If Kevin Faulconer loses his bid to oust County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer in the most-watched race in the San Diego region this year, it won’t be because of money.
Faulconer’s supporters are coming in strong. As of Friday, according to a tally maintained by strategist and numbers guy Mason Herron, independent groups have spent almost $1.79 million on the race and the vast majority has been to support Faulconer and attack Lawson-Remer. Business groups have gone all out for him, including some it’s not entirely clear why they care.
For example, a group of McDonalds franchise owners have put in $350,000 to support Faulconer. Big Mac’s got K-Faulc’s back.
The ads have been brutal against Lawson-Remer. They say he would address the homeless crisis with urgency while she has sent staffers to meetings of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. Republicans saw the power in the “missing-work” arguments in 2012 when they used them – with pictures of empty chairs – to help sink Nathan Fletcher’s campaign for mayor in that year’s primary election. Those arguments have a stickiness – a challenge to her basic qualifications.
In any usual environment, the money pouring into the race, Faulconer’s name recognition and these targeted and tough attacks would make Lawson-Remer’s re-election about as difficult as possible.
But she’s got a great shot to win. The district has a Democratic registration advantage and if Faulconer loses, the easiest answer to why is probably also the correct one: He won’t have been able to shake his connection to former President Donald Trump.
It’s the core of Lawson-Remer and the Democratic Party’s attack on Faulconer. It’s on billboards and mailers and ads during the Padres playoff games.
All the attacks feature this photo of Faulconer with Trump.
The photo is one of two the White House made public from Faulconer’s June 2019 meeting with Trump. Ironically, the top issue they discussed is the one Lawson-Remer says motivates her the most as well: the border sewage crisis.
Trump’s team was in the middle of negotiating with Mexico and Canada on what would become the USMCA, the new North American trade agreement and Faulconer and other San Diego representatives were pushing hard to include hundreds of millions of dollars for the border sewage issue into it. They succeeded.
But the photo has since haunted Faulconer.
Real heads will remember the controversy that broke that night and the next day when Trump described their meeting. I remember it fondly. Some stories are just really amusing.
“We just finished San Diego, as you know, San Diego, in California,” Trump said. “They’re so happy. The mayor was just up in my office, great guy. He came up to thank me for having done the wall because it’s made such a difference. He said, it’s like day and night. He said people were flowing across and now nobody can come in.”
Faulconer’s team denied this.
“That’s not what Mayor Faulconer said. We all know that the President uses his own terminology. But that wasn’t the focus of their conversation,” Gustafson wrote. “The president as an aside asked Mayor Faulconer what he thought about the border, and the Mayor’s response is that we welcome federal investment in our land ports of entry. We’re the busiest border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, and federal dollars help us make it easier to trade, cross legally and commute across the border.”
The timeline: Lisa Halverstadt helped pull together a timeline of Faulconer’s takes on Trump.
June 2016: On election night, then-mayor Faulconer tells NBC 7 he “could never vote for Trump” and decries his “divisive rhetoric.”
June 2019: Faulconer, then co-chair of the US-Mexico Border Mayors Association and chair of the Trilateral Alliance for Trade in the Americas, visits the White House to meet with Trump’s intergovernmental affairs team when Trump asks to meet him. The Union-Tribune reports that they met for 19 minutes and discussed homelessness solutions and the cross-border sewage crisis and its impacts.
In his own readout of the meeting on Twitter, Faulconer wrote that he “encouraged more federal action to fix” the still-ongoing sewage nightmare.
December 2020: As Faulconer prepares to run for governor, he tells Los Angeles Times columnist George Sketon that he voted for Trump.
“I thought he was going to be the best for the economy,” Faulconer said.
September 2024: When pressed by Voice of San Diego, Faulconer declines to reveal which presidential candidate he supports.
“I’m not getting involved in all the national issues,” Faulconer said. “There’s enough divisiveness on the national level. I’m focused on local issues.”
Now: Supporters of Faulconer are fighting back as best they can.
The other side of that mailer: Another version of that mailer includes a side that has a picture of “Elyse” and a comment from her supporting Faulconer, describing her as a lifelong Democrat.
She’s Elyse Lowe, the city of San Diego’s director of development services. She worked for Faulconer for years in various roles like head of economic development.
Notes
The stakes in that election: Much of the money flowing to support Faulconer is coming from builders. It remains unclear how either Faulconer or Lawson-Remer will be able to mobilize the county to address homelessness the way they both plan, but they have starkly different takes on the future of housing in unincorporated areas of the county and what happens there will be immediately impacted by who wins. MacKenzie Elmer pulled together a piece about what’s at stake in that issue.
Trustee finally speaks: Shana Hazan, the president of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education, gave an interview to NBC 7 San Diego Friday, for the first time addressing her and her colleagues’ decision to fire Superintendent Lamont Jackson. The main question? Why were earlier warnings about his behavior unheeded?
“It’s clear that we did not have all the information that other members of the staff were aware of,” Hazan told NBC 7. “I was disappointed that that information did not come forward sooner.”
Funds flow for Turner: After the Lincoln Club received an unexpected $1 million to support the candidacy of Larry Turner for mayor of San Diego, we reported that it received $1 million to support Turner. But there was an intense blowback that insisted we were misrepresenting it and it wouldn’t go to support Turner.
It has gone to help Turner: Tuesday the Lincoln Club put another $350,000 into a committee it formed to support Turner, boosting the total it has sent there to $800,000 so far.
Politifest photos: Thanks to everyone who came to our event. If you haven’t checked out the page with all the content available from the day (including transcripts!) please do.
Vito Di Stefano always does a great job photographing the event. Here are just a few of his great pics.
If you have any feedback or ideas for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.