Mayor’s race now all about turnout

As San Diego’s leading mayoral contenders make their way to the finish line in Tuesday’s election, their success may well hinge on how effective their campaigns are in motivating supporters to actually vote.

The mailers, TV commercials, debates and endorsements have all been key to promoting the candidates — and lambasting their opponents — but in the end, they’ll matter little if a sizable percentage of their political base fails to cast ballots.

City Councilman Kevin Faulconer, the lone major Republican candidate, seems assured of making it into an expected runoff in February, according to Sunday’s U-T San Diego/10News poll. His chief Democratic rivals, City Councilman David Alvarez and Qualcomm executive Nathan Fletcher, have the much bigger challenge of scouring the city in search of enough willing voters to propel one of them into the second runoff spot, say campaign strategists. [Poll results at end of this story.]

They’re among a field of 11 candidates, including former City Attorney Mike Aguirre, looking to replace Bob Filner, who resigned after just nine months into his mayoral term following a sexual harassment scandal.

“The Democrats will literally be pulling people to the polls whereas the Republicans, all they have to do is ask nicely,” said Chris Crotty, a Democratic political consultant who is not involved with any of the mayoral campaigns.

Republican political strategist Bob Schuman doesn’t completely agree, saying the Faulconer campaign needs to work hard for a good turnout in hopes of securing an impressive lead heading into a runoff.

While Fletcher and Alvarez will both be duking it out for Democratic voters, Alvarez’s biggest challenge will be engaging the “lower propensity” voters in the southern part of the city, Schuman said. Those neighborhoods are heavily Democratic and several are in Alvarez’s council district. They also had some of the lowest turnout rates in last year’s mayoral primary. Filner won handily in most of those precincts. Overall, precincts won by Filner had a 31 percent turnout. In those precincts won by his Republican opponent, Carl DeMaio. turnout was 46 percent.

“They both have to do everything humanly possible, and if you’re Fletcher, you say, where do you get another 5 percent and he’s got to take it right out of Alvarez’s base,” said Schuman, who is not involved in the campaigns.

The U-T/10News poll showed that Faulconer has a comfortable lead with support from 40 percent of likely voters, while Alvarez and Fletcher, a former state assemblyman and Republican turned Democrat, are in a statistical tie for second place. Fletcher’s poll numbers have slowly fallen to 24 percent while Alvarez has been on an upward path, at 22 percent. The poll was conducted by SurveyUSA and has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

County Registrar of Voters Michael Vu has adjusted downward his original voter turnout projection of 50 percent to 44 percent. Although comparable to the percentage in the city’s last special mayoral election in 2005, political observers doubted turnout Tuesday will be that high.

Anywhere from 65 percent to 70 percent of voters in this election are expected to vote by mail or turn in their absentee ballots at their polling places, Vu predicts.

As of Sunday, his office had received 131,000 ballots, or 36 percent of the 360,000 ballots mailed out to voters. Of those returned, 46 percent were from Republican voters, 35 percent from Democrats, and 27 percent with no stated party affiliation, Vu said. Tens of thousands more mail ballots will likely be turned in at polling places, he added.

Over the weekend, yet another flurry of campaign pieces arrived in voters’ mailboxes. Faulconer supporters invoked Comic-Con, saying he’s the only mayoral candidate with a plan to keep the pop culture convention in San Diego. The mailer cited his commitment to sign a long-term contract. City firefighters sent out pieces touting Fletcher’s backing among key legislators and police officers, while the American Federation of Teachers urged voters to support Alvarez and attacked Fletcher as a political opportunist.

The candidates all ramped up their get-out-the-vote efforts over the weekend, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to make phone calls day and night, walk precincts and wave signs, targeting households identified as supporters but who have yet to vote.

Hoping to energize their workers, Faulconer, Alvarez and Fletcher each held weekend gatherings to jump-start their phone bank and precinct-walking efforts across the city. On Sunday, Faulconer talked with volunteers and then made some phone calls to undecided voters. Alvarez headed to the Hillcrest Farmer’s Market and walked precincts in his South San Diego council district. Fletcher was out in southeastern San Diego neighborhoods, and Aguirre held a news conference highlighting the difficulties the homeless face in getting into the city’s winter shelter.

The key to Fletcher’s voter turnout effort, said campaign spokeswoman Rachel Laing, is reaching out repeatedly to those voters who have already indicated they will support him.

“This is an intense period where you’ve been working for a very long time, and now, this is game time,” Laing said. “We have to get all those people who promised to vote for Nathan out the door. All you think about is getting out the vote, getting people to the polls.”

Alvarez, who will be relying heavily on his political base south of Interstate 8, has the added political muscle of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, which has been spending heavily to get him elected.

“We will literally have hundreds of people out,” said secretary-treasurer Richard Barrera, comparing it to the effort on behalf of Filner last fall. “It’s a mix of union members and volunteers talking to people and trying to connect with people who we think will vote for David.”

The effort, he said, will be citywide with an emphasis on neighborhoods with higher concentrations of identified Democratic voters.

Faulconer as well is embracing a citywide approach, said campaign spokesman Tony Manolatos, even though traditional Republican support is concentrated north of Interstate 8.

(AARON Perry / Union-Tribune)