Footwork Pays Off in Election : Politics: District-only voting shifts emphasis to a door-to-door, personal campaign as reflected in big wins of incumbents Ron Roberts and Bob Filner.

Two days before last Tuesday’s San Diego City Council election, Councilmen Bob Filner and Ron Roberts did what they had been doing for months: knocking on hundreds of doors in their districts, searching for votes in their reelection campaigns.

That same Sunday afternoon, Councilman Wes Pratt attended the San Diego Chargers’ football game--where the home team’s loss was hardly a good omen. Councilman Bruce Henderson, meanwhile, made some telephone calls to prospective supporters, but admitted later: “I didn’t work hard enough--there’s no question. I have to look in the mirror to find the person to blame.”

For those searching for the lessons of Tuesday’s council primary--and for why Filner and Roberts were handily reelected while Pratt was defeated and Henderson barely avoided the same fate--the candidates’ choice of how they spent the final weekend of the campaign serves as a compelling starting point.

While the four outcomes turned on differing factors, arguably the major consistent thread was that the district-only format rewarded simple hard work--particularly that of the candidate himself--even more than the conventional campaign attributes of name recognition and money.

“With district elections, it’s a totally different ballgame . . . that often comes down to who hustles the hardest,” said political consultant David Lewis. “What you once did with mail or TV (advertisements) you now do by walking and calling. Those who understand that get to continue to play, but those who don’t will find themselves standing on the outside looking in. “

Indeed, San Diego’s second biennial round of district-only council elections demonstrated how dramatically the rules of the game have changed since voters approved a 1988 ballot initiative replacing the city’s former method of district primaries followed by citywide runoffs.

Of the eight council seats contested in 1989 and this year since the switch, three incumbents--Pratt, Gloria McColl and Ed Struiksma--have been defeated, Henderson has been forced into a tough November runoff and Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer barely survived her reelection campaign two years ago. In contrast, in the four council races in the 1980s before the shift to district elections, only one incumbent lost a reelection campaign.

If there was any doubt over how significantly incumbents’ political security has been reduced by district-only elections, Tuesday’s primary erased them with “a political earthquake,” in the words of Peter Navarro, the head of the managed-growth group Prevent Los Angelization Now! (PLAN).

“This shows that ’89 wasn’t an aberration--it was the beginning,” said Navarro, whose own political stock soared by virtue of his backing of Pratt’s opponent, the Rev. George Stevens, and who outpolled Henderson but fell 13 votes short of the majority needed for outright election, drawing 49.94% of the 19,226 votes cast.

All explanations for the four incumbents’ mixed performance begin with the shift from the former two-tiered election system to district-only races.

If the former citywide runoffs forced candidates to be political wholesalers who relied upon 30-second TV and radio ads and mailers to reach mass audiences, district-only contests have transformed them into political retailers who must find their votes one by one.

Even with dozens of volunteers, it is physically impossible for candidates to effectively cover a city of 1.1 million, forcing them to rely on glitzy advertising campaigns aimed at 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 common arguments offered by district election proponents is that they enable challengers to compensate with hard work for the financial and publicity advantages attendant to incumbency.

“To a large extent, campaigns have become house-to-house battles,” said Filner, who politicked door-to-door in his 8th District nearly every day over the past six months. “It’s long, hard work, and frankly, some people don’t like that. But those kinds of candidates are going to be screened out under district elections. If you’re not out there on the streets, you’re through.”

Filner’s dogged efforts produced tangible dividends in Tuesday’s election, as he gained a landslide 70% to 26% victory over San Ysidro activist Andrea Skorepa--a victory all the more impressive because it came in a district with a 62% Latino majority specifically designed to enhance the electoral chances of Latino candidates such as Skorepa.

In the 2nd District, Roberts’ campaign was equally aggressive, producing what the councilman termed “a nonstop, full-court press” that saw him walking so much in recent months that he developed a bone bruise on his heel. He campaigned door to door despite the fact that he was a prohibitive favorite against two badly overmatched opponents.

While not ignoring the importance of candidate-to-voter contact, Pratt and Henderson placed far less emphasis, or at least spent far less time, on precinct walking than their council colleagues--and, significantly, their challengers, both of whom benefitted from scores of volunteers from environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and PLAN.

“When you don’t have a lot of money, you walk a lot,” said Tom Shepard, Stallings’ campaign consultant. “Fortunately, district elections make that a very good way to spend your time.”

Henderson focused instead on telephoning voters, believing that method was quicker and as effective as walking--an assumption that many consultants dispute.

“It’s not that we took it easy, but we clearly didn’t do enough to motivate voters,” Henderson conceded. “We’ll be much more visible in the runoff. I got a wake-up call in the primary, and believe me, I’m up.”

Pratt, meanwhile, noted that his City Hall duties left him with less time to campaign than Stevens--an obstacle that Roberts and Filner shared, but overcame. Even some of his supporters, though, said that the quiet, generally soft-spoken Pratt was never comfortable withdoor-to-door campaigning, doing it more out of a sense of obligation than preference.

Moreover, Pratt’s presence at the Chargers’ game two days before Election Day is a telling anecdote that suggests not only overconfidence in a race that he lost by 573 votes, 52% to 48%, but a failure to make efficient use of one of the most critical periods of any campaign--indicative, perhaps, of other lapses.

“There are a lot of things you should be doing two days before an election, but going to a football game isn’t one of them,” one council member said.

Reflecting a historical pattern, voter turnout in San Diego’s district-only council races has been low, with percentages ranging from the upper teens to the low 30s. In last week’s primary, the turnouts ranged from a low of 22% in the 8th District to a high of 23.9% in the 4th District.

Consequently, nuts-and-bolts campaign mechanics such as “targeting”--the process of identifying likely supporters and getting them to the polls or to vote via absentee ballots--have expanded importance in candidates’ strategies.

The relative predictability of the turnout, Roberts’ consultant John Wainio explained, makes it possible to “almost break campaigns down to a simple arithmetic formula.”

“You can figure out about how many votes will be cast, how many you need to win, and how you’re going to get them,” Wainio said.

In Roberts’ campaign, major emphasis was placed on soliciting absentee ballots--viewed as an effective means of attracting votes from people who, while supportive of a candidate, might not bother to go to the polls.

Just as Roberts devoted hundreds of hours to walking door-to-door, his campaign committee--built around 70 precinct leaders--devoted as much energy to a six-step program designed to produce 4,000 absentee votes through repeated personal and telephone contact with 12,000 targeted voters, many of them occasional voters who vote with greater regularity in state and national elections than in local races.

The precision with which Roberts’ staff plotted that phase of his strategy was evident in the final unofficial vote totals released by the San Diego County registrar of voters office, which showed that he received 4,179 absentee ballots--a sizable share of the 9,774 votes he received in his 57%-33% victory over former City Hall aide Richard Grosch.

“It sounds so simple and obvious, but a district election really is just a lot of hard work,” Roberts said. “You can have a good record and plenty of money and a brilliant strategy, but it won’t mean anything . . . without the sweat.”