The conventional wisdom regarding low-turnout local elections is that they favor older, whiter, more conservative homeowners. At the same time, they also lend themselves to volatility and erratic outcomes; something as incongruous as 500 bike messengers voting in a bloc could swing a race.
Around 105,000 votes have been counted so far — not quite 21 percent. There are some 111,000 outstanding votes, meaning the ceiling for turnout looks like it’ll fall shy of 43 percent. These are not vast numbers; by Tuesday’s end, the young poll worker at my neighborhood garage seemed to have gotten most of the way through the novel she was reading when I said hello in the morning. The receipt hanging outside the polling place today revealed only 22 people voted there on Election Day.
With 111,000 votes outstanding and most voters having opted to not participate, it is a stretch to begin making grand and binding statements about the hearts and minds of San Franciscans. In eight months’ time, vastly more city residents will go to the polls; it will be a wholly different electorate.
And yet, we can begin to see what worked in this election and what did not. And, if these results hold up, the city’s moderate power structure has, at last, found a way to crack the Democratic County Central Committee and take control of the local party.
The “Democrats for Change” currently holds 21 of the 24 seats. Of the “Labor & Working Families” slate, only Jane Kim, John Avalos and Connie Chan would finish in the money if the race were called now.
Backers of the “Democrats for Change” slate had told me they hoped to win 10 seats on the DCCC. They cleared that bar by enough to graze the lighting fixtures.
Yes, early vote-by-mail ballots tend to lean heavily conservative — and a couple of thousand votes separate candidates on the tail end of qualifying from those hovering well out of contention. With many votes outstanding, this may yet tighten into a less-lopsided outcome. But a large shift would be a mathematical oddity. For the most part, voters stayed home, and the young lady working the polls finished reading her novel. Even 500 bike messengers might not be able to make a dent in this one.
In 2016, the city’s progressives were vastly outspent and ran a slate of well-known current and former local politicians for DCCC — and won handily. In 2020, the same situation unfolded, and the city’s lefties did even better. But, this year, the script has been flipped. At least, so far.
The “why” is not yet clear. Vastly outspending your opponent by perhaps a 5:1 margin doesn’t hurt, but past moderate slates were lavishly backed by tech money and old money and outspent opponents prodigiously — and failed dramatically.
What changed? Well, personnel changed: The well-known DCCC candidates voters backed in 2016 included John Burton, Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty and Aaron Peskin — who was the shot-caller orchestrating that campaign. Peskin, who was focusing heavily in 2024 on passing the housing bond Proposition A, was not strategically involved in this year’s DCCC race. And, it seems, the successor veteran politicos running for DCCC do not have the pull of their forebears.
Also, it’s not 2016 anymore: After years of San Francisco, deservingly or not, being reduced in the national and local eye to Doom Loop City, the message of “change” appears to have resonated. These candidates talked about issues like the fentanyl scourge and crime and safety and other matters that are relevant to San Franciscans now. While the campaign material was reductive, even facile, it at least appears to have jibed with what’s on voters’ minds now. To paraphrase a line from “The Big Lebowski,” Say what you will, but it is an ethos.
On the contrary, as we’ve written before, it’s not so much that progressive ideas aren’t resonating with the voting public, it’s that progressives don’t seem to have any ideas right now. It’s not clear how they’d handle the drug crisis or homelessness, or patch up the Giants’ starting rotation. The pitch to voters for the Labor & Working Families slate appeared to begin and end with the fact that the opponents were subsidized by tech billionaires.
That’s factually accurate. But that and a dollar gets you a cup of coffee. “Look at who’s donating to those guys,” once again, has not worked out as a viable electioneering strategy.
The push, funded by those same billionaires, to oust two sitting judges has gone far less swimmingly. Judge Michael Begert is sitting at 59 percent of the vote over Chip Zecher, and Judge Patrick Thompson is holding a far less commanding 53-47 lead over Jean Roland. The slash-and-burn approach that has, thus far, worked wonders in the DCCC race did not seem to take hold here.
The dichotomy is jarring. Perhaps vastly asymmetric spending works more in a contest with zero press and for a body — the DCCC — that even educated San Franciscans often have no idea exists, and are bewildered to find themselves voting for.
Mayor London Breed’s ballot measures C, E and F are, as anticipated, all comfortably ahead. Proposition B, the bête noire of the mayor and Supervisor Matt Dorsey, is failing by a 2-to-1 margin.
Many political players on all sides of San Francisco’s political spectrum told me that they feared that people, driven by the polls to vote for giving police more power (Proposition E) and subjecting welfare recipients to drug screening (Proposition F), would be loath to generously approve a $300 million housing bond. Even mayoral allies bemoaned that London Breed was not just neglecting her housing bond, but undermining it (Mission Local’s Xueer Lu says the mayor dropped by at the Proposition A party last night … for five minutes).
And yet, Proposition A is on track to win.
It requires 66.67 percent to pass. It has 67.74. We need the extra decimal place here.
Ballot drops throughout Wednesday only marginally changed the initial outcomes. The next tranche of votes will be released at 4 p.m. on Thursday. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
An earlier version of this column ran Tuesday evening as part of overall election coverage.
SF’s progressive leaders are perceived as having no new ideas or solutions to the monumental problems facing the city. Safe injection sites? Reduced sentences? Affordable housing projects that never get built after 5, 10, 20 years? Sorry, not super appealing or impressive to most people. In fact, who are the progressive leaders these days?
If a citizen does not exercise the voting franchise, he/she should not
complain. Casting a blank ballot is in itself an exercise of that right
to vote.
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing
You gotta have something if you want to be with me
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing
You gotta have something if you want to be with me
I’m not trying to be your hero
Cause that zero is too cold for me, brrr
I’m not trying to be your highness
Cause that minus is too low to see, yeah
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing
And I’m not stuffing, believe you me
Don’t you remember I told ya
I’m a soldier in the war on poverty, yeah, yes I am
–Billy Preston, Bruce Carleton Fisher