We humans are creatures of habit. When my parents’ favorite Chinese restaurant closed and a new one opened in its place, their behavior never changed. It’s as if the car drove itself to the parking lot at 41st Street; they somnambulistically ambled out, got a table, and even kept ordering the same stuff.
San Francisco’s unfolding mayoral race emanates the same sort of vibes. Mayor London Breed, Ahsha Safaí, Daniel Lurie — and, soon enough, Mark Farrell — are making their play for the coalition of San Francisco voters who have backed every mayor going back to Frank Jordan. That’d be Chinese voters, white Democratic homeowners, older white renters and Republicans. That was the winning combination for moderates Jordan, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee and London Breed.
But it won’t be this year. Or at least, not just these groups. And that’s because we’re now electing mayors and other citywide offices in presidential election years. Instead of less than half the voters deciding the city’s next mayor, San Francisco could crack 80 percent participation this year — easily.
With the bulk of our serious mayoral candidates tripping over themselves to tack to the right, one needn’t be a political scientist to see wide-open lanes on not just the left, but the center-left. And yet, it increasingly appears that nobody will materialize to claim those lanes. Mayoral candidates needn’t declare until June, but a candidate who isn’t independently wealthy will need time to raise funds and get the ball rolling. The actual people who’d balance out this race — namely Supervisor Aaron Peskin and City Attorney David Chiu — haven’t yet indicated that they’ll run (and may never do so).
Things worked out okay for my aging parents when King Yen became Holly’s Mandarin and they just kept going and doing the same thing, regardless. But “same as it ever was” will not be a winning mantra for this year’s crop of mayoral contenders. There’s a whole contingent of new voters — new sorts of voters — that the victor will need to court.
“There will be another 250,000 younger white renters, non-Asian people of color — that kind of universe,” says veteran political consultant Jim Ross. “They probably won’t vote in March, but they’re certainly going to show up in November to vote against Donald Trump. And nobody is talking to them right now.”
Instead, candidates are fighting over the same sliver of voters. But the 30 to 45 percent they are not catering to are going to be the deciders. For all the talk about this city lurching to the right, it’s the lefties who’ll decide our next mayor.
San Francisco considers itself a liberal place, and its struggles have long been seized upon by reactionaries to discredit the very concept of liberal government. There may be no other city in which the theatrical fecklessness of a local school board has been used to discredit the national Democratic Party.
Extrapolating national trends and moods based on the behavior of San Franciscans is a dodgy proposition. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that the city isn’t as liberal as either its most ardent supporters or fervent detractors would claim; that list of our last 30 years’ worth of mayors would be Exhibit A for that. Going back to the early 1990s, San Francisco voters have chosen citywide leaders who generally favor less regulation and taxation on businesses, a police-oriented approach to crime and disorder, tougher sanctions on the homeless, and less bountiful general city services.
Let’s call it what it is: These are Republican positions. But is San Francisco electing Republicans? Lord, no; a candidate presenting themselves to the city’s electorate as a Republican is in the same position as a man showing up to a blind date with dog shit slathered on his pants. And that’s because the issues on which San Francisco’s citizens and their leaders are unabashedly liberal are not municipal matters — land-use, budgeting and other stuff we fight about, bitterly — but, rather, social issues and state and federal affairs. That’s stuff like gun control, abortion rights and minority rights. None of these are wedge issues or even controversial matters here in San Francisco (anymore), and they’re all largely irrelevant to local governing.
And yet, they’re impossible to decouple: A Republican who sorts their recycling; does yoga; believes in women’s bodily autonomy; believes in LGBTQ, immigrant and minority rights; doesn’t think everyday citizens should be allowed to possess military arsenals and takes canvas bags to the grocery store would be hard to discern, ideologically, from a San Francisco moderate thought-leader. But he or she is not getting elected here until re-registering. And probably not even then.
San Francisco last elected a Republican mayor in 1959; this city’s voters tired of the GOP generations before the national party became a fascist death cult. But would we elect a candidate with liberal bona fides on state and national issues who pushes GOP-like policies locally? We’ve done so, again and again and again.
And yet, San Francisco voters also elected liberal firebrand Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2019, right? Yes, that happened.
But don’t forget that Boudin received only 36 percent of the first-place votes in our ranked-choice system; his more conventional opponents received the vast majority of first-place votes. Boudin’s challengers did him a huge favor by failing to agree on a ranked-choice strategy that would ensure one of the more moderate candidates — who, by far, received the most votes — came out the winner.
