We are all in San Francisco’s ‘March for Billionaires’ now

Back in February, a shade under two dozen young people announced that they were organizing a pro-billionaire march in San Francisco.

It seemed, for all the world, to be a strange and terrible satirical bit, but when Mission Local arrived at the march’s staging grounds in Alta Plaza Park, Nathan Fielder was nowhere to be seen. Neither were many marchers. Instead, journalists trying to find marchers to buttonhole dominated the scene. 

Eight months after that march, the pro-billionaire crowd is enjoying the last laugh. Early returns from San Francisco’s midterm election are in, and every last measure favored by our dynastically wealthy mayor and lavishly funded by his merry band of billionaires is on track for victory. 

The mayor’s propositions to consolidate executive power and raise the signature-gathering and legislative barriers to put measures on the ballot, backed by some $14 million and facing little in the way of opposition, are all leading handily.

Prop. D, which would raise the threshold for either signature-gatherers or elected officials to place material on the ballot has nearly 60% of the early vote. Prop. E — which would give more authority to the city administrator — and Prop. F — which would enable the mayor to hire and fire department heads and commissioners and fold and repurpose city departments and their workers — are both doing even better.

Mayor Daniel Lurie belittled affordable housing Prop. I — which would direct scores of millions of tax dollars from real-estate sales over $10 million to his own Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development — as a “slush fund.” 

That’s a wild thing to think or say or put on a mailer and send to people’s homes, but, regardless, the mayor’s thumbs-down and $2.8 million seem to have taken the wind out of Prop. I’s sails. In early returns, it trails by a 56-44 tilt. 

This year, San Francisco’s Democratic Party (composed of the big-money-backed slate of Democratic Party officials that trashed the labor-backed slate in the last election) took the unprecedented step of altering its bylaws so it could buck the state party and offer up a “No” endorsement on Prop. 40, the “billionaire tax.” 

And, lo, in San Francisco — be sure to wear some flowers in your hair — only some 52% of early voters here came out against a tax on billionaires that would have funded healthcare. 

It’s not a one-off: In 2024, 57% of San Franciscans inveighed against a statewide measure that would have allowed the city to expand rent control beyond buildings constructed before 1979. And, in just June, voters comfortably spurned the labor-backed “Overpaid CEO” tax, which would have dinged businesses where the big boss earned more than 100 times their median workers. 

So, clearly, the rich are having a moment in San Francisco. We can argue about what that means. But we can’t argue about this: San Franciscans, by and large, like Daniel Lurie. And we have, once again, proved that Don’t vote for that! Billionaires backed that! is not a deal-breaker. 

Oh not at all.

Every election, observers are forced to ask the Alfie question: So what’s the answer? That’s what I keep asking myself. What’s it all about? Know what I mean? 

Keep in mind, once more, that these are preliminary results.  

So here’s what it’s all about: Mayor Lurie remains influential and well-liked — and backed by new money, old money and his own money. Unprecedented amounts of money — and there’s more where that came from. He has been the face of this election in every which way: If you laid out this season’s political mailers on the table, a multitude of Luries would grin up at you like a Warhol painting. 

Our mayor is decent and positive and an omnipresent Internet presence who pays out-of-pocket for a 24/7/365 PR campaign and is rarely unscripted.

It’s his combination of popularity and vast financial outlays that’s his secret sauce. Lurie and his billionaire brigade are not the first wealthy people to put obscene amounts of money into city politics (though they are breaking records here). But past megadonors haven’t been nearly so likeable, nor able to maintain the veneer of positivity.  

To wit: The 2024 Mark Farrell mayoral soft money vehicle, Prop. D, spent some $9.6 million — much of it from billionaire Michael Moritz — to remake City Hall in a similar fashion to Lurie’s suite of measures this year. It was trounced by Prop. E, a grassroots attempt to nullify it, which succeeded despite a modest war chest of tens of thousands of dollars. 

Juul’s $12 million attempt to write its own regulations in 2019 became the “Ishtar” of San Francisco ballot misadventures. 

