By Gary Rotto
SAN DIEGO — There is a cardinal rule in campaigning: don’t attack your opponent in a multi-candidate field. For example, if you attack one of your opponents in a three- candidate field, the voters are likely to not vote for the person attacked, but they aren’t going to vote for you because you engaged in “dirty politics”. “Thank you for exposing that scummy person, but I don’t like your style” is their reaction. In a two-candidate field, it becomes, who do I like less – usually.
We saw this rule manifested in San Diego City Council District Six. “Don’t Get Zapf’d!” admonished wave after wave of political mailers. So I, like others in the district have waited for the reason to vote for her opponent. And waited.
I’m fortunate that I knew both candidates – Lorie Zapf and Howard Wayne, the latter of whom has been active in our Jewish community. They’re both fine people. But the average voter doesn’t. So it became, “wow, I don’t like her but I don’t like him for dealing dirt”.
It’s a shame. The pro-Wayne mailers came and even I immediately dumped them into the trash. They were yawn inspiring. And because I know Wayne’s legislative history, it infuriated me.
When Wayne ran successfully for the State Assembly, his campaign was built around the image of a deputy attorney general who investigated crimes to get at the truth and then prosecuted the bad guys. I remember the image of a person in a fedora and a trenchcoat –an image somewhere between television’s Lieutenant Columbo and the Law and Order cast. It was brilliant image developed by former State Senator Steve Peace and Bernie Rhinerson, then a principal with Southwest Strategies.
In the California Legislature, Wayne had significant successes – creating a program that screened all women for breast and cervical cancer; a clean water initiative – just to name two. It would have been a great message “Someone who knows how to get things done … we need his maturity and leadership to help turn around out city.” And the campaign could have reprised the image that so many residents would easily have recalled.
But instead, we got mailers showing Wayne and groups of folks … bland, blander, blandest. It was probably an attempt to say that Wayne was someone just like you and me. But the public believed that the city is in a fiscal crisis. Yes, they wanted someone they could relate to. But more than that, they wanted someone with brains and experience. Someone who would rise above the crowd to help dig us out of this mess. (Whatever the real definition of a civic mess may be.)
I happened to run into Wayne at City Hall about three weeks before the election and asked him point blank, “Where’s the positive mail? You did great things in the Legislature!” His response, “I know, it’s coming Gary. But you know that they are attacking me … for being a career politician. It’s really a nasty race.” Which I interpreted as meaning that the voters will react more to the negative than the positive.
The negative, “Don’t get Zapf’d” mailers were actually paid for by organized labor. This disclosure was printed in small, legal type on the mailers.
Candidates try to say that they’re not the ones sending out the negative stuff. But the voters don’t distinguish between what an independent expenditure does and what a candidate pays for. And I didn’t hear Wayne publicly or privately tell labor or his supporters to knock it off. That would have been the brave stance – to call Lorie and say, “Let’s tell all our supporters thanks but no thanks if you want to be negative. We’ll stick to our own backgrounds and the issues.” No such call or press conference occurred that I know of.
It’s known that negative campaigning suppresses turnout in a two-candidate race. The voters don’t like the message and don’t like the messenger. So they skip the line in which they are supposed to select a candidate for that office. And therein laid the danger for Wayne. Republican turnout was significally higher than Democratic turnout. (Was anyone really inspired by the Jerry Brown campaign? People might have voted for him, but how enthusiastic were they?)
Yes, the mail may have suppressed Republican turnout for this race, but the negative mail was sent to Democrats as well as to Republicans. The question was how many Independents and Democrats in this district were turned off and did not vote. It looks like quite a few. So a brilliant legislator returns to being a brilliant prosecutor. We’re fortunate that Wayne will continue his career in the office of the Attorney General, but with some imagination, he could have been a leader on the San Diego City Council.
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Rotto is a former San Diego regional director of the American Jewish Committee.