☆ Local election Hot Takes
While waiting for the vote counters to finish up, we asked Opp Now community members for their comments on the campaigns (not the candidates), winners, losers, and big takeaways. An Opp Now exclusive.
Mercury Rising
I agree with Oliverio’s comments on local media. Historically, the Merc news desk has tried to put its thumb on the scales of the election. Not this time—I followed the campaign online from the East Coast, and the Merc played it pretty straight and retained a high level of professionalism. Their op-ed endorsements were pretty much winners, as well.
Local nonprofit journalism had a faceplant election season, as labor-funded websites abandoned any semblance of independence and turned into eager stenographers for their Labor Masters, both in their story selection and framing. Super transparent partisanship. As a longtime media watcher, I can’t imagine how their click-bait attacks on moderates did anything other than chase away any readers other than labor and nonprofit activists. Advantage: Merc.
—Paul Davenport (now residing in North Carolina)
And the Raspberry Goes To…
My three election winners:
Mahan’s ground game: Tight, professional, disciplined. This is what you get when you have a tech CEO run a campaign—it hums. They stayed on course and on message with an exceptional meet n’ greet program and on-strategy messaging.
Merc op-ed page calling out false campaign techniques. It was great to see Clendaniel & Co. chime in when Labor went overboard in their attacks on Mahan and Khamis. We need our institutions to be referees, and the Merc showed up for the game.
Irene Smith’s email program. While everybody else was busy finding new ways of asking for money, Smith took the Thought Leadership route with (probably too brainy) ruminations on homelessness, affordable housing, mental health, redevelopment, and governance structure. Smart stuff.
And the 3 losers:
The anti-Khamis hit piece teams. Just vulgar stuff. False, nasty, ugly. Just awful. I am floored anybody gets paid for dreaming up this tripe.
The Sisters of Perpetual Outrage. The bogus petition from nonprofit women leaders against a Smith campaign mailer flopped—and rightly so. Their wacky critique read like an Oberlin Gender and Race studies seminar that went off the rails. Thank you to Dr. Alan Perlman, whoever you are, for calling them out.
Maya Esparza's messaging team. Who hired the consultant that told them that attacking Bien Doan’s zip code would be effective? Weird, tone-deaf, low-ball effort. This left the policy differentiation lane wide open to Doan, who effectively claimed it as his own.
—Susie Murillo is a longtime friend of Opp Now and contributor, currently a Political Science graduate student
Same as the old boss
My Top 4 takeaways:
The mayoral race was more about likability than policy. I watched a half dozen or more mayoral candidate forums. They revealed very few differences in the candidates’ positions on housing, homelessness, and crime.
There were no debates. Local media dropped the ball by only hosting “candidate forums” where each candidate recited well-rehearsed high-level talking points. There were few drill-down questions, follow-up challenges, or candidate-to-candidate confrontations. That seriously impeded voters’ ability to identify meaningful differentiation on policy prescriptions.
No change in major policy direction is on the horizon. Despite the divide between labor and real estate interests, policy-making at City Hall is mostly guided by groupthink. We can expect more spending on subsidized housing, more regulation of the housing market, more population densification, further advancement of the climate change & carbon neutrality agenda, continuing excuses for the police officer shortage, a worsening of the parking shortage, the ongoing drumbeat of woke virtue signaling, and zero tax relief.
Did the big donors in the mayoral contest read the City Charter? San Jose is not like most big cities. The mayor’s job is not an executive position. The top executive in San Jose is the City Manager. Under the SJ charter, the mayor presides over council meetings (Robert’s Rules of Order stuff), submits an annual budget message (non-binding priorities for the council to consider), and nominates candidates for the city manager position on the infrequent occasions when vacancies occur. Beyond that, the mayor has one of eleven votes on the council.
—Tobin Gilman (Although no longer a permanent resident, Gilman remains a SJ homeowner and very engaged in local politics.)
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity