It’s a shame that San Francisco’s fascinating election results can’t be viewed in isolation from the strange and terrible returns that propelled Donald Trump once more to the presidency. But the luxury of ignoring the bigger picture is something San Francisco no longer gets to do.
As of a shade before 1 a.m., every last in-person vote was tabulated — 37,345 of them (20,000 provisional votes are pending). In-person voting is a bit like shaving with a straight-edge razor or knitting your own pot-holders: You could do it if you wanted to, but hardly anybody does. At present, 234,453 votes have been counted; a shade under 45 percent. The Department of Elections expects around 157,000 more votes to trickle in (including those 20,000 provisional ballots). That would result in perhaps a 75 percent turnout; San Francisco voters show up at an average of 77 percent in presidential election years going back to 1916. This year’s federal election is rather special. San Francisco’s turnout was not.
By law, any ballots postmarked by Nov. 5 have seven days to reach City Hall. But it’s not likely that a massive batch of ballots is going to drop on Nov. 12.
The next update to the vote totals will come at 4 p.m. on Thursday. Yes, there is no update today (I know!).
Here’s where things stand:
Daniel Lurie remains the man to beat, dispatching Mayor London Breed in a ranked-choice voting tabulation by 25,000-odd votes. There are many more votes to count, but S.F. State political science professor and ranked-choice voting savant Jason McDaniel kindly highligted this key factor: Lurie receives the majority of Mark Farrel’s secondary votes and Aaron Peskin’s No. 2 votes are breaking to Lurie at a percentage approximating the percentage going to Breed (33 percent of Peskin’s No. 2 votes go to Breed, 32 percent to Lurie and 35 percent are exhausted).
So, barring unforeseen lunacy, Lurie is going to win this thing. That’s because — of course — he was blessed with all the monetary advantages one could desire. But he also hired the right people, and ran a drama-free and disciplined campaign. It was clear to Team Lurie that its path to victory was to garner the abundant second-place votes from Farrell, so it set its sights on him — and he proved to be a most incendiary target.
Fascinating stuff, but the luxury of viewing San Francisco politics in isolation from the larger world is, like in-person voting, a thing of the past. The notion of having a neophyte mayor taking the reins at the same time an emboldened kleptocratic fascist assumes power in Washington, D.C. is concerning, to say the least. And you thought the biggest problem for San Francisco in 2025 was its bereft downtown and looming budgetary cliff. Things can always get worse. On Nov. 5, they did.
Speaking of worse, it was a uniquely terrible night for free-spending political pressure group TogetherSF and its chosen candidate Mark Farrell. Proposition D, TogetherSF’s measure to halve the number of San Francisco commissions and empower the mayor is almost 20,000 votes in the hole — and late-breaking voters tend to side with more progressive causes, not less progressive ones.
Prop. D had nearly $10 million behind it. And that’s just for starters: A Prop. D committee served as a lucrative soft-money vehicle for Farrell. On Nov. 4, news broke that he’d agreed to pay a $108,000 ethics fine for commingling funds from his mayoral committee and Prop. D committee; he was accused of using the unlimited donations to the ballot measure committee to subsidize his mayoral committee and, in effect, elude the $500 donation cap.
What a predicament: Farrell and TogetherSF had clearly hoped Prop. D would pull Farrell across the finish line. But that didn’t happen. Did he weigh it down? Did it weigh him down? Was it a mutually assured destruction?
In a surreal touch, Prop. E, the Peskin-produced countermeasure to Prop. D that drew tens of thousands of dollars in support is winning. Winning!
On the eve of the election, we compared Farrell to Vinko Bogataj, the hapless Yugoslavian ski-jumper whose epic meltdown for years underpinned “ABC Wide World of Sports” description of “The agony of defeat.”
This comparison seems apt — and would seem to encompass both Farrell and TogetherSF’s efforts in this election cycle.
In prior years, when in-person voting was more significant, and voting patterns were more predictable, a late progressive shift was easier to chart. That’s no longer the case. But late-breaking votes would still figure to be more likely to break progressive than not.
As such, incumbent Connie Chan in District 1 should be optimistic and Dean Preston in District 5 should be hopeful. There are many thousands of votes yet to count, but they may have weathered the storm of very wealthy donors targeting them specifically. Michael Lai and Chyanne Chen are locked in a close race in District 11 with Lai a couple hundred votes up. But Chen has to like her chances with late-breaking voters. Vamos a ver.
In Districts 3, 7 and 9 Danny Sauter, incumbent Myrna Melgar and Jackie Fielder appear well-positioned.
The Department of Elections will commence counting votes again on Thursday. We wish their work was at center of the political world, because it is that interesting. But, alas, it can’t be.
I fantasize about a People’s Team of Rivals where neophyte Lurie partners with wise old policy owl and wonk Aaron Peskin to combat/equalize and protect San Franciscans from the dangers of the Trump presidency and administration. SF needs brilliant, skilled and thoughtful leadership now more than ever. Partnership and unity are the inoculant against the Trump virus.
