OB Staff Report / September 29, 2025
Campaigning for San Diego’s June 2 primary election is already underway. Given the City’s deplorable state of affairs (101 Ash, predatory development, bait-and-switch trash fees, paid Balboa Park parking), voter interest in the four Council races on the 2026 ballot will be unusually intense.
To help voters make informed choices, the Rag will provide investigative coverage of the most important 2026 races. We will scout campaign finance reports and document where candidates get their support. We will study the fine print on campaign mailers and tell you which powerbrokers and special interest groups funded them.
The best indicators of a politician’s real agenda aren’t their promises or their platforms. It’s the money. When you know who is backing a candidate, you can pretty much predict what that person will do in office.
Let’s say we publish a list of the top 20 donors to Candidate X, and we identify many of them as players who have been close to Mayor Todd Gloria. Their support for X means they believe X will follow in Gloria’s political footsteps.
If you think Gloria has been a great mayor, you might want to give X your vote and even your money. If you think Gloria has been a disaster, you might want to back one of X’s opponents.
The Rag’s election coverage also will identify where candidates have directed their own contributions — which politicians, groups, and causes they have personally supported.
Finally, and of equal importance, we will dissect campaign mailers and determine who is funding them.
Campaign flyers are numerous, expensive, and almost always deceptive. In this era of mail-in ballots, too many voters rely on literature that arrives by post. Few of us can determine the source of the mailer. It’s easier to say, “I’m for neighborhoods, and this flyer says these candidates are for neighborhoods, so I’ll vote for them.”
The Rag can – and will – determine the sources of mailers (it’s what we live for). If the fine print on a mailer says, “Paid for by San Diegans for Safer Streets,” and we find that the group is funded by advocates for greater density and less street parking, we’ll tell you those important facts.
We have fond memories of past eras when all local media organizations covered elections by digging into campaign finances. We wish our colleagues at other news outlets still did that.
But we don’t mind being the last watchdog barking. The OB Rag has always pulled back the curtain at election time to reveal which big money interests are paying to place their lackeys in the halls of government. And we always will.
Our coverage begins soon with a close look at the five candidates who have declared their intention to run in the June 2 primary for the District 2 Council seat.
For a full roster of the declared candidates in the four 2026 Council races, click here.
