Stallings Wins Race for Seat on S.D. Council

Grasping an upset victory that barely eluded her in September, Pacific Beach activist Valerie Stallings defeated San Diego City Councilman Bruce Henderson in Tuesday’s 6th District runoff election, tipping the council’s ideological balance toward a moderate coalition.

Seven weeks after she fell just short of unseating Henderson in the primary, Stallings, a Salk Institute cancer researcher, completed the task Tuesday by handily outpolling Henderson, 14,879 votes (55.6%) to 11,871 votes (44.4%), according to final unofficial returns.

Though Stallings eschewed outlining detailed positions on many major issues throughout the campaign, the first-time Democratic candidate never disputed being to the left of Henderson’s doctrinaire conservative stance on most topics, saying simply: “It’s difficult not to be.”

However, having waged a campaign founded more on criticism of the Republican incumbent’s record than providing insight into her own policies, Stallings will take office in December primarily as, in Henderson’s words, a “big question mark.”

Even so, Stallings’ moderate-to-liberal leanings on the few issues on which she offered specific positions, combined with her endorsement by environmental activists and labor groups, have caused her to be widely seen as a likely ally of council moderates.

Displaying the inscrutability that became her hallmark in the campaign, Stallings, calling herself a “team player” capable of getting along with all of her future colleagues, has said simply that she expects to form “issue-by-issue coalitions” on the council.

Extensive publicity about the 6th District election’s capacity for shaping San Diego’s political future, combined with Tuesday’s warm, sunny weather, helped produce a 32% turnout of the 82,816 registered voters in the 6th District, which includes eastern Pacific Beach, Bay Park, Clairemont, Mission Valley and Serra Mesa. That was a considerable improvement over the primary, in which the turnout had been only 24%.

“I’m optimistic that that big voter turnout was a continuation of what we saw in the primary,” an ecstatic Stallings said late Tuesday night. “The people wanted a change . . . and I’m going to do that for them.”

Henderson’s defeat marked council incumbents’ fourth loss in eight elections since San Diegans in 1988 approved district-only races as a replacement for the city’s former electoral system of district primaries followed by citywide runoffs. Councilman Wes Pratt was defeated by the Rev. George Stevens in September’s primary, and incumbents Gloria McColl and Ed Struiksma were unseated in 1989.

For Stallings and Henderson, the seven-week runoff campaign began on vastly different emotional notes: disappointment for Stallings stemming from her “excruciatingly painful” realization that she had come within 14 votes of the majority vote needed for outright victory, and Henderson’s subdued thankfulness that he would get a second chance to win a second four-year term in a race once seen as little more than a formality.

“Last night, the patient was on life support, but today he’s breathing on his own and the prognosis is good,” Henderson’s top aide, Jim Sills, said the day after the Sept. 17 primary. To extend Sills’ metaphor, however, Henderson’s political illness became terminal Tuesday night.

With the three other council seats at stake this year having been decided in the primary, the 6th District runoff attracted heightened public attention because of its potential for altering the city’s political dynamics.

Absent the 6th District representative, two loose coalitions--one a generally conservative, pro-development group and the other the remnant of the more moderate “Gang of Five” that dominated the council last year--have equal strength at City Hall.

The race’s outcome is expected to shift the council’s balance of power, with activists on both sides agreeing that a Stallings-for-Henderson switch could dramatically change the council’s legislative agenda until the next biennial round of council elections in 1993.

In their attempt to frame the campaign and its ramifications in their own terms, the candidates hewed to markedly different strategic tacks.

For Stallings, the runoff posed two parallel challenges: trying to keep Henderson on the defensive through well-paced attacks on his record, while simultaneously filling in the gaping holes in her own public identity through more detailed explanations of her positions and political philosophy than she provided in the primary.

By campaign’s end, however, Stallings had spent more time raising questions about Henderson’s performance than answering queries about her own potential behavior at City Hall.

In debates and interviews, the 51-year-old Stallings consistently criticized Henderson as a “blowhard” and “obstructionist” responsible for much of the infighting that has undermined the council’s effectiveness.

She also repeatedly reminded campaign audiences of votes that earned Henderson the Sierra Club’s “Golden Bulldozer” award for having the council’s worst environmental record. She also faulted him on issues ranging from a controversial council-approved Pacific Beach downzoning plan that he authored to the “political hypocrisy” of doubling his council staff size over the past four years while billing himself as a fiscal conservative.

At the same time, however, Stallings left lingering doubts about her own agenda, remaining noncommittal about a wide range of city services and programs on the grounds that “it would be totally inappropriate for me to go into the City Council . . . with my mind cast in stone.”

Consequently, it was not without justification that Henderson often complained: “I talk about issues but she just talks about me.”

Henderson, meanwhile, glossed over his staunchly conservative record as an effective means of protecting the taxpayers’ pocketbook at City Hall even as he attempted to capitalize on the vacuum created by Stallings’ vagueness to create concerns that she would be considerably less stingy with tax dollars.

Labeling Stallings a “tax-and-spend liberal,” Henderson routinely suggested that she would be inclined to raise taxes to pay for expansion of city programs and creation of new ones--allegations that he had difficulty documenting.

An unrelenting opponent of new taxes and fee increases, Henderson, a 48-year-old lawyer, described himself as having “a proven record of saying no,” taking credit for council actions that he contends saved the city $40 million this year.

A skillful, no-holds-barred debater, Henderson sought to cast the election as a choice between the known and the unknown, most succinctly in his dismissive remark that “I have a record and she doesn’t even have a position.”

Stallings, though, sought to turn Henderson’s political equation on its head, gambling that opposition to his record was strong enough for voters to place their faith in a largely unknown commodity and for her to overcome his 3-to-1 campaign spending advantage.

“People don’t know as much about me as they do about Bruce Henderson, but that’s true about most challengers,” Stallings said. “Besides, the primary showed what people think about his record. Compared to his record, no record doesn’t look so bad.”

FINAL ELECTION RETURNS

San Diego

City Council District 6 100% of Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Valerie Stallings: 14,879 (55.6%) Bruce Henderson *: 11,871 (44.4%)

Coronado Advisory measure on new city hall 100% of Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Yes: 1,455 (32.3%) No: 3,056 (67.7%)

Jacumba Park benefits tax 100% of Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Yes: 45 (33.3%) No: 90 (66.7%)

* Denotes incumbent

Elected candidates and winning side of measures are in bold type.