They sing songs about April in Paris. But nobody has much to say about August in San Francisco.
The fog comes in and the residents go out. The government essentially goes on hiatus, thereby enabling the bureaucrat-to-Burning Man pipeline. Revelers leave San Francisco at its coolest and greyest and, instead, decamp to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. God help them.
Speaking of inhospitable, there’s a mayor’s race on. Not that you’d necessarily know: The candidates aren’t exactly laying low, but, in August, they’re lying in wait. You haven’t yet been inundated with mailers. Unless you live in a majority-Asian neighborhood, you may not yet have had a candidate knock on your door or buy a cup of coffee at your cafe.
But it’s all coming. After Labor Day, when fatigued voters are paying more attention, you can figure the candidates will get to work.
It’s going to be hard work. And, by its nature, dirty work.
All the major candidates have amassed their war chests, which range from “enough” to “enough to run a small country.” They all have their private polling and public polling. And, while polls must be taken with a grain of salt (or enough salt to season a small country), the candidates have an idea of what their paths to victory look like and how smooth or precarious they may be.
San Francisco runs ranked-choice elections which, to a degree, encourages congeniality. But, at the same time, it also encourages candidates to target the competitors whose secondary votes would likely shift to them; think of it like winning a jousting competition with the victor taking the vanquished’s armor.
Except, in this case, if you’re perceived as a belligerent asshole during your joust, the vanquished candidate’s voters sour on you and you don’t get the armor. So, that’s a challenge. It’s always better for your opponents to self-immolate or have the big hit delivered by someone else: An opponent, a newspaper — or an independent expenditure committee, bursting at the seams with funds.
Again, it’s all coming. It was John Paul Jones — the naval commander, not the bassist for Led Zeppelin — who famously said “I have not yet begun to fight.” Thankfully, nobody figures to be firing a literal cannon at anyone else, but the same applies to the amorphous San Francisco mayoral race. In the next few weeks, everything will begin in earnest.
They will begin to fight.
But what will these fights look like? Who’s going to hit first? These are the multi-million dollar questions.
Would it make sense for Aaron Peskin to attempt to blow up Mark Farrell? He may try to do so out of pure muscle memory, but it doesn’t figure that kneecapping Farrell will result in many of Farrell’s votes going Peskin’s way.
So, that would be counterproductive. Peskin’s challenging path to victory, it seems, runs through Mayor London Breed. He’ll have to shore up progressive voters, reach elusive young people, and hone in on “liberal” voters who are presently with the mayor. Again, no easy feat.
On the other hand, would it make sense for Lurie, or Lurie’s deep-pocketed independent expenditure committee, to target Farrell? If Farrell were to falter, it figures a lot more of his voters would shift to Lurie than to Peskin — or, for that matter, Breed.
Yes, that would make more sense. Lurie’s IE has already amassed more than $5.2 million, and could double that before everything is said and done. There’s an ungodly amount of money flowing into this race, but Lurie is clearly the New York Yankees of this contest. Remember how the Bronx Bombers used to pick up players at the trade deadline, who they didn’t even need, just to keep them from landing with competitors? That’s a resource advantage at work, and this is something Lurie enjoys.
We may even be getting a preview of what’s to come. All you have to do is Google Mark Farrell (with no quote marks). The No. 1 result as of Aug. 18 was a sponsored link reading “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell” and taking you to this Chronicle column questioning Farrell’s ethics. The sponsor of that link? That’s right: Daniel Lurie for Mayor 2024.
Toothpaste money for him. Lurie (or his IE) will have enough funding that he won’t even have to balance his spending needs, as other campaigns must. Team Lurie can essentially spend on whatever it wants. How Lurie or his backers choose to wield their significant monetary advantage will greatly shape this race, and will certainly alter its tenor.
And yet, we may also soon see hostility between the two ostensible front-runners, Breed and Farrell. There is little risk of collateral damage for either, as neither Breed nor Farrell figures to reap many votes from the other. But the candidates trailing them in the polls would relish the damage inflicted upon either or both.
In any event, the attacks are coming. An October surprise is hard to foresee but, then again, that’s why they call it a surprise. Yet there are already so many mines lurking just beneath the waterline: Ethical dubiousness; keeping bad company; performative fecklessness masquerading as leadership; alcohol-fueled bullying; it’s a highlight reel of lowlights.
“Everyone knows how to do it,” says a longtime city politico. “And they’ve all been polled.”
Yes, polls. Polls. Say it with me, in your Clarence Boddicker voice: “Oooh! Polls, polls, polls!”
