Local elections are typically dull, uninteresting affairs. For offices with minimal power, between candidates with little in the way of campaign infrastructure, very few voters usually pay attention to municipal races and often the elections end in uninteresting, low turnout landslides. Outside of New York and occasionally Chicago, elections for mayor are hardly noticed by the national media, and until recently, elections for district attorney were even less talked about. But in 2003, the elections in San Francisco were different. When the results were in, the city’s voters changed the course of modern American politics without even realizing it.
The Mayoral Race
Gavin Newsom was a local boy. Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin County, a wealthy suburb, he excelled at baseball while playing for Redwood High School. He would receive a scholarship to play at Santa Clara before entering the business world after his graduation in 1989. He was successful as an entrepreneur, and seven years later mayor Willie Brown would pluck him from obscurity. After hosting a fundraiser for Brown, Newsom was appointed to the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996, and then to the vacant supervisor position for District Two in 1997. In 2000, Brown allies were defeated in elections across the city. Newsom was one of the only survivors, no doubt aided by the fact that his district encompassed the city’s wealthiest and most establishment friendly neighborhoods, and from there he became Brown’s heir apparent.
In the two years leading up to the election, Newsom carefully positioned himself as a social progressive with a fiscally responsible streak. He published 21 position papers over the course of the campaign trying to portray himself as a technocrat with a plan for San Francisco. More controversially, he strongly backed a measure that cut funding to the city’s homeless and instead redirected the funds towards services. In response, protesters published his home address on flyers throughout the city, egged him, and burned him in effigy on his own front lawn. His opponents tried to tie him to Brown’s patrimonial style of politics and argued that San Francisco needed a change. What made this line of attack particularly strong was the fact that Brown’s office was under investigation by the FBI at the time. However, the biggest hurdle for Newsom was his opponent, Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez.
The city’s progressives could not have designed a better candidate to contrast Newsom if they had a lab to do so. While Newsom was a wealthy businessman, Gonzalez was a public defender who rented an apartment with a roommate while he ran for mayor. While Newsom sponsored a ballot measure that many described as a “tough love” approach to homlessness, Gonzalez sponsored a measure to raise the minimum wage. As early as 2000, Gonzalez was advocating for the expansion of transgender health benefits to city employees. Additionally, Gonzalez tapped into progressive anger at the Democratic establishment. He argued the party had become too moderate, abandoned its working class roots, and had conceded too much ground to George Bush. His rallies were stereotypically San Francisco, involving poetry readings and mobile dance floors.
As strange as it may sound to modern readers, at the time, Democrats in San Francisco needed a win. The party nationally had lost the 2000 presidential election in painful fashion, and just two months before the jungle primary for the mayoral race, California Governor Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenagger. The party was desperate to avoid a defeat at the hands of the Greens that would have left them looking weak and ineffective; the party spared no expense. Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore were all called in to stump for Newsom. The Gore visit was particularly meaningful, as Democrats sought to stoke partisan anger at Gonzalez for belonging to a party that they blamed for Bush occupying the White House. These visits, as well as the rhetoric of the campaign, contributed to a bitter and divisive atmosphere. The race brought partisan anger to San Francisco in a way the city had not seen in decades.
The District Attorney Race
While the mayoral race received widespread attention, another race flew largely under the radar – the race for San Francisco District Attorney.
Terence Hallinan was born and raised to a fabulously wealthy, and famously progressive, family in Marin County. Hallinan was the embodiment of the counterculture movements that had so often found their home in San Francisco. As a youth, he was a frequent fixture in the courtroom, not for his proficiency with the law, but because of his proficiency with his fists. He was arrested on multiple occasions for battery and was even barred from entering his home county of Marin by a judge. But through it all, Hallinan managed to fight (sometimes with his fists) for a number of progressive causes and get himself admitted to the California Bar. As an attorney, he vigorously defended clients who had been arrested on drug charges. Outside of court, he attempted to enter politics in 1977, only to lose a race for supervisor to none-other than Harvey Milk. In 1995, he was elected District Attorney for San Francisco.
Hallinan’s office was beset by controversy almost immediately. On his first day, he fired over a dozen senior prosecutors. When a man who was upset about the firings approached Hallinan in a bar, he responded by punching him in the face. Hallinan won re-election in 1999, but things only got worse from there. When three off duty police officers beat up two local men over a bag of fajitas, Hallinan indicted the city’s entire police leadership. He was seen as overreaching and letting his personal dislike of police influence his decision making. Making matters worse, the case completely fell apart due to lack of evidence, making the whole endeavor look like a massive abuse of power, and just to top it all off, the police chief he indicted was the city’s first black officer to hold that position, tanking Hallinan’s image with the city’s black voters. His office was additionally criticized for its inability to convict criminals and its case backlog – it had the lowest conviction rate of any DA’s office in the country at the time. The negative press was inevitably going to give a challenger an opening, and Hallinan went into 2003 an underdog.
