In Oakland, Tuman, other mayoral candidates marshall outsider coalition

In a joint announcement, Joe Tuman, Bryan Parker and Courtney Ruby say they will hold a news conference on Thursday to “discuss why voters should choose a candidate from outside City Hall.” Currently the front-runners are councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan and Libby Shaaf and Mayor Jean Quan. 

“We’re not saddled with the baggage that they carry,” Tuman said in an interview. “The cynicism about the the way government works is not directed at us.” 

Tuman, Parker and Ruby hope that by forming a coalition, one of them can be vaulted into office under ranked-choice voting. A poll of 515 likely voters released Wednesday by KPIX found that Kaplan was leading the pack with 19 percent of first-place votes, while Schaaf had 17 percent. Both Quan and Tuman had 15 percent and Parker had 10 percent. The poll’s margin of error was 4.4 percent. 

Tuman is a politics professor at SF State, Parker is a business executive and Ruby is the city’s elected auditor. Despite the fact Ruby has an office of the fourth floor of City Hall she has claimed since the start of her campaign that her watchdog role makes her an outsider in city politics. 

Tuman pointed to a recent poll by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce that found the just 19 percent of voters said Quan was doing an excellent-to-good job running the city and 17 percent of voters said they thought the City Council was doing an excellent or good job.

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