San Francisco is a pricey town; the $3 the 49ers paid for an egg during the Gold Rush days translates into well over $100 in today’s money.
Money in politics has been prodigious for quite some time too. But a Rubicon of sorts was crossed this year when crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, apparently proactively, dropped a $500,000 donation into a PAC supporting District 10 supervisor aspirant Theo Ellington, the mayor’s pick.
Ellington was already, far and away, the fundraising leader in this race. He is widely viewed as the prohibitive favorite. So that’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Or maybe not: A $500,000 donation for Larsen is the equivalent of a person with a net worth of $1 million giving $36.50.
So it wasn’t just the (staggering) size of the donation that caught politicians’ eyes, it was the casualness of it. Yes, unions put $1 million into re-electing Supervisor Connie Chan in 2024 — but that was a broad consortium of organized labor in a monthslong campaign. This was a single individual dropping half-a-mil the way folks pull out their wallets to buy a bacon-wrapped hot dog. Larsen could do this again tomorrow if he felt like it — and the next day and the next day and all the way to election day.
“And here’s what no one likes to talk about,” says a city campaign strategist. Politicians “don’t do things because of money or they think they’ll get money. They do things because they’re worried money will be spent against them.”
Politics, it turns out, is one of the more affordable and efficient pastimes for free-spending billionaires. It’s cheaper than fast cars or art or even the incredible philanthropy that many of our biggest political donors engage in. And here’s the thing: The ROI is significant. You can’t solve world hunger or homelessness or climate change even with massive, ongoing philanthropic donations.
But you can, absolutely, politically remake a city for a small fraction of the price of a Van Gogh or a McLaren.
It’s election season again and that means you can’t venture into the virtual world without stumbling into Mayor Daniel Lurie.
To wit: A San Francisco political strategist plays YouTube videos of chirping birds to either amuse, placate or torment his cat, Lucy. And, like clockwork, after five minutes of tweeting and flapping and squawking, there’s Lurie, imploring Lucy to vote for his Measures D, E and F to strengthen and consolidate mayoral power.
Higher-ups in organized labor confirm they are — perhaps monomaniacally — putting all of their blood and treasure behind Chan’s congressional race. Lurie and his allies, meanwhile, have enough money in their collective couch cushions to pour $11 million into his ballot measure campaign — more money raised than every other proposition on the ballot combined, largely financed by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires.
This means that there will be no significant opposition to the mayor’s measures, even though Prop. D would quadruple the signature-gathering requirements to place items on the ballot — a significant hurdle for labor unions, neighborhood types or anyone not wealthy enough to plaster ads between bird videos for cats.
Of note, $4.5 million has been spent to date to signature-gather for these ballot measures, one of which would make it harder for you to signature-gather items onto the ballot. That’s a bad look — Lucy is unimpressed. But it’s hard to imagine the city’s human voters are going to spurn this mayor’s wishes. Certainly not without a coherent and decently funded opposition campaign.
There has always been a lot of money in San Francisco politics and there have always been rich and politically influential city figures — your Fishers, your Hellmans, your Bernsteins — going back to the days when Samuel Brannan shouted to all who’d hear “Gold! Gold from the American River!”
In the present day, however, the city’s rich have never been richer, more brazen or faced with less pushback and less viable opposition. They are spending more and asking for more. Today’s big shots don’t just ask for more cops (and cameras) in their neighborhood, a sweetheart development deal or a tax cut (but they do want those things). They also want structural change.
“In my lifetime, it seems unprecedented to me,” says historian and political scientist Rich DeLeon, the 84-year-old author of the seminal 1992 book “Left Coast City.”
Gray Brechin, a historian and the author of the 1999 book “Imperial San Francisco,” agrees.
“In the Gilded Age, with the Big Four and the Silver Kings and all the rest there was pushback,” he says. “There was the Workingman’s Party and the Populist Party and San Francisco was a strong union town, unlike Los Angeles. Now, I just don’t see that.”
“What do you buy after your super yacht and your mansions?” he continues. “You buy the government and you buy the media.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s three keys to success are “Money. Message. Mobilization.” Those who seek to counter this city’s billionaires are deficient in all three.
Does money alone win you a race? No. The vape giant Juul could tell you that. The backers of Prop. D of 2024 could tell you that.
But, in general, it’s better to be rich and famous than poor and unknown. And you still need “message” and “mobilization.” The knock on this city’s left, for quite some time, is that its messaging has been muddled if not nonexistent — clearly look at the scary billionaires buying these elections isn’t working. Jack Torrance might have wanted to know who was buying his drinks, but local voters don’t seem to share that concern.
And “mobilization” is harder in a city that has priced its working- and middle class to the outer Bay Area and beyond.
Fewer and fewer members of most public sector unions — which are now more or less the last remaining pillar of city progressivism— live here. They are less and less inclined to head to some remote corner of a city they don’t spend time in and talk to people — who are less and less inclined to want to listen. Campaigners tell me that, post-pandemic, in-person, people-powered activities have lost ground to digital ads of the sort playing for Lucy the cat.
That’s hardly surprising. San Francisco’s demographics have undergone a sea change over the last few generations. And our demeanor and customs feel like they’ve transformed, too, in a much quicker timeframe. “Everywhere I go, everyone is hunched over their phones,” says Brechin. “Only in Irish pubs are they standing and having Guinnessess and talking to each other.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie remains popular. It’s not hard to see why: He is an affable, positive, friendly man whose affable positivity is broadcast continually in his many, many internet videos. He continues to pay consultants and strategists who poll relentlessly — enabling him to essentially campaign 24/7/365 to the city’s phone hunching demographic.
Say what you will about Lurie, he is well-meaning. You cannot say the same about some of the people in his orbit, however. When asked if Lurie had misgivings about the sheer volume of money in San Francisco politics and the motives of some of his backers, the mayor’s office responded: “Our administration has proven every day that we work for the people of San Francisco and no one else. It doesn’t matter who gives how much to what campaign — we’re working every day to deliver results so people are safe, the streets are clean, and our comeback benefits every community in our city.”
That’s a more politic message than Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan delivered at a 2022 conference promoting Network States — essentially tech-funded startup nations. Tan and his allies, he told the crowd, were working to build “parallel education, nonprofits, media, unions” in an effort to create “the alternative tech political machine” to “reform” San Francisco.
“And if it works in [San Francisco],” said Tan, as recounted in “The Nerd Reich” by Gil Duran, “it will work everywhere.”
That’s another factor differentiating today’s wealthy San Francisco political movers and shakers from their predecessors: “We have a cult of radicalized billionaires who believe it is their destiny to rule the 21st century,” Duran tells me. “They know our system is for sale. And that’s the name of the game, not only in San Francisco but in Washington.”
Whatever your criticisms of Lurie and the incredible sums of money he spent to obtain his office, he is not part of that crowd.
But they are supporting his measures. And Lurie will not be mayor forever. The normalization and acceleration of expending vulgar sums of political cash and the centralization of executive power will outlast him.
This city’s wealthiest are playing a long game.
They are winning it.
