Update: Faulconer in Early Lead, Fletcher and Alvarez Neck and Neck

Honestly, I could have written that headline two days ago, but the early returns almost exactly match the late polling:

Faulconer 45% (Last poll 40%)
Fletcher    25% (Last poll 24%)
Alvarez    23% (Last poll 22%)

UPDATE with overnight results.

Faulconer: 43.6%
Fletcher:     24.3%
Alvarez:      25.6%

Looks like Alvarez takes second, but there are still 35,000 ballots to count. Headline is that Alvarez is the second place finisher.

End of Update.

I don't think this bodes well for Alvarez as he needs a very strong showing among Latinos to beat Fletcher.  However, given the close start it will be a long night.  I don't intend to stay up for it, because Faulconer is going to face a run off and that's what I needed to know.

Faulconer tweeted about his early lead:

KF 45 percent!! pic.twitter.com/jMxexPCZYU
— Faulconer for Mayor (@Faulconer4Mayor) November 20, 2013

Unions, Democrats, Shipbuilding and the Mayor's Race

An interesting development in the San Diego mayoral race is the way labor unions are splitting their endorsements between the two main Democrats in the race, Alvarez and Fletcher.  Fletcher features endorsements largely from government affiliated employees unions such as these (not all inclusive, from his website):

• San Diego City Firefighters/IAFF Local 145
• San Diego Police Officers Association
• San Diego Lifeguards Association/Teamsters, Local 911
• San Diego County Probation Officers Association
• San Diego Deputy City Attorneys
• Peace Officers Research Association
• San Diego Municipal Employees Association

Governor Jerry Brown has also endorsed Fletcher, which doesn't surprise me because he seems beholden to the public sector unions.

Meanwhile Alvarez is more heavily favored by the private sector unions.  The San Diego-Imperial County Counties Labor Council has endorsed Alvarez.  Our home has received multiple phone calls from UCFW 135 asking for support for Alvarez.  The county Democrats also endorsed Alvarez, perhaps not trusting Fletcher, the former Republican?

In terms of substantive issues, the dispute over land use in Barrio Logan that pits some residents against shipbuilding interests.  The City Council adopted a community plan on September 17 opposed by shipbuilding interests who say it will eventually kill jobs in San Diego.  Alvarez has supported and Faulconer opposed the plan.  Why do shipbuilding interests oppose the plan? According to Andrew Keatts at VOSD:

Really, what’s in dispute within the plan is its attempt to separate industrial and residential areas by creating a commercial buffer in a small area northeast of the shipyard. Homes are explicitly banned from being built in that area – meaning no waterfront condos.
That area’s currently occupied by an array of industrial companies, many of which service the shipyard in one way or another. One of those companies, for instance, is Cal Marine Cleaning, which does mechanical cleaning for the three major shipbuilding companies, BAE Systems, Continental Maritime of San Diego and General Dynamics NASSCO.

Keatts goes on to say that there is a "slippery slope" argument, that eventually the buffer zone will be turned into housing, which will in turn lead to a demand to remove all industrial activity from Barrio Logan.  What is also obvious is that killing off support industries is a way to strangle the shipbuilding and repair industry.  It seems obvious that the plan is a threat to the industrial ecosystem of the area, which of course hurts jobs creation.  From the U-T:

Shipyard leaders have expressed concern that the new plan could drive up suppliers’ costs, make San Diego less competitive and possibly prompt the Navy to contract ship building elsewhere.

Although Alvarez and Faulconer, as city council members, have garnered the most attention on this issue, Fletcher has endorsed a more restrictive plan than even Alvarez endorsed.  Democrats could once be counted upon to at least favor economic plans that helped unionized industries, like shipbuilding.  What has changed?  The Democratic coalition has become more and more a coalition of environmentalists, government employees and beneficiaries.  Of necessity, that makes the Democratic party the enemy of free enterprise.  (Fletcher pictured at right a "Protect Our Jobs" rally, courtesy KPBS.)

Looking for shipbuilder and fellow blogger Dean to weigh in.


