt about that before Tuesday’s election, the defeat of two council members and a third’s narrow survival in the four races being contested made the point with a political thunderbolt heard by everyone in City Hall.

Among the changed dynamics either seen this year or forecast for future elections are:

* Significantly reduced political security for incumbents, a shift largely attributable to the diminished role that high name recognition and huge campaign treasuries play in district races.

* Virtually non-stop door-to-door politicking by incumbents, even in non-election years, in an effort to demonstrate attentiveness to their districts.

* A scramble by candidates accustomed to running glitzy mass-media campaigns to quickly master the techniques of grass-roots politics.

* Campaigns waged on such widely divergent issues from one district to another that, as one consultant put it, “they’ll look like they’re being run on different planets.” For example, even as slow-growth themes dominate one race, diametrically opposed calls for jobs and industrial development may head the agenda in an adjoining district.

“Clearly, it’s a different world with district elections,” said consultant David Lewis, whose firm managed Struiksma’s unsuccessful bid for a third four-year term. Referring to the four even-numbered council seats at stake in 1991, Lewis added: “If I were an incumbent in districts 2, 4, 6 or 8 . . . I’d already be looking over my shoulder.”

Final unofficial returns showed that Abbe Wolfsheimer retained her 1st District seat in northwestern San Diego by only 571 votes over challenger Bob Trettin out of nearly 32,000 ballots cast--16,072 (50.9%) to 15,501 (49.1%). In the 5th District, which covers the north-central portions of the city, former Wolfsheimer aide and land-use planner Linda Bernhardt defeated Struiksma by a surprisingly wide 3-to-2 margin, 13,704 votes (60.1%) to 9,094 (39.9%).

McColl lost her 3rd District seat to longtime Normal Heights activist John Hartley in September’s primary, and 7th District Councilwoman Judy McCarty was easily reelected in the primary against token opposition.

All explanations for council incumbents’ worst electoral performance in more than a decade--before Tuesday, only one other councilman had lost a reelection campaign in the 1980s--begin with last November’s passage of Proposition E. The fifth such proposal put before San Diego voters in the past two decades, the measure replaced the city’s former two-tiered election format--district primaries followed by citywide runoffs between the top two vote-getters--with district-only contests.

In so doing, the strategies that had governed council campaigns for half a century were obliterated--creating new political realities that, judging from the election results, challengers grasped better than incumbents.

There is little question--least of all among the candidates themselves--that, were it not for the shift to district-only races, Hartley, Bernhardt and, perhaps, Wolfsheimer would not be preparing to take the oath of office next month.

“Abbe possibly might have made it, but with the other two, absolutely, positively no way,” said Hartley consultant Tom Shepard. Hartley and Bernhardt, in fact, have said that they probably would not have even bothered to run in a citywide race.

“When an unknown like me can be outspent by a two-term incumbent and still win 3-to-2, you have to say district elections made it possible,” Bernhardt added.

Under the city’s former election system, it was not uncommon for candidates defeated in the district primary to win citywide on the basis of their better-known names and fund-raising ability--factors essential to reach a citywide electorate. Even with hundreds of volunteers, it is physically impossible for candidates to effectively cover a city of 1.1 million people, forcing them to rely on 30-second television and radio ads and mailers to reach voters they cannot hope to personally contact.

By reducing the playing field in council races to one-eighth their former citywide size, however, district elections make an aggressive door-to-door campaign not only feasible, but almost mandatory. Indeed, one of the most frequent arguments for district elections is that they enable challengers to compensate with hard work for the financial and publicity advantages attendant to incumbency.

“It used to be that, if you were an incumbent, the day after the primary you’d go out and buy $100,000 of TV time and blow away your opponent,” Trettin consultant Jack Orr said. “It’s not that simple any more.”

The Bernhardt and Hartley campaigns provided compelling case studies of the transformations brought about by district races. Relatively unknown and with limited sources of financing at the outset of their races, both constructed extensive grass-roots organizations and spent hundreds of hours walking door to door or telephoning voters.

Although Struiksma and McColl did not ignore those necessities, they clearly were outmaneuvered and outhustled by their challengers. The critical error both incumbents made, consultants and others argue, was to run campaigns that had the look and feel of pre-Proposition E races--heavily outspending their opponents, blitzing voters with mailers, taking false comfort in the fact that, even at race’s end, they remained much better known than their opponents.

“They really didn’t know how to run a grass-roots campaign, because they never had to under the old system,” said Filner, who finished ahead of McColl in a 1983 primary but then lost to her in the citywide runoff. “All they knew was how to run citywide.”

