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: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.
Ahsha Safaí was in and out of four back-to-back events Friday evening, from a Chinese banquet hall in South San Francisco to a packed artist studio near Eighth and Folsom streets.
In the past week, he went to his campaign’s 100th meet-and-greet at a cocktail bar, dropped by a law-school graduation party of a former staffer, and appeared at three 50th anniversary galas for nonprofits in childcare, early education and the arts.
At most, he joined his City Hall colleagues to address the crowd and hand out certificates. At the Wah Mei anniversary gala on Friday night, he was also joined by his mayoral opponents Daniel Lurie and Aaron Peskin.
After brief greetings and lots of photos, he reminded people, mostly in glittering gowns and dress slacks, that he is running for mayor. “We are getting our momentum at the right moment,” Safaí said to one attendee who asked how the campaign was going.
He made sure to touch on issues that could appeal to each specific crowd.
At the Children’s Council gala, for example, he talked to attendees about his track record of helping the Mission Childcare Consortium in his district to purchase its building in 2017, preventing it from closing down.
“I put local artists’ works in my office,” he told The Drawing Room owner Renée DeCarlo at the ArtSpan anniversary auction on Friday night, after seeing bidding for an art piece growing from $300 to $4,000.
Safaí could use as much support as he can get, as recent polls continue to have him trailing behind the mayor and three other major contenders. In the political group GrowSF’s poll released last week, he received just 9 percent of the first-choice votes. An earlier San Francisco Chronicle ranked-choice-voting poll in February showed that only 8 percent of likely voters ranked Safaí as their first choice.
But the mayoral candidate, still awaiting endorsement results from his labor allies, didn’t seem defeated.
His consultancy team has conducted their own polls, Safaí said, and found that while his performance isn’t ideal when tracking “pure name recognition,” the numbers “go up dramatically” when the voters learn more about his track record and immigrant and labor background, the candidate said.
“On straight name recognition, yeah, I have work to do,” Safaí added. “But the challenge is getting out there to tell your story.”
Safaí also noted his name doesn’t come with “high negatives,” meaning his unfavorability ratings are low.
Not so for other candidates. Safaí made a dig at Mayor London Breed’s high unfavorability rate: In both the Chronicle’s poll and a poll from GrowSF, Breed had double-digit unfavorability ratings — 71 percent in the Chronicle poll and 63 percent in the GrowSF poll.
But do most voters vote on name recognition, or will they research the candidates’ background? Safaí likes to believe they’ll do the work.
“San Francisco voters are very well-informed. They spend the time to be informed on the issues,” he said. “But that’s why it’s our job to raise the money to do the grassroots campaign.”
Either way, no one is going to win outright in this race, he said.
Although it was too early for Safaí to reveal a ranked-choice voting strategy, he will definitely have one, and plans to have conversation with three other candidates in the last two or three months of the campaign. But a strategy with the mayor appears unlikely, he said.
“I feel good,” he concluded, confident to stay in the race till the end. “We have a lot more momentum to go, quite frankly.”
There are still six months left until the election and I’m already exhausted and bored by the non stop coverage of the mayoral and supervisor elections. Can ML find other news to cover once in a while?