A Horse Race in S.F.

Volunteers take yoga breaks. Musicians wander in to plunk out tunes on the borrowed grand piano or entertain supporters with the mournful sounds of the didgeridoo. More than 300 local artists have covered the walls with their lent works, turning this once-barren warehouse into the city’s largest impromptu gallery.

Just a month ago, this space was vacant. Today, it is ground zero for the upstart mayoral campaign of Board of Supervisors President and Green Party member Matt Gonzalez.

Gonzalez’s opponent, millionaire entrepreneur and city Supervisor Gavin Newsom, was widely expected to sail to the finish line without a hair out of place. He has campaigned for more than a year as the chosen successor of outgoing Mayor Willie Brown. In the November general election, voters handed Newsom a resounding 42% to 20% lead over Gonzalez in the nine-candidate field.

But after Gonzalez leapfrogged his progressive mentors to snag the runoff slot, the landscape of this city’s top political contest shifted with a seismic jolt.

With two days before residents vote Tuesday, Democratic Party favorite Newsom is on the defensive. And Gonzalez, whose shaggy mane and ill-fitting suits contrast sharply with Newsom’s slicked-back hair and preppy attire, has created a buzz in liberal circles as a populist cure to politics as usual.

Newsom, 36, has outspent Gonzalez by about 10 to one, pouring more than $3.6 million into mailers that have turned increasingly negative as the race has tightened. He has secured a range of Democratic Party endorsements, including former Vice President Al Gore, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi -- who has warned that a Green Party victory in the nonpartisan race would damage the Democrats.

At Gonzalez’s Mission district headquarters, supporters relax on donated sofas in a low-lighted lounge named the Elector8 -- in a twist on San Francisco’s defunct Club DV8.

Here, volunteers who have swelled in ranks from 1,000 to more than 4,000 in weeks sip organic juice and talk about a new era in national politics if Gonzalez, 38, can pull off an upset. Many are new to politicking and have embraced the candidate’s image as an ethical outsider who will place the interests of the working poor above corporate concerns.

“All of a sudden, at age 40, I have more excitement and enthusiasm about participatory democracy than I’ve ever had in my life,” said Eckhart Beatty, a lanky freelance writer who tied Gonzalez signs and yellow balloons to his bicycle on a recent evening before riding off with other supporters for a promotional tour through city streets.

“People have ... a sense of awe that someone can put himself out there as a no-nonsense, down-to-earth leader who is genuinely concerned with some sense of ethics,” he said. “It’s time for a leader for the people and not primarily rich special-interest groups.”

Gonzalez, political observers say, has managed to cast himself as the antipolitician at a time when many have soured on the system in general, and on Brown’s machine-style politics specifically.

This despite the fact that Gonzalez holds the top seat on the Board of Supervisors, where he was ushered to power with a slate of left-leaning newcomers in 2000.

In presenting himself this way, Gonzalez has fired up a grass-roots campaign that is nipping at Newsom’s heels.

Polls by New Jersey-based SurveyUSA have shown Gonzalez with a growing lead over Newsom. Even though those polls are viewed as suspect because they can capture improbable and unqualified voters, they were widely reported in the city and gave Gonzalez a boost.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s respected pollster David Binder conducted polls for Newsom and a consortium of business interests that support him. They show Newsom in the lead by a steadily narrowing margin, with Gonzalez drawing to within 7 percentage points.

“Gonzalez seems to be mobilizing young people in a way we haven’t seen in a long, long time,” said San Francisco State University political science professor Richard DeLeon.

“Newsom is running this classic, well-oiled, professional campaign that in the past has steamrolled everyone,” DeLeon added. “But in San Francisco, with its deeply ingrained antipower bias as part of the political culture, that has a recoil effect. It is not consistent with grass-roots neighborhood activism, and it backfired.”

Poets, artists, comedians, bikers and even strippers have hosted fundraisers for Gonzalez, a former deputy public defender who once played bass in a punk band, holds monthly art openings in his City Hall office and is a beat poet aficionado. Nearly 100 house parties have spread the word from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Though Gonzalez says “98 percent” of volunteers are city residents, some have come from as far as New Jersey to donate their time. “Coming to San Francisco with 50 people from Portland. Need floor space to sleep on. Nothing fancy,” read one recent phone message for volunteer coordinator Alli Starr.

“I think we’re energizing a whole group of people who had given up on politics,” Gonzalez said. “They just assume the person with the most money is going to win. We’ve kind of put that assumption on its head.”

Newsom’s campaign spent months recruiting and training 550 precinct captains -- covering every city block. And 1,500 volunteers are poised to fan out on election day to coax the already converted to the polls, spokesman John Shanley said.