Correction: To the right of Jackie Fielder 😉
“Partnership and unity”
This is pretty rich coming from the poster who has spent months making vindictive and nasty personal attacks against every SF political figure to the left of Jackie Fielder.
You ask yourself, how could the Democrats lose to someone like Trump?
And then you look at local races and see what that party has to offer: Wiener, Lurie, Breed, Farrell, Haney. No wonder. God help us.
I don’t think it is fair to lump Lurie in with Wiener, Breed, Farrell and Haney. Say what you will about Lurie, but he very much ran as his own man and not attached to the same, Tammany Hall machine as these others.
I am optimistic about his Mayorship, because it couldn’t possibly be worse than the mess being left behind.
What “strange & terrible ” night? A Democratically nominated & elected (by the public) candidate won the Presidency after running a superior campaign .
The “TERRIBLE NIGHT” was watching all those poor Kamala supporters being told to “GO HOME & GO TO BED” by her Campaign Chairman because she couldn’t even bother to show up and THANK HER SUPPORTERS and concede the election!
THAT was a terrible night! for them. Such unloving cynical behaviour
(even for an corporate puppet like her.)
Remember, it wasn’t a “Strange & terrible night” for 72,000,000 American people.
40% of them from CA. Now Miss “he’s a fascist”Unity ,continues the hatred, the anger with calls to “keep fighting”. You lost.
Joe, let’s stop the hatred please. Stop the canceling, torch burning mobs.
You are a newsman in my neighborhood, in my beautiful San Francisco .
Now is the time for you & the poor mean spirited brainwashed Dems to take off the Covid brown shirts and put some flowers in your hair! Don’t worry- Be happy! xoxo
A LOT of bad news nationally in this election. But the good news is that Bay Area residents generally voted for public safety.
Oakland recalled Price. Thank you Oakland! Now maybe we will have fewer throat slashings on BART by multiple felons who Price set free.
San Francisco voters get more sensible on DA votes every year. First we recalled Boudin. Then the leftiest lefties put forward a gang lawyer, Hamasaki, to replace Boudin and let all the criminals out, but we voted for Brooke Jenkins. And now, the lefties put forward another pro-criminal attorney who worked for both Boudin AND Price. San Francisco voters aren’t interested: Jenkins got an even higher vote percentage, which probably makes Mission Local more unhappy than any other result.
We voted for Prop. 36. LA voters ousted George Gascon. Overall it was a bad day for the “anti-carceral philosophy” people who coddle criminals and embrace shoplifting and open-air drug markets.
To make another 1970’s sports analogy, Farrell and Breed were off like Prefontaine, while Lurie drafted the pack a la Dave Wottle. Pre got picked off final lap in Munich, while Wottle made a comeback for the ages.
https://youtu.be/4BRhVjq6SI8?feature=shared
Well look on the bright side, Billionaires are more invested in our Democratic processes than ever before! Surely Citizens United has united all of the citizens, no?
I’m hopeful that at some point my fellow democrats will preach and whine less, and listen more. People are tired of petty crime. Tired of open borders. Tired of massive taxes that go to a government uninterested in solving critical problems. I have a $13k tax charge for “mental health” on my CA return? Over 40% of CA voted for Trump. Is he the answer? No. Is he better than extremist liberal democrats? Yes. We need to start listening to our neighbors rather than preaching at them. If we want to win the next election, we need someone who cares about the same things red states care about – safety, crime, immigration, taxes, good education, middle class values, lower taxes – because otherwise democrats will never win. Instead, our legislative priorities this year include banning legacy admissions at PRIVATE universities, speeding up tiny homes for the homeless, designating an endangered sea shell as CA’s state sea shell, and coming up with a million ways to make us pay more more to the state in taxes, fees and payment penalties. I’ve been a democrat for 25 years. We are completely out of touch with reality and what people care about. But the people have spoken. We only have ourselves to blame.
Yeeks Dan. Read the room. Maybe you should live in Livermore or Texas. Or Atherton. What do you care about? Also: what do you care about? You live in the second most urbanly dense and fluid city in America where things are changing constantly. Should you consider moving to a gated community or a shopping mall? Do you want the SFPD to handle all of that makes you feel “unsafe” or “over taxed”? Are you hoping that local democratically elected office holders are like a paid subscription to Hulu, Amazon Prime or Netflix subscription that can handle this? Surely there must be an app for that, but you’ll have to pay for it. I prefer paying taxes and engaging at public and transparent hearings. Just wondering….. do you have kids? Do you have elders that you have to look after in spite of your work schedule? Do you ride the bus? Is your kid a skateboarder? What if your kids go to public school? What if you’re black or brown or low income while still living here in San Francisco? What do you say then? Are you looking for a formula because nearly all of the billionaire funded candidates in this election cycle ( that San Franciscans rejected for a good reason) were looking for the same thing