By MADELEINE BAIR
The race for District 9 Supervisor is in its final months, and along the main corridor of the Mission District, storefronts are brandishing their allegiances. One market facade displays a sign for David Campos, while the taqueria next door promotes Mark Sanchez. A sign for Eric Quezada is taped beside an advertisement for international calling cards. Eva Royale and Eric Storey have their storefronts too.
If window signs measure popularity, District 9 is up for grabs.
Candidate Sanchez, now president of the Board of Education, was hoping to change that Wednesday night by hosting a party at a Mission District music club.
Competing against five others for the seat, including a police commissioner and several progressive activists, Sanchez is widely viewed as one of the standouts in the crowded race, endorsed by the Sierra Club and the San Francisco teachers’ union. He is the only one to hold elected office and one of just two to live in the Mission District rather than the more affluent Portola and Bernal Heights neighborhoods.
But at the recent weeknight fundraiser, the signs of a promising campaign were nowhere to be found.
An hour into the event at El Rio, the South Mission bar, a jazz quartet played bebop in a side room empty but for a woman sitting on the edge of the stage. A couple of Mark Sanchez signs leaning against a wall was the only hint that this was not an after-hours jam session.
“Not a lot of people here,” said Luis Barahona, smoking a cigarette on the back patio. He supports Sanchez’s progressive politics, but lives in another district.
“My son’s in the band,” said an older man with red cheeks sharing the patio. “It’s my birthday,” he continued, as a way of apologizing for not knowing the band’s name.
Several jazz standards later, the candidate showed up and so did a handful of friends and supporters. Just as many, perhaps, as jazz fans from the front bar who heard that the famed bassist, Marcus Shelby, was part of the band.
No one collected money at the fundraiser, and merely a handful of curious voters showed up. But as admirers approached Shelby after his set to praise his style, they may have noticed the basket of Mark Sanchez pins along the way.