It’s not clear if Mayor Daniel Lurie is the cause of a changed San Francisco or a symptom, but, on the June 2 election results sheet, that was a distinction without a difference.
Barring a truly miraculous turnaround, every last thing San Francisco’s popular mayor and his big money allies would’ve wanted came to pass, and in no uncertain terms.
It’s unclear if Lurie is riding a wave or building a wave. But this, too, is a distinction without a difference. The outcomes of Tuesday night’s low-turnout election were not, on the whole, shocking. But the margins — damn near every race was a massacre — were.
On the cusp of the election, the backers of Proposition A, the big earthquake bond, were sweating bullets. The measure, which required two-thirds of the vote to pass, was polling at 64 or 65 percent just a few weeks ago. On election night, the measure, carried by Lurie and the firefighters union, banked more than three-quarters of the vote.
The mayor had also become the de-facto face of the No on D campaign, urging voters to spurn the “Overpaid CEO Tax,” lest it lead to a disastrous dispersal of city businesses. Voters seem to agree: More than 55 percent of early voters inveighed against the measure.
District 2 Supervisor and close Lurie ally Stephen Sherrill has nearly 70 percent of the vote. And, in District 4, Lurie appointee Alan Wong is enjoying a near-majority in a five-way race and easily wins in ranked-choice voting. On top of that, incumbent school board president Phil Kim has a near-supermajority and prosecutor Phoebe Maffei is besting public defender Alexandra Pray for a judge spot by a 60-40 tilt.
It’s unclear how many ballots are outstanding, but none of these races was even close to being close. These are wipeouts across the board, and it’s hard to foresee any of these results changing. “We’re living in Daniel Lurie’s America,” sighed a losing strategist.
City Hall critics who felt the mayor has been treated with too much deference likely ain’t seen nothing yet. The coming months figure to be a municipal deference-off. It’s hard to predict Lurie-aligned supervisor candidates losing in November and it’s difficult to foresee the mayor failing to fundraise for and pass his charter amendments to amass even greater executive power in City Hall Room 200.
In 2020, an Overpaid CEO Tax passed by a 65-35 margin. What a sea change this city has undertaken: So now, a shade over five years later, with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Now, that 2020 general election featured an 86.3 percent turnout. We’ll learn roughly how many ballots are uncounted in this year’s election on the morning of June 3, but the biggest takeaway so far is that hardly anybody voted: Only 23.4 percent returns as of late Tuesday.
So it’s not a perfect analog. But, barring unforeseen lunacy, it does seem to be the death knell of the political theory that, so long as enough money was available to spread the word for a populist measure of the sort San Franciscans ostensibly support, it wouldn’t matter how much money was spent to oppose it. San Francisco voters, in the past, opted to tax overpaid CEOs or sock the sellers of big real estate, like Donald Trump, with taxes. This year, Prop. D’s message was that taxing big business would save us from Trump’s healthcare cuts.
But either that message didn’t land or was simply drowned out by a cavalcade of anti-D ads, funded by billionaire tech CEOs, and featuring Daniel Lurie urging us not to ruin the good thing this city had going.
Lurie’s poll numbers are equal to or greater than the gaudy results from Tuesday night. San Franciscans seem content with the status quo: Even-keeled establishment incumbents like Sherrill and Wong are on their way to resounding victories while a self-styled iconoclast like congressional aspirant Saikat Charkrabarti was trounced. San Francisco, it seems, is not in the market for a shit-disturber.
In the generation since progressives unseated Willie Brown’s Board of Supervisors and Matt Gonzalez ran against Gavin Newsom, the demographics of this city have changed mightily. Coalitions of renters and progressive homeowners have, through the decades, been supplanted by more affluent and moderate residents.
San Franciscans are also busier; you have to earn double-income high-end wages to eke out a middle-class life in this city, and political involvement isn’t what it was in past decades. The progressive movement, if you can still call it a movement, has essentially been winnowed down to labor and nonprofits. Beyond proposing revenue measures — taxes, that is — it’s hard to nail down progressive ideology in 2026.
The ongoing desiccation of the progressive movement and its untenable demographic and ideological dead ends are things my writing partner Benjamin Wachs and I wrote about all the way back in 2011. This has been a long time coming.
Fifteen years later, there is just not a coherent vision to counter Daniel Lurie’s Let’s Go, San Francisco! — and, even if there were, it would not likely appeal to the city’s present demographics.
Surely the candidates opposing Lurie’s preferred supervisors knocked on endless doors, but that’s not the difference-maker it once was. “Everyone now is on these platforms,” notes a longtime city political strategist. “Everyone following Daniel Lurie on the Let’s Go, San Francisco algorithm is served a bunch of digital ads.”
Those ads were compelling. Far more so than a knock on a door from some of Tuesday’s victorious candidates. Or, it seems, any of the also-rans.
San Francisco has had popular mayors before. But San Francisco has never before had a popular mayor who also essentially ran a self-funded 24/7/365 campaign for himself and for this city as Lurie does and continues to do.
The Let’s Go, San Francisco! message is, in fact, a winning one. After years of national and local stories focusing on the worst of the city and an era of bruising, corrupt and creatively incompetent politics out of City Hall, San Franciscans are happy to embrace a return to civility and — surprise, surprise, surprise — acknowledge the obvious: The city is indeed a gorgeous and special place.
Well, of course it is! If it wasn’t, it’d have to be better governed.
The city’s dwindling left will never have a majority, let alone a plurality, of the money. Last night was no different: Its candidates and measures were vastly outspent. But, for years, the argument was that it had the people.
But that’s hard to say in the present. And it was impossible to say regarding this election. On June 2, the majority of the people did not get involved.
Daniel Lurie, and his extremely wealthy allies, have won the day; it was an Agincourt-like rout. But, despite what the Let’s Go, San Francisco! algorithm feeds you, this city’s issues remain intricate and unresolved. There are no simple solutions to complex problems.
City voters may yet grow disillusioned with present political leadership and the wealthy tech interests overtly bankrolling it to a gaudy degree even by San Francisco’s advanced standards. But not in the short-term. And, even if they do, there is absolutely no individual or movement in place to offer anything remotely resembling a competing worldview.
We are living in Daniel Lurie’s America.