by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
City Councilmember
and Mayoral candidate David Alvarez
Gabriel Solmer,
Carmen Lopez & Dr. Isidor Ortiz
Georgette Gomez
Richard Barrera
“What the Heck
Happened?” was the title of a forum the Chicano Democratic Association (CDA) of
San Diego County held April 12 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa
Park. The aim of the meeting was to analyze the February 2014 special election
for Mayor of San Diego and determine why Latino Democrat David Alvarez lost to
white Republican Kevin Faulconer — and what’s more, why he lost by a much wider
margin (almost 10 percent) than the last pre-election polls said he would. The
presenters praised the determined grass-roots voter contacts CDA and other
organizations supporting Alvarez had made on his behalf — but their own numbers
showed those efforts hadn’t been enough: Latino and Asian voter turnout in the
special election still lagged 10 percent behind whites.
The meeting was
kicked off by Alvarez himself, who began by thanking “the CDA and all of you
who were supportive in the race. I’m proud of how much we were able to move the
ball on the minimum wage, economic and environmental justice, and how the city
has not invested in our communities.” Alvarez argued that his campaign was so
successful at setting the agenda that “the other candidate came out for all
that.” Faulconer, Alvarez argued, felt compelled to claim the same goals of
neighborhood empowerment as he did.
“This campaign
showed a lot of potential,” Alvarez said. “We built a coalition, including
Latinos, African-Americans, old people, young people.” Acknowledging that “most
people care about the Presidency and the Senate but don’t pay attention to the
Mayor’s race and other local races,” Alvarez argued that the efforts of CDA and
other groups supporting him “got people who’d never cared about local politics
before to walk precincts, make phone calls and host fundraisers. We got people
to participate through social media. We tried to reach out or call to all
potential voters. We just came up a bit short.”
Alvarez admitted
some of the handicaps he faced in his campaign. “It was a special election,” he
said, “and they tend to bring out older voters and Republican voters.” He also
had to deal with primary opposition from Republican-turned-independent-turned
Democrat Nathan Fletcher and fellow Latino Democrat Mike Aguirre — who endorsed
Faulconer over him in the general election. Still, he said, the aggressive
door-to-door campaign waged on his behalf was so effective that a Republican
who sits with Alvarez on the City Council admitted to him that “the last week
they were really scared.”
The opening
remarks by Alvarez set the tone of the rest of the meeting. Speakers praised
the intensity and effectiveness of the volunteer efforts for Alvarez and said
that, even if they weren’t enough to elect him, they did point the way to electing a future mayor who’s
progressive, Latino or both. “Working with David both in his city council
office and on the campaign was a pleasure,” said Gabriel Solmer, Alvarez’
representative and advisor on environmental and land use policy. “We talked to
a lot of voters who got five to six calls a day” — an indication of how many
groups were mounting grass-roots campaigns for Alvarez, including the
Democratic Party, organized labor and party clubs.
“What were our goals?”
Solmer said. “To win, to build a coalition for the future, to hold fast with
disenfranchised communities.” She argued that though they didn’t win, they
accomplished the other two goals. “We focused on turnout south of I-8 and
persuasion north of I-8,” she explained. “We were using very tested models:
field, mail, TV and earned media.” “Earned media,” formerly “free media,” means
getting mainstream media outlets to cover your candidate and thereby winning
exposure for which you don’t have to pay for advertising. Not surprisingly, she
hailed the “field” operation — the door-to-door precinct walking for Alvarez —
as the most important part of the campaign.
Not that getting
out potential Alvarez voters was easy. As part of her presentation Solmer
showed a dizzying array of PowerPoint slides that salami-sliced the electorate
not only by ethnicity but also by party registration and what political
activists call “propensity.” Propensity simply means how likely the person is
to vote, based on how often they’ve voted before: a “high-propensity” voter has
cast a ballot in all five of the most recent elections, a “mid-propensity”
voter has voted in four of the last five, a “low-propensity” voter in just one
or two and a “no-propensity” voter hasn’t voted in any. A key part of the
Alvarez campaign effort, Solmer explained, was getting low- and no-propensity
voters to turn out and vote for him.
“We identified
83,000 supporters” in those “low-propensity” and “no-propensity” groups, Solmer
said, “and 60 percent actually voted for David. That’s much higher than in most
campaigns.” The key to getting these voters out, Solmer added, was repetition.
“We touched these people two to four times.” Solmer showed a graph comparing
the turnout in February 2014 with the general election from 2010 — chosen
because it was a non-Presidential year and turnout is always lower when the
presidency isn’t at stake — and noted that in the areas where they contacted
voters and got them excited about the Alvarez campaign, the “drop-off” in turnout
between November 2010 and February 2014 was less than it was where they didn’t have a field campaign doing multiple voter contacts.
