See how they run: Mayor Breed, back from China, works from home

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Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: London Breed. Read the rest of the series here.

Visit the zoo and make a plan to see the pandas, and you may notice: They don’t do much. They’re rare and amazing, but content to sit in their enclosures and eat the up to 84 pounds of bamboo they require for sustenance every day, leaving zoo-goers with a sense that the visit ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Sometimes, so goes City Hall.

Mission Local is today starting a new series in which we follow all of the major mayoral candidates with dispatches from the campaign trail — Mayor London Breed, former supervisor and interim mayor Mark Farrell, Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, and Board President Aaron Peskin. We’ll follow one candidate every day for one week, another the next week, and so on.

This week, it’s Breed. But, fresh off of an 11-hour flight from Shanghai that touched down at SFO Sunday at 1:40 p.m., Breed is taking the day, presumably jetlagged, and working from home — busy with Zoom meetings and (private) city operations, but little in the way of campaigning. 

“She just arrived yesterday, so she’s spending the day getting ready for the coming week,” said Noel Sanchez, a mayoral spokesperson. “That includes getting briefings, reading all the briefing materials, and also meeting with staff on what transpired last week.”

Still, the race for Room 200, 198 days away, goes on: The mayor will on Tuesday join a merchant walk in Chinatown and a “small business boogie” in the Tenderloin, attend the SFFILM Festival Wednesday, and generally begin shaking hands and kissing babies.

“We have endorsements that are coming up, we have fundraising that is continuing every week with house parties, we have debates that are starting in a few weeks,” said Joe Arellano, her campaign spokesperson. “It’s really all of the above. We have meetings all day on the campaign side.”

The campaign season is kicking off early — debates generally take place over the summer or after Labor Day — but candidates need three public debates under their belts to qualify for matching funds from the city, and there is an incentive to check those off and start working the field.

Also: The groups hosting the debates will want to begin spending money and endorsing their preferred candidates.

Jim Ross, a longtime political consultant, said the “real point right now” of debates is to sort out endorsements and start bankrolling candidates. Groups will want “some juicy tidbits that they can use” on mailers, flyers, and ads, and will hope to secure and boost positive media coverage.

“It has nothing to do with discourse and democracy,” added another consultant, who did not wish to be named. “It’s, ‘Can we have our people on the street and holding signs?’”

TogetherSF Action, the outfit funded by billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz and led by former Breed and Farrell aide Kanishka Cheng — dubbed one of the city’s top movers and shakers by the San Francisco Chronicle today — is hosting a debate soon, likely on May 20. 

The big money group, one of several intertwined organizations that has spent handsomely in city politics over the last four years, is predicted to endorse Farrell. Groups like TogetherSF and ally GrowSF, which is predicted to go for Breed, will want to “get their endorsements down and start pounding people over the head” with mailers and phone calls as quickly as possible, said Jim Stearns, Peskin’s campaign consultant.

Most candidates will attend TogetherSF’s debate, but Peskin has asked the group to promise an independent moderator and to ask the same questions of all the candidates, among other conditions, before accepting their invitation; that comes after the group’s chief community officer, Margaux Kelly, participated in a protest at Peskin’s campaign kick-off. Safaí is waiting on those proposed changes before deciding whether he, too, will participate, his campaign manager said.

The Eastern Neighborhood Democratic Club is also hosting a May debate, though the exact date is unclear — possibly May 9, if enough candidates can make it then. Bruce Agid, the club’s president, is a Breed supporter, and the club is likely to pull her way.

Those will be the first of many, many forums — but forums don’t necessarily make a candidate. 

Look back to 2011, said Stearns. It was the last competitive election with a similar timeline, and it featured dozens and dozens of debates.

“What was hilarious about that was there were like 100 debates and forums, and Ed Lee attended almost none of them,” said Stearns. “The guy in the lead decided, ‘I’m not attending any debates.’ These 10 candidates were arguing with each other and Ed Lee was never there.”

“There will be a point where you can go to a debate or forum every single night,” added Ross — a good time, for political groupies.

“The debates in San Francisco are fun,” he said. “The supporters show up, there are demonstrations, people put up signs. It’s a lot of fun — for everybody but the candidate.”