‘Stand with Joel’ campaign raises $667K. Still, it’s an uphill battle.

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The campaign to support District 4 Joel Engardio — named “Stop the Recall, Stand with Joel Engardio” — has raised four times as much money as the campaign to recall him from office, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

The recall campaign has received a little over $161,000 in contributions as of July 7. The Stand With Joel campaign, meanwhile, raised about $667,000, or four times as much.

But a war chest like that may not matter as much in this race, said Jim Ross, a campaign consultant who knows something about recalls: He worked, unsuccessfully, to keep Chesa Boudin in office back in 2022.

It’s better to have money than not, but Engardio entered the recall with tough odds. He was first elected to lead District 4 in 2022 by just 469 votes, a slim margin when facing an electorate on an up-or-down vote. And most of his constituents opposed Prop. K, the very thing that landed him in this recall. 

Engardio is going to have to go door-to-door and be visible to his existing constituents, Ross said. Money will help Engardio to send out mailers and buy ads in Chinese newspapers, but in a low-turnout election, footwork to build on the relationships with his existing constituents is key. 

“The money in this race is not as important as the people on the ground,” Ross said. “He really needs to convince folks that Prop. K is not something he needs to be recalled about. He needs to talk about all the other things he’s doing for the district.”

Half a million dollars is “more than enough money” to communicate the anti-recall message, Ross said. But the focus for the Stand with Joel campaign now is probably more on persuading voters with face-to-face from Engardio than mass messaging. 

It will be a tough road ahead for Engardio either way: There are a little under 50,000 registered voters in District 4, and not all of them will turn out to vote this September. Ross, for his part, estimated about 20,000 people would turn out to vote. 

Notably, the recall campaign gathered 10,523 valid signatures in order to qualify. 

Engardio’s base of support heavily opposed Prop. K

The recall election will take place on Sept. 16, and only among District 4 voters. If the recall is successful, Mayor Daniel Lurie will appoint a new District 4 supervisor. 

Engardio was supposed to face re-election in 2026, but Engardio’s support for Prop. K, which closed the Upper Great Highway to cars and transformed it into the Sunset Dunes park, galvanized residents against him. 

While the city as a whole supported the ballot measure by 55 percent, Sunset residents voted 64 percent against it. 

The precincts that were most favorable to Engardio during his 2022 election were also some of those most heavily against Prop. K, and the supervisor faces the prospect of being voted out of office by former supporters. 

Precincts that supported Joel Engardio the most strongly opposed Prop. K

Precincts added to

District 4 in 2022

Percentage of District 4 voters who voted

against Prop. K in November 2024.

Percentage of first-choice votes Joel Engardio

received in the 2022 District 4 supervisor race.

Precincts added to

District 4 in 2022

Percentage of first-choice votes Joel Engardio

received in the 2022 District 4 supervisor race.

Percentage of District 4 voters who voted

against Prop. K in November 2024.

Chart by Kelly Waldron. Data from the San Francisco Department of Elections. Basemap from Mapbox.

The path to defeat the recall seems to be an uphill battle for Engardio, no matter the funding. Many who supported Engardio have turned against him because of Prop. K. And for those who didn’t support him in the first place, well, “Why would they support him now?” asked Ross.

Sunset Dunes, with its shiny new skate park and art installations, could be one reason. Supporters of the new park, even those who did not support Engardio previously, might back him now, Ross said.

But it could easily go the other way, too: Engardio has made a habit of heralding his support for Prop. K in the part of the city where it was the least popular. That may not be the wisest strategy. 

“The math in this race has always been a little challenging for him,” Ross said.

Recall has more small-money donors, anti-recall has more money

The money, for its part, shows that the recall campaign is broad-based. Though it has raised less overall, it has more donors: 316 people contributed more than $100 as of July 1. The Stand With Joel campaign had only 164 such donors. (Donors under $100 are aggregated by the city.)

Most contributions to the recall campaign were for less than $1,000, totaling $75,756 or 47 percent of the total. The highest donations were for $10,000 and $9,900, given by William O’Keefe and Frank Butler, respectively. The Chinese American Democratic Club, which endorsed Engardio’s run for supervisor in 2022, has turned against Engardio and donated $7,000 to the recall.  

The sums for Engardio are much larger. He has received support from tech CEOs, the police officer association, real estate groups and labor unions, sometimes totaling six figures. 

The biggest sum came from Chris Larsen, founder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, who made three separate donations adding up to $200,000.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman contributed a total of $175,000. Stoppelman was also a staunch supporter of Prop. K. He donated $350,000 to the campaign for Prop K. John Wolthuis, the co-founder of tech company Twilio, also donated $100,000 to Stand With Joel. 

The San Francisco Police Officers Association PAC, the police union’s campaign vehicle, contributed $50,000. The Teamsters labor union contributed a total of $13,000 from its various local chapters. 

As of the end of June, neither campaign had much left on hand — both were spending heavily. The recall campaign had spent about $230,000, while the Stand With Joel campaign had spent about $440,000, almost twice as much. 

Both spent the bulk of their funds on consulting and staffing. The Stand with Joel campaign, from February to April, spent nearly $40,000 on advertisements with GrowSF. 

Recall campaign is ‘grassroots,’ supporters say

Most of the donations to either campaign were made before the petition to recall Engardio qualified for the ballot on May 29. Since then, one campaign has ramped up considerably: The Stop the Recall campaign has received $208,500 in donations over just the past month. 

The campaign to recall Engardio, meanwhile, received just $1,506 in that time. 

“We are trying to get donations now,” Albert Chow, one of the most outspoken supporters of the recall, said on June 27, a day before the recall held a kickoff rally in the Sunset.

This disparity in funding has been a major talking point for the recall campaign, which has said Engardio is backed by deep-pocketed donors, while the recall is a “grassroots campaign” with limited resources. 

When the recall campaign worked to gather signatures in the past few months to qualify it for the ballot, for instance, it operated out of the living room of Otto Pippenger, the campaign’s field organizer.

On a recent morning in May, the last day of the signature gathering, Pippenger trained last-minute volunteers in this living room, with the curtain half-drawn, where stacks of petitions were scattered on a folding table and a map of District 4 on the wall. 

“I don’t want to make light of the fact that our headquarters was Otto’s living room,” Chow said. “We don’t have big money donors. We are all local Sunset folks.”

Joe Arellano, a spokesperson for the Stand with Joel campaign, said the donations the campaign has received are the “funds needed to ensure Joel can stay in office and beat this recall.” 

“We are proud of the support we’ve received from people supporting our public parks, public safety and public education,” Arellano said. “These are the issues Joel fought for when he ran for office.”

Updated on July 7, 2025.