Jack Davis, the most feared and loathed man in San Francisco politics, is dead

In 2003, by Jack Davis’ recollection, he fired Gavin Newsom. The axe fell not long after Newsom tapped Davis to run his mayoral campaign.

“I didn’t agree with his behavior and he violated some agreements he had made to me, so I terminated my relationship as the manager of his campaign. In other words, I fired him,” Davis told me in 2015. 

“He said, ‘you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘I just did, Gavin.’” 

But just because Davis had “fired” Newsom didn’t mean Davis would  turn down a payday. Newsom’s subsequent 2003 mayoral campaign manager, Jim Ross, confirms that he still authorized a $10,000 check to Davis every month. 

“We paid Jack for the entire campaign,” Ross said. “And I don’t think he ever came into campaign headquarters.” 

What did Davis do to earn this money? That’s the wrong question: It’s what he didn’t do. Ross is candid: Davis was paid for not switching sides and “doing someone else’s campaign.” Davis was feared by his political enemies — and by his own clients, too. 

John Rankin “Jack” Davis, the most ruthless and sharp-elbowed lobbyist and political consultant in a town renowned for ruthless and sharp-elbowed politics, died Friday in hospice at his 17th Street Mission District condo, at the age of 79.

Davis, raised in a family of Pennsylvania undertakers, broke into politics in the 1970s, organizing for LGBT rights in Florida against the homophobic political campaigns promoted by Anita Bryant, but soon joined the gay migration to San Francisco.

He went on to mastermind three consecutive winning San Francisco mayoral campaigns in the 1990s, at one point running a winning campaign against a sitting mayor he’d helped elect only four years prior. 

Davis was HIV-positive for decades and, like many gay men of his generation, watched scores of lovers and friends and associates die young.

“I lived thinking, you know, I had a live grenade inside of me,” he said. “And it was going to go off.” 

He was a legendary partier, even by San Francisco standards, and the debauchery at his 50th birthday soiree in 1997 made international headlines.

They weren’t positive: A room full of VIPs, lubricated by thousands of dollars worth of liquor, watched a woman dressed as Pocahantas carve a pentagram into a man’s back, urinate on it, and then sodomize him with a Jack Daniel’s bottle.   

“That was 18 years ago, and they’re still talking about it,” Davis said with a laugh in 2015. “I tell ya, people still come up and tell me it’s the best party they ever went to. If the blood-and-urine thing hadn’t happened, it woulda been a top-shelf event.”

Davis lost a kidney to cancer in the early 2000s and, he noted in 2015, “the nephrologist says the one kidney I have, if it was like the other, is not pristine.” In the end, it was blood cancer that got him. 

“He lived a very, very long time for someone who was sick,” summed up Eileen Hirst, the former longtime chief of staff to San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey (Davis got his political start in San Francisco running Hennessey’s victorious 1979 campaign).

Davis was a man who was full of surprises, and his last one was making it to 79 and dying in his own bed; Hirst notes that, at times, it felt more likely that he’d have been murdered. 

There were, after all, scads of people with a great deal of ill will for Davis — and he reveled in this. If he had succumbed to foul play rather than cancer, it would have been a “Murder on the Orient Express”-like situation. In his singular political career, Davis left more burned bridges behind him than the Second Armored Division.  

Perhaps the most logical way to make sense of Davis’ political meanderings was that he  just didn’t cotton to the establishment. In 2015, when asked if he had indeed called Mayor Ed Lee’s preferred financier, Ron Conway, “a bag of crap,” as he was quoted in the San Francisco Business Times, Davis said he didn’t remember. “But if they say I said it,” he conceded, “I’m not disputing it.” 

As successive tech booms caused the local population of billionaires to multiply, Davis ripped into the notion of this new class of political backers  “finding sport in San Francisco politics.” He decried the rise of the self-aggrandizing billionaires who increasingly called the tune in San Francisco politics as “obscene.” 

It was a long way from Davis’ political start, when he engineered the shoestring 1979 election of Hennessey, the nation’s most progressive sheriff, over incumbent Eugene Brown.

Hennessey took an immediate liking to Davis: The liberal lawyer was impressed that Davis had been arrested protesting the Vietnam War, in addition to his organizing for gay rights. 

“Jack was what my friend Ray Towbis called a hungry samurai,” recalled Hennessey. Davis quickly sank his teeth into Sheriff Brown. San Francisco’s incumbent top lawman was undone by the ineptitude of his own deputies; a series of eerily timed jail escapes rendered him a political laughingstock.

Within political circles, there has long been speculation that deputies may have intentionally dropped the ball in order to ease the ouster of their unloved boss, Sheriff Brown. There were further rumors that Davis himself  had a hand in this. 

Hennessey has heard those rumors too, but “it’s just a crock.” Yet there is some there there: “When there is an escape, word in the law-enforcement community gets around really quickly,” Hennessey explains. “If you can catch them or cover it up quickly, it doesn’t become a news item.”

