On opposite sides of the Richmond District, canvassers hit the streets on a recent Saturday morning with warring goals.
About 50 union carpenters left Scott Wiener’s Westside headquarters in the Inner Richmond looking to secure votes for the state senator in the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress.
Shortly after, 30 union nurses, electricians and other volunteers for Connie Chan, the Richmond District supervisor, set out from Fulton Playground Park to do the same for their chosen candidate.
The Richmond District has become a battleground in San Francisco’s congressional race, but the symmetry of that battle is not clear: Wiener has invested significant resources in the neighborhood and opened an office there, though Chan feels secure in her victory over the area.
“We’re confident that our constituents in District 1, in the Richmond, know our work,” Chan said.
Chan has represented District 1, which includes the Richmond, for nearly six years, after all, and in 2024 won reelection by a healthy margin after a close match in 2020. In the June 2 primary election, Chan came in first place in precincts across the city’s west side, and performed especially well in the outer avenues.
But Wiener is edging in. He came in first place in many of the Richmond’s northern and eastern precincts, including the one where his Richmond office — which serves as a headquarters for all Westside operations — now lies.
“What we’ve found is that the Richmond is a very untapped market for Scott Weiner supporters,” said Wiener campaign spokesperson Joe Arellano.
The state senator has support from Richmond residents because of his housing and safe-streets stances, Arellano said, and has made inroads with “disgruntled Connie Chan constituents” who care about public safety and homelessness in the neighborhood.
“When they say all politics is local, I think this is a perfect example,” Arellano said.
Wiener has poured resources into the area. He opened the satellite Westside office there in July and then spent $20,000 on two neighborhood billboards advertising an AI chatbot designed to criticize Chan’s record — he quickly took the site, and the billboards, down after criticism.
The candidate has also visited the Clement Street farmer’s market — where his campaigners stand cheek-by-jowl with Chan’s every week — and other events in the neighborhood. His Richmond District office has served as a site for twice-weekly Cantonese phone banking, further reaching into Chan’s base.
Michael Terris, a 40-year local political consultant, said that if Chan can “completely dominate” the Richmond, it could make a difference in the general election. “But,” he added, there are moderate voters in the area Wiener can win over, “which is why he’s trying to cut into her base.”
Others characterize Wiener’s entrance as more “psychological warfare” than vote-getting.
“There’s an element of Senator Wiener’s campaign wanting to gain some ground here,” said Nadia Rahman, a Richmond resident and political consultant who supports Chan. But he is also attempting to portray Chan as losing support in her own backyard, she said, to gin up bad publicity.
Her most recent example: The Wiener campaign produced videos featuring Richmond residents expressing disappointment with their supervisor.
“If [Chan] hasn’t been effective in the Richmond District,” said one apparent Richmond constituent in one video, “I can’t see how she’ll be effective in Congress.”
Rahman, who formerly directed Saikat Chakrabarti’s unsuccessful primary campaign, said the videos featured known Chan opponents singled out to portray a neighborhood in sway. “Our district is very much behind Supervisor Chan,” Rahman said. “Senator Wiener’s campaign doing that implies something else.”
Are Richmond residents ripe for the plucking?
Seen one way, the congressional contest is the latest manifestation of a longstanding political rift in the Richmond, where urban issues like housing and transportation have long embittered neighbors and pitted them against each other.
Chan’s quiet support for Prop. G, the measure to transform Sunset Dunes park back into a road during the week, for example, is sure to earn her votes in the Westside — and has already become a proxy battle in the congressional race.
She and Wiener publicly disagreed over a similar controversy when Golden Gate Park’s main thoroughfare permanently closed to cars in 2022 — Chan wanted cars to return to the road — and Wiener has continued to rehash that issue in debates.
Amid those rifts and others, Wiener says he has won the neighborhood’s support. When his campaign painted a bespectacled giraffe on the side of 4300 California St. in July and opened his Westside office there, the state senator immediately claimed victory over the neighborhood: He said he came in first place there in the primary election.
“And we’re gonna do it again in November,” he said in a video announcing the office opening. Primary election data show that Wiener came in first in District 1 by 66 votes.
But that was a three-way contest where Chakrabarti got 17 percent of the vote. Chakrabarti’s supporters are expected to largely go to Chan this time around, and a staffer familiar with the Chan campaign’s door-knocking efforts said that her popularity in the neighborhood has never been higher — Chan’s congressional campaign, that staffer said, has more support in the Richmond than did either of her past two runs for district supervisor.
Still, Richmond resident and YIMBY political organizer Bobak Esfandiari called Wiener’s presence “rhetorically correct, philosophically correct, and also politically smart.” Esfandiari works as executive director of the local Democratic Party and has volunteered with Wiener’s campaign.
Wiener’s effort in the neighborhood, he said, “means [Chan] has to continue to spend time earning the votes of people who purportedly should know her the best, and in theory, should like her.”
Esfandiari said he has seen support for Wiener from younger people trying to start families in the neighborhood, and others who appreciate the state senator’s work on housing and transportation.
For Olivia Reynolds, Wiener’s west side organizer, the state senator’s narrow victory in the district made clear that “this part of the city is ready for new leadership,” she wrote in a statement. Wiener’s team has spoken with thousands