Its not hard to know the politics of San Francisco. I knew early in the most recent campaign (and wrote in my blog) that the telephone poll putting Gonzales ahead was wrong. I drive around the city and talk to many people. San Francisco is a small city. You only need to keep your ears open and do a little statistical calculation.

The photo is a scooter in North Beach dressed up like a South Asian tuk-tuk. The scooter captures the soul of the City. Hip young techie people, high on the exotic beauty of South Asian women. Everyone thinks he/she is an artist, part of Burning Man and part deep ecologist. All this together rolled into a sentimental longing for the good old days of 1934 when unions led a general strike to failure.

What actually happened in the election was sentimental sloppy vs sentimental neat. Both candidates are young, glib and sound like debate champions. They obscure all issues. Gonzales was sentimental sloppy, gaining support everyday by being the Howard Dean, anti-machine, “we’ll win through pure righteousness”.

Newsom was the old Catholic Irish-Italian voters backed by the Phil Burton mean democratic party machine.

There are roughly 460k registered voters in San Francisco. Over 300k came out to vote in the Gore-Bush presidential election; Gore won easily. That was considered a hot contest. The next hot election was the recall of Governor Davis for which 270k came out to vote; Davis won easily. Then a month later came the local elections and only 180k voters turned out; 40%. Low turn-out, low interest, the citizens had voted a year earlier to end run-off elections but the Democratic Party hijacked the legislation. When the real runoff happened on Tuesday 245k turned out to vote, a third more than in the earlier pseudo election.

In all San Francisco elections about 25% of the voters send in absentee ballots. The absentee ballots usually go for the person who was ahead a few weeks before the election (as they did this time) and they also favor the candidate who mails out the most absentee ballots to likely supporters. This is where sentimental but neat Newsom, won the election.

Newsom mailed out 70k absentee ballots to likely supporters and got back a surplus of 20k votes in his favor which won him the election. Gonzales had the momentum by election day, and actually won on election day, but Newsom had already banked (that is the technical term) his absentee votes.

The poll mentioned in my Nov. 17th blog was right about the District Attorney race, as I mentioned at the time. The cops and firemen held their noses and voted against the alcoholic incompetent K.O. Hallinan, and voted for the the lefty Harris who “couldn’t be worse.”