Scott Wiener goes to four to five house parties a week in his bid to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and at a recent affair he has come prepared for a shoes-off home.
At a midday get-together in a light-filled, second-story apartment in the Castro, that meant bright blue socks with large polka dots and lime green toes.
He remains the front runner in the race against District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan and tech centimillionaire Saikat Chakrabarti, who served briefly as chief of staff to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Over 90 percent of San Francisco voters are already familiar with Wiener, according to a Chakrabarti-commissioned poll. Wiener has the longest political track record of the bunch: He has represented city voters since 2011, first as the city’s District 8 supervisor (which includes the Castro) and then as state senator (where he represents all of San Francisco, plus a bit of San Mateo county).
So, Wiener’s campaign has chosen to focus on small gatherings like these, where Wiener can get beyond a short introductory encounter and instead delve into policy details.
This particular house party consisted of about a dozen millennial parents, most of whom seemed to have children attending the same schools. The vibe was cozy: Coffee, orange juice, bubbles, and bagels were laid out in the apartment’s living room alongside Scott Wiener window signs and campaign literature. Magnetic letters on the fridge spelled out “WELCOME SCOTT.”
As the group settled in, the host lobbed the first question: “Can you tell us your life story?”
After joking that he’d “filibuster for two hours,” Wiener laid out a concise narrative: a childhood in a suburbanizing, conservative “farm town” in southern New Jersey where most of the neighbors “had never met a Jew in their life.” His parents found some other Jewish families and formed their own synagogue.
Wiener admitted to himself that he was gay as a 17-year-old, he continued. It was 1987 and the AIDS epidemic was in full force. “I saw that there was a mass die-off happening in my community,” said Wiener, “and that there was a federal government that not only was not doing anything about it, but wanted us to just die and get it over with, basically.”
That experience — plus growing up as a Jew — gave him an understanding of what can happen when the government is hostile to a certain group. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, maybe government services will be bad.’ It’s like, ‘Will you survive?’”
The host moved on to policy next. How, she asked, could Wiener use a role in Congress at the federal level to encourage the state of California to shell out more to its public schools?
“Well, first we need to, like, not eliminate the Department of Education,” he said, referring to Trump’s attempts to dismantle the department. The crowd responded with a ripple of woeful chuckles.
Wiener had a plan, he said, to increase federal funding for students who need extra help in school and are on personalized learning plans; make school meals healthier; and expand funding for afterschool programs.
“In an era where often both parents are working or you have a single parent, afterschool programs are not an optional nice-to-have,” Wiener said. “They are completely essential for the functioning of the family.”
At this, the host smoothly pivoted to Wiener’s best-known policy focus: housing. “You’ve already done so much,” she said. Wiener is the Chief YIMBY in Sacramento, and laws that streamlined affordable housing approvals and forced cities to upzone for more housing have come to redefine the California housing landscape — and earned him enemies among market-rate housing skeptics. “What more are you going to do?”
At the state level, Wiener said, he has been “methodically working towards automatic permitting,” meaning that if housing developers comply with all the laws about project height, density, and design, they should be able to build a project — even if neighbors or politicians don’t like it.
Before he helped pass those changes, he continued, “If someone comes forward and says, I have a project, I checked all 10 boxes, that, before, would have entitled you to go into the political mosh pit for five years.”
If he makes it to Congress, he told the group, his plan is to tackle the economic factors that are making housing unaffordable. That means expanding Section 8 rental assistance programs for low-income renters, boosting the construction workforce, investing in mixed-income housing production, making it easier to finance multi-unit housing, and giving $10,000 to local governments for every new housing unit they build.
The goal is that this plan would lead to the construction of 8 million new homes over the next decade.
It would also cost $1.2 trillion, he added, but he could raise that by working to reverse some of the tax cuts put in under President Donald Trump and former President George W. Bush.
He’s hopeful that he can do this, he told the crowd, because even though Congress is so polarized, housing is a rare area where there is some agreement across the aisle — a federal bill on housing, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, just passed the Senate.
“I’ve had Democratic Socialist members and MAGA members both supporting bills that I passed,” Wiener said of his housing work in the State Senate.
What about, asked one attendee, the criticism that Wiener is “in corporations’ pockets” and takes donations from pro-Israel groups and people.
“These are not my concerns, but I didn’t know what to say to these people,” she said.
Wiener has pledged not to take money from pro-Israel PACs like AIPAC, United Democracy Project and Democratic Majority for Israel. He hasn’t, but some of the donors to those PACs have given to Wiener: Out of the $3.4 million Wiener has raised, about $45,000 comes from some 20 donors who have given to those groups.
Wiener said that most of those donors are “local Jewish community leaders who, frankly, donate to me because of my work in the community and in spite of my views on Israel and Gaza, not because of them.”
Wiener has changed his views on Israel and Gaza. While he has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and settler violence in the West Bank, after Oct. 7 he said Israel had a “right to fight back” in Gaza and was often critical of pro-Palestine movements: He said boycott movements sought the “destruction of Israel,” and that a Jewish-led protest targeting a pro-Israel group in San Francisco was antisemitic.
Wiener declined to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide at a Jan. 7 debate, but did so four days later, earning criticism from pro-Israel groups. He then stepped down as co-chair from the State Senate’s Jewish caucus.
As for the corporate money, said Wiener, he currently has a 98 percent voting record with the California Labor Federation and 98 percent with the California Environmental Scorecard. At the California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business interests, he only votes in alignment with their interests 16 percent of the time.
“I’ve taken on some of the largest corporations on the planet,” Wiener said. “I’m at perpetual war with the oil industry. I am yet again at war with the big tech companies this year. I’ve gone to war with the health insurance industries to expand access to mental health treatment.”
After about an hour of talking, Wiener got up and prepared to leave for the next events — the NorCal Cherry Blossom Festival and a birthday party for San Francisco SPCA. Had he swayed anyone in the crowd? Most seemed to have already planned to vote for him, but were happy that he’d shown up.
To be more precise, they were happy that he’d been showing up for a while. “Even though you don’t have kids, we still see you at our McKinley holiday fundraiser right up the block every year,” the host told him. “It’s very motivational to us.”
Wiener has always relied on this type of interactive campaigning. I recall that he rang my Castro district doorbell back in 2011 when he was almost unknown. We had an interesting and lively discussion for what must have been 20 minutes, and he convinced me to vote for him as D8 supervisor because of his pragmatic and reasonable approach to the issues. He will get my vote again this year.