Team Hennessey, however, found out about these incidents. “And we let the press know about it. We didn’t let them get buried.” 

In the end, it was Eugene Brown who was buried. And Davis’ Keyser Söze-like legend was launched. “When you were running against Jack Davis,” says an erstwhile friend and rival, “you were always looking under your own bed.” 

Colleagues remember Davis being fervently and personally devoted to his political clients. He and Hennessey remained friends for life. But, for some, things changed after they were elected. Davis grew disillusioned with them and parted company — often bombastically. 

In 1991, in what Davis described as “retribution” against Mayor Art Agnos, he ran Frank Jordan’s successful mayoral campaign. But Davis then soured on Jordan and then ran Willie Brown’s winning campaign against Jordan in ’95, and then directed Brown’s 1999 re-election campaign. 

Following that, Davis signed on to Team Newsom — in fact, Newsom’s signature “Care Not Cash” measure, which served as a mayoral springboard, was purportedly devised in Davis’ home.

Davis subsequently “fired” Newsom, accepted his monthly tribute and, by 2009, Davis was lambasting Newsom as “probably the worst mayor in modern history.” 

“Jack was a complicated, difficult person,” says Hirst. “But he was worried about death. He asked me if I thought he’d go to hell for getting Frank Jordan elected. I said yes.” 

In order to unseat Agnos in 1991, colleagues recall Davis working 20-hour days at Frank Jordan campaign headquarters in a cut-rate Van Ness Avenue motel — it’s gone now. He’d bathe in the motel pool, sleep a few hours, and then get right back to work. 

But in the mid-1990s, during the tail end of Jordan’s term, there was Jack Davis sitting across from his invited lunch guest: Art Agnos.

Davis told the man he helped exile from City Hall that, if Willie Brown couldn’t be persuaded to run against Jordan, that Agnos should throw his hat back into the ring — and Davis would run Agnos’ campaign. 

Agnos recalls saying that he wasn’t inclined to run, but would look into it if Brown didn’t. He recalls thinking something blunter: What the hell?

What the hell, indeed. In addition to engineering three consecutive successful mayoral runs, Davis also ran Quentin Kopp’s improbable 1986 state senate victory over Democrat Lou Papan — making Kopp the first independent elected to state senate since 1874, in Kopp’s own recollection. 

“He loved getting on Lou Papan’s nerves,” recalls Kopp, 97. “One stunt was, he said Papan was afraid to debate me; he figured as a Democrat he had the campaign locked up and didn’t want to take a chance on making a mistake. Papan was an insurance writer and seller and he had an office in the Outer Mission on Mission Street. Jack dressed up like a chicken and marched back and forth in front of Papan’s insurance business.” 

When KQED subsequently held a televised debate, Kopp says that Davis heckled Papan in the studio with chants of “Chicken, chicken, chicken,” and sparked a fracas. “Jack,” Kopp sums up, “was ruthless.” 

Nobody denies that. But he was more: Colleagues describe Davis’ pinpointing of likely voters and pushing them to vote by mail as years ahead of its time. 

His aggression was coupled with a flair for campaign literature. When voters in the early 1990s were presented with a utility tax to underwrite a proposed Giants stadium, Davis led the successful opposition, devising a mailer that would fit around a light switch.

As voters were weighing whether they should be taxed on their energy use, the flier featured a photo of Giants owner Bob Lurie, with the light switch protruding where his nose would’ve been. The text: “Flip Off Bob Lurie.” 

Hennessey, Kopp, Jordan, (kinda) Agnos, Brown — it’s not a politically cohesive or coherent path. Davis also consulted for the city’s biggest landlords in a tenant supermajority town and helped to entitle skyscrapers. In 2015, Davis said he’d been working for decades, pro-bono, for the University of California, San Francisco, and claimed a significant role in getting the hospital into Mission Bay.  

His personal anti-establishment bent could be messy. In 2016, he backed Bernie Sanders before donating $2,700 to Donald Trump. In 2024, Davis requested — and received — an Aaron Peskin for Mayor banner so huge that the campaign worried its employees would die in a fiery wreck while attempting to drive it across town.

The out-and-out brutality of San Francisco’s political yesterdays do not evoke ready nostalgia among Davis’ colleagues and contemporaries. But the passion Davis poured into his work does. 

“Campaigns are [now] run by ad agencies,” says longtime San Francisco political consultant Eric Jaye. “Not by people sleeping in their offices and bathing in the dirty pool.” 

Davis did that. It could’ve killed him. Maybe should’ve killed him. But, for good or ill, Davis left his mark in this city.      

He did it, he says, without a care for the payoff. “Making money? I’ve never worried about money. And the more I didn’t worry, the more money I made,” he said in 2015. “I’m quite comfortable. And I have been blessed.”