SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor Willie Brown was headed for a resounding victory Tuesday over Supervisor Tom Ammiano, whose grass-roots campaign attracted national attention but failed to topple one of California's most powerful politicians.
Brown had 64% of the vote to Ammiano's 36% with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted. In the city's other runoff race, Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan, one of the state's most liberal district attorneys, trailed challenger Bill Fazio 53% to 47%.
Late Tuesday, a jubilant Brown donned a baseball cap emblazoned with "Still Da Mayor" as supporters cheered wildly at the Longshoreman's Hall on Fisherman's Wharf.
"I want to be the representative of all the people of this city," Brown said, urging his challengers to join him in "making this a great city."
Speaking across town to his supporters minutes later, Ammiano did not concede.
"My voice may be high, my orientation may be gay, my politics may be left, but we are right," he said. "We have moved San Francisco. We have been a voice for the people who have been shut out and we will be shut out no longer."
The mayor's race made for strange political bedfellows. Once the poster child of all that Republicans hated about the state's liberal establishment, Brown won the endorsement of the local Republican Party during the runoff. Exit polls Tuesday showed that he did well among the city's more conservative voters, who became a key in a race pitting two liberals against each other.
During the campaign, Brown promised he would fix problems caused by the city's booming economy, vowing to build more affordable housing, improve the public transportation system and ease downtown traffic congestion. Most of all, Brown promised to be more humble after voters repeatedly told pollsters they found him too arrogant.
Indeed, it was a humbling experience for the onetime speaker of the state Assembly to be forced into a runoff by Ammiano, a stand-up comedian who declared his write-in candidacy just three weeks before last month's general election.
Ammiano, who had hoped to become San Francisco's first openly gay mayor, made integrity the cornerstone of his campaign. He accused Brown of cronyism and said the 65-year-old mayor favored downtown business interests over the city's neighborhoods.
Brown tarred Ammiano as a big-spending, far-left liberal who would divide the city and raise taxes.