What You Should Be Reading

• The train wreck of the ACA websites' debacle, but the news has seemingly been everywhere, so I don't believe you missed it.  Of course, Dean has his own snarky take on the whole fiasco. Of course, we are also seeing massive spinning about the savings some folks are seeing, but W.C. Varones shows how the media lies about that too. DooDooEcon publishes a nice little map showing winners and mostly losers by state.
• Don't believe that the government's tech woes will be solved by whiz kids from Silicon Valley.  Veteran program managers of global systems will tell you that forcing the system to operate correctly only when data is available from all sources is a poor practice.  But the political decision to prevent revelations on the amount of subsidies people are getting drove technology in the wrong direction.  See Reuters for an accessible explanation.  This is not about technology, but politics overwhelming good program management.

DeMaio vs Fletcher/Filner or Something Else?

Polling in the San Diego mayor's race has been scant; but Nathan Fletcher's (picture left) decision to leave the Republican party appears to have been shrewd. From the U-T:

A U-T San Diego poll showed DeMaio with 22 percent of the vote, followed by Filner at 18 percent, Fletcher at 17 percent and Dumanis at 8 percent. The survey of 404 registered city voters was taken May 1-2 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 points.

Conventional wisdom from that article is that Filner, being the lone competitive Democrat in the race is likely to benefit from the line up of two Republicans and one former Republican in the race. My view of Fletcher is that he is closely tied to the Republican downtown establishment, but left the party because DeMaio earned the county GOP endorsement. My fear is that he will knock DeMaio from first place and we will end up with a Filner vs Fletcher match up in November. For this reason, I have donated to the DeMaio campaign early, rather than waiting for November. The barrage of negative advertising against Fletcher may not be working, because it focuses on ancillary issues like missing votes in Sacramento. I don't think the voters in San Diego much care at this point. What would be more effective would be to highlight Fletcher's lukewarm response to protecting taxpayers, bringing up his tepid response to Proposition D, for example.

However, polling from SurveyUSA/KGTV from May 14 had these results:

DeMaio 31%
B Filner 21%
Fletcher 21%
Dumanis 13%
Other 6%
Undecided 8%.

This is a poll of likely voters, which is good, I'm not sure if the U-T article quoted is of registered voters. Proposition B, pension reform, is likely to energize a base of voters friendly to DeMaio. If you analyze the month on month results from the SurveyUSA poll, you might conclude that the negative advertising is having some effect, as Fletcher is down 5% from last month.

We are going to need a mayor committed to implementing Proposition B, which holds a commanding 54% to 22% lead in the same poll. I consider the election of Carl DeMaio (lower right) one of the most important races in the country. If San Diego, know historically for its inept handling of employee pensions, earning it the nickname Enron by the Bay, can get its fiscal house in order; then maybe the whole state isn't beyond saving. My fear is that it will take a monumental crisis to create a climate for change given the union's stranglehold on state politics.

Push Polling From Nathan Fletcher

I got a call this evening from a number in Ogden, UT 801-823-XXXX purporting to be a poll about the San Diego mayor's race. After asking me who I was supporting for Mayor of San Diego, and learning that I was supporting Carl DeMaio, I was asked a series of follow on questions. It didn't take me long to figure out that this was just some push-polling from the Fletcher campaign. A sample of some questions:

Would it make you more likely to vote for Nathan Fletcher if you knew that he had sponsored legislation to allow unemployed Californians to keep their health insurance during the recent recession?
Would it make you more likely to vote for Nathan Fletcher if you knew that he had sponsored Chelsea's law to protect our children from sexual predators?
Another question involved some green or clean water law he was involved with.

There were a lot more questions than those, but were pretty much straight from the Fletcher campaign literature.

Then the line of questioning went after after Carl DeMaio.
"Would you be more or less likely to vote for Carl DeMaio if you knew that he had received $2.7 million in government contracts?"

