S.F. Supervisor race crazier than ever

Term limits, newspaper strike, twenty candidates add up to a Twilight Zone election

Four incumbents. Twenty challengers. One Republican. Five seats. Zero daily newspapers.

Add those numbers together, and San Francisco gets one of the most anything-goes Board of Supervisors elections that the city has seen in years. As voters go to the polls tomorrow to choose five representatives to sit on the 11-member board, it feels a little like the Twilight Zone.

No regular daily papers, some political observers fear, may mean fewer voters -- and even less predictable election results.

"The interest in the election will decrease, and voter turnout will decrease,'' said longtime San Francisco political consultant Dick Pabich. "TV doesn't really cover local campaigns."

Four current board members and 20 challengers are vying for seats at City Hall. At least one outsider is guaranteed to become an insider, as term limits are forcing Supervisor Bill Maher off the board and opening up his seat.

The incumbents -- Annemarie Conroy, Susan Leal, Carole Migden and Kevin Shelley -- have all fared well in pre-election polls. But as past elections have shown, good poll numbers don't always promise victory on election day.

That fact, and the promise of one open spot, have the challengers running hard. Among the 20 are several of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds trying to break through a system that has long blocked candidates of color from city office.

Six of the challengers are believed to have a serious shot -- school board member Tom Ammiano, labor lawyer Sylvia Courtney, health commission member Arthur Jackson, community college board member Mabel Teng, attorney Bruce Quan and educator Alicia Wang.

The field is packed with self-described progressives, but it has sometimes been hard to tell that from the tone the campaign has often taken. Conroy, a Jordan appointee to the board and the only Republican among the supervisors, has in many ways set the agenda for the race.

Candidates of all political stripes have blended more conservative concerns such as cutting government spending and fighting crime into campaign themes that once concentrated on civil rights and social services. The top contenders are running especially hard on this more pragmatic approach.

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