UCSF District 6 Supervisor Candidate Forum Videos

Live SoMa | Sep 22, 2010 | Comments 12

Speaking of ‘Special Treatment’ amongst our friendly District 6 Candidates…

A recent District 6 Supervisor Candidate Forum held at UCSF’s Genetech Hall Auditorium (September 13, 2010) was open to only five of the Candidates. Four of those Candidates actually showed up (Elaine Zamora had a personal issue that caused her to miss it), leaving an empty seat at the table, rather than adding anybody else.

After speaking extensively with a number of the Candidates who were not asked to participate, it became a personal issue to me, as a participating member of this community. After all, this was the second Forum in South Beach/Mission Bay that excluded Candidates for absolutely no reason. Matt Drake added (in one of our recent exchanges), “they arbitrarily set the limit for candidates at five people, and they could give me no concrete reason why they chose five, instead of three or seven people. They just picked the number five.”

How To Determine the “Top” Candidates… “Top” of What?

As far as I can tell, “the powers that be” have decided on behalf of the South Beach/Mission Bay Neighborhoods that the only viable Candidates are the “Top 5 Funded” Candidates in the election. In such a local race, does funding really matter, though? Something tells me we’re not going to see this race play out on TV, so the winner could technically be the Candidate with the most local exposure. What does local exposure cost, save for some good old fashioned pavement pounding?

Social Networking is FREE, walking the streets is FREE. Lest we forget that some of the Candidates who are favored in poorer parts of the District may not have the fancy-pants donors of those in the “machine”. They also might not have a large Social Network presence, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have crowds showing up on Election Day placing actual votes.

So what if we used other factors to determine the “Top Candidates”? If you want to use Funding as your reference point, you might be shocked when you see some of the others that we’ve compiled here. Please excuse my amateurish pie charts. Excel is not one of the strongest bullet points on my resume (as my wife so eagerly suggested when she saw me building these).

What if the "Top" Candidate were decided based on years lived in District 6?

Or By How Many Facebook Fans They Had?

Or By How Many People Have Actively Visited Their Candidate Page on LiveSOMA?

None of these factors have the same Candidates in the same order. Ultimately, none of these factors matter because none of them predict who will show up on election day. So Glendon Hyde has a couple hundred more fans on Facebook than anyone else, that doesn’t mean they are residents of District 6, and that they’ll show up to vote on November 2nd.

Couldn’t the same be said for Campaign Funding? A couple of months ago, we asked each Candidate in our Candidate Corner, “Are the majority of your District 6 Supervisor Campaign Donors from within District 6?” To me, that completely negates the “Top” Funded as deciding factor for “Top” Candidate, particularly when you look at which ones are and aren’t funded primarily from within District 6.

As you can see in the crude chart to the left, two of the “Top Funded” Candidates are not primarily Funded from within the District. So whether they have $10 or $10 Million doesn’t mean anything when it is translated to who can actually vote.

Of course $10 Million would produce a lot more door hangers and fliers to be dropped all over the neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean that the neighborhood likes all the paper confetti that’s starting to pop up all over town. Again, it doesn’t necessarily translate to voters.

I’m not an idiot though, and I realize that the four Candidates that participated in this recent Forum are widely considered to be the favorites in the race. In fact, this month’s 7 x 7 Magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday, and Jane Kim made the 2010 “Hot 20 Under 40″ List (Congrats to Ms. Kim). They also mention that she is the “leading candidate in the race for District 6 Supervisor”, which is a hotly debated statement by some.

My point with all of this is that I don’t need any Neighborhood Association or Bicycle Coalition to tell me who they think is the “Top Candidate.” I guess some people find them useful, other people prefer to take a sheet from a man on the street that lists everything they should vote for and how they should vote. I, myself, prefer to make my own decision, for myself, and myself only. After all, my interests and issues are different from yours, so why would you want me to tell you who to vote for?

With that said, I decided on the ride home from last week’s District 6 Forum that I was tired of these Forums deciding who was important to me, and opted instead to add the other Candidates to the video portion. Long story short, I gave them the same exact questions and timing restrictions, and if anything, I was much harder on their timings than the Forum was on the participating Candidates.

Maybe it was a waste of my time to travel all over District 6 and spend the afternoon with these Candidates, but you know what? It’s nobody’s place to determine that. That’s what voting is for.

Here are the questions from last week’s District 6 Supervisor Forum broken down by question with revolving Candidates. If you look on the LiveSOMA Youtube page (by clicking the video), you’ll notice I’ve added the times at which each Candidate begins their answer. You can click on the time of whichever Candidate you’d like to hear, and it will take you to that spot in each video. This way, you can skip through anyone you don’t care about, or otherwise save time. Enjoy.