By Steven T. Jones
John Avalos and his small army of campaign volunteers entered Bottom’s Up bar as Barack Obama was giving his televised acceptance speech. It was a buoyant moment. Avalos had the lead with the absentee votes and he said that his team’s exit polling at the precincts had him about 20 points up at the polls.
“I’ve been feeling pretty confident for about a week,” Avalos told me.
After getting hammered by downtown’s well-funded attacks and a strong campaign by the mayor’s candidate, Ahsha Safai, labor came on strong for the Avalos campaign, which already had been waging a sustained volunteer effort with deep connections to the district.
“This is really about our neighborhood,” Avalos said. “It was the people in this room that really turned it around.”
And he said the attacks by groups like the Association of Realtor backfired: “No one out here believed that horseshit.”