My fashionable friend has identified the sleek, grey jacket Mayor Daniel Lurie has sported on his Instagram forays through San Francisco as a Brunello Cucinelli gray cashmere (MSRP: more than my car). As outerwear goes, you could do worse. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of coattails.
Tuesday’s election will demonstrate whether Lurie’s political coattails are more sizable than his actual ones.
Not halfway through his first term, the mayor’s polling numbers are on par with Joe Montana’s circa 1988. He’s not just liked — he’s well-liked. But it’s not yet clear how much of the mayor’s popularity is transferable. Joe Montana, you may recall, urged us to buy Nuprin. We didn’t.
Lurie, meanwhile, has urged us not to buy Proposition D, which would tax billion-dollar companies and fund social services to make up for Trump’s federal budget cuts. He has also urged voters to elect his appointee in District 4, Alan Wong, and Lurie’s donor network has been active propping up the Sunset supe.
Both races are critical for San Francisco organized labor. If Prop. D fails — or if the Chamber of Commerce-spun measure designed to tank it, Prop.C, gets more votes — the city will have to deal with perhaps $300 million yearly failing to materialize in the general fund.
This would likely lead to a reduction in services and the mayor pushing for even more layoffs — which is why passing Prop. D has become the raison d’être for much of city labor.
Numerous city observers foresee that some manner of labor strife is on San Francisco’s horizon in the not-too-distant future. Whether that strike comes as a flex after labor beats back Lurie and a billionaire-backed campaign or comes out of a position of weakness and anger after losing that campaign is to be determined. It brings to mind the line from a vindictive cobra in the Rudyard Kipling short story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”: If you move I strike, and if you do not move I strike.
Meanwhile, if Wong is not the winner in District 4 — or, for that matter, if Stephen Sherrill, another Lurie ally backed by the mayor’s well-heeled allies — loses in District 2, it could become that much harder for Lurie to lay off city workers (or give tax breaks to sellers of big-dollar real estate in the midst of a revenue shortfall).
If the voters do as Mayor Lurie wishes, however, he goes from “people thinking he’s untouchable to actually being untouchable,” in the words of a political strategist critical of the mayor.
Conversely, if Prop. D succeeds and/or voters dump one of the sitting supervisors, a mayor who has thus far walked on water would have to learn to swim.
Uniquely among modern San Francisco mayors, Lurie won without the support of virtually any vestige of organized labor. He didn’t need them. To an extent, he still doesn’t — see those Joe Montana numbers.
Lurie’s vast wealth and adjacency to vast wealth, in fact, enable a different kind of governing.
When Lurie-aligned networks of rich donors fund downtown renovations or civic boosterism, that money can’t be reallocated by the board toward far more pressing needs — or, for that matter, the needs of favored unions and nonprofits. The mayor’s priorities, privately funded, are not pitted against layoffs and cannot be threatened or leveraged as part of the tumultuous budget process. “It’s just happening,” says a longtime city politico. “And that’s why voters are responding to Lurie. They feel like things are getting done.”
It also doesn’t hurt that the mayor can continue to spend his own money on consultants, strategists and speechwriters to help frame his messages. These people are good at their jobs. To wit, the mayor abandoned and utterly failed at his election pledge to add 1,500 shelter beds in six months, a pledge all of his opponents decried as untethered and untenable — and then successfully spun that as a sign of growth and strength.
Unions, specifically progressive-aligned unions like the SEIU and IFPTE, are growing increasingly rankled. They have put millions behind Prop. D, the so-called “Overpaid CEO Tax,” and Lurie has become the de-facto face of the No on D campaign.
This effort, funded by some of the wealthiest tech barons in all the realm, is sending a forest’s worth of (Daniel Lurie-emblazoned) mailers to voters’ homes. Anyone hoping for a fleeting nine minutes of joy watching YouTube highlights of the one game in three the Giants win must first witness Lurie delivering a doozy about how Prop. D would be a disaster and other deleterious, damning dictions debuting with “D.”
The argument against Prop. D is not demented or dotty — the city in just 2024 revamped its business tax structure to be less reliant on the biggest companies and do away with ballot-box one-offs of the sort voters are now weighing. Yes, big companies could decamp from San Francisco. That’s notable. But it’s also notable that Lurie never in his (surely polled up the yinyang) anti-D dictums describes what D would do.
That’s because San Franciscans would likely support that message: The measure is a means of offsetting Trump budget cuts to healthcare and sticking it to the billionaires who got a tax break. Tying Prop. D to Trump was, in fact, the core message of its backers.
And, with $3.3 million behind it, the Prop. D campaign has enough money to spread that message. Its backers are betting that if their message has been effectively delivered, it won’t matter that opponents have put $6.6 million into kneecapping it.
There is a philosophy on running San Francisco campaigns that, with enough money behind a message that appeals to most San Francisco voters — like, say, taxing billionaires to fund social services — that no amount of opposition funds will prevail.
Voters just six years ago approved an Overpaid CEO Tax by a 65-35 tilt. It is an understatement to say that times have changed since 2020 and it’s hard to conceive of Prop. D passing by that gaudy margin now. But its backers certainly aren’t bracing for a loss. Vamos a ver.
If D does indeed win, coupled with the incredible shrinking gubernatorial run of San Jose mayor Matt Mahan — a moderate funded by some of the very same wealthy tech interests — that would be quite a predicament. We could expect to see this city’s newly activated and emboldened donor class rending its Brunello Cucinelli garments in a fit of pique.
And they’ll rend harder if Lurie doesn’t retain both of his allied supervisors. A lot of money changed hands here — consultants’ boat payments were likely assured. Poor to middling outcomes would make it that much more difficult for Team Lurie to fundraise for his November charter amendments to greatly enhance mayoral power.
Par for the course for the charmed life of Daniel Lurie, he’ll arguably be a winner no matter what voters decide regarding Prop. D.
If, over the mayor’s wishes and in a rebuke to his wealthy donors, Prop. D passes, it could actually provide Lurie with the best of all possible worlds. At least politically.
Could businesses abandon San Francisco? They could. They always say they will. But the mayor can note that this is exactly what he warned us about. And, in the meantime, he can take the anticipated hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the general fund from the tax he opposed and use it to stave off the curtailing of city services and wholesale dismissal of unionized and nonprofit workers.
The SEIU, IFPTE and other union contracts are up in 2027. City unions fought, methodically, for years, to win the right to strike. Did you notice Lurie giving police and firefighters 14 percent raises in April? Other unions sure did. Whatever deleterious disasters may be developed by Prop. D, it would certainly behoove the mayor to have dispensable dollars to derail our more draconian dilemmas.
There is, in fact, a history of pro-business, pro-downtown San Francisco mayors opposing taxes on business and downtown, losing, and then using the resultant hundreds of millions of dollars to balance the budget. That could happen here, too.
So that’s something to think about on the eve of the election. As is the ever-prophetic presidential slogan of Alfred E. Neuman: “You could do worse … and you always have!”
