By Tim Redmond and Savannah Blackwell

When the early absentee voter returns came in around 8:30 p.m. on election night, it was clear that at least one major – and significant – upset was in the making. Jeff Adachi, who until a year ago was a political unknown, was ahead of Kimiko Burton, daughter of one of the state's most powerful politicians, in the race for San Francisco public defender.

Absentees generally favor conservative candidates, and Adachi was running with the support of progressives such as Sups. Tom Ammiano and Matt Gonzalez. But he'd still won the absentees, 51 percent to 49 percent.

Then the first returns from the precincts came in – and Adachi pulled even further ahead. His lead grew as the night went on. The message: all over town voters from the left, right, and center were sick of the political machine personified by John Burton.

The Brown-Burton machine took another pounding March 5 – but the progressive forces allied with Ammiano didn't exactly have a night of resounding victory, either. Harry Britt, the former supervisor who was running for state assembly with Ammiano's strong support, fell a few hundred votes short in a race won by Sup. Mark Leno (who was once an ally of Mayor Willie Brown but has had a major falling-out with him.)

Meanwhile, on the west side of town Leland Yee (once a critic of Brown but now a little more friendly with the mayor) defeated Dan Kelly, an Ammiano ally.

Certainly there is no overall victor in the latest local political war. If anything, March 5 left a power vacuum in the city: The mayor is increasingly looking like a lame duck, but Ammiano – who has all but announced his candidacy to replace Brown in 2003 – hasn't yet consolidated power. And in the middle are Leno and Yee, both of them at this point political wild cards.

Leno will take office with less than a powerful mandate – he barely squeaked through the Democratic primary against a candidate who had been out of office for more than 10 years. So his first job will be to mend fences. Yee won fairly handily, and his position as the assembly member representing the west side of town and the first Asian American ever elected to state office from San Francisco immediately makes him a political force (and potentially a candidate for mayor).

Then there's Carole Migden, who made a strategic move to the reform wing by backing Britt and essentially cutting her ties with the machine. She's a shoo-in for the job she's running for now – state Board of Equalization – but even Migden admits it may not be a long-term position. If Brown decides to run for Burton's state senate seat when term limits force Burton out in two years, Migden could be his opponent – and with the progressives behind her, she could mount a formidable campaign.

"There's nobody at the top of the heap right now," pollster David Binder, who worked on Leno's campaign, told us. "The voters clearly don't like the old machine, but they're still looking for the new way."

Still, Binder said that the Britt campaign was a signal of the ongoing clout of the progressive wing. "Mark started off with a big advantage in name recognition, and that always helps in low-turnout elections," he noted. "Harry did a good job creating a grassroots campaign, and he showed that the progressive-labor alliance is still very powerful."

The early absentee results showed Leno with 47 percent of the vote to Britt's 32 percent, so it's clear the campaign should have mounted a stronger effort to get to absentee voters. In addition, the Britt campaign's mail was largely targeted at the left, when Britt needed to craft a message that would play well with more moderate voters. That said, given how far Britt had to come from behind, his close finish with Leno was remarkable.

"Given that he was out of politics for 10 years and that he finished within a point and a half of Leno, that is a victory," Sup. Aaron Peskin said.

Others, though, say Leno's win has less to do with progressive reform. "[Leno]'s truly independent. He did not win with either [the machine or the Ammiano insurgent left]," Robert Barnes, Leno's campaign director, told us. "In fact, both of those factions worked against him. Mark Leno had to knit together and go outside of those to forge a district-wide coalition."

"Voters are looking for a new way," he added. "They're not going with the old way and not convinced that Tom and the others have a new way. They're looking for something they perceive as truly independent."

Yet Ammiano and his allies can claim some significant victories. The passage of Proposition D, which gives the Board of Supervisors three appointments to the Planning Commission, and the victory of 12 reformers for 24 elected seats on the Democratic County Central Committee, indicate a continuing antimachine mood among the voters.

Overall, progressives said they were pleased. "We're getting close, but we're going to misfire from time to time," Ammiano said. "The jury's out – on everybody and everything."

Peskin said he thinks the true indicator of the health of the reform movement was Proposition D and the Adachi campaign: "We won two and a half out of three," he said. "With Adachi, D, and DCCC – it's as good as it's been in a decade."

One of the few truly disturbing results was the overwhelming loss of Proposition C, which would have allowed noncitizens to serve on city commissions. In liberal San Francisco, more than 68 percent of the voters rejected the idea.