Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: London Breed. Read earlier dispatches here.
Mayor London Breed is doing well in the money race. The November 2024 election is gearing up to be a monumentally costly venture, and already the five major contenders, plus several outside political action committees bolstering their designs on City Hall, have collectively raised $11.7 million.
New finance filings were released last week, showing totals through June 30. While Levi Strauss heir and Tipping Point CEO Daniel Lurie, the wealthiest person in the race, is self-funding his campaign and therefore miles ahead of the pack, Breed is ahead in another way.
Most direct fundraising, lowest average donation size
She has fundraised the most from San Franciscans giving directly to her campaign, a measure of strength because the contributions are capped at $500 per donor and indicate a large base of support. Her average donation size is the lowest, at $331, just $13 behind Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin.
Breed has the most donors overall, at roughly 2,800 (Breed’s campaign says it has 3,049 total donors; Mission Local is relying on city filings of contributions and removing duplicate names to arrive at a total). Breed’s overall fundraising, including dollars from the city’s public financing program, which rewards candidates with six-to-one matching funds, stands at $1.85 million.
Fundraising has been steady
Breed has also fundraised consistently. Her opponent Mark Farrell, the former District 2 supervisor, who served as caretaker mayor in 2018, had a big surge of giving around the time of his announcement, but he has tapered off since; Farrell is also awaiting public financing, which would give him a significant boost.
Lurie’s fundraising has climbed precipitously, amplified by a $590,000 check to himself, $1 million from his mother, and much more from other big donors.
Streams of money raised month-by-month
Daniel Lurie
Peskin joins the race
Farrell joins the race
London Breed
Ahsha Safaí
Mark Farrell
Aaron Peskin
February
March
April
May
June
July
2024
Daniel Lurie
Peskin joins the race
Farrell joins the race
London Breed
Ahsha Safaí
Mark Farrell
Aaron Peskin
Jan.
Feb.
Apr.
May
Jun.
Jul.
Mar.
Note: Includes funds received through public financing.
Graphic by Kelly Waldron. Source: San Francisco Ethics Commission.
Peskin joined the race later and has since ramped up the most quickly, now at the top of the pack in terms of donations received in June, the most recent month for which numbers are available. District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí had a big spike in May from public financing, and has since ramped up again, with the second largest amount of funds raised recently.
All have very healthy fundraising levels, several political consultants said, with more than $2 million cash on-hand among them, and months of fundraising left.
Breed is the incumbent, so her broad base of donors is not exactly surprising. Her re-election race was a given since she won office in 2018, so she has had far more time to fundraise, and she benefits from existing relationships with campaign consultants and staff.
Big money still flowing Breed’s way
But all that does not mean Breed isn’t benefiting from some cavernous pockets.
Besides Lurie, she is the only other candidate so far that has a PAC in her corner raising large sums to win her re-election. That PAC, which is called Forward Action SF and backed by the Abundance Network, longtime Breed ally Todd David's new venture, has fundraised $850,120 from some familiar names in San Francisco campaign finance.
(Farrell, for his part, has an associated ballot-measure committee that rivals say is helping him fundraise in unlimited donations, and which has shared expenses with his mayoral race.)
PACs, unlike candidate campaigns, do not have donation caps. But they are ostensibly independent from the candidates, and cannot legally coordinate messaging or strategy directly with their campaigns.
It often makes the dollar-for-dollar value of giving to PACs less effective than funding a candidate directly, since the candidate’s staff has a more immediate sense of the campaign trail: What voters are saying, what messaging resonates, and where to devote resources.
“It’s like when the rebels finally capture the airfield, and they end up with these jets they can’t fly,” said a longtime political consultant. PACs may amass far more cash, but they are not always run by the most experienced campaigners, and their staff are “separate from the campaign, they don’t understand the campaigns, and it’s hard to coordinate.”
“The [independent expenditures’] effectiveness is, like, 25 to 1,” he added. “The most effective money is campaigns themselves.”
When Gavin Newsom was first elected mayor in 2003, “We had a ‘No IE policy,” said Jim Ross, a longtime Bay Area campaign strategist who served as Newsom's campaign manager then, referring to “independent expenditures." PACs making independent expenditures, another term for a campaign ad or mailer, get more bang for their buck when cutting attack ads and negative messaging, since the candidates might not want to badger opponents directly.
But featuring the candidates’ strengths is best left to the direct campaign staff, Ross said.
“We told all of our donors, all of our big donors, ‘We don’t want you to give to an IE; we want you to give directly to the campaign.’”
Still, that giving is limited to $500.
Chris Larsen, Michael Bloomberg, carpenters' union give to Breed
Wealthy donors make up for PACs’ shortcomings by doling out far, far more money — and have done so for Breed.
The cryptocurrency executive Chris Larsen is Breed’s billionaire champion. Since 2018, he has funneled at least $742,292 to the candidate directly or to PACs supporting her, according to city filings. He gave $400,000 to the PAC supporting her 2024 re-election, its largest contribution.
Larsen also gave $500,000 to pass her two ballot measures in the March election: Proposition E, the police measure expanding the department’s powers, and Proposition F, the drug-screening for welfare recipients measure. He has spent some $4.4 million on San Francisco politics, the bulk since 2018.
Also in her camp: Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-New York City mayor, who has given the pro-Breed PAC $200,000. Bloomberg is a heavy donor to San Francisco politics — at least $28.9 million since 2008 — but the vast majority of that went to pass the sugary drinks tax and defend the e-cigarette ban.
In 2020, Breed endorsed his presidential run after Kamala Harris left that race, and Breed seems to be the only San Francisco candidate Bloomberg has ever bankrolled, according to filings. Also in 2020, the New York Times reported that Bloomberg had spent hundreds of millions supporting municipal programs and courting the nation’s mayors. That resulted in a “Mayors for Mike” moment, in which he received the support of city leaders across the country. Breed was one of some two dozen of those who attended a Harvard University program sponsored by Bloomberg.
Other donors giving to the pro-Breed PAC:
- The NorCal Carpenters Union has donated $125,000. The union has, in recent years, broken ranks with its counterparts in the labor movement and moved in a more development-friendly direction on housing — and Breed is the darling of YIMBYs in San Francisco.
- Diane “Dede” Wilsey, the controversial socialite and Dow Chemical heiress, who hosted a re-election fundraiser for then-President Donald Trump in 2019, has donated $25,000. Wilsey is a big spender on politics: She has given at least $5.4 million federally, according to the Federal Elections Commission, much of that to Republicans. Her family has spent another $2.4 million on politics in San Francisco going back to 1998. She has supported Breed to the tune of at least $43,672 since 2015, filings show. But this is her biggest Breed give yet.
- Zack Rosen, the CEO of Pantheon and another longtime Breed backer, gave $25,000. Rosen is a co-founder of California YIMBY and, alongside David, runs the group that put the pro-Breed PAC together.
- TMG Partners, the Bay Area real estate developer behind some two dozen projects in the city, most of which are office space, has given $25,000.
- The San Francisco Apartment Association, the landlord lobbying group and boogeyman of tenants’ advocates, gave $10,000.
Methodology
A note on our approach: Contributions to candidates are listed by donation, not by donor, so Mission Local has removed duplicate donors to arrive at donor counts. We do this by matching names, occupations and zip codes.
Contributions below $100 are also not itemized, meaning they cannot be used for average donation amounts. We have removed those unitemized totals when calculating the mean, meaning the true averages for each campaign are lower.