GOP Recaptures San Diego Mayor's Office

“Obama Turnout Machine Crashes in San Diego — Loses Mayor’s Race by Nine Points,” John Fund writes at NRO:

Kevin Faulconer recaptured the mayor’s office in San Diego for Republicans in a special election yesterday. The polls were skin-tight leading into yesterday’s election, and unions poured in millions to keep control in the nation’s eighth-largest city.

But in the end the vaunted Obama election model — flood the zone with negative attack ads and excite the base of the Democratic party — flopped. Faulconer defeated fellow City Council member David Alvarez by nine points in a city that Barack Obama carried by 63 percent to 37 percent only 15 months ago.

Democrats were stunned at the margin. In the November open primary, Democrats had won 54 percent of the ballots cast and were convinced they could win the runoff between Faulconer and Alvarez. Unions pitched in a record $4.2 million to promote Alvarez, compared to only $1.7 million from business interests backing Faulconer. In the end, Alvarez outspent Faulconer in total by a million dollars.

Partly the Faulconer blowout was the result of the lower turnout of a special election called to replace disgraced Democratic Mayor Bob Filner. But partly it came from a renewed ability of Republicans to reach out to independent and moderate voters with the need to practice fiscal restraint and sound management. “It’s been less than a decade since public-employee unions drove San Diego into near-insolvency, and people were reminded of that,” says Jason Roe, a political consultant in San Diego.

From DC to Detroit to San Diego, that’s the Blue State model, coupled with, as Rand Paul has been reminding voters recently their War on Women, personified in San Diego by Bob Filner. As Glenn Reynolds adds, some of the result in today’s election result “is probably Filner fallout. Dems better hope that all of it is Filner fallout, because otherwise it suggests a severely damaged brand.”