But despite the
efforts the Alvarez campaign and groups like CDA put into the effort, it still
wasn’t enough to close the turnout gap between voters of color and whites.
Perhaps the most important table in Solmer’s blizzard of statistics and graphs
was “Turnout in 2014 by Ethnicity,” which showed that among Latinos and Asians
turnout was more than 10 percent lower than among whites. (African-Americans
weren’t included in Solmer’s analysis.) Here are the numbers Solmer presented,
showing that despite the herculean efforts made by Alvarez’ supporters, much
more needs to be done to get Latinos and Asians to turn out at the same rates
as whites:
|
Description
|
Total Registered Voters
|
Voted in 2014 Special Election
|
Turnout Ratio
|
|
Total
|
659,308
|
286,227
|
43.41%
|
|
Latino
|
117,891
|
41,828
|
35.48%
|
|
Asian
|
58,106
|
19,892
|
34.29%
|
|
White
|
464,650
|
217,502
|
46.81%
|
Dr. Isidro
Ortiz, political science professor at San Diego State University and a San
Diego resident for 22 years, continued with the meeting’s main theme: that even
though Alvarez didn’t win, his campaign advanced the progressive agenda for San
Diego and helped the Latino community in particular. “What was this election
about, and what was at stake?” he said. His answer: it was the latest step
forward for the Chicano movement, which as early as 1972 committed itself to
electing Latino officeholders and challenging laws that made that more difficult.
According to Dr.
Ortiz, District 8 — the City Council district Alvarez represents — “was formed
as part of a lawsuit by the Chicano Federation” and was “made possible by the
[Latino] insurgency of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.” He also noted that
the election featured two Latinos among the four major candidates: Mike
Aguirre, from what Dr. Ortiz called the “Chicano generation,” and Alvarez, from
what he called the “post-Chicano generation.” While various theories have been
offered for why Aguirre endorsed Faulconer over Alvarez in the general —
including Aguirre’s ongoing battle with the city employees’ unions, which
heavily backed Alvarez and were the principal source of independent
expenditures on his behalf — Dr. Ortiz suggested it was as much a generational
split as anything else.
Dr. Ortiz, who
said he registered as a Democrat in 1970 but quickly changed to “decline to
state” — the circumlocution you have to adopt if you want to register in
California without affiliating yourself with a political party — also quoted
the Republicans’ explanations for why Faulconer won: “a superior candidate, a
stronger team and a more inspiring message.” Though the orthodox opinion among
San Diego’s media outlets has been that Alvarez lost because his potential
voters didn’t turn out, Dr. Ortiz said that’s not how the Republicans explain their victory. His own view? Alvarez lost
“because of the conditions that existed,” not only because it was a special
election but because Faulconer and Alvarez were running to replace Bob Filner,
a Democrat who had been driven from office in disgrace and had therefore
tarnished the Democrats’ political brand in San Diego.
Carmen Lopez,
who was hired in 2004 as an outreach coordinator for the San Diego County
Registrar of Voters as part of the settlement of a lawsuit alleging violations
of Latinos’ voting rights, said part of the problem is that Latinos in San
Diego are “not voting correctly.” She discussed one of the most powerful pieces
of data available to chart the ethnic vote: the way people register at
citizenship ceremonies where they’ve just taken the naturalization oath and are
thus eligible to vote for the first time.
While the
percentage of new citizens who sign up to vote by mail is steadily increasing —
from 70 percent in 2011 and 72 percent in 2012 and 85 percent in 2013 — Lopez
said new voters who choose to vote by mail don’t always do it right. “A lot of
them turn in their ballots late,” Lopez said — reflecting the common error that
their votes will be count if the ballots are postmarked the date of the
election. In fact, they’ll only be counted if they’re mailed far enough in
advance that they’re received by
election day. Another common mistake is they forget to sign their name to the
outside of the ballot envelope.
“A lot of them
come from countries where votes by mail and write-in votes don’t exist,” Lopez
explained. “We have to educate people to get their ballots in on time.”
Barrio Logan and the
Minimum Wage
The April 12
program continued with two presentations on upcoming issues San Diegans will
have to vote on, which the meeting’s organizers see as the next big test for
San Diego’s Latinos and the progressive community in general. Georgette Gomez
of the Environmental Health Coalition told the sad tale of Barrio Logan, a
neighborhood formed when a state freeway bisected it from Logan Heights. In
1978 the city created a community plan for Barrio Logan that called for turning
it into a total industrial zone and forcing out all its residents. The
residents protested, and over the last five years they worked with the city to
create a new plan that would allow residents and industries to coexist and
create enough buffer spaces so the people living there wouldn’t be poisoned by
industrial pollution.
