San Diego grew up as a Navy town, and has historically been defined by a conservative political culture. It was Richard Nixon's "lucky city" in 1972. And it is where, in 1996, the Republican Party convened to nominate Bob Dole for President. Exactly when things started to change on the ground is a matter that depends on whom you ask. (For instance, I will tell you that as recently as the late 1980s, when I was in the fifth grade at a San Diego public school, the teacher asked the class to raise our hands if our parents were Republicans, and all but my and one other kid's hands went up.) But one definitive moment in San Diego's political development will be easy for future civic historians to pin down. It happened a few months ago, when a gadfly City Council member, environmentalist and surf-shop owner named Donna Frye announced her write-in candidacy for the city's mayoral race at the eleventh hour and earned more votes than the other two candidates, both Republicans.

Frye's turnout surprised San Diego voters partly because, from a practical standpoint, the odds were stacked against her. She was a school-of-hard-knocks candidate competing against a Harvard-educated former judge and a county supervisor who had served two terms on the City Council. (Though Frye does have an associate's degree and some fifteen years' experience running her own business, you are more likely to read about her life as a hotel maid, gas-station attendant, short-order cook and recovering alcoholic.) She was a political outsider, and she cobbled up a grassroots campaign that in today's terms was conspicuously light on rhetoric. Not to mention that she had only five weeks to convince the electorate to vote for Donna Frye, a name they might not have heard before and would not find on the ballot.

But Frye's turnout surprised people mostly because she was a progressive running against two establishment Republicans in what is thought to be a conservative stronghold (it is, after all, the city that gave the world Tucker Carlson). And because she managed to rouse a ground-up movement in a town that often seems content to enjoy its climate and leave the bother of political involvement to bigger, more troubled cities.

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