LOCAL ELECTIONS / LONG BEACH MAYOR, COUNCIL : Kell Grabs Victory From Jaws of Defeat

Spurning the city’s Establishment with one arm and holding onto it with the other, voters this week elected underdog Doug Drummond to the City Council in a stunning political upset while giving Mayor Ernie Kell and Councilman Evan Anderson Braude another four years in office.

Drummond, 53, a retired Long Beach police commander and political neophyte, claimed 51% of the vote in the Belmont Shore-area district, snatching victory from Jim Serles, a prominent dentist and city Planning Commission chairman, who finished with 49%.

So close was the mayoral match that Kell made a concession speech and said goodby to a sad band of supporters at Nino’s Italian Restaurant before he picked up a last-minute lead early Wednesday morning over Councilman Tom Clark. It was only when a reporter ran after Kell in the parking lot with the news of his sudden gain that the mayor jubilantly returned to Nino’s, one of his favorite haunts.

“We’re winning the . . . thing,” Kell shouted incredulously as he jabbed the air with a clenched fist and a kick of his foot. “Bring out the cake.”

Soon bottles of chilled champagne and a victory cake inscribed “Bye Bye Tom” were fetched from their hiding places and about 15 Kell followers were toasting “four more years.”

For most of election night, it had looked as if it would be bye-bye Ernie. Except for some early absentee returns, Kell trailed until the very end, when he just scraped by Clark with 50.5% of the vote, to Clark’s 49.4% Fewer than 700 votes saved Kell from defeat at the end of his first term as the city’s first full-time mayor.

“We were feeling good about it until the final votes came in,” said a disappointed Clark, who for the last nine months has spent his weekends tramping through neighborhoods in search of support, knocking on the doors of 15,000 homes.

From the beginning, Clark had said he felt he had a good chance of capturing the mayor’s seat because of his 24-year tenure on the council, his involvement in community groups and his aggressive walking campaign. But in the end he was hampered by a much smaller campaign budget than Kell, who had more than twice as much to spend.

Braude, 42, had the only easy ride of the election. The lawyer won a second term in the downtown seat with 57% of the vote, fending off retired deputy police chief Bill Stovall, who garnered 43%.

“I have to tell you, I’m really delighted,” Braude said as a raucous crowd celebrated his impending victory at his downtown campaign headquarters late Tuesday night. “This time we spent less money than we did four years ago.” The Braude-Stovall race was courtly in contrast with the Serles-Drummond slugfest. Rife with personal attacks, allegations of corruption and sign stealing, it ended Tuesday in a neck-and-neck contest, with Serles and Drummond trading razor-thin leads throughout the night for control of the wealthy district that includes Belmont Shore, Naples and the Peninsula.

“A vote for me is a vote against clubmanship,” Drummond said at a local German restaurant, where he sipped a beer and entertained thoughts of victory. “I don’t belong to a (political) gang. I am truly independent. I am truly working for the 3rd District.”

Serles failed to show up at his scheduled election night party, leaving a roomful of waiting supporters without even a concession speech. Several attempts to reach him at home were unsuccessful, and a telephone operator said his receiver was off the hook Tuesday night. He could not be reached Wednesday morning.

It was doubtlessly an embarrassing defeat for Serles, who had tried twice before to beat incumbent Jan Hall.

When Hall announced that she would not run again, it looked as if Serles would cruise to victory with name identification as chairman of the Planning Commission, the fattest bankroll of any council candidate and the backing of teachers, firefighters and even the local police union that Drummond once led.

But other council members, in a post-election analysis, said Serles’ high profile may have hurt him in a district where voters had already rejected him twice.

“It was the day for the outsiders,” Councilman Wallace Edgerton said. “Serles was seen as an incumbent. He was seen as Establishment, and people are upset about crime and graffiti. They are angry and frustrated.”

The campaign took a sour turn early on, when Drummond accused Serles of accepting illegal campaign contributions from developers. Although no formal charges were ever filed, Serles’ campaign never seemed to recover.

Then the race got nasty. Serles hit Drummond with a $6-million libel suit and said his doctorate in criminology came from a “diploma mill.” Drummond said Serles is corrupt and accused him of trying to “buy the election” by outspending the Drummond campaign as much as 4 to 1.

In the weeks after the April primary, Serles unleashed a blizzard of slick campaign flyers, and Drummond said he lost six pounds walking precincts. Both were on the phones and papering the district with get-out-the-vote messages until the bitter end.

“We’re all exhausted,” Serles said as the polls closed. “We’ve certainly given it our all.”

“Hard work wins, and winning is humble because folks do it, not me,” Drummond said of his victory, promising to make a stronger police department, low-density neighborhoods and better schools his priorities when he takes office.

As the numbers mounted in Clark’s favor, Kell’s camp attributed Clark’s strong showing to a general mood of dissatisfaction with incumbents. “What we are seeing is an anti-incumbent factor that we have seen throughout the country,” said Jeff Adler, Kell’s political consultant, who rejected any suggestion that Kell’s campaign attacks on Clark’s integrity may have disenchanted voters.

“It was our job to educate the public about Tom Clark’s record. Win or lose, I don’t have a problem with the campaign we ran,” Adler said.

He added that the high turnout in the 3rd District had hurt Kell, who has traditionally been a political antagonist of that district’s representative, Councilwoman Hall.

Still, that was countered by the equally high turnout in the 5th District, Kell’s old City Council area and a strong base of support.

About 39% of the city’s 173,714 voters cast ballots in the Tuesday election.

After the April primary somewhat unexpectedly thrust Kell into a runoff with Clark, the mayor put his reelection efforts into high gear, spending freely on mailers and firing broadsides at the 63-year-old optometrist, the council’s most senior member.

In a series of mailers Kell, 61, a retired developer, boasted of his stands on crime and education while accusing Clark of repeated ethical lapses during his long council career. Clark, who represents the 4th District, retorted that Kell was mounting a personal vendetta against him, dredging up one-sided versions of long-forgotten incidents.

Although Clark is as firmly established in local political circles as Kell and shares many of the mayor’s positions, Clark apparently came close to persuading a majority of voters that he wasn’t the same. He assailed Kell as a do-nothing mayor with a flotilla of generous special-interest buddies and promised more leadership on pressing issues.

Councilman Edgerton, a Kell supporter, said: “Tom Clark was very clever to appear as an outsider when in fact he was the incumbent voting on the issues. I got to hand to it to him, it was a sleight of hand.”

The mayor has no vote on the council, only a veto.

Convinced that he was going to lose, Kell tried to console a tired collection of supporters sitting among red, white and blue balloons as the results dribbled in after midnight: “I gotta tell you, it doesn’t look good. But life doesn’t start in politics, and it doesn’t end in politics.”

In subdued tones, Kell conceded to reporters that he had perhaps failed local voters in some ways, “even though I tried not to.”

An hour later, the white-haired former councilman was gleefully retracting his concession.

“I’m stunned,” Kell said. “If the voters want me to serve four more years, I’ll be glad to do it. I can’t believe it. It reminds me of Dewey. It’s like waking up after a dream.”

With the backing of the local police union in the 1st District council race, Stovall seized on crime as the major issue of his campaign. That, Braude said, was a mistake.

“We’re not dealing with one issue. We’ve got a lot of issues to cover,” Braude emphasized as it became apparent that he had won.

Stovall, saying he may consider another run, said: “I’m proud that I moved from ground zero to that of a serious challenger in a very few months in a race where I was fighting City Hall.”

* ELECTION TABLES: J4