The loneliest Republicans in the world

What’s it like to be a McCain supporter in a city that votes more than 80 percent Democratic?

In these fi nal frenzied weeks of the presidential campaign, you can’t throw a rock in San Francisco without hitting a Barack Obama ad. Everywhere you turn, there’s a sign in a window, a sticker on a hybrid, or a stencil on the sidewalk pledging allegiance to the senator/ deity from Illinois. You might wonder if his opponent, Arizona senator John McCain, is even on the ballot here.

There is, however, at least one McCain campaign sign within city limits. It sits in the window of Stephen Wagstaff ’s apartment on the southern slope of Potrero Hill. Tonight, Wagstaff, a 30-year-old Republican activist, is hosting a Straight Talk House Party, at which a couple dozen or so members of the area’s long-suffering Republican underclass (and their friends) have convened to eat, drink, and talk up their man’s chances.

Wagstaff seems like a very San Francisco sort of conservative. Rail thin, with longish hair and wearing skinny black jeans, he works for an investment fund downtown but looks more like he should be singing in a punk band. Most of his friends are liberals, he says, and his conservative life is mostly virtual, sustained by blogs and talk radio. “At times, it can be lonely here,” he admits.

Indeed, while partisan hostilities are occasionally a problem (activists tell stories of screaming matches at local protests), the toughest part about being a San Francisco Republican may be that the Democratic majority doesn’t take you very seriously. Glen Park resident Will Trachman, a 28-year-old attorney who is far more conservative than most of his friends, outlines his coping strategy: “In my social circle, I try to be the jovial Republican— misguided, maybe, but basically OK,” he says. “So when I talk politics, they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t mind Will. He’s just howling at the moon again.’”

Tonight, at least, that’s not a problem. Amid a spread of catered Mexican food and an arsenal of beer that includes the obligatory cans of Bud (Cindy McCain runs an Anheuser-Busch distributorship), Wagstaff praises McCain’s fi scal conservatism and hard-line foreign policy and criticizes, as he puts it, Obama’s “arrogance, inexperience, and dangerous naïveté.” These sentiments go over well with the group, most of which identifi es more closely with the party’s small-government, big-defense wing than with its Bible-thumping fundamentalists.

By 11 p.m., the evening is winding down. Jay Rubin, a poet and an English instructor at the College of Alameda, takes a McCain sign for his home in Noe Valley. (“I’m drowning in blue Obama signs down there.”) Still, he seems unsure of where to hang it. Probably not on his front door; really, who needs that hassle? “Maybe on my back door,” he muses. “Or maybe on my offi ce door at school.” Wagstaff says that his sign has been up for six months with no problems. Even though the city—and almost certainly the state—will go blue, he says, “we have to keep up the good fi ght.”