Law School grad rallies San Francisco’s progressives in his race for mayor.

MATT GONZALEZ ’90, President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, looks a little beat. Like he just got over the flu, which he did, and spent the last month running a whistle-stop-style campaign, which he also did. Gonzalez had hoped to become the first Green Party mayor of a major city, and while he lost that bid, the race was thrillingly close. 

A few days after the Dec. 9 election, Gonzalez is seated in a corner of his spacious City Hall office. He rephrases a question—“How does it feel to have 130,000 people vote against you, is that what you want to know?”— without a hint of bitterness. “I’m here,” he answers himself. “I’m the president of the board of supervisors.” 

“My race was about taking a mandate from this candidate [the winner, Democrat Gavin Newsom].” Because Gonzalez garnered so much support, he says, “Newsom’s strength is perceived very differently now. Nobody’s looking at this guy like he can do whatever he wants, politically.”

Gonzalez entered the mayoral race late, just before the deadline in August, and surprised many in the city’s political class by making the runoff. His opponent raised nearly $4 million to Gonzalez’s $500,000, garnered support from national Democratic leaders, and had a year’s head start on the campaign. 

Still, Gonzalez won 47 percent of the votes, including the majority of those cast on Dec. 9. (Newsom won the race through absentee ballots.) Making personal appearances around the city, Gonzalez rallied San Francisco’s progressives and inspired many of the younger, often disaffected, voters to head to the polls on a rainy day. 

“I have, since getting into politics, tried to do it differently,” Gonzalez says. “People constantly tell me, ‘You can’t do it like that, Matt. You need to raise a lot of money. You need to be a Democrat.’ Those things have not been too much of an obstacle for me.” 

As a Green Party member and a political opponent of outgoing mayor Willie Brown, Gonzalez was the outsider in the campaign, a position that both helped and hurt his candidacy. Voters who were frustrated with the Brown machine supported him, while others feared that he wouldn’t be effective and that his election would hurt the Democratic Party nationally. 

Gonzalez’s lifestyle is also outside the norm for a major-city politician, though it’s not so different from that of many San Franciscans. He shares an apartment in the Western Addition with two roommates, and owns neither a television nor a car. He hangs out with the likes of Jello Biafra, former lead singer for the Dead Kennedys, and beat poet Diane di Prima. 

“Matt has a whole different way of looking at politics,” says Jane Goldman ’90, who campaigned for Gonzalez. “At a party I threw for him, Matt spent a lot of time answering questions. And he really answered the questions. It wasn’t the sort of sloganeering you expect to hear from politicians.” 

“I disagree with Matt on a few things,” she adds, “but I’m confident that his position is based on what he believes is best for the city, not a calculation on what would resonate best with the voters. What a cool thing that is.” 

At the Law School, Gonzalez was an editor of the Stanford Law Review and a research assistant to then-Dean Paul Brest on a revision of a constitutional law casebook. He also worked on death penalty cases for the California Appellate Project and for the East Palo Alto Community Law Project. But no one saw him as a future politician. “Of all the people I knew in law school, I thought Matt was the least likely to be willing to tolerate the nonsense that politics involves,” says Whitney Leigh ’90, a former roommate. “I saw politics as a profession that was filled with backroom deals and phony pandering. It never occurred to me that Matt would be a successful politician.” 

Gonzalez says he didn’t think much about politics as a law student, but after working as a public defender in San Francisco for nine years, “You become aware of this entity that needs to be reformed, so you want to do something about it.” 

He ran for San Francisco district attorney in 1999, opposing the death penalty and maintaining that the office was mismanaged. He lost that race, but in 2000 ran for the board of supervisors in a district election and won. In 2003, the board voted him president.

 But this latest race, for mayor, was a step into an entirely different arena, one in which considerable attention was directed toward two seemingly off-the-point issues: his membership in the Green Party and his physical appearance. 

As a Green in the supposedly nonpartisan race, Gonzalez galvanized the Democratic machinery in favor of his opponent: Al Gore and Bill Clinton dropped by the city to back Newsom. 

And as a young, attractive man running opposite another young, attractive man, Gonzalez endured plenty of gushing about his looks as well as jabs at his longish hair and his rumpled suits. A week before the runoff, the San Francisco Chronicle imposed head shots of both men on paper-doll images, then gave each a fashion makeover. 

Gonzalez shrugs off the attention paid to his dress. “It was the two young guys thing,” he says. “It brings a certain levity to what is otherwise a serious, mundane process of getting votes.”