Having achieved office in this manner, Boudin was cooked the moment a recall qualified and he was facing an up-or-down vote, running against himself. Boudin lost the recall by a 55-45 clip — a percentage that roughly mirrors how progressive standard-bearers have done in consequential citywide races here for quite some time.
In 2022, that wasn’t enough of a voter bloc to prevent Boudin’s banishment to academia. But, in the context of the 2024 mayoral race, it represents a significant swath of the electorate. To date, nobody is connecting with them.
San Franciscans do not have a track record of electing populists as mayor. But, given the chance, we do seem to be suckers for economic populism. City voters have thrown down, handily, for every measure Supervisor Dean Preston has put on the ballot; he’s 5-for-5.
Preston is facing a heavily funded effort to oust him and a high-profile opponent in Bilal Mahmood, who described Preston as “deeply unpopular.” Maybe so: But San Franciscans like to vote for his stuff — and District 5 voters love it. That’s interesting and complicated: It’s harder to assess where San Francisco is going when people seem so unclear on where it’s been.
It has been said that progressive leaders aren’t jumping into the mayor’s race because their ideas wouldn’t resonate with voters. But that’s facile — and the truth is probably worse for city progressives. Right now, they don’t seem to have ideas.
Even reductive or transparently political initiatives supported by the mayor and her ideological brethren are likely to succeed, and not just because of the high-decibel, high-dollar efforts behind them. It’s also notable that nobody is articulating a coherent alternative. Mayoral candidates are even running up each others’ backs and stealing each others’ stuff.
As the old saying goes, “We have to do something. And this is something.” Or, as the mayor starkly put it, “We have to do more. And Proposition E is more.”
Well, it’s definitely something.
Humans are creatures of habit. Left-leaning city voters have long since grown inured to their chosen mayoral candidate losing. Now, however, it looks like city lefties’ choice will be the winner.
That’s hilarious, when you think about it. That, too, is definitely something.
I used to consider myself a prog but the lack of interest in policy / understanding 2nd and 3rd order effects, endless contortions and smugness in place of humility to admit when things don’t work… These are not qualities becoming of a leader. Folks vote and run for office on the basis of how magnanimous it makes them seem. I’m tired of it. Stop using cheap language about republicans, false equivalences to the War on Drugs, etc and give a reasoned policy analysis. Thanks, low information voters.
It’s crying wolf and counterproductive calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you on every little thing some kind of secret Republican or cryptofascist. The normie liberal Democrats in San Francisco can look around at the rest of the state and the rest of the country and know where we stand. Frankly, the far left in SF and elsewhere has more in common with the far right than it does with us.
I think your point about the changed electorate is important, Joe, but I’m not sure it cuts in a firmly pro-progressive direction. As you also point out, the city’s progressive camp has no new ideas, and worse they seem to be convinced that anyone unhappy with the state of the city is essentially a MAGA-hatter. (The school board recall was massively popular in a way that cut across all the city’s demographic boundaries, but the city’s progressive leadership has learned exactly zero lessons from it, preferring to tar parents – like me – as racists.) So blithely assuming those extra voters are going to skew SF-progressive… I’m not there yet.
This is not to say that the moderates have a lot of new ideas either (great, let’s redo the war on drugs, again; let’s make homelessness illegal, again) but at least they’re acknowledging that a lot of city systems are broken even if their solutions are retreads. And that will appeal to a lot of these presidential-year voters.
Luis —
It’s a fair point, but we can roughly gauge the demographics of the folks who’ll show up in high-turnout elections. It’s a wide-open race, but I think it’s fair to say that nobody is happy with the way things are. That’s why even the longtime incumbents and the vestiges of the status quo are claiming to be the “change” candidates. What “change” looks like will be interesting to see.
I agree with you that people writing off the school board recall as a mere vestige of a nationwide reactionary campaign and those who voted for it as useful idiots are ignoring San Francisco’s facts on the ground — and doing themselves no favors.
JE
I guess one of the tough problems in talking about this town is that in the way “progressive” is used nationally, all those new voters will be 1000% progressive, but in the very specific way we use progressive in S.F., their allegiances are less clear.
