The victory roar was audible blocks away.
At 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, a packed crowd stared up at a jumbo-sized screen at Novo Brazil brewery in Imperial Beach. The restaurant was host to Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre’s election night watch party in her race to fill a vacant South County seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
Aguirre, a Democrat, stood surrounded by a who’s who of San Diego Democratic politics. Elected officials, union leaders, activists, volunteers and even a few teenagers doing their best to look unimpressed waited with bated breath for initial election results to flash on the screen.
Suddenly, results appeared, showing Aguirre with a nearly seven-point lead over her Republican opponent, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann.
The crowd erupted in thunderous cheers. Aguirre cried as supporters pressed in on her and chanted “Paloma! Paloma!”
The energy Tuesday evening gave vent to six months of pent-up Democratic frustration following the surprise resignation late last year of former District 1 Supervisor Nora Vargas, also a Democrat.
Vargas, first elected to the Board in 2020, gave Democrats a 3-2 majority on San Diego County’s most powerful elected body.
Her resignation left supervisors stalemated on a range of pressing issues – immigration, a projected budget deficit, looming federal budget cuts – even as economic and political headwinds threatened to exacerbate the county’s already significant challenges.
As Democrats celebrated their return to power late into the night Tuesday, there were hugs, high-fives, beaming selfies and plenty of schmoozing – but also a quiet, palpable current of anxiety.
After months of campaign promises and withering attacks on McCann’s Republican proposals, Democrats now have to govern San Diego County at a time when voters say many major indicators in their communities – homelessness, the cost of housing, business conditions, county finances – are moving in the wrong direction.
When Aguirre finally pushed through the crowd to a makeshift podium to give a victory speech, she captured the electorate’s frustration in words alternately sober and combative.
“I ran for this seat because I know what it’s like to struggle and to fight for a better life,” she said. “We’re done with a county government that doesn’t invest in our community. The time for action is now.”
In a short interview before her speech, Aguirre said she was putting the finishing touches on a 100-day plan that would guide her efforts in her first months in office. Once election officials certify results, Aguirre is expected to be sworn in later this month.
First item on her agenda, she said: Fast-tracking a five-point action plan she recently submitted to the Board of Supervisors to resolve the Tijuana River sewage crisis. Supervisors gave the plan preliminary approval last week, and Aguirre said she would work to ensure it is implemented quickly.
She also said she would support a recent proposal by Democratic Supervisors Monica Montgomery Steppe and Terra Lawson-Remer to explore strategies for shielding San Diego County from anticipated steep federal budget cuts.
An unspoken item on the to-do list: Balancing the list itself with what is already shaping up to be a steady stream of proposals from local interest groups.
Votes were still being counted Tuesday evening when Crystal Irving, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 221, which represents county employees, issued a statement calling Aguirre’s win “SEIU-endorsed candidate Paloma Aguirre’s election victory.”
“The win is the result of a coalition of union members, environmental advocates and residents supporting a campaign based on our shared values,” Irving said.
Union officials interviewed in the days leading up to Election Day listed a range of policies they hope Aguirre will support, including reducing the county’s reliance on non-union contract workers, giving county workers greater say in implementing county policy, maintaining programs that help undocumented immigrants facing deportation, and enacting a possible countywide project-labor agreement that would guarantee union-level wages and benefits at construction projects requiring county approval.
An SEIU-backed independent expenditure committee spent more than $385,000 supporting Aguirre in the campaign, according to campaign finance records. Another union representing laborers spent more than $230,000.
Backing Aguirre “wasn’t a hard decision for us,” said Marco Briones, political director of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, an umbrella union group. “She has built a lot of trust with people in our [union] community when she didn’t need anything from us because that’s where her values were. It’s a loyalty to a person we know.”
Aguirre’s campaign reflected a tension latent in the surge of union funding. She praised unions and union aspirations in virtually every one of her campaign appearances. She hired a campaign consultant, Dan Rottenstreich, who is married to the president of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council. She echoed unions’ antipathy to President Donald Trump in her frequent attacks on McCann as a supposed mini-Trump Republican clone.
But she also took care to call her campaign efforts “people-powered” and told stories on the campaign trail about the everyday struggles faced by cash-strapped South County voters. Mindful of a rightward shift in voting patterns in her district during the November presidential election, she devoted little attention to social issues such as race and sexuality and kept her focus squarely on residents’ concerns about the cost of living.
McCann won enough crossover votes from Democrats and independents on Tuesday to draw within sight of Aguirre in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
As Democratic Chula Vista City Councilmember Michael Inzunza put it in an interview shortly before the election, South County voters “are moderate. There are a lot of moderate Filipino, Mexican American and Anglo moderates. They’re not Trump voters. They’re business and religious moderates.”
Only one issue knocked Aguirre off her campaign script. A dramatic May immigration raid on a restaurant in the South Park neighborhood of San Diego, followed by more raids and convulsive protests in Los Angeles, prompted Aguirre to add undocumented immigrants to her list of South County residents struggling to survive in harsh economic and political times.
She softened her opposition to a controversial county sanctuary policy and dared McCann to set aside his Republican identity and condemn the Trump-ordered raids. (McCann did, but only more than a week later at a televised candidates’ debate.)
Speaking in Spanish to reporters for Spanish-language news outlets Tuesday evening, Aguirre was more unvarnished in assailing Trump. She slammed his “racism against our people” and said flatly, “We don’t accept that…We fight for our people. We fight for immigrants.”
The conflicting pressures animating Aguirre’s campaign – Democratic party activists’ pent-up energy, voters’ everyday pocketbook anxieties, outrage at federal immigration enforcement – now confront Aguirre as she takes her seat at the helm of county government.
The Board of Supervisors’ upcoming agenda is packed with thorny questions that don’t fit neatly into partisan silos.
Should the county stiffen its homeless camping ban to bring it in line with cities in the region? What is the best way to help people with drug or mental health problems who refuse treatment? Should environmental laws be weakened to speed up home development? Should the county dip into reserves to blunt the effects of federal budget cuts?
At voting centers on Tuesday, voters mostly ignored partisan extremes and said they wanted practical solutions to problems that affected their daily lives.
“I work in government and I see a lot of waste,” said Barry Preston of Chula Vista. “I don’t want more taxes. I pay enough of them, and look at all of these homeless people still struggling.”
“I hope they keep thinking about the roads,” said Jennifer Jensen, also of Chula Vista. “We live down the street from El Pastor Del Rica [a popular Chula Vista taqueria co-owned by Mexican professional boxer Canelo Alvarez] and there’s so much traffic.”
“We need help,” said Oscar Lopez, a general contractor in Imperial Beach. “Prices and materials are going up, and people don’t want to pay. I need support for that.”
Aguirre seemed to grasp the complex task now before her. “As long as it’s in the best interests of the people, I support it,” she said on Tuesday, vowing to seek pragmatic solutions to the county’s problems and work with Republican members of the Board of Supervisors when possible.
Then she told a story.
“I got up at 7:30 a.m. yesterday to help a woman who couldn’t drop off her ballot [at a voting center],” Aguirre said. “She’s a single mom with two kids living in a room she rents from another family in a house. But she’s being kicked out in two months.”
She paused, seeming momentarily absorbed in the image she’d just conjured. “That’s who I’m thinking about and fighting for,” she said.