As of Monday morning, the Department of Elections reports that only about 17 percent of outstanding ballots had trickled back to City Hall in advance of Tuesday’s primary. It has never been easier for San Franciscans to vote, but the vast majority of us haven’t done so yet, and probably won’t: 50 percent turnout seems a wild dream. A shade over 40 percent is a more tenable goal, but even that’s optimistic.
Elections are complicated, and discerning the will of the electorate even more so — but this much isn’t: Elections professionals say Californians’ apathy this election season is due to “organic reasons.” As in: A snoozer ballot.
San Francisco’s March 5 election “will have all the impact of a fart in the wind,” says veteran campaign strategist Jim Ross. “And people will move on to the next crisis in San Francisco.”
Well, perhaps so. But the impact of Tuesday’s election may hinge far less on what it decides than how it was decided. Thanks to Mission Local’s handy-dandy election dashboard, we can track the dollars going into every ballot proposition or candidate race. And there are a lot of them — it’s a soft-money Saturnalia.
There has always been money in San Francisco politics, but things have gotten to the point that billionaire investors are dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop on donations into municipal judge races. All told, more than $11 million has poured into this mid-year local election, with much of it emanating from the cadre of extremely wealthy donors deploying their money via the matryoshka of interconnected organizations that have dominated the last few election cycles.
In today’s column, we’ll examine some of the dynamics of Tuesday’s election and discuss some of the burning issues our data team will analyze.
But we’ll put the No. 1-with-a-bullet outcome right here at the top, and this holds true regardless of who or what wins: The stunning flow of money into a lowly midterm San Francisco election portends truly leviathan amounts of cash inundating the crowded and high-turnout November presidential election. If a baseball analogy helps, here you go: When your journeyman utility infielder gets an $11 million contract, your star slugger can expect one exponentially higher.
Wealthy backers lavishly funding a player in the political game is a move as old as politics itself. But today’s next-level spending, on races up-ballot and down-ballot and heretofore largely apolitical, is an attempt at consolidation of power.
It’s not akin to paying a single player or even fielding an entire team. It’s more like buying the league.
Contributions to San Francisco Superior Court judge candidates
Source: California Secretary of State. February 26, 2024. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
Is San Francisco truly a liberal place? Is it veering to the right? These will be the questions fueling the hot takes coming out of Tuesday’s election.
Like almost every major city in America, San Francisco is a capital-D Democratic stronghold. As we’ve written before, national-level wedge issues, by and large, aren’t in play here. Abortion rights, minority and LGBTQ rights, gun control — these are not the matters dividing San Franciscans.
Commingling issues like these with the municipal matters that do divide San Franciscans — land-use, homeless policy, crime and punishment — presents a skewed picture of the city’s ideology. Politicians with liberal bona fides on state and national issues, and conservative views on local matters of law and order, taxation and regulation, have been steadily elected on a citywide basis, going back decades.
So, no matter what happens on Tuesday, it’ll be hard to read the political pulse of a city based on the outcome of a low-turnout primary election. But it will be even harder to do so based on the outcome of the Democratic County Central Committee races.
What’s all this, then? The “DCCC” is, essentially, the local Democratic Party. And, in a city where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 9 to 1, it can be an influential body. There’s lots of arcana its members sift through, but the most forward-facing duty of the DCCC is to make election endorsements. In November, with perhaps 85 percent of the electorate clamoring to the polls and many thousands of low-information voters seeking the capital-D Democratic Party imprimatur, it’s good to be the branch of San Francisco Democrats controlling that party.
San Francisco’s more left-leaning faction has, for years, held the majority of the DCCC’s seats. Even well-funded attempts to unseat them have, in recent election cycles, failed. So, this time, the money got ridiculous; candidates are bagging hundreds of thousands of dollars for a volunteer position on the DCCC.
The slate of candidates calling themselves “Democrats for Change” has out-fundraised the slate calling itself “Labor & Working Families” by a factor of 3 to 1. And that’s just the money we can readily see: When you factor in the bevy of fly-by-night slate mailers piling up in your recycling container, the ratio would figure to be a bit more like 5 to 1.
The “Democrats for Change” are heavily funded by the tech and old money interests backing the ever-expanding network of interlocking “SomethingSF” groups. The “Labor & Working Families” slate is surely funded, in part, by working families but — surprise, surprise, surprise — much of its money is derived from organized labor.
But can randos simply buy a seat on the DCCC? This question is tied to the earlier, more fundamental one — are San Franciscans liberal?
In recent years, liberals dominated the low-turnout DCCC elections. Was that because voters wanted liberals calling the shots locally, or were voters simply voting for current and former politicians whose names they know?
Both of these can be true. But, truth be told, the latter seems more true. More than campaign dollars, the factors behind a successful DCCC run are often remarkably, even depressingly, pedestrian. Name recognition is a major, major factor; city politicos were only half-joking that DCCC incumbent Leah LaCroix benefited mightily from sharing a name with a popular brand of bubbly water. And it’s not just San Francisco voters who opt for the names they know, or even think they know. Political data maven Paul Mitchell ran for DCCC in Glendale 20 years ago. And he won — because he shares his name with a famous haircare magnate. “I bet I’d win because my name’s Paul Mitchell,” he said. “I was right.”