But that wasn’t
good enough for the owners of the companies, especially shipyards, that operate
in Barrio Logan. They circulated signatures to have the new Barrio Logan
Community Plan put on the ballot to be voted on, not just by Barrio Logan’s
residents but the whole city. What’s more, said Gomez, they got the signatures
they needed by flat-out lying about the community plan, saying it would drive
the Navy and the shipyards out of San Diego and cost the city jobs.
“All of that is
untrue,” said Gomez. “The reality is these people are challenging the plan
because they want to control the way the city makes policies. It’s about the
Republicans wanting to control what goes on throughout the city. … We
supposedly have a Democratic-majority City Council, but [the Republicans and the
business interests they represent] are trying to change the dialogue and take everything to the voters.” Already, said Gomez, they were able
to get the Council to cancel an increase in the fees paid by developers to fund
affordable housing by circulating petitions to place it on the ballot — and
instead of going ahead with the vote, as with the Barrio Logan plan, the
Council wimped out and backtracked on the fee increase.
The Barrio Logan
Community Plan will come before voters throughout San Diego — most of whom,
Gomez said, don’t know anything about Barrio Logan — in June 2014 as
Propositions B and C. Gomez asked people to vote yes on Propositions B and C to protect Barrio Logan as a
mixed-use area and allow people to live there in relatively healthy conditions.
If B and C lose, she warned, the 1978 plan comes back into effect and the city
will have the authority to drive all Barrio Logan’s residents out.
“We ran a
campaign for Mayor and came within three percent of electing David Alvarez,”
said Richard Barrera, recently appointed secretary-treasurer of the San
Diego/Imperial Counties Central Labor Council and an elected member of the San
Diego Unified School District Board of Trustees. He was there to promote an
initiative campaign, aimed at the November 2014 ballot, to increase the minimum
wage in San Diego to about $13 per hour. But, in what was probably the most
powerful and dramatic speech on the program, he held off on advancing that
proposal and “worked the crowd” with an emotional appeal to community
solidarity and advancing the overall progressive political agenda.
“We did a lot of
work that is positioning us to go forward and win,” said Barrera. “We did the
right thing. When Bob Filner fell apart, there were choices. We could have
stayed home and capitulated — and a lot of people were arguing for it. We
didn’t. We could have made a second choice, to let political expedience
determine what our agenda is. We said no, because if we’d made either of those
choices, none of us would be here. If we’d made either choice, Kevin Faulconer
would still be Mayor, and we would have nothing to build on. Instead we made
the third choice, to dig in and find extra money, extra energy, and get people
involved who weren’t involved in 2012.
All of us became organizers, and now we’re able to push forward on the issues
that matter to our people.”
Barrera referred
to the latest edition of Making Ends Meet,
a report by the progressive San Diego think tank the Center on Policy
Initiatives (CPI), which said that four out of every 10 families in San Diego can’t pay their rent and all their bills on the money they
earn from working. For Latinos, according to CPI, it’s six out of 10. “This is
not an issue of people not having jobs,” Barrera stressed. “It’s about people
working and not making enough to make ends meet. So what’s our agenda? Working
families need to be able to support themselves and create better opportunities
for their kids. Many of them are children of immigrants who came to the U.S.
for better opportunities.”
But Barrera’s
critique of the way things are in the U.S. in general, and San Diego in
particular, went far beyond that. “We continue to disinvest from public schools
and reinvest in prisons,” he said. “Public schools have to be places that
democratize our society.” Like Gomez, he said progressive San Diegans have an
obligation to defend the Barrio Logan community plan and the health of its
residents against the corporate attack at the ballot box. “The polling is
pretty clear,” he said. “If voters understand the choice, they’re on the side
of the Barrio Logan community. They’re going to spend a lot of money; we’re
going to beat them with a lot of people.”
Then, and only
then, did Barrera get to labor’s main priority in this year’s elections: a
ballot measure they’re working to qualify for November which will raise the
minimum wage in San Diego to $13 per hour and give workers at least five
guaranteed days of paid sick leave per year. “Eighty percent of people in our
restaurant industry don’t have earned sick days,” Barrera explained. He added
that this forces restaurant workers with communicable diseases to come in to
work, thereby exposing customers to those illnesses. As for the minimum wage
increase, Barrera said the $13 figure was picked because “you have to make at
least $13 per hour in San Diego to make ends meet.” He said they plan to put
the initiative on the ballot in Chula Vista and National City as well.
“The other side
will tell us all hell will break loose if working people can pay their bills,”
Barrera said. “What we need to do going forward is to say who’s got the power,
and to use our power to do right by our families and our kids.”