We’ve seen many polls. We’ll see many more. There are good polls and not-as-good polls, but there is no poll that has been carried down from Mt. Sinai. In San Francisco, our neighborhood demographics are as varied as the weather, and there is no one way to reach everyone. To wit: Mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin netted just 12 percent support in the Chronicle’s online-only poll, but nearly 22 percent in the Deputy Sheriff’s Association’s hybrid poll. There are private phone or hybrid polls in which Peskin’s numbers are closer to the latter than the former. And he’s not the only candidate whose numbers bob up or down like a yo-yo depending upon whether it’s an online poll or a phoner/hybrid.
What does this mean? A few things. First of all, in none of these polls is Peskin yet doing well enough to win (and both he and Breed have enough negatives that it’s not intuitive where their secondary votes are coming from). But there is a very big universe between 12 percent and 22 percent, and it would seem to indicate that the truth is out there, and no one poll or methodology is catching it. Polling for ranked-choice voting, meanwhile, is meaningless when a large swath of the electorate is undecided — and, to boot, remains a statistical double bank shot.
Readers would do well to scan news articles for a poll’s mechanism, just as they peruse the ingredients in the supermarket. Ingredients, it turns out, matter.
But there are factors at play in this particular mayoral election that transcend polling. The people who answer polls tend to be likely voters. But, in this election, we’re going to see a lot of unlikely voters; that’s how we’ll likely get to 85+ percent turnout in 2024 (To put that in context: 53 percent of us voted in the 2018 mayoral election, and 42 percent showed up in the 2011 mayoral contest).
There has never before been a mayoral race with this sort of projected turnout, and how this tsunami of voters will behave remains something of a mystery.
In 2022, Mayor London Breed made defeating Proposition H, which set up the mayoral election for a presidential year, her No. 1 priority.
It won. She lost. And yet, sometimes you win by losing. This seems to be such a case for Breed, or at least it could be. Prop. H, remember, shifted citywide elections, like mayor, from odd years, when about half the electorate shows up, to even ones, when more than 80 percent of San Francisco voters can get involved. This year, with yet another epochal presidential election on tap and hometown product Kamala Harris headlining the Democratic ticket, it’s not inconceivable that San Francisco could shatter its all-time turnout record of 86.33 percent.
So, that’s why we’re voting on the mayor this year. Breed’s bête noire, Prop. H, it turns out, may have saved her career, counter to what she (and many others) thought in 2022, she actually would’ve been vulnerable in 2023. But in 2024, she’s competitive, and bolstered by Harris’ resurgent Democratic party and doom-loop fatigue. Again, sometimes you win by losing.
Having more people vote on the important stuff is good. But it’s not exactly an unmitigated good. And that’s because the presidential election sucks up all the air in the room. Sure, well-informed voters know about the 15 local propositions and nearly as many state propositions and all the supervisor races, and could parse the policies of all the mayoral candidates, but that’s not everyone. And yet, just about everyone is going to vote.
Nearly nine in every 10 registered voters may cast a ballot in San Francisco, come November. And many of them are just starting to pay attention to the local stuff. Or maybe they haven’t started yet.
If vast swaths of voters haven’t yet begun to think about the mayor’s race, that may well change after Labor Day. The candidates certainly figure to give them a lot more to think about.
Remember the line from John Paul Jones: I have not yet begun to fight. That fight is coming, and right soon. And we’ll all see how voters feel after that.
“First of all, in none of these polls is Peskin yet doing well enough to win…” The truth hurts.
It would seem Lurie is the biggest threat to Breed as it’s hard to imagine Farrell surpassing her with Lurie and Peskin transfer votes. Lurie may have an underdog shot with Farrell and Peskin transfers.
Great column Joe — our politics may not be the same, but I appreciate good writing. I’m team ABP (Anybody But Peskin)! Farrell, Breed, Lurie — I don’t care how they get ranked but vote for all 3 to guarantee we don’t end up with the guy who: gets drunk and yells at firemen while they are putting out a fire, occupies a 2 unit building that was procured under dubious circumstances from an owner accused of an illegal unit merger, is the ultimate NIMBY — most recently the only supervisor voting against the residential conversion of 2395 Sacramento Street in a 10-1 vote, and who was creepily campaigning at Dore Alley (the gay fetish street fair)
Agree Greg. Moderate SF voters probably do not see much difference between Breed, Farrell and Lurie. The over-riding factor is to tick all three of those above Peskin.
You think 4 more years of corrupt Breed would somehow be preferable to Peskin? Where did you say you’ve been living? It’s not here.