Glancing at past election slates, San Francisco DCCC candidates with more conventional American names tend to do better. So do candidates in careers involving teaching, green energy or other professions that voters like.
And, bottom line, candidates whose names appear at the very top or very bottom of the voluminous list of options do better than those stuck in the middle. Voter fatigue is real: In 2020, there were nearly 1.5 million undervotes for DCCC — meaning voters went through the list and picked the names they knew or liked, and didn’t vote for nearly as many candidates as they were entitled to.
“I bet I’d win because my name’s Paul Mitchell. I was right.”
Paul mitchell … no, not that paul mitchell
Tuesday’s election will pit the extremely well-funded and ubiquitous Democrats for Change slate against a Labor & Working Families slate with more recognizable names. This would appear to be your classic unstoppable force vs. immovable object matchup, and one will prevail. One slate or the other will better appeal to voters; big-name candidates will drag their lesser-known slate-mates across the finish line, and ultimately determine who controls the local Democratic party.
The conventional wisdom is that name recognition beats out big spending. But, this time, the spending is ludicrous. Even still, it’s just toothpaste money for the wealthy donors. It feels as if a political spendthrift Rubicon has been crossed.
So, what does all this matter? That depends on who you are. As far as November endorsements go, “If you ain’t for London Breed now, you’re not going to be after Tuesday,” sums up one longtime city politico. But a November DCCC endorsement could be important for mayoral contenders like Mark Farrell — or maybe even Aaron Peskin.
It will definitely be a major factor for all the down-ballot races, like the Board of Supervisors.
Here at Mission Local, in the coming days we’ll be analyzing how DCCC candidates did with relation to their dollars spent. We’ll also track how the dueling slates fared on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
Contributions to Democratic County Central Committee Candidates
Source: San Francisco Ethics Commission. Amounts include all donations of $100 or larger as of Jan. 20, 2024 and any donations above $1,000 as of March 2, 2024. Information on candidates’ slates obtained from their respective websites, Labor and Working Families and SF Democrats for Change. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
After Mission Local wrote that Mayor London Breed was pushing hard for donations to her own ballot propositions C, E and F — but not her $300 million affordable housing bond, Prop. A — a brace of donations came in to support the bond.
That bond requires two-thirds approval, and it remains to be seen if these late dollars make the difference. But low-turnout elections, such as Tuesday’s, tend to feature disproportionate returns from older voters, homeowners and conservatives — so these are bad signs.
Low-turnout elections are also susceptible to erratic and volatile outcomes. Somewhere on the ballot, that may play out, but nobody appears optimistic about Prop. A.
Prop. C would do away with transfer taxes in downtown office buildings being converted to residential use; the city economist has opined that it would do little to aid conversions, and potentially punch a hole in the city’s tax base. There is no well-funded opposition. If there had been, it likely wouldn’t pass. But there wasn’t.
The mayor’s marquee measures have been E, which would reduce police oversight and ease the ability to pursue nonviolent suspects and enact surveillance measures, and F, which would require recipients of cash welfare payments to be screened for illegal drugs, and enter treatment if they’re found to be using.
The mayor placed E and F on the ballot. And, in doing so, she created a brewing conundrum: The natural “yes” voters for Props. E and F are natural “no” voters for Prop. A. This harks to the situation two years ago, when voters opting to recall DA Chesa Boudin voted in strong numbers not to provide Muni with a $400 million infrastructure bond, tanking transit funding.
Every poll we’ve seen indicates E and F will win, handily. Which, again, portends poorly for Prop. A.
We ran a statistical analysis on that 2022 election, and we will do so again this year. As the numbers solidify in the coming days, we will track how voters’ position on any one ballot measure correlates with their position on others.
We will also analyze the effectiveness of various groups’ election endorsements. Which swaths of the city listened best to GrowSF, the Chronicle, the League of Pissed Off voters, etc.? Vamos a ver.
Onward to Tuesday. Don’t forget to vote.
There has always been a lot of money in San Francisco politics. It’s just that when employees of various nonprofits go “volunteering” on the weekends to elect themselves more contracts etc, all that free media is off the books.
Yeah, the millions in dark money pumped in by Galtian billionaire techbros so they can control all levels of local government is way outclassed by two or three scheming fixed-income seniors peddling godless vacancy control on behalf of the SFHRC on the sidewalk outside Rainbow on a Sunday morning.
Imagine thinking the prog machine is funded by people on social security when the TODCO exists. I couldn’t be so stupid.
when all you can do to combat the army of paid minimum wage workers who are mobilized by the billionaires to run educational classes for people interested in making the city better, free meals and drinks as neighborhood socials, tech meetups, and free coffee meet and greet with their candidates is to volunteer some of your own free time to drop off pamphlets or make calls. I just hope everyone selling out to the wealthy are getting paid handsomely since they have a history of breaking things and going fast to try to make a profit for themselves and they usually don’t mind who ends up getting hurt especially since they can always walk away with their own money and try again.
It’s been interesting watching SF become Orange County.
The old liberals will be mailing in their ballots, while the GrowSF crowd will be trying to find the app or social media site that allows them to vote.