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State Sen. Scott Wiener has taken a commanding lead over Supervisor Connie Chan in the race to be San Francisco’s next member of Congress: He is leading 57% to 43% in the first batch of results, with 29% of the votes accounted for.
There will be further returns throughout the night and the coming days but that lead is considered significant. The winner will be the city’s first new representative in 39 years, replacing Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.
It will be difficult for Chan, who was endorsed by Pelosi, to win.
Chan’s 43% is less than what election observers felt she needed to bank in the first round to have a puncher’s chance. She may be able to make up ground, though. Conventional wisdom holds that late voters will favor Chan. In San Francisco, later votes have historically skewed more working class — though not as reliably as they used to.
For many San Francisco voters, this has been the first competitive congressional race of their lifetimes. It may well be the last for quite some time — the winner could retain the seat for decades.
Throughout the campaign Chan and Wiener have largely agreed on most national issues, taking positions to the left of many Democrats elsewhere in the country. Both have said they want to pass Medicare for All, increase taxes on the wealthy, abolish ICE, direct more federal money to building new housing and enact AI regulations — though they sometimes disagreed on how to do these things.
When it comes to local issues, their views diverge significantly: The candidates have been in opposing political camps for years.
Wiener has been seen as the embodiment of YIMBY urbanist ideals. He promoted a more bikeable, walkable city during his time as District 8 supervisor, and loosed regulatory hurdles to expedite the construction of all kinds of housing during his time in the state senate.
Chan’s record as District 1 supervisor has focused on protecting tenants and social services from budget cuts in her time as chair of the board’s budget committee. She has not embraced urbanism — car-centric voters in the Richmond were a core part of her base during her runs for supervisor in 2020 and 2024.
The two went after the support of different political coalitions. Wiener appealed to the city’s moderates, touting his extensive legislative record to argue that he’d be the more effective legislator for San Francisco’s interests in Washington.
With well over a decade in elected office — first as a supervisor from 2011 to 2016 and then as a State Senator from 2016 to the present — Wiener pointed to dozens of bills to argue that he had the legislative chops to make a positive impact in Congress. In 2016, for example, he passed a law requiring that San Francisco employers with 50 or more workers provide at least six weeks of fully paid parental leave.
Chan, meanwhile, centered her campaign message on representing working people without getting into details — a smart way to reach all her potential supporters without exposing the political differences among the progressives and conservatives who make up her base.
Chan often criticized Wiener for not being progressive enough, pointing to his lack of support for Proposition 40, the statewide billionaire tax, and highlighting her support from a vast majority of the city’s unions. Chan also criticized Wiener for raising money from the wealthy individuals and institutions that have donated heavily to local races in recent elections, which gave Wiener’s coalition the ability to outspend Chan’s by over 10 million.
Nowhere have their differences been clearer than in the debate between Chan and Wiener over AI regulation. Both said that, if elected to Congress, they will work to pass legislation that will make AI companies more legally liable for harms their products cause, and add safety features like “kill switches” on AI models.
Wiener’s narrative on AI is that he was a visionary who started working on AI regulation in 2023, long before the need for regulation was a national discussion. In 2025, Wiener passed the country’s first AI regulation bill, SB 53.
Chan argued that Wiener worked too closely with the AI industry in writing those regulations, arguing that SB 53 was watered down. Wiener’s previous bills were stronger, and Wiener said changes were made because Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed his original, and that the weaker measure was better than no bill at all.
Chan also attacked Wiener because a pro-Wiener independent expenditure committee accepted $3.5 million from Public First Action, an advocacy group that supports some AI regulation and receives millions in funding from Anthropic.
Selling weapons to the Israeli government was one of the few issues where Wiener and Chan’s national policy platforms have not been completely aligned. Though both candidates describe the actions of Israel’s miliatary in Gaza as genocide against the Palestinian people, Wiener was criticized for adopting the term only after facing backlash this January.
Though both candidates’ positions on weapons sales to Israel have morphed over the course of the race, Chan has consistently taken a harder approach to limiting arms sales. By the end of the race, Chan supported a full arms embargo on Israel, while Wiener would advocate that Israel only be allowed purchase defensive missile systems from the United States.
Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan two weeks before the June primary was arguably the biggest moment of the race, giving Chan the viability to counter Wiener, who had a leg up due to his longer tenure in office and larger war chest. Pelosi’s base, which overlaps heavily with Wiener’s, helped Chan tap into centrist voters beyond the progressive coalition that she started with.
Chan’s popularity in election polls soared in the days after Pelosi’s endorsement, and she finished the primary about 10 points above pre-endorsement poll numbers. Pelosi continued to demonstrate her commitment to Chan’s victory heading into the general election, facilitating high-profile endorsements, hosting fundraisers, and even loaning one of her most trusted aides to Chan’s campaign.
The next vote drop is at 9:45 p.m.
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