Viewing that explanation as an oversimplification, Struiksma consultant Lewis argues that other factors contributed to his candidate’s defeat--most notably, his staunch pro-development record in a district that suffers from severe traffic congestion and other problems traceable to growth.

“People felt Ed was out of step on growth and told him so,” Lewis said.

Hartley adviser Shepard, however, contends that 5th District voters’ discontent with Struiksma--or toward any incumbent--would have been politically insignificant in a citywide contest.

“Ed Struiksma always had this latent problem of discontent in his district,” Shepard said. “To articulate that to a citywide audience would cost a challenger about $40,000. But you can do a good district mailer for about $5,000. So, Ed Struiksma’s problem didn’t become a serious issue for him until Linda Bernhardt could make it one for $5,000.”

At least on that point, Lewis concurs. One of the major issues in the 5th District race was Struiksma’s support for the controversial 3,300-home Miramar Ranch North development, which drew intense opposition from nearby communities. In a citywide race, however, “that would have been only a minor blip, at most,” Lewis said.

In the 1st District contest, Trettin, a former aide to county Supervisor Susan Golding and, before that, to the councilman who was unseated by Wolfsheimer in 1985, Bill Mitchell, found himself in a more paradoxical position.

His own consultant concedes that the 3% name recognition that Trettin began the campaign with would have been enough to scuttle his candidacy under the city’s former election system. However, Orr also believes that, once Trettin narrowly survived the primary by edging the third-place finisher by 116 votes, he suffered because of the shift from citywide to district runoffs.

With strong financial backing from the development industry, Trettin was better positioned than most first-time candidates to wage a citywide campaign. In addition, Wolfsheimer’s well-documented history of abrasive comments and an argumentative, sometimes patronizing style--factors that have alienated many of her council colleagues--arguably would have been a greater liability in a citywide contest than within her own district, where many residents see her as a scrappy, forceful advocate.

Individual neighborhoods’ enhanced clout under district races probably will force officeholders who previously spent more time talking about “remaining close” to their constituents than actually doing so to begin to match deeds to words.

“Once voters feel their added power, the next step is for them to start asking candidates, ‘Why am I only seeing you now during a campaign?’ ” said Filner, who regularly walks precincts in his district and expects to see other council members increasingly follow suit.

Bernhardt, for example, said Wednesday that she plans to resume her precinct-walking shortly after her inauguration.

“One lesson of this election is you’d better be out there in the neighborhoods and put top priority on their needs, because if you’re not, you’re going to be gone,” Bernhardt said.

Ironically, for some voters, the additional contact with candidates and their campaigns came to be seen this fall as perhaps a bit too much of a good thing. Because of the reduced campaign boundaries, so-called “high-propensity voters”--those who vote most frequently--were deluged with mailers and telephone calls. In the 5th District race, for example, Struiksma and Bernhardt sent out roughly 3 dozen mailers between them, contacts often complemented by phone calls.

“There is a saturation point,” Trettin said. “We were all calling and contacting a much smaller group of voters than you’d be going after in a citywide race. Even some of my supporters told me they were getting sick and tired of getting so many phone calls. People would say, ‘Look, we’re already going to vote for you, but this is getting ridiculous.’ ”

As sometimes narrow district issues grow in importance, both legislatively and politically, under a district-only council, future council campaigns may increasingly reflect that diversity--creating races that often may have little in common with one another.

“I expect single-issue politics to really take off under district elections,” said Trettin consultant Orr. “An issue important to one district, or even a single community, will outweigh citywide issues.”

Within political circles, the consensus is that the issue of growth, long a staple of San Diego politics, may remain a pivotal topic primarily in the 1st and 5th districts, simply because they include much of the city’s vacant land available for development. The 8th District also has huge expanses of open space, but there many residents welcome growth for the jobs it brings--giving the issue a different political slant.

Similarly, crime and the city’s crumbling infrastructure may attract greater attention in the older communities of the 3rd and 4th districts than elsewhere in the city, while the long-running debate over the future of Lindbergh Field may never again be a major campaign issue outside the 2nd District, which is under the airport’s takeoff path.

One key component of political campaigns that apparently will not change under district elections is the amount of money spent in most of the races. Even with this year’s geographically smaller contests, $250,000-plus campaigns remained the rule--a price tag comparable to the amounts spent in the former district-citywide races.

“That’s never going to change,” Orr concluded. “All district elections mean as far as money goes is that more and more dollars will be spent on fewer and fewer people. Maybe that’s not so bad, because the first rule of advertising is repetition. And, since most people probably are less interested in candidates than toothpaste, it takes more repetition.”