Martha Abraham has won a seat on the Council by ousting incumbent Councilmember Henry Foster. It is another stunning loss by an incumbent representing District 4 just eight years after Foster’s former boss, Monica Montgomery Steppe beat the sitting City Council President Myrtle Cole.
Abraham didn’t give many in-depth interviews about her plans. But she sat down with NBC 7 San Diego’s Joey Safchik two weeks ago and they had an interesting exchange about Mayor Todd Gloria.
Safchik brought up our reporting that Gloria had worked behind-the-scenes to try to help Abraham win. She said she didn’t know anything about that and that his support was not welcome at all.
Safchik: “Do you worry that association with him could be toxic for you?”
Abraham: “Absolutely. You know, the mayor, unfortunately, is not the most liked person in our city. And I have run my campaign without any establishment help. I’m not endorsed by any other candidates or elected officials. And so it’s important for me to continue to be a people-powered campaign and win this with people.”
Safchik: “How do you feel about Mayor Gloria? Would you reject his official endorsement?”
Abraham: “I wouldn’t accept an official endorsement.”
It was cold rebuke. She insisted she didn’t know him, proudly highlighted that she had never talked to him and would tell him to keep his support to himself.
Abraham declined to talk to me about that.
But she wasn’t alone. The mayor’s ostensible favorite in the City Council District 2 race, Nicole Crosby, who also won Tuesday, was not interested in being associated with the mayor at all. Signs appeared in Ocean Beach and Point Loma claiming Crosby stood with Gloria – a callback to when signs in the same areas claimed Kevin Faulconer stood with Donald Trump. They helped kill Faulconer’s bid for county supervisor.
Faulconer’s Lincoln Club was now funding some of the signs tying Crosby to Gloria.
One of the many TikTok influencers who posted on behalf of Crosby did a video pointing at one of the signs. “First up, Nicole doesn’t even like Todd Gloria,” she said.
I asked Crosby if that was true.
“We disagree on the direction of San Diego. I oppose flock. I opposed ADUs. I opposed the bait-and-switch on the trash fee. Policy wise, we are not aligned. We are different types of leaders,” she said.
But does she also just not like him, like the influencer said?
“It’s not a personal attack. Just because the mayor and I disagree doesn’t mean I hate him personally,” she said.
OK, no actual hate.
The mayor should have had a good week. Everyone he wanted to win in the election won. They made a deal on Midway Rising affordable housing that seems like it will satisfy the Council and go forward next week. He announced Friday that for the first time in years, the five-year fiscal outlook for the city doesn’t look nightmarish and no further service cuts will be needed.
But it could not have felt good to see the candidates you want to win find new ways to say how repulsive you are as a leader.
So it was almost perfectly timed when, on Election Day, news broke that a group led by Genevieve Jones-Wright filed an official recall notice. Everyone covered it – the U-T even wrote an editorial on it – because it felt like the next chapter in an ongoing story of the mayor’s decline.
Rumors spread, again, that Gloria would take a job with the new governor, Xavier Becerra. But at a press conference Friday, Gloria said he would not accept any such invitation.
He’s in. Determined to turn this all around.
The Recall Arguments
The first response most people had to the recall was that it was almost impossible. Jones-Wright and her allies will need to collect 120,000 valid signatures, which means they’ll have to collect up to 150,000 or more. We’ve seen so many signature drives fail, even ones that have spent more than $1 million on the effort. And time is short. The clock on 120 days started already and they’re not even allowed to begin collecting signatures.
He may be deeply unpopular but this is an enormous lift.
“Every day he is mayor, it costs us. The cost of the recall is justified when you look at what he costs San Diegans,” Jones-Wright told me. She’s joined by Kathleen Harmon, Terrie Best, Donnetta Moore and Shelby Huffaker.
Michael Zucchet, the general manager of the largest union of city employes, the Municipal Employees Association, sent over a statement opposing the recall. He had three main points: The election for the next mayor was approaching soon. A recall process could help someone get elected who doesn’t deserve it. And the mayor has made changes that he deserves to see through.
Zucchet cited the improving budget, the reduction of middle managers and the hiring of a new chief operating officer.
“We ask frustrated residents to join us in giving these positive changes time to work while continuing to demand accountability at City Hall, rather than resorting to counterproductive non-stop political campaigns,” he wrote.
Jones-Wright said there needs to be “broader empathetic thinking.”
“This says we got ours so we don’t worry about you,” she said. “You are telling impacted people, who have been harmed, that they need to just take it a little while longer. This people to show themselves: people who say they stand with working people are in this instance are turning their backs on those people.”
The recall may be hard to pull off but it could force people to take positions on just how bad the mayor is or how much they support him.
Bailey Never Had a Chance
From the moment we reported the news that Richard Bailey had moved to Point Loma and left the Republican Party in preparation for a run for City Council, we have been asking him and talking about Donald Trump. Republican incumbent City Councilmember Lorie Zapf had lost that seat in 2018. She hadn’t faced any scandal.
The only thing that she had working against her was that she was a Republican and the electorate was raging against Trump after he won in 2016. Labor unions and the Democrats tied Zapf to Trump and she lost by 15 points.
You could see it all over again. But in this case, Bailey had sort of also seen it. He had left the Republican Party but that’s all he was willing to do. He refused, repeatedly, constantly, to ever engage in a discussion about his perspective on Trump. He finally, when pressed, acknowledged he had supported and voted for the president in 2024.
He considered it irrelevant. I think if you pressed him he’d point out that slamming the president wasn’t going to help him win. He’d convinced himself that the people who had intense animosity toward Trump would not come over to him. He needed people who could look past it.
But looking back, it was impossible for him to win this race. He had every possible advantage: He spoke well on the issues. He built an inimitable social media presence and following. He raised more money than Nicole Crosby and benefited from $700,000 in spending from one individual benefactor in Point Loma.
And yet, as the votes are counted, it looks like he will do maybe just a little better than Zapf did in 2018. The wave of backlash to the president in this midterm election was bigger and meaner than 2018 and as smart as he is, Bailey refused to ever look at it and deal with it.
The wave was going to drown him. We knew it. We could see it. It wasn’t that hard to see. A district that had clearly no interest in anyone who supported Trump – and the immigration crackdown and the war and the tariffs — was probably going to go hard against the president in this midterm cycle. Rather than tell us we were being small and petty to focus on it, Bailey should have seen it for what it was: The main problem he had to solve.
Candidates must deal with the world as it is, not as they want it to be.
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.