Darshini Patel wants you to know: GrowSF endorsement came ‘without my consent’

You can wager on anything these days, but it’s a safe bet that nobody put down money that GrowSF would endorse a dues-paying democratic socialist like Darshini Patel in District 8.

Say it with me in your Jim Harbaugh voice: NOOOOOOOOOBODY.

GrowSF is the so-called moderate, tech-backed political pressure group bankrolled by the ascendant billionaires who, with a straight face, are arguing that they need to take this city back. 

Patel is a high-energy 38-year-old DSA member and political newcomer who has been running a low-dollar, uphill battle — literally in craggy D8 — to attain office as a woman in a district where the demographics are heavily tilted toward a gay man. 

Patel does have potential moderate crossover appeal. She worked in the Obama White House and in New Hampshire for the Kamala Harris campaign. She joined a nascent Doordash in 2017 on the cusp of its expansion into ubiquity. She’s also a YIMBY, but her views on policing, harm reduction and public safety align tightly with those of the city’s left. 

Her campaign has, by her count, knocked on 20,000 doors in District 8. Which, until Oct. 1, would’ve only earned you a workout by traversing the district’s topography and a callused set of knuckles. But after that date, this took on new resonance. 

That’s when Emanuel “Manny” Yekutiel, the far-and-away front-runner in District 8 and Grow’s preferred candidate, withdrew from the race after a second on-the-record allegation of sexual misconduct. 

Following Yekutiel’s abrupt departure, much of San Francisco’s political establishment engaged in a choreographed cover-your-ass apology tour and coalesced around candidate Gary McCoy, a 48-year-old former aide to Rep. Nancy Pelosi and three city supervisors. 

GrowSF did not do this. Instead, it ran a district-level poll gauging whether voters still cared to back Yekutiel and informing respondents of McCoy’s decades-old history as a homeless drug addict and thief. 

Then, last Monday, GrowSF endorsed Patel. 

Patel says she learned that she had supplanted Yekutiel as GrowSF’s candidate of choice at the same time as everybody else. She was surprised. And displeased: In July, GrowSF emailed her and asked if she would care to fill out its political questionnaire, noting that “A #2 endorsement is still possible.” (At the time, Yekutiel was still Grow’s undisputed No. 1). 

Patel sent back a terse reply stating that she “wouldn’t be submitting answers.” 

And yet, she says that on Oct. 9, she received a 20-minute call from GrowSF (her phone records confirm this). Patel says she spoke with the organization’s co-leads, Steven Buss Bacio and Sachin Agarwal.

“They said, ‘we would like to endorse you.’ It wasn’t a question,” Patel recalls. “I said no in so many different ways.” 

On Oct. 12, Patel learned — indirectly — that GrowSF endorsed her in District 8. She says her first reaction was, “What the hell?” 

Phone records indicate Patel dialed up the organization that morning: During a 12-minute call, Patel says she was told that GrowSF could not discuss its endorsement with her because that would constitute illegal coordination between an independent expenditure committee and a candidate for political office. 

Mission Local’s query of GrowSF to gauge the thought process behind this endorsement elicited the following statement:

We endorsed Darshini Patel for Supervisor because she is the best candidate for the District. We don’t ask for 100% alignment from the candidates we endorse, but we are confident that of the three remaining candidates, her values are most closely aligned with the voters of District 8.

Our query about whether GrowSF’s principals recalled their phone calls with Patel in the same manner she did was not answered. 

GrowSF has let it be known that it will put “six figures” into an ad campaign slagging McCoy, who was chronically homeless and addicted to drugs between ages 18 and 31 and served as one of the city’s most prominent advocates of harm reduction for drug users as the vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360 between 2021 and 2025.

In its endorsement of Patel, GrowSF describes McCoy as “unfit for this job,” in part because of his work at HealthRight and his decades-old criminal record. 

There is a fine line between ideological flexibility and behaving as if you’ve been struck on the head with a ball-peen hammer and, truthfully, this feels more like the latter.

Patel, turns out, is a current board member of HealthRight 360 and has views on harm-reduction largely mirroring McCoy’s. They also have similar policies on policing, Flock cameras and building more housing; not for nothing did they form a political alliance in September and held a joint canvassing event earlier this month. 

As for McCoy’s troubled past, he is 16 years sober and is not the only politician in San Francisco who has been arrested, adjudicated or even incarcerated for drug use and crime in his distant past.

Whatever Grow’s motivation, it has positioned itself to drop a chunk of change into angry, negative ads against a politician it clearly detests and who clearly detests it. Sounds like great fun. Maybe that’s reason enough. 

As an independent, third-party entity, GrowSF is entitled to endorse whomever it wishes. So far as anyone can tell, no laws were broken here. A political shitstorm targeting Gary McCoy will likely benefit Darshini Patel.

But she’s not happy. Not at all. In discussions with the candidate, she evinces a sense of loss. And sadness. “The trust I spent months building,” she says, “eroded overnight.” 

Patel pledges that her positions won’t change. But, in the wake of the endorsement, she’s no longer able, in good conscience, to claim her grassroots campaign has no big-dollar backing.

Pleasant interactions have soured; she has, in the past week, been accused of being “morally corrupt” because she was bestowed with an endorsement she had no ability to reject. 

And this gets to the heart of why Darshini Patel is sad. But not just sad: She’s angry. The District 8 race ruptured because of issues with physical boundaries and consent. It is not lost on Patel that, on a metaphysical level, she, too, is experiencing these issues.

“People are spending a lot of time telling me I haven’t said no strongly enough to Grow,” she said. “Why are people not questioning Grow what their motivations are for doing this without my consent?”

Darshini Patel wants you to know that the 20,000 doors her campaign knocked on did not come as a result of any underwriting from GrowSF or any other big-money donor. Her septuagenarian parents are getting recognized in the Castro now as they make her case. Her fiancée’s mother is phone-banking for her from Texas.

The looming air strike of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of angry, negative ads, she says, has undercut the positive, homespun ethos of her campaign: “I’m being met with skepticism now.” 

San Francisco was always an expensive political town, but the dollar figures in the present day have made prior big spends look like a child’s experiment. 

This has always been a mean and petty political town, too. Generations of bright, accomplished, well-meaning younger people have been ground down and disillusioned and discarded by the toxic political machinery of San Francisco, a system operated on the principle that every child can grow up to be an establishment hack.

Patel says she won’t let this happen to her. It’d be nice if that’s so. 

“This is a campaign that’s run by everyday people who believe in something,” she says. “If I remember that, there’s a lot to hold onto there.”