Around the end of 2002, a young career prosecutor working in Hallinan’s office decided that she could be the one to seize the opportunity. Kamala Harris started her campaign as a virtual unknown. The only real publicity she received prior to her run was because of her romantic relationship with Mayor Willie Brown, which ended in the mid 1990’s. Born and raised in a working class family in the East Bay, her background contrasted sharply with Hallinan’s. She used the relative anonymity to build a brand that she thought would exploit both that contrast and her boss’s weaknesses and set up her campaign office in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Hunter’s Point. Harris carefully balanced her prosecutorial experience with a progressive image and portrayed her career in law as one that was solidly on the left. In essence, her campaign believed that voters liked most of Hallinan’s policies, but hated his incompetence and scandals. In addition, Harris thought that because her two main opponents in the jungle primary were white men, she had an inroad to gain a base of support with women and non-white voters. By the beginning of 2003, Harris’s campaign was off and running, with a strategy, message, and ground operations.
While it might be tempting to look back on her first campaign from that point on as an inevitable triumph of a skilled politician over inept opponents, this was far from the reality. In October 2003, just a month before the jungle primary, the Harris campaign was dead in the water. In her internals, she could not even crack double digits. But then in October 2003, a gift arrived. Harris was endorsed by the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s largest paper, and her campaign took off. One of her opponents, Bill Fazio, became nervous that she would prevent him from making the runoff, and handed her another gift. His campaign printed fliers implying that in exchange for dating Willie Brown, she had received plump government jobs she was not qualified for. The ad backfired, making Fazio look desperate and misogynistic, and Harris surged in internal polling. Her closing message was simple. A mailer with a photo of every San Francisco district attorney of the last 100 years (all white men), with the words “It’s time for a change”. She edged out Fazio by 3%, less than 7,000 votes, and advanced to the runoff with Hallinan.
The Results Of the 2003 San Francisco Elections
In the end, the Democratic establishment and Willie Brown weathered the storm of the 2003 San Francisco elections. Newsom won the mayoral race by about 6%, or 13,000 votes. Gonzalez actually won in ballots cast on election day, but Newsom had mobilized the full force of the Democratic party to bank as many absentee voters as possible and his lead with that group was too large to overcome. For all of Gonzalez’s efforts to portray Newsom as a conservative, most voters simply didn’t see it that way. Furthermore, the city’s Democrats did not defect in large enough numbers to hand the party many of them blamed for George W. Bush a huge win. Harris’s win was more comfortable than Newsom’s. She won by 13%, doing much better than Newsom in the city’s progressive neighborhoods. Within a few years, both Harris and Newsom had gained national notoriety. Newsom by 2004 was ordering the city to marry same-sex couples, and Harris was being touted as a potential future president even before she ran for California Attorney General.
What Could Have Been
The 2003 San Francisco elections launched the careers of both Harris and Newsom, who now serve as a senator and governor of America’s largest state, respectively. Both have been touted as presidential candidates, and Harris remains in the 2020 VP discussion. But perhaps more interesting is the effect the defeat had on the progressive movement in America.
In the years since Bernie Sanders launched his 2016 presidential campaign, and especially since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset win over Joe Crowley, Democrats across the country have seen an uptick in anti-establishment challengers that argue the party has ceded too much ground to Republicans. If Gonzalez wins in the 2003 elections, does this movement begin years earlier in San Francisco? It’s not a far-fetched possibility. A win would have been a very powerful proof of concept for left-wing insurgent candidates across America. Gonzalez would have won while being outspent 10-1, having numerous prominent Democrats stump for his opponent, and being up against a very powerful political machine. And he would have done all of this in an age when the internet was not nearly as powerful a political organizing tool as it is today. Does Gonzalez become a national icon for the left? Do progressive activists in other large cities attempt to replicate his campaign? While it is impossible to know for sure, there is no denying that a Green being elected the mayor of one of America’s largest cities would have been a major political earthquake with huge implications.
Even the DA’s race, while it was lower profile, had far reaching implications beyond the future career of Kamala Harris. Just like the progressive anti-establishment challengers that have gained notoriety in recent years, a new wave of progressive prosecutors has emerged to challenge the conventional notion of what a District Attorney should be. Many of these candidates have made declining to prosecute, or at least declining to pursue jail time for, certain crimes a central plank of their platforms. But one of Hallinan’s key undoings was that he was seen as too soft on crime, even for San Francisco. If he is re-elected, do progressive minded reformers see DA offices as a more viable target years earlier? As with Gonzalez, it is impossible to know but nonetheless interesting to consider. Gonzalez and Hallinan would have formed a powerful progressive force at the top of San Francisco’s government: a Green Party member and a man who described himself as “America’s most progressive District Attorney”.
The saga of the 2003 San Francisco elections does not change the fact stated at the top of this article. Local elections are in fact, most of the time, dull and uninteresting affairs. But they matter, and not just for the impact they have on citizens’ lives but for the careers they nurture. Only twenty years after Newsom was serving on the Parking and Traffic Commission, he was being touted as a potential future president. But the 2003 San Francisco elections speak to the randomness of politics in a Democracy as large as the United States. If the San Francisco Chronicle does not endorse Harris in October, she is almost certainly not California’s junior Senator and perhaps she holds no elected office at all. If Gonzalez flips 6,500 more voters to his side, it is possible the entire Demcoratic Party, and by extension all of American politics, develops a visible left-wing contingent years earlier than it actually does. These are the types of major changes that live and die, sometimes randomly, at the local level.