One of the hard things about the school board vote is that we haven’t been able to have a reasonable discussion about it afterwards. There’s no political home in the two S.F. camps for the many parents I talk to who say “yes, racism is a real and deep problem in the school system; and also we need competent people who take that racism seriously in the context of the district’s many other challenges.” Same problem with policing, really – no home for “SF cops really should conduct fewer shootings, chases, and racist text messages; but that doesn’t mean open drug sales and bike chop shops on every corner are good either”.
I had hopes that ranked choice voting would allow some alternatives to float up but just seems like you then get slammed from both sides in a recall.
Those lines are what you hear from the major SF moderate candidates. There is no “getting slammed from both sides” unless you accept the progressives’ consistent misrepresentation of what folks on the liberal wing of the SF Democratic Party are actually saying.
What do we really know about tnis out-of-nowhere guy Bilal Mahmoud? In his press, spcial media and campaign lit he calls himself a “neuro scientist” but his highest level of education is a B.S. in Human Biology from Stanford. Also: the oft touted magical resume fluffer that “I worked in the Obama administration” is another of Mahmoud’s talking points. Exactly what did he do and for how long? Was it an internship? Did he cross paths with Vikrum Aiyer (Breed’s failed appointee who was made to withdraw after it was discovered that he improperly billed the federal government for his UBER rides, dry cleaning, coffee shops and dining out) ? Word has it that Mahmoud was an intern for a brief period during the Obama years.
Yes, I agree it would be good to know more about him.
What would you like to know about him that you don’t currently know?
Greeny,
The posseur on the D-9 Supe race is guy named ‘Trevor Chandler’.
Tell me you can make-up a whiter name ?
Also, worked for Obama ?
Says his present occupation is ‘Public School Teacher’.
Word is that he was a Substitute for one day and paid union dues 30 days.
Didn’t get into how many Detention Halls he sat or fights be broke up in School Yard.
They barely try with their subterfuge nowadays.
I recall Willie Brown arranged a stay for Gerald Green at Harvard in the Shorenstein School of …
wait, didn’t need to say more after I typed the word ‘Shorenstein’.
Katie Porter for U.S. Senator.
She really is the really really real deal.
Go Niners !!
Cindy Sheehan couldn’t get the time of day from most progressives or media in the city when she ran for Congress against Nancy Pelosi. We were amazed she won as many votes as she did.
I had a favorite cartoon from that period of a man in a crowd wearing a t-shirt that said “Billions for war and all I got was this t-shirt.”
It seems, superficially, everyone today lives in a matrix. We drink from paper straws that we shove into a plastic top. And we are supposed to be saving the planet one baby step at a time.
Politics— the science of who gets what, when, where, and how has, in this city as elsewhere, been perfected by moneyed interests to divide people and keep them compliant.
It wasn’t always so, nor (optimistically) is it inevitable. Harvey Milk was a uniter. Might we one day see others like him?
It is quite clear to me that while all governments move further right, the masses are mostly moving left and seeking new solutions.
I am definitely looking for a truly progressive candidate. Fair, practical, skilled management, not developer-funded, and ruthlessly committed to honesty and a healthy, participatory community with very high standards on environment and social justice. Put that hat in the left lane and I’m here to help.
I thought Frank Jordan was a Republican. He sure acted like one in office.
Also, the School Board deserves any and all scorn heaped upon them. Most of them are only there to test their name recognition, in a misplaced effort to achieve higher office.
It is insanely frustrating. The City government is dysfunctional and corrupt, there is detailed documentation of this in both the SF Chronicle and Mission Local (insane amounts of time to hire people, to approve permits, terrible code.) None of it has to be this way. San Francisco desperately needs someone to reorganize the whole bureaucracy from the bottom up. But the only “serious” candidates have to already be in government and so can not call out the whole thing as rotten.
the twin goals of revenue \ and bureaucracy are the mother’s milk of San Francisco politics; they are, for the lack of a better narrative, the actual goals. upending the attendant corruption – like the way Daniel Lurie has spoken of – is tantamount to overturning the apple cart, and there’s too many invested in the status quo.
Bravo, Two Beers. Your comments are right out of my mouth. When I tell people that San Francisco is not a “progressive” or a “leftish” city, they object but mostly because they too are “moderates” or what we used to call, right-wing reactionaries. I too believe that Nixon was our last Liberal president! The Democratic party has tilted so far to the right that it is indistinguishable from Republicans circa 80’s.
