Looking Behind Stallings’ S.D. Council Upset

Supporters and opponents of San Diego City Councilman Bruce Henderson agreed Wednesday that he was the wrong candidate, with the wrong strategy, at the wrong time--and, as if that were not enough, he also was unlucky.

The day after Henderson’s 56%-44% loss to first-time candidate Valerie Stallings, both sides of the 6th District contest began dissecting Tuesday’s runoff election, searching both for explanations of an upset unthinkable two months ago and for lessons for future campaigns.

Henderson’s loss, the fifth for council incumbents in nine elections since San Diegans approved district-only races in 1988, reinforced how dramatically district campaigns have altered the dynamics of local politics. Before the shift to district-only elections, council incumbents lost only one previous race in the 1980s.

Henderson’s failure to fully grasp those changed political realities, partisans and critics contend, contributed heavily to his defeat in his bid for a second four-year term, spawning a campaign ill-suited to what Stallings consultant Tom Shepard calls the “vote-by-vote warfare” of district elections.

In crucial strategic areas such as door-to-door politicking, solicitation of absentee ballots and “targeting” likely supporters in a low-turnout election--the essential ingredients of most successful district races--Henderson’s campaign lagged far behind Stallings’.

During the final days of the race, Henderson barnstormed his district in a pickup truck with a megaphone--an activity that not only inevitably reached many people ineligible to vote, but which also struck some as, in the derisive words of one consultant, “almost a parody of a ‘50s-style” campaign. Some of Henderson’s mailers--one of which featured his dog “talking” to voters--also were openly ridiculed in political circles, and were seen even by some of his strongest supporters as an ineffectual use of his more than 3-to-1 spending advantage.

“Henderson fought the War of 1812, but he was up against Desert Storm,” conceded Jeanette Roache, one of Henderson’s fund-raisers.

Myriad other factors--among them, lingering anti-incumbent sentiment in general and strong anti-Henderson attitudes in particular--also figured prominently in Stallings’ victory, as did several lucky breaks that went her way in the runoff, campaign activists said.

In a brutally ill-timed endorsement, Henderson last month drew the backing of the National Rifle Assn. the day after a gunman killed 22 people and himself and wounded 23 others in Killeen, Tex., in the nation’s worst single-day massacre.

While Stallings was still capitalizing on that juxtaposition of events, Henderson found himself facing another contretemps when his top aide, Jim Sills, scuffled with an elderly man who had been taunting the councilman at a campaign rally.

Though both episodes appeared to be minor chapters in the campaign’s overall history, Stallings’ strategists believe that they halted Henderson’s momentum just as he appeared to be making headway in his attempt to shift the campaign’s focus away from his record to what he called Stallings’ fuzziness on the issues.

“There are fluid dynamics in the last couple weeks of a campaign, and what those things did was keep him on the defensive,” Stallings adviser Shepard said.

Another ironic facet to Tuesday’s election is that Henderson early this year played a leading role in redrawing the boundary lines of the council district that voted him out of office. Public outrage over the council’s protracted redistricting battle prompted the recall of former Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt in April--a bitter race in which Henderson actively supported her successor, Tom Behr.

Bernhardt’s consultant, Rick Taylor, conceded Wednesday that he could not resist gloating over Tuesday’s change of fortune.

“This is the man who specially crafted this district so he could win an easy reelection and destroyed a young woman’s promising political career in the process,” Taylor said. “This has to be the ultimate irony. There is a God.”

Within Stallings’ camp, the preferred explanation for her unexpectedly comfortable victory focused on her appeal as a qualified alternative to Henderson.

“It started out as an anti-incumbent or anti-Bruce thing, but, as voters got to know me, they became more comfortable with me,” Stallings said.

Even so, consultant Shepard and others agreed that Stallings benefited from voters’ “leap of faith,” since they knew far less about Stallings, who waged a campaign long on criticism of the incumbent’s record and short on detailed explanations of her own policies and agenda, than about Henderson on Election Day.

“The people wanted to make a change, and while we may not have answered all the questions about Valerie, we showed enough for them to see her as an acceptable way of making that change,” Shepard said.

Political strategists inside and outside the campaign also argued that the 48-year-old councilman, the only incumbent on Tuesday’s ballot, became a convenient target for public disenchantment with incumbents and the City Council itself.

“The people got rid of the known and chose the unknown. What better way to express disgust for incumbents in general and Bruce Henderson in particular?” said consultant David Lewis, who was not involved in the race.

Henderson himself, however, suggested that a more critical factor in his defeat may have been public disdain for his no-holds-barred style of politics, one which Henderson concedes “rubs some people wrong” because of a bluntness that often comes across as arrogance.

“My approach has always been to say, ‘Here’s how I see it,’ and if you agree, fine, and if you don’t, well, then we just disagree,” Henderson said. “I never judged what I said or did on the basis of whether it was good or bad for my political career. Apparently that’s not the best style for survival in politics.”

Much better known and financed than Stallings, an overconfident Henderson admitted that he badly underestimated the Salk Institute cancer researcher until her surprising first-place finish in the Sept. 17 primary, in which she fell only 14 votes short of the majority vote needed for outright election.

Narrowly given a second chance for survival, Henderson, who had eschewed door-to-door campaigning in the primary, threw himself into that critical activity in the seven-week runoff, but still spent less time than Stallings in face-to-face encounters with voters--regarded by many consultants as the single most critical aspect of any district race.

Moreover, having given only cursory attention to grass-roots organization during the primary, Henderson’s campaign team found that there was too little time in the runoff to match Stallings’ neighborhood-by-neighborhood game plan.

“Basically, you can’t make up for eight months of ineffective campaigning in seven weeks,” Henderson’s campaign aide Roache said.

Recognizing that Stallings had effectively made his staunchly conservative record and abrasive style the issue in the campaign, Henderson sought to redirect voters’ attention to what he persistently characterized as the challengers’ “tax-and-spend liberalism.”

However, Stallings’ lack of a record made it difficult to document that charge, and, when Henderson was unable at public forums to support his allegations that the challenger would be inclined to expand programs and raise taxes, his own credibility suffered.

To some in Henderson’s inner circle, the mailers epitomized how he and Sills simply were out of sync with what moved voters in the 1990s. In the primary, for instance, many Henderson partisans privately conceded embarrassment over one brochure featuring multiple photos of former President Reagan urging voters to “win one for the Gipper” by casting their ballots for Henderson.

But, if that piece produced grimaces among Henderson’s followers, some of them were aghast in the runoff over what came to be known disparagingly as “the Rufus mailer.” In that brochure, Henderson’s dog Rufus appeared next to quotes saying things such as: “Here’s the truth about Bruce, and I’m not just a woofin’!”

Sills, however, described the Rufus mailer as “a very effective piece,” dismissing the criticism on that and other points as second-guessing “from people who haven’t forgiven me for beating them in past campaigns.”

“This campaign was good enough to win a lot of races--it just wasn’t good enough to win this one,” Sills concluded. “Campaign managers don’t win or lose elections--voters do. They had a choice to make, and they made it. Besides, if one in 20 votes were changed in this election, you’d be having this conversation with Tom Shepard.”