Republican Kevin Faulconer won yesterday’s San Diego Mayoral special election because he was the better candidate, with a superior team, and a more compelling message.
When Democrat Bob Filner took the mayor’s office in 2012, he was the beneficiary of Barack Obama’s 22-point California landslide. In becoming mayor, he broke a long line of successive Republican mayors in America’s Finest City.
When Filner was forced to resign in the midst of scandal, electing a Republican successor was far from certain. After all, Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans within the city limits, and organized labor can access vast pools of campaign funding if the national unions chose to engage, which they did.
Yet it’s Republican Kevin Faulconer, not Democrat David Alvarez, who will be moving into the mayor’s office. How did it happen?
The Faulconer team recognized the need to build a broad and diverse coalition that went well beyond the traditional Republican base. With deep roots in the community, Faulconer succeeded in earning the support of prominent Democrats like former San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre. Faulconer succeeded in growing his base, while the Democrat Alvarez failed to grow his.
In a special election, driving higher turnout is key, and the Republican Party of San Diego County, in cooperation with the California Republican Party, Republican National Committee and the Faulconer campaign mobilized a massive ground operation to maximize turnout through in-person contact with Republican voters throughout the city. This was not some last minute GOTV effort pasted onto the back end of a television campaign. Instead, it was an integrated priority program woven into the fabric of the entire effort.
The vast majority of spending on the Democrat side didn’t come from the Alvarez campaign itself, but rather from massive independent expenditures funded by the big labor unions in Washington and Sacramento. While the funding was formidable, the source of that funding proved especially controversial in a city that just a few years ago was driven to the brink of bankruptcy in a pension scandal blamed in large part on union pressure for benefits the city could not afford.
The massive reliance on union funding tainted the Alvarez campaign and provided an opening to the Faulconer team to argue that electing the union-backed Alvarez could take the city backward. The Alvarez argument, that Faulconer was the tool of “downtown interests,” proved weaker than the Faulconer argument that Alvarez would be a tool of labor officials.
San Diego now becomes the largest city in America with a Republican mayor, and Kevin Faulconer’s victory should be studied by Republicans interested in winning in urban and suburban America.
While some Democrats may argue the Faulconer victory is an isolated one, such assertions ignore the fact that President Barack Obama’s high profile endorsement did little to help Alvarez even in a plurality Democrat city. Vulnerable Senate Democrats already nervous about getting any “help” from Barack Obama cannot be encouraged by the results in San Diego.