It’s easy to stand for gay rights or gun control as neither of these causes has any fiscal ramifications but good luck asking for housing the homeless, building affordable housing, providing healthcare for all, or improving public schools. That’s when liberal Democrats like Breed and Wiener show their true right-wing colors because god forbid if they spend one red cent to improve common people’s lives.
Thanks, Joe for a great article. Long ago, I decided to stop using the term “moderate” for these right-wing conservatives. I hope that reading your article would encourage others to do the same. There’s nothing moderate about enriching billionaires while starving the needy.
Lurie should declare that he’d be willing to accept Breed’s undated letter of resignation at this time.
Whoooaaahhh !!
You called David Chiu a ‘Progressive’ ?
His first business had the head of the Christian Coalition on its Board of Directors as only one of many Right-Wingers.
One of their first big contracts was for $350,000 to train volunteers to the top staff of a big time Political Campaign that ended at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yeah, Chiu may have made the difference in Gore/Bush.
Samson Wong wrote a story about it (‘Guns, God and the GOP’) in Asian Weekly tracing David’s path upward on the backs of Right-Wing preachers and gun nuts.
In San Francisco and later, Sacramento, Chiu played ‘Sundance Kid’ to Scott Wiener’s ‘Butch Cassidy’ wiping out over 2,000 units of Rent-Control housing across from SF State.
This is a ‘Progressive’ ?
Time for a Woman !!!
Gimme Krissy Keefer
Gimme Connie Chan
Gimme Rebecca Solnit
And, gimme Katie Porter for U.S. Senator !!
Anybody but Breed is in my voter handbook.
now there’s Mark Ferrell!
As a senior citizen … born/raised/politically seasoned, in San Francisco … I have long contended that we are gilding-the-lily, when it comes to angst over the imaginary “tug-o’-war,” between Liberals and Progressives.
Since my teen years, I have enjoyed working on political campaigns – be they for issues, or candidates. I could stuff envelopes, and make phone calls, with the best of them. I’ve belonged to several of the Democratic clubs. I’m enthusiastic about going out on voter registration drives.
In the late ’90’s, I began to hear the word “progressive,” come into the discourse. “Progressive.” Sounds good … “progress” is a good thing. But, I wasn’t seeing any change on the horizon.
Confused, I asked the late, wonderful, Jane Morrison to explain. (I think I may have asked in much the same way that a young child might ask where babies come from. I didn’t understand.) I can’t recall exactly how she phrased her response. But, my impression was that “Jane doesn’t know, either.” Also, I thought that if SHE didn’t know there was no reason to worry about it.
At that time I was aware of (then) Congressman Bernie Sanders. After Senator Jim Jeffords, who dissociated with the GOP, and opted to caucus with the Democrats … tipping the majority … announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election, I hoped that Sanders would seek the office.
When Senator Sanders threw his hat into the presidential ring, I began to hear that word, again. “Progressive.” Hearing his campaign interviews/debates, I thought “Well, yeah. Of course.”
San Francisco liberalism has ALWAYS been “progressive,” as the label suggests, today. Relax. We don’t need more “tugs-o’-war,” over labels.
(I have another screed, ready to go, over district-supervisorial-elections, if you’d care to hear it.)
Really going to hinge on media strategy, I think. In the absence of clear signals from community leaders and representatives, and given the very crowded field, the affluent renting professional constituency will have to lean on big media institutions to get information on who is competent and who will look after their interests. This is a year where the Chronicle’s endorsements and coverage might actually become really consequential. Candidates’ public record on stuff like interpersonal conduct is also going to matter more, because for unsophisticated voters that’s an easy heuristic for gauging trustworthiness. Going to be an interesting race to be sure.
“it’s the lefties who’ll decide our next mayor”
In a sense, although by national and state standards Brown, Newsom, Lee and Breed are “lefties” anyway. It is only from the extremity of SF politics that such Democrats are seen as right-wing.
My recollection is that mayoral elections can be close. After all both Ammiano and Gonzalez came close to winning, the former as a write-in. So another way of looking at it is that the Progressives and the Moderates are broadly in balance.
And guess what that means? That the 10% of SF voters who are registered Republicans actually decide!
MTN —
The point you make about Brown, Newsom et al. supposedly being “lefties” by national standards is addressed, in depth, in the column. Ammmiano did not come close to winning. He got just over 40 percent of the vote. Gonzalez got just over 47 percent. Like I write, the 55-45 tilt that doomed Chesa Boudin is roughly indicative of how progressive standard bearers have done in consequential citywide elections for quite some time.
