Berkeley Race Reveals Similar Tactics Used Against Daly

Berkeley’s District 7 includes the UC-Berkeley campus and the Southside neighborhood -- including Telegraph Avenue, People’s Park and the three largest undergraduate dorms. Like Daly’s district in San Francisco, it has consistently elected and re-elected progressive candidates who strongly support rent control. But like Daly’s district, the neighborhood also has very high turnover – and the electorate is largely disengaged from local politics. More than half of District 7 is Cal students who graduate every four years, and Election Day on the Berkeley campus is eerily similar to Election Day in the Tenderloin. You literally have to remind people that there’s an election going on and you have to make voting extremely easy for them, or else they simply won’t show up.

Both Kriss Worthington and Chris Daly have a strong progressive record in their respective legislative bodies. They were also first elected because they engaged their district’s most disenfranchised population. In 1996, Worthington defeated an incumbent who had only appointed one student out of 35 to Berkeley’s various city commissions, and ran an aggressive campaign that mobilized student voters. In 2000, Daly was elected with overwhelming support from the District’s residential hotel tenants – on a campaign platform that promised to make visitor fees illegal and put sprinklers in every room to prevent the rash of hotel fires.

More
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=3851#more