SRO Tenants Helped Make Daly’s VictoryPaul Hogarthbyline‚ Nov. 09‚ 2006In the last three weeks before the election, progressives came from out of the woodwork to save Chris Daly’s re-election. With the Chronicle publishing polls with Daly ten points behind Rob Black, there was a palpable fear among the left that we could lose San Francisco’s most tenant-heavy district to an anti-tenant Supervisor. Activists like Nicole Derse sent out mass e-mails warning that if Rob Black won, “we all may be packing our bags.” By 5:30 a.m. on Election Day, there were 100 volunteers in Daly’s campaign office energized to get out the vote – and 400 more joined in later on that day. But independent from the official campaign, organized labor worked hand-in-hand with tenant organizers to coordinate a targeted outreach effort to mobilize Daly’s most loyal constituencies – Local 2 conducted phone-banks in Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Chinese, and SEIU organized the residential hotels. In fact, SEIU’s effort to mobilize SRO tenants in District 6 was the most sophisticated, organized and deliberate get-out-the-vote strategy ever conducted for that population. Its resounding success helped secure Daly’s re-election. |