At this point, I stopped the conversation and asked if the caller was working for the Nathan Fletcher campaign. The lady on the other end said no, she just reads the scripts. I told her that I understood that, but then asked a slightly different question: "Was you company hired by the Nathan Fletcher campaign?" She replied that she was pretty sure they had been. I wished her a good evening but told her that since this was really a campaign call, not a poll, I wasn't going to participate.

I had thought push-polling was considered a little disreputable, but since Marine Corps veteran Nathan Fletcher is using the technique, I clearly must be mistaken.

Fletcher Leaves Republican Party

Nathan Fletcher, California Assemblyman and San Diego Mayoral candidate announced that he was leaving the Republican party today. VOSD discusses his long history with the GOP.

He had Ronald Reagan in mind when walked door-to-door campaigning for Republicans as a teenager and registered Republican voters outside Home Depots in college. He became a professional Republican operative, even working as the state party's political director. He married a former campaign staffer for President George W. Bush. He counts big-name Republicans — Karl Rove, Pete Wilson, Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney — among his supporters in his bid to become San Diego's next mayor.

Over at sdrostra, the announcement has generated a flurry of comments about Fletcher's choice, but I think that his trouncing in the GOP endorsement process led to this decision. The VOSD article opines that this was a result of Tony Krvaric remaking the San Diego Republican party into a less "establishment" mold. If that's really true, then I applaud the move. I'm tired of paying for largesse to downtown business establishments through my city taxes. I have been critical of Krvaric in the past, but if he is really moving the party in that direction, then great. It remains for the moment, unproved.

Meanwhile, polls show Fletcher in last place, so what did he have to lose? The latest polling showed:

DeMaio 24%
Filner 20%
Dumanis 10%
Fletcher 10%
Undecided 35%

It seems that the betting would be for a November runoff between DeMaio and Filner, since neither looks capable of getting more than 50% in the officially non-partisan June primary.

Dumanis and Fletcher Unveil Education Plans

But who cares? Watching KUSI tonight, there was some story about Bonnie Dumanis and Nathan Fletcher offering up education plans. I don't care. As the news pointed out, this is not a province of the mayor and their will be enough for the mayor to handle without adding education reform to his or her plate. With the city facing tough issues like pension funding, the potential implementation of a new defined benefits plans and ongoing budget woes, Fletcher and Dumanis are focused on the wrong issues. For the same reasons that I am not a Rick Santorum supporter, he isn't focused on the debt and the economy, I can't support Fletcher or Dumanis.

Meanwhile, Carl DeMaio remains the front runner, if the local polling is to be believed.

Carl DeMaio vs Nathan Fletcher

I am leaning to supporting Carl DeMaio for mayor of San Diego. My biggest reason was his outspoken opposition to Proposition D, which made a big difference in its defeat last fall. Meanwhile Bonnie Dumanis ducked the issue and Nathan Fletcher (left) was on record as opposing, but did little to work against its passage.

Now we have another big issue, how are we going to take steps to reduce employee pension costs by shifting new employees from defined benefit to defined contribution plans. Carl DeMaio is aggressively touting the plan, which will reduce the risk to the city in the long run. Nathan Fletcher is "waiting on analysis." From the VOSD:

Contrast Fletcher with Councilman Carl DeMaio, another Republican mayoral candidate. DeMaio's the one with all the answers now. He's touted his authorship of the 401(k) measure and of an 80-page glossy budget plan when he made his official mayoral announcement Sunday. . . .

DeMaio's definitive stances give him license to hammer those who haven't taken them. But it also attracts anger. San Diego's largest organized labor group already has opened a political action committee just to defeat him. He also has a history of upsetting some of the city's more moneyed interests that could help him financially navigate a large mayoral field.

DeMaio didn't accept the anti-establishment mantle, but he sure talks like someone who's that kind of candidate.

"I don't see this as a race of me versus other candidates," he said. "I see this as a race of me versus the system and the people who benefit from the system. Organized labor and a lot of business lobbyists who've really had too cozy a relationship in the past."

Sometimes you have to judge a man by the enemies he makes. Carl DeMaio is making the right ones in my Tea Party opinion.