Brown Winning Handily in S.F. Mayor’s Race

Mayor Willie Brown was headed for a resounding victory Tuesday over Supervisor Tom Ammiano, whose grass-roots campaign attracted national attention but failed to topple one of California’s most powerful politicians.

Brown had 64% of the vote to Ammiano’s 36% with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted. In the city’s other runoff race, Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan, one of the state’s most liberal district attorneys, trailed challenger Bill Fazio 53% to 47%.

Late Tuesday, a jubilant Brown donned a baseball cap emblazoned with “Still Da Mayor” as supporters cheered wildly at the Longshoreman’s Hall on Fisherman’s Wharf.

“I want to be the representative of all the people of this city,” Brown said, urging his challengers to join him in “making this a great city.”

Speaking across town to his supporters minutes later, Ammiano did not concede.

“My voice may be high, my orientation may be gay, my politics may be left, but we are right,” he said. “We have moved San Francisco. We have been a voice for the people who have been shut out and we will be shut out no longer.”

The mayor’s race made for strange political bedfellows. Once the poster child of all that Republicans hated about the state’s liberal establishment, Brown won the endorsement of the local Republican Party during the runoff. Exit polls Tuesday showed that he did well among the city’s more conservative voters, who became a key in a race pitting two liberals against each other.

During the campaign, Brown promised he would fix problems caused by the city’s booming economy, vowing to build more affordable housing, improve the public transportation system and ease downtown traffic congestion. Most of all, Brown promised to be more humble after voters repeatedly told pollsters they found him too arrogant.

Indeed, it was a humbling experience for the onetime speaker of the state Assembly to be forced into a runoff by Ammiano, a stand-up comedian who declared his write-in candidacy just three weeks before last month’s general election.

Ammiano, who had hoped to become San Francisco’s first openly gay mayor, made integrity the cornerstone of his campaign. He accused Brown of cronyism and said the 65-year-old mayor favored downtown business interests over the city’s neighborhoods.

Brown tarred Ammiano as a big-spending, far-left liberal who would divide the city and raise taxes.

“In the end, economics is what counted,” said political analyst David Lee, with the Chinese American Voter Education Project. “Integrity is great until you have to pay for it.”

Ammiano, 57, pulled off a political miracle in the general election, vaulting over two far-better-financed and more conservative challengers to force Brown into the runoff. But the former school teacher’s fervent army of volunteers could not overcome Brown’s alliance of business interests, labor unions, Asian Americans, African Americans and conservative homeowners.

Nor could Ammiano compete with Brown’s fund-raising prowess. The mayor raised $3.1 million for his campaign, from donors across the nation. In addition, independent political action committees raised an estimated $1.3 million for Brown. The campaign appeared certain to prove the most expensive in the city’s history.

Mark Mosher, spokesman for San Franciscans for Sensible Government, said the business group spent at least $500,000 on Brown’s behalf. The group financed phone banks, mailers and television commercials for the mayor and targeted the city’s more conservative voters.

“We didn’t want San Francisco to be another Berkeley, where they have stagnated growth because of housing controls,” said Matthew Huey, a Chinese American building contractor who was at the Brown election-night party Tuesday.

Ammiano raised less than $500,000--most of that in small donations from San Franciscans. He received only about $4,000 in donations from political action committees.

Despite the fact that both Brown and Ammiano are liberals, the two offered dramatically different visions for the city. Brown promised to keep economic good times rolling by promoting development and creating jobs.

Ammiano vowed to fight gentrification and protect neighborhoods from the encroachment of chain businesses. He said the mayor’s office should be weakened and the Board of Supervisors given more power and said he would appoint neighborhood councils to tackle local planning issues.

“I’ve been walking around the neighborhood and thinking about it,” said Salvador Figuera, a 72-year-old resident of the city’s heavily Latino Mission district, after he cast his vote for Ammiano. “Mr. Brown has been here for four years and he hasn’t done nothing in this neighborhood. He helps only the rich, more than the ordinary people.”

One of Brown’s first tasks will be to smooth over tensions between blacks and gays caused by Ammiano’s challenge to one of the nation’s best-known African American politicians. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson appealed to Ammiano to stay out of the race, then made several campaign appearances here on the mayor’s behalf.

Four years ago, gays overwhelmingly supported Brown’s candidacy against incumbent Mayor Frank Jordan. This time, a majority of gay voters told pollsters they would back Ammiano. But Ammiano’s support extended beyond the gay community, energizing tenant activists, the poor and young people who feared getting squeezed out of a city where rents are soaring and housing costs are among the nation’s highest. He mobilized thousands of volunteers to knock on doors, register 10,000 new voters and distribute campaign literature.

“Ammiano entered the runoff with that admittedly amazing write-in campaign and we took a shot on the chin,” said Brown spokesman P.J. Johnston. “But we drew Supervisor Ammiano out on the issues and gave people the opportunity to compare him next to Mayor Brown in eight debates.”

In the end, Johnston said, the campaign won over key conservative voters for whom “Willie Brown may not have been their first choice, but he was the only choice in this election.”

Kevin Kelem, a 44-year-old who lives in the Mission district, said he voted for Ammiano in the general election but cast his ballot for Brown on Tuesday after receiving a prerecorded call from President Clinton supporting Brown.

“Ammiano doesn’t have the experience,” Kelem said. “And Willie Brown, as disgusting as he is, he can go to Washington and get the money that this city needs.”

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Times researcher Norma Kaufman and correspondent Queena Sook Kim contributed to this report.