A factor that hasn’t been discussed much in the analysis of the election results is the very low turnout for a contested mayor’s race. The turnout without the provisionals and final absentees was about 30 percent; by my figures, when the 35,000 remaining ballots are counted, it will total about 37 percent.
That’s about the same level as the 2007 race, when Gavin Newsom had no serious opposition and the races for sheriff and district attorney were essentially uncontested.
The past two contested mayoral races had much higher turnout. In 1999, when Tom Ammiano ran against Willie Brown, 45 percent of the voters turned out; same for the 2003 race pitting Matt Gonzalez against Gavin Newsom.
It’s odd — the weather was good, there were three contested races, all of the candidates had and spent money … and even in traditionally high-turnout areas, not that many voters went to the polls.
In the Mission, where John Avalos won overwhelmingly, turnout was only 30 percent.
Clearly, one of the reasons that Ed Lee won is that he got his voters to the polls. Would higher turnout on election day have made a difference? Maybe. Lee had support all over the city, and he was going to be tough to beat. He also got most of the second-place votes from candidates like David Chiu and even Leland Yee, who had spent much of the fall attacking him. And although Avalos won on election day, Lee was so far ahead from the absentees that catching him would have been difficult.
Still: The race certainly would have been closer. And the low turnout is curious. Did people just assume Lee was going to win? It’s hard to imagine that voters had no appealing candidates — there were so many choices. And there was so much election hype — I got about 30 mail pieces in the last week.
By the way: Randy Shaw did his list of winner and losers, and he left out Avalos entirely. Avalos didn’t win the election, but his suprisingly strong finish established him as a progressive leader for the future and helped keep the left organized and in the game. He also left out Ross Mirkarimi, who is the first solid progressive to win a citywide office in quite a while — and he did it running for sheriff against two law-enforcement types. Mirkarimi has now established himself as someone who can win in all parts of town and has made crime and law-enforcement a progressive issue.
Then there’s OccupySF — and while a lot of the people there probably didn’t vote, the fact that that Avalos stood with the occupiers and contrasted himself to Ed Lee (who came very close to using the cops to evict the protesters) helped his campaign immensely.