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For the last two weeks before the election, Mission Local’s campaign dispatches are switching daily between the major candidates. Read earlier dispatches here.
This Sunday, mere days after telling Mission Local that he never releases a poll to the press, Jim Stearns, campaign consultant to Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskinโs campaign for mayor, released two polls to the press.
One poll, conducted by the polling firm Public Policy Research in early October, showed Peskin in third place, at 17 percent. The next, an identical poll taken weeks later on October 18 and 19, shows Peskin tied with Daniel Lurie at 25 percent; London Breed in third with 18 percent, and Mark Farrell in fourth place with 15 percent.
โTerrible, right?โ said Stearns, when contacted about his reversal of policy. โThis is a dire circumstance.โ That dire circumstance is several other polls that donโt show Peskin in the lead, including one, done by Sextant Strategies & Research and released today by the San Francisco Chronicle, based on data collected on October 15 and 16. โWe thought we should add ours to the mix, because ours is literally the last, most recent poll,โ says Stearns.
The Chronicle poll shows Lurie and Breed nearly tied with 23 and 24 percent of first-place votes, respectively โ and Lurie walking away with 56 percent of the vote once all the ranked choice votes were tallied. Out of the people who responded to that poll, 18 percent said that Peskin was their first choice (up from 12 percent in August, but he was knocked out by the fourth round.
In a race that is shaping up to be this close, the margin of error makes a lead of a few percentage points in any poll pretty dubious. The most recent poll released by Peskinโs campaign sets its margin of error of 4 percent โ and says 11 percent of San Francisco voters still havenโt decided who they will support for mayor. The Chronicle poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percent, and pegs the number of voters who havenโt decided at 13 percent.
The race is on to persuade those undecided voters. And plenty of money is going into that. Mission Local reported on Friday that, in October alone, Daniel Lurie gave another $1.75 million to his own campaign, bringing his total fundraising to $8.93 million, with $8.04 million of that from his own pocket. According to recent campaign filings, much of that is being spent on advertising.
For months, the Peskin campaign has been running a volunteer-heavy grassroots campaign with a strong emphasis on door-to-door canvassing, house parties, merchant walks, and face-to-face conversations with undecided voters, as well as securing progressive endorsements. In recent weeks, those efforts have only intensified.
So have the efforts of heavy-hitting donors pursuing an โanyone but Peskinโ strategy in the mayorโs race. On the same day that the New York Times published an anti-Peskin op-ed written by local billionaire Michael Moritz, Ron Conway, a tech investor who donated heavily to Ed Leeโs mayoral run and against Peskinโs most recent run for the Board of Supervisors, gave $100,000 to Residents Opposing Aaron Peskin for Mayor 2024, a PAC whose purpose is exactly what the name says. Itโs Conwayโs first major donation to the mayorโs race.
Sunny Angulo, Peskinโs former chief of staff and current campaign manager, chooses to see this as a good sign. โYou know Aaron is surging in this race,โ Angulo told the San Francisco Standard for its Power Play newsletter, โif they’re resurrecting Ron Conway and his money bags from the dead.โ
Politicians and influence groups are releasing polls right now, says Stearns, because everybody’s trying to keep voters enthusiastic, margin of error or no margin of error. โWe’ve consistently been in third place. This is the first time we’ve been in first place. Not that much reason to hide it. You know what I’m saying? Letโs just go for it.โ
Aaron is the only leading candidate not backed by billionaires and special interest.
He is a grassroots candidate with sole endorsement of S.F. Teachers, CA Nurses, City College, CA Healthcare Workers, S.F.Tenantโs Unions and Working Family Party. These are the people he will be fight for as mayor. The others will be fighting for billionaire interests..
Rather than fearmongering about billionaires, maybe we should focus on issues. Peskin has been a supporter of most of the policies that have led to the decline of this City. He would reverse the few good things that Mayor Breed finally has gotten around to doing and just revert back to the prior status quo. He has no interest in fixing the City’s financial crisis or taking action to tackle homelessness or drug addiction.
You don’t like successful people and think that they should have no voice?
There’s earned success, and then there’s winning the birth lottery.
I find it fascinating that Lurie is having to spend north of $10 per San Franciscan to tie Peskin and I have yet to receive a glossy mailer or non-skippable YouTube ad from his campaign.
Thank you for your excellent coverage. I especially appreciate your mention of the billionaires trying to buy the election, such as Michael Moritz who clear has a deep hatred of Aaron Peskin (based on his no comments allowed NY Times editorial).
As a side note, The SF Standard has avoided coverage of such meddling, conflicts of interest, PAC spending, etc., perhaps because they are funded/owned by Moritz.
