---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Bock Comes On Strong In Bid for Assembly Green candidate leads race against Harris Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, March 31, 1999 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris was losing his bid to return to the state Legislature last night as an all but unknown Green Party candidate inched ahead in the race for the 16th Assembly District in the East Bay.
The Green Party candidate, Audie Bock, drew 52 percent of the vote to Harris' 48 percent, with 137 out of 153 precincts reporting in the special runoff election.
Bock, an East Asia scholar and businesswoman who lives in Piedmont, mounted a feisty door-to- door campaign hoping to become the nation's first Green Party member of a state legislature.
``I'm generally stunned at this,'' Bock said last night as returns trickled in. ``I think it's testimony to the fact that people are tired of being dictated to by a (political) machine. I had no expectations. We did the best we could with very limited resources.''
The early returns were surprising because Harris is a well-known Democrat in a heavily Democratic district that includes Alameda, Piedmont and much of Oakland.
``We're still confident,'' said Harris' campaign manager, Claude Everhart, as the ballot counting reached the halfway mark. ``We don't know where (which precincts) the votes are coming from. We really don't have anything to say at this point.''
The winner will replace Alameda Democrat Don Perata. Perata left the Assembly seat open after he moved to the Senate last year.
Harris represented the Assembly district for 12 years before becoming mayor of Oakland in 1991. He served two terms as mayor but declined to seek a third.
The former mayor was hoping to return to an institution full of inexperienced members as a result of the continual rotation caused by term limits. Because of his background and his political kinship with San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown during Brown's era as Assembly speaker, Harris has been seen as a contender for the leadership post.
In a primary election for the Assembly seat in February, Harris beat two other Democrats to win the party's nomination, aided by substantial turnout in Oakland neighborhoods where voters were given coupons for free chicken dinners, courtesy of the state Democratic Party. He came a few hundred votes short of winning the seat outright.
Voters in yesterday's election were not similarly rewarded. Harris
--and Bock -- relied on volunteers who walked precincts and drove voters to the polls.
Bock walked precincts on weekends during the campaign, sending out as many as 27 volunteers at a time. A core of six people walked every weekend for up to four hours a day.
Yesterday, about 15 Bock supporters worked to get out the vote, including ``human billboards'' holding signs at freeway on-ramps.
``There are a few of us out working, we had a few people out there standing with signs this morning,'' said John Cromwell, Bock's assistant campaign manager. ``We got a few favorable honks. . . . We feel pretty good about it. I think we've done as good as we could have hoped and the other side has taken notice of us.''
The Alameda County registrar's office predicted that between 15 percent and 20 percent of the electorate would participate.
Yesterday's election was the fifth and last of a series of musical-chair rotations prompted by Representative Ron Dellums' midterm resignation from Congress last year.
Bock made an unusually strong bid for a candidate outside the mainstream. She attracted the support of consumer advocate Ralph Nader and raised enough money to send a mailer districtwide.
She slammed Harris, accusing him of refusing to debate her. Harris denied the charge, saying he was busy with campaigning.
Harris talked up his attempts while mayor to promote literacy among children and adults. In the Assembly, he says he wants to work with local governments to create jobs and improve health care and the schools.