San Jose mayoral candidates, Matt Mahan, left, and Cindy Chavez both tout their solutions to crime and homelessness.
More than $1 million has poured into San Jose’s mayoral race in recent weeks, pushing what was already a record amount raised closer to $8 million and suggesting the race to lead the Bay Area’s most populous city is neck and neck down the stretch.
Mayoral candidates Cindy Chavez and Matt Mahan now have spent a little over $3.3 million combined, and independent expenditure and political action committees have put more than $4.6 million into the race as well, up from the nearly $3.8 million as of Oct. 21.
With money flowing in and spending ramping up on both sides, Garrick Percival, a political science professor at San Jose State University, said the contest’s competitive nature is clear.
“I’m expecting a close race — I’ve heard from people that it’s well within the margin of error — so both campaigns are feeling like it’s theirs to win,” Percival said. “There’s clearly an effort to reach voters who haven’t cast their ballots, which is a lot of voters.”
The candidates will be out hustling for every vote this weekend. Chavez has events planned with state Sen. Dave Cortese, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and county firefighters. Mahan will be doing meet-and-greets with the Ethiopian community and Shasta Hanchett neighborhood.
Mahan has continued to edge Chavez in personal campaign fundraising, for which the city limits donor contributions to $1,400 per election, with $1.8 million compared to $1.5 million for Chavez.
But political action and independent expenditure committees have spent almost $3.7 million on Chavez’ behalf, while those backing Mahan have dropped $885,000 toward his cause.
Chavez, a former head of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, draws a significant share of independent spending from labor unions, including those representing the city’s police officers and firefighters. She also is backed by a group funded by the San Francisco 49ers ownership and another formed by the former president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Carl Guardino.
Mahan’s independent backers include a California Real Estate committee, Silicon Valley Biz PAC, representing local business interests, and Common Good Silicon Valley, a group initially put together by outgoing Mayor Sam Liccardo, who supports Mahan, to promote various causes.
Campaign pieces have taken an increasingly harder edge as the Nov. 8 election draws near, with the two camps and their supporters calling out pieces they say are unfair. Percival said that’s typical in the last days of close contests.
“It’s about trying to draw distinctions, trying to draw up the negatives of your opponent,” Percival said. “Independent groups seem to be doing that dirty work in closing stretches of the campaigns.”
In a race where public safety has loomed as an issue, Chavez and her supporters take issue with Common Good ads hammering her for “dangerous ‘catch-and-release’ policies” intended to “depopulate” the county jails. The group says the policies have “put individuals with a history of violent crimes back on our streets.”
Chavez has touted her pretrial release and bail reform efforts as a county supervisor for “reducing wealth disparities” and ensuring that “non-violent suspects return to court without spending weeks, or months, sitting in jail, unable to work or attend school,” which she says saves taxpayers $200 a day. She bristles at the suggestion they are responsible for San Jose’s surge in violent crime, which she argues is due to chronic police department understaffing under Liccardo’s watch. She adds that “we’re not the judges” with authority to grant bail.
“If you want to be mayor of San Jose, the buck stops with you, and for both Sam and Matt, the buck stops with anyone but them,” Chavez said. “Sam and Matt have not addressed public safety in San Jose in a robust way, period. The number one way to address public safety is to have police officers present.”
Liccardo counters that San Jose crime soared even though the active police force has swelled by 230 positions since 2017, while the county jail population fell to half what it was in 2014. And while judges have a role in pretrial release, he said county policies have promoted cite-and-release at the jail before cases go to court. From January 2020 to April 2022, Liccardo said 877 people have been cited and released five or more times and 03 people have been cited and released 10 or more times.
“We’ve had a lot of frustrated cops who are tired of arresting people who are routinely released,” Liccardo said.
Chavez and her supporters also called out an ad funded by the Silicon Valley Biz PAC accusing the supervisor of “trying to silence the Asian American community in San Jose.” It refers to criticism of her by East Side Union High School District trustee and Mahan supporter Bryan Do, who blames her for the defeat of two Vietnamese-American council members in recent years and accused her campaign of legal threats against him over whether he suggested to the refugee community that she’s a communist, which he denies.
Asian American Chavez supporters, including the Asian Law Alliance’s Richard Konda and Vietnamese American Roundtable board member Huy Tran, denounced the ad as “blatant race-baiting” and even suggested the PAC darkened Chavez’ photo. Chavez also noted that a city card room, Casino M8trix, made a $7,500 contribution recently to Healthy Economy, a PAC that helped fund the ad.
City Attorney Nora Frimann said city law bars card rooms from contributing to candidates or candidate-controlled committees, but not to independent expenditure committees.
Victor Gomez, Silicon Valley Biz PAC’s executive director, responded that critics “have no proof” of their accusations and that labor groups backing Chavez engaged in race-baiting ads against supervisorial candidate Johnny Khamis.
Mahan’s backers have meanwhile taken issue with ads funded by the police union featuring District Attorney Jeff Rosen, a Chavez supporter, that rebut charges from a pro-Mahan real estate group regarding a 2006 city trash contract scandal.
That year, former Mayor Ron Gonzales was indicted on charges of secretly brokering an $11 million deal with a trash hauling company to cover costs of a higher-paying union contract. Chavez, vice mayor and a candidate to succeed him, testified along with other council members before the grand jury, and the real estate group’s ad questioned whether Chavez was more involved than she’d indicated.
A judge later dismissed the indictment, and Chavez never was charged, but lost her first run for mayor that year to Gonzales critic Chuck Reed.
Rosen said in the ad that “Cindy did nothing wrong” and “testified truthfully and the implication that she didn’t is a lie,” adding that “I have full confidence in her integrity and ability to lead San Jose” and that “I know the truth because my office had oversight.”
Retired prosecutor David Pandori, who had assisted in the Gonzales case, said Rosen, first elected in 2010, had no personal involvement in it or role in his predecessor’s decision to drop it.
Rosen said he wouldn’t comment on “specific complaints” and that “my political position on the race is a matter of record.”
Originally published at John Woolfolk, Harriet Blair Rowan