From Politico…
An off-season mayor’s race in America’s eighth-largest city has become an unexpected magnet for national political groups, as labor unions and Democrats scramble to keep San Diego government in liberal hands and Republicans seek to capture their first big-city mayoral election win in half a decade.
The Tuesday special election in San Diego, triggered by the resignation of Democratic Mayor Bob Filner, caps a tumultuous stretch in the seaside defense-contracting-and-tourism hub that was once a stronghold of California Republicanism. Rocked in the past few years by a public-pensions meltdown that drove one mayor from office and again last year by Filner’s lurid sexual harassment scandal, San Diego politics is now buffeted by a different kind of force: overwhelming outside spending.