S.D. Mayor’s Race Hinges on Absentees

Susan Golding clung to a narrow lead over Peter Navarro in the San Diego mayoral election late Tuesday night, but the race’s outcome will remain in doubt until tens of thousands of absentee ballots are tabulated later this week.

After a costly, increasingly bitter campaign in which both candidates promised voters change and ambitious approaches to revitalizing San Diego’s economy, the outcome in the Golding-Navarro contest--as well as that of many other local races--hinges on nearly 75,000 absentee ballots countywide not expected to be counted until Thursday.

Although a precise breakdown of the number of uncounted absentee ballots cast within the city was not available Tuesday night, the figure clearly will be large enough to potentially determine whether Navarro or Golding assumes the mayoralty next month.

The closeness of Tuesday’s race appeared to validate several pre-election polls that showed a very slim lead for Golding, who waged an aggressive, often negative campaign to overcome a double-digit deficit in surveys last summer.

From the start, the race to succeed retiring Mayor Maureen O’Connor after her 6 1/2-year tenure on the 11th floor of City Hall revolved around themes such as change, trust and political insider-versus-outsider distinctions.

Recognizing his non-incumbency as the highest card in his political hand in a year marked by escalating public antipathy toward officeholders, Navarro--a 43-year-old UC Irvine economics professor and registered independent who catapulted to political prominence in the late 1980s through his advocacy of controversial managed-growth ballot initiatives--repeatedly characterized himself as “an agent of change” and “a tough S.O.B. (who’s) going to shake things up.”

“How many of you think that local political leaders exerted leadership over the past eight years?” Navarro asked at debates, a question that typically produced few uplifted hands.

“How many of you think our local political leadership over the past eight years has adequately managed our growth and protected our environment? How many think you’re safer in your home today than you were eight years ago? How many think that your environment’s cleaner, that your job’s more secure? If you can’t answer yes to even one of those questions, my advice is to help me work with you to change direction.”

Golding, meanwhile, was forced to approach that issue from a more defensive posture simply because of her incumbency, albeit as a two-term county supervisor, not at City Hall.

Indeed, following Navarro’s first-place finish in June’s primary, Golding’s top strategists realized that her chances in November hinged on a delicate rhetorical balancing act: laying claim to the change theme despite having served more than a decade in local and state office, while simultaneously chipping away at Navarro’s appeal as a political outsider.

“I’ve seen government from the inside, so I know what works and what doesn’t,” the 47-year-old Republican told audiences. “Seeing what’s broke from the inside makes it easier to fix it. . . . The city is a complex, $1-billion-a-year corporation. You don’t make someone the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation when he hasn’t even been to the mail room yet. Experience does count and it does matter.”

By race’s end, the mayoral contest not only had become the most costly in San Diego political history, with a total price tag exceeding $2 million, but also one of the most acrimonious in years. A sizable percentage of Golding’s $800,000-plus campaign came from contributions from development-related businesses, while Navarro loaned more than $550,000 to his own campaign to keep pace.

Both candidates repeatedly questioned each other’s integrity and truthfulness--a key issue on which Navarro severely damaged himself by lying about the source of the nearly $220,000 in personal funds he spent in the primary. Having insisted for months that the money came from savings, investments and speaking fees, Navarro later acknowledged--under pressure from Golding--that most of the funds came from a $300,000 family inheritance.

Golding capitalized on her opponent’s politically embarrassing admission by using it to raise questions about Navarro’s record whenever he attacked her record.

For example, when Navarro began airing a series of TV and radio ads in the race’s final week that attacked Golding via references to her former husband, imprisoned felon Richard Silberman, Golding quickly labeled the gambit “another Navarro lie.”

But Golding also diminished her own credibility and lowered the campaign’s dialogue through her constant allegation that Navarro’s campaign was backed by the pornography industry. Although Navarro did receive several campaign contributions from adult bookstore owners, the contributions totaled less than a quarter of 1% of his campaign treasury--and, more to the point, were returned once Navarro learned of their source.

With San Diego mired in an economic slump, this year’s mayoral race was also the first in years that did not evolve into a hand-wringing debate over “Los Angelization,” this city’s oft-heard political pejorative for urban sprawl, snarled traffic and smog.

Faced with nearly 100,000 local residents jobless and a home construction rate that is the lowest in a decade, both Navarro and Golding, in contrast to the usual debate over rapid growth and environmental protection, focused on ways to create jobs in industries such as biotechnology to help offset those lost through defense cuts and other business failures.

The dominance of economic issues posed a challenge for Navarro because of his past advocacy of growth restrictions that critics argued would have cost jobs and increased housing prices--charges he dismissed as “developer distortions.” Regardless, when Navarro billed himself as the race’s “jobs candidate,” Golding countered by arguing that “jobs terminator” would be a more appropriate political moniker for him.

The strategic core of Navarro’s campaign, however, stemmed from his abiding belief that voters this year planned to look beyond such issues in making their choices.

“She’s an incumbent, I’m an outsider--that’s what voters will remember and that’s the change people want,” Navarro said. “She’s had her chance. Now it’s time for someone else to try.”