Best,
JE
Ammiano was able to get Brown into a runoff with a write-in campaign and established the 40% bench even after being outspent by multiples. That campaign fed the next year’s progressive sweep of the Board of Supervisors by mobilized residents. The productive years of 2001-3 plus an independence from the nonprofits is how Gonzalez raised Ammiano 7.5%.
I remember quite fondly the day that Eric Quezada and the professional Mission Latinos slunk in with their tails between their legs and requisite toddlers in strollers as props to make peace with Matt after endorsing Ammiano in the primary.
Gonzalez’ close call so shocked the establishment Democrats that they organized shortly after to strategize on how to contain the threat. Wasn’t there a meeting organized by Fisher sometime around 2005-6. around Daly’s last campaign?
After that point, once Chiu became Board President, the complexion of Board politics changed. Progressives were relegated to the politically connected city funded nonprofits and SEIU under the proviso that they disconnect from organized residents.
Leno came close to putting together a liberal/progressive coalition that came within spitting distance of taking out Breed and the machine. But that was testament to Mark’s likable, approachable temperament and deft political skills.
When Campos failed to make the 40% bench against an empty suit like Haney, who was endorsed for supe by the progs, the prog obituary was written on the wall.
My prophesy after 2007 or so was that the professional progs were breaking their covenant with residents and that would lead to them being smitten at the ballot box. Ammiano said at the time that politics was cyclical. There is nothing cyclical about a line sloping negative over time.
That’s how we got nonprofit and labor funding technicians like Hillary Ronen, who makes Tom Ammiano look like Che Guevara, and risk an AIPAC supervisor.
With resident organizing, the only way to beat concentrated campaign money, atrophied, that capacity would need to be spun up and appear credible in a short amount of time to even approach the base we worked with in 2003 by fall campaign season unless someone with Leno’s profile can step in to build a slightly broader lib/prog coalition.
Avalos hit the 40% bench.
Jane Kim did slightly worse in SF 48.87 than in the Senate district 49.0 but notably exceeded Gonzalez’ high water mark.
And Campos’ 2:1 shellacking was all the more pathetic because it was in the east side Assembly district.
All fair and good. But taking your example of the 55-45 Chesa recall, is it not possible to see that vote breaking down as:
45% progressive Democrats.
45% moderate Democrats.
10% Republicans.
And again, taking our prior mayoral examples, Ammiano and Gonzalez might have won if all the city’s GOP voters had stayed home.
Any progressive candidate for mayor this year (and so far there are none, just like last time around) has to win an extra 5% to 10% from somewhere. And that leaves two questions:
1) Who is a credible left-wing candidate? I will go out on a limb here and say not Preston or Ronen. And
2) Where do those extra 5% to 10% of votes come from?
Well said, thanks Joe for your insightful commentary on our crazy little town. I wish a progressive would jump in already! So depressing that we may end up with defanged civilian oversight of the police and drones spying on us through our windows because no one has the courage to fight back. Add a potential return of the orange Cheeto for president and we have the makings of a coming inducing November 2”24 election. Keep educating em Joe!
I’m getting ready to leave the country and moving to Northern Spain but I hope Peskin steps up. Breed has been a nightmare. Her letters to members of the police commission of their own in advance resignation in case they disagree with her should disclude her from running. Our our memories that short?
Right on cue, as if to illustrate the contradictions in this article that are borne of our mangled and obfuscating political language, “Pelosi Calls on FBI to Investigate Alleged Links Between Russia and Pro-Palestine Protestors.”
These “moderate” Democrats would make Joe McCarthy blush.
Saying nice things about social issues (yet for some reason, rarely enacting legislation to further those causes) while serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful does not make a politician “moderate,” regardless of one’s party affiliation.
The terms “liberal” and “progressive” are not synonyms, and “progressive” as it is used today would be on the right end of traditional left politics (by many measures, Nixon would now be a progressive, nauseating as the thought might be).
Democrats and Republicans in office are not opponents; rather, they are rivals for favors from the wealthy and powerful, which is why both parties serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful, while differing on the symbolism, if not the actual substance, of social issues.
Mission Local writers: please, please, please stop using the word “moderate” to describe right-wing Democrats (the set of which, sadly, overlaps that party’s leadership).