Though Newsom enjoys support from a broad cross-section of the city, from Chinese American business leaders to African American ministers to gay homeowners, his opponent has cast him as an establishment candidate because of his close ties to Brown and support from big-business interests, Republicans and the wealthy. Gonzalez’s endorsements include author Isabel Allende, documentarian Michael Moore, musician Bob Weir and actors Danny Glover and Martin Sheen.

Brown, who is stepping aside because of term limits, launched Newsom’s political career by appointing him to the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996 and to the Board of Supervisors a year later.

Last fall, Newsom sponsored a ballot initiative called Care, Not Cash. Overwhelmingly approved by voters, although stalled in court and at the Board of Supervisors, it would slash general assistance payments to the homeless and give them vouchers for services instead.

This year, he placed an initiative on the November ballot -- approved by 60 percent of voters -- to ban panhandling near ATMs and other locations and outlaw aggressive panhandling.

Gonzalez and other Newsom opponents have decried those efforts, saying that they criminalize the poor and that services to the homeless are already strained. But to many voters, Newsom showed courage with his drastic proposal to rid the streets of homeless alcoholics and addicts.

Many Newsom supporters believe his ideas are fresh, and that he has the credentials to advocate for San Francisco while a Gonzalez administration might further isolate it.

“With a Republican in the White House and a Republican in Sacramento, I want someone like Gavin Newsom, who has connections and alliances in the Democratic Party,” said Richard Morehead, a Newsom precinct captain who set up an ironing board piled with Newsom campaign literature outside a Pacific Heights supermarket recently.

After serving stuffing to thousands of the needy in the gritty Tenderloin district’s Glide Memorial Church on Thanksgiving Day, Newsom said his opponent’s newfound popularity is not surprising.

“What happens when you’re a front-runner for so long is people are naturally interested in the person who got through the pack and came in second,” he said.

The media pored over 10 years of his tax returns before the election, Newsom noted, criticizing him for his financial ties to multimillionaire Gordon Getty, a family friend who has invested in many of Newsom’s businesses.

Gonzalez’s short campaign -- he entered the race in late August and spent the first five weeks below the radar because of the state recall election -- has insulated him from comparable scrutiny, Newsom alleged. (Gonzalez recently vowed to provide his tax returns to the San Francisco Chronicle after eluding requests to do so for weeks.)

Both candidates had vowed to run positive campaigns that focused on issues.

Newsom -- who pushed a popular parks bond issue as supervisor -- has unveiled 21 policy papers on topics including work force development, the environment and the need for middle-income housing.

Gonzalez placed a successful initiative on the November ballot that boosts the city’s minimum wage to $8.50. He has received strong backing from environmental organizations for his stance on clean-burning fuels and public transportation. And, he wants to encourage small-business job creation by replacing the payroll tax with a gross receipts tax.

But as the race has tightened in recent weeks, its focus has shifted to name-calling. Analysts say the nasty tone probably has hurt Newsom more than his opponent.

With Newsom at his side at a breakfast for black ministers, Mayor Brown called Gonzalez -- who represented mostly minority clients as a public defender and is the son of Mexican immigrants -- racist and sexist.

Newsom distanced himself from Brown’s comments. But his standing as a Brown protege, analysts say, had made him vulnerable to charges that he would perpetuate the mayor’s governing style, long criticized for cronyism and backroom dealing.

An endorsement from former supervisor and civil-rights lawyer Angela Alioto didn’t help. Alioto, who placed third in the November race and had been expected to endorse Gonzalez, switched camps to Newsom after she said he agreed to grant her a powerful -- although unpaid -- advisory post in exchange for her support.

Gonzalez called the deal unethical and said he had turned down a similar offer from Alioto. Newsom insists that he never promised Alioto anything.

Those incidents, among others, place Newsom on the defensive.

“It underlines a sense of desperation and -- whether it’s true or not -- that Newsom isn’t in charge of his own campaign,” said DeLeon, who has heard from retired and relatively conservative friends who decided to switch camps after the Alioto affair soured them on Newsom. “There’s restlessness in the populace, and a sense of populism.... This race was Newsom’s to lose. But that’s not what’s going on at all now.”

Binder, the San Francisco pollster, is more circumspect.

“Newsom has been campaigning for a year, and there’s some tendency at this point to go for the new person,” he said. Gonzalez has “done a real good job of mobilizing young progressive voters. He has a profile of being kind of idealistic and holding to his liberal values.... But my guess is it’s still an uphill road for him.”

Voters also weigh in Tuesday on San Francisco’s district attorney. Terence Hallinan, who calls himself the nation’s most progressive district attorney and has successfully fought off previous attempts to unseat him, is struggling to hold onto his job.

His opponent, Kamala Harris, is a deputy city attorney who has criticized his office as ineffective and technologically backward. Harris would become the first black woman in the state to land a top prosecutor’s job.