But you remember these big-dollar bombs because of their improbable losses. Farrell — and vaping — were neither positive nor likable, even if they had filthy amounts of money at their disposal. 

Farrell, a politician who stumbled from ethical scandal to ethical scandal like the Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes meme, turned out to be the worst person to hitch to your big-dollar charter amendment, and he dragged it under. 

And here — pun intended — is your money shot: Far from being mortally wounded after the debacle of Prop. D of 2024, the big-money players learned their lessons. They dusted themselves off and are now backing perhaps the city’s most pro-business, pro-downtown mayor ever. With the likely passage of Lurie’s mayoral power enhancements, it’s hard to argue they haven’t achieved pretty much everything they set out to. 

The deeper, underlying issue here is that the city’s most influential donors deny the established fact that San Francisco ever had a strong-mayor system. This is a bit like dismissing “gravity” or “it’s wise to dress in layers in San Francisco.” As we’ve written before, there are youngish public-policy-school grads wearing Allbirds to work who have more input and influence on the city’s budget than any and all elected supervisors. They work for the mayor. So do our city’s department heads. 

But, a big-money campaign targeting San Francisco’s obvious institutional torpor with nonsensical claims about “slush funds” run out of the mayor’s office, “corruption” in City Hall two years into Lurie’s tenure and shadowy “insiders” calling the shots instead of the mayor and his wealthy allies is handily winning the day. 

In any event, San Francisco’s strong mayor will be stronger and bands of yahoos who can pull together 10,000 signatures will no longer be able to throw taxes on big business onto the ballot. Nobody’s signature-gathering their strange and terrible ideas before San Franciscan voters again — unless, of course, millions of dollars is mere toothpaste money for them. Ay, there’s the rub. 

Perhaps the best summation comes from Tevye the dairyman: “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”

Lurie and the city’s ascendant billionaires aren’t just succeeding because of wealth and popularity and Let’s Go, San Francisco! (though this helps). Their zenith is coming as the city’s left is at its nadir: There has never been weaker or less coherent opposition to the city’s big-money elements. 

Labor, the last financially capable pillar of the city’s left, is primed to suffer the winter of its political discontent. After blowing all its money backing the doomed “Overpaid CEO Tax” in June, organized labor monomanically fixated on backing Connie Chan in her congressional race vs. Scott Wiener. Returns are, again, early, but Wiener’s early double-digit lead appears insurmountable

That’s an impressive series of losses but Lurie, nevertheless, cut a deal last month with labor, guaranteeing raises and foregoing the possibility of layoffs until 2029. It was, quipped one longtime City Hall player, a deal befitting a labor movement with the power and panache of 2006, not 2026. But Daniel Lurie does have a city to run in every season, not just election season. 

The vestiges of the city’s left are gathering on Election Nightat El Rio. It’s not a funereal affair — unless you’d play hyphy music at a funeral. Some people are pleased Prop. B, which would lay the foundations for a public bank, is in a tight race. But this is less of a silver lining than a copper lining. 

For these people to be victorious in local elections once more, two things would have to happen: 

1. El Rio must secede from the city and begin holding its own elections (though a schism would invariably erupt between the patio sect and the interior sect), or; 
2. San Francisco’s left must begin telling voters what it’s for, not just what it’s against (and that nefarious rich guys are funding the opposition and how much money they’re spending). And, ideally, what the left is for would resonate with the city we have now — and, now as a matter of necessity, not be dependent on divisive revenue measures. 

As we’ve written before, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s three keys to success are “Money. Message. Mobilization.” Those who seek to challenge this city’s billionaires are deficient in all three.

It’s a tall order to come up with a vision to counter this city’s wealthy, emergent powers — let alone explain how you’ll achieve it. And there’s the matter of swimming upstream against torrents of cash to even be able to tell voters about it. But Democrats around the nation appear to be winning their races against opponents who, far more often than not, outspent them. 

There are lessons to be learned here. But is anybody willing to? That’s the billion-dollar question.