Greens Win Historic Board of Supervisors Seat in San Francisco.

• Author: Feinstein, Mike

In a breakthrough victory for the Green Party, Matt Gonzalez became the first Green elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in a December 12, 2000 run-off election.

Gonzalez swept to victory by a 66.1% to 33.9% margin, despite being overwhelmingly outspent by his opponent Juanita Owens. Owens was backed by San Francisco Democratic Mayor Willie Brown's political machine and received over $200,000 in soft money expenditures from the San Francisco development community.

With the election of Gonzalez, San Francisco overwhelmingly becomes the largest US city to elect a Green (750,000), followed by Madison, WI (210,000), Hartford, CT (130,000), Salem, OR (130,000) and Berkeley, CA (110,000).

Gonzalez's victory comes in San Francisco's liberal 5th District, which stretches from the Western Addition and Haight-Ashbury to Japantown, and which contains many young, politically active voters, renters and a significant poor black population

A public defender and affordable housing advocate, Gonzalez joined the Green Party in October, after having been a Democrat for many years. He wrote an editorial "Why I Turned Green" for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on why he changed parties, and addressing whether his switch would hurt his chances in a district with 33,519 Democrats and 2,735 Greens.

The Democratic Party in San Francisco includes sanctioned Democratic clubs that engage in massive soft-money campaigns against good progressive candidates. What do I have in common with these clubs and the tactics they employ? I don't have much in common with them at all. So I joined the Green Party. I decided I am not going to vote for candidates who support the death penalty or oppose gay marriage. I'm not going to vote for candidates who oppose campaign-finance reform or value the corporation over the individual. Nor will I give the local machine party any legitimacy by remaining a part of it"

Some urged Gonzalez to wait to change parties until after the election. In his editorial, Gonzalez responded. Why should I wait? Shouldn't the voters in District Five have the opportunity to vote against me because I'm Green? And what kind of impression would I be making on folks whom I'm asking to trust me if I can't even be honest about my own party affiliation?

The local Democratic Party attacked Gonzalez with an ill conceived direct mail campaign attempting to associate Gonzalez with the situation in Florida, saying "its about the Supreme Court, stupid" and...