Peskin responds to questions with well reasoned ideas. He gets things done by working through the issues to get to the best outcome and he is NOT bought by out of town billionaires or in town real estate speculators
make billionaires irrelevant again!
Itโs not accurate to say that Farrell, Breed, Lurie are only for billionairesโฆtheyโre for mere millionaires tooโฆand there are a lot of those peeps in the city ๐
peace out โ๏ธ
Good, because Peskin and Lurie are the two best candidates.
Greg,
Your mathematics are off.
The ultimate winner will have gotten over 50% of the “continuing’, i.e. non-discarded, votes. That generally means around 25% of the actual vote. That is unlike a real run-off system where there are only two choices and the winner must receive 50% plus one of the actual votes.
Hmm, I wonder why they didn’t release the results of the ranked-choice voting exercise.
San Francisco Republican Party betrayed it’s own mayoral candidate Ellen Chou who has the guts to run AS A REPUBLICAN when everyone like Daniel Laurie everyone like him should know the REGRESSIVE not “progressive” politicians of the radical Democrat liberals of Newsom-Pelosi have destroyed the City turning it into a Ghetto Detroit! Just like Detroit ruined by Democrats UAW where aggressive union leaders of automobile and here in SF the SEIU and union government employees are forcing it’s hotel unions members to go on strike when major convention, corporate travel and leisure tourist from Japan and China have sharply declined so big Hiltons, Four Seasons chains are bankrupt and soon forced to close because the banks that now took them back will find it is NOT viable with it’s employees trying to drive away the remainding few.guests left to pay its bills after it’s high union wages!!!!โ
If we elect someone with the same old ideas based on the same old failed ideology, the city will continue its downward spiral and ultimate hurt the working class, small business owners, and folks working in the service industry. Frankly, I would also like San Francisco to be a place where my children can afford to live and Peskin’s record on housing in his district is not good. Let’s turn the page– please.
Well, if your working-class children can afford $3 million condos in glass towers, then by all means go ahead and vote the way the Moritz/Conway oligarchs are telling you.
As a landlord, I love rent control. My rents have increased 7x since it was implemented.
If 33 passes, I expect the value of my 2 unit building to increase, because no one is going to build housing in CA anymore, LOL.
Then I will sell as a TIC and leave the country with my 7x+ increase in value since ’88. And create 2 homeowners on the way out.
And none too soon, this city/state has gone to shit in the same time frame.
Coincidence? I think not.
One may laugh and mock the above comment but take heed.
Ever notice that as more and more tenant protections are added – the rent goes higher and higher?
The increasing, almost de facto, right to title on a landlord’s property bestowed upon a renter is making the rental business untenable. No sane landlord rents to the average Joe. For decent properties in good locations rental agents are mandatory to skim off only the top income folks with impeccable credit ratings and loads of documentation attesting to their trustworthiness.
Vacancy control is the end goal of 33 here in San Francisco, limiting the amount rent can be raised upon vacating.
This will have two effects:
1) Landlords will always raise the rent the maximum possible including all possible pass thrus every year since they won’t be able to raise the rent to market on vacating.
2) When this all becomes financially untenable – on vacating, the unit will be sold off as a TIC.
We all gonna be smug sticking it to the evil ones when 33 passes.
But renter’s revenge will reap a bitter harvest.
And to the above 7x commentator – dude – you gonna pay hella capital gains tax.
Peskin reveals a poll saying that he can win, after saying that he never reveals polls?
Peskin claims he can win even though he admits that 75% of SF voters prefer someone else?
Anyone but Peskin.
Peskin is the ONLY candidate that supports policies for the working class. Breed, Lurie, Farell, et al are great if you’re a billionaire. Though it’s easy to be fooled by billionaire’s PR, most San Franciscan’s are not billionaires. Peskin is surging because voters are realizing this.
The most terrifying words to hear this election season are, โIโm a billionaire and Iโm here to โhelpโ.โ
Peskin’s policies, by perpetuating SF’s housing shortage, lead to ever more expensive housing. His policies, by multiplying layer upon layer of bureaucracy, stifle the creation of new jobs. Not sure how all of that supports the working class.
You can’t be serious, right? Whoever your own favorite candidate might be, at least 75% of SF voters prefer someone else. That’s pretty much what polls have shown all along; it’s just what naturally happens when there are four strong candidates in the race.
Whoever the winner is, though, whether it’s Peskin or anyone else, they’ll have gotten over 50% of the votes in the final head-to-head against the second-place finisher โ more voters will have preferred them over the #2 than vice versa. That’s one of the strengths of a runoff system, including the instant-runoff voting we use in SF local elections.