Turning San Diego County blue
San Diego County’s 3.3 million residents make it California’s second largest county, and by happenstance, a political microcosm of the state.
San Diego’s multicultural inner-city neighborhoods and affluent coastal enclaves now vote Democratic, while the county’s inland suburbs and rural hamlets retain, albeit diminished, their conservative traits. While Democrats hold an overall 36.5 percent to 29 percent voter registration edge, in real terms the county is something of a partisan tossup.
A bitterly fought, high-dollar battle this year in the traditionally Republican 49th Congressional District along the county’s northern border (and bleeding into Orange County) symbolizes Democratic hopes of turning San Diego County bright blue.
The county’s Board of Supervisors is another partisan battleground. It galls local Democrats that they have a plurality of the county’s registered voters, but all five county supervisors are Republicans.
Supervisor Ron Roberts is retiring this year, and Democrats are mounting a major drive to flip his district, which includes La Jolla and other coastal neighborhoods.
Nathan Fletcher, a former Republican state Assemblyman who ran unsuccessfully for mayor and is now a Democrat, finished first in the June primary.
Fletcher, who is married to Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, will face Republican Bonnie Dumanis, a former judge and prosecutor, in a November runoff.
Currently, if a county supervisor candidate receives more than 50 percent of the June primary vote, he or she is elected, avoiding a November runoff. If no one gets a June majority, the top two finishers — such as Fletcher and Dumanis this year — duel in November.
AB901 allows San Diego’s County Charter to require a top-two runoff in November regardless of what happens in
June, not unlike the state toptwo system that state Democratic leaders repeatedly denounce.
In San Diego County, though, Democrats see a toptwo runoff as an advantage. And after AB901 was passed, Democrats and local unions circulated petitions to place such a charter change on next November’s ballot.
That’s when things became difficult.
San Diego County’s top election official ruled that the petitions lacked enough signatures to qualify the ballot measure, citing AB901’s requirement for “10 percent of the qualified electors of the county.”
He interpreted that to mean 10 percent of the county’s 1.7 million registered voters, or 170,000 signatures, while proponents of the measure assumed it would be 10 percent of the total vote in the previous gubernatorial election, or about 67,000 names.
Democrats and unions see the ruling as a partisan political maneuver to thwart their partisan political maneuver and are now hustling to overturn it. They inserted a brief passage into one of the Legislature’s 26 budget “trailer bills” that would retroactively set the signature threshold at 10 percent of the county’s total vote in the 2014 governor’s election.
It is, of course, another misuse of the budget trailer bill process for non-budgetary purposes, and in this case partisan purposes, but it’s also symptomatic of the struggle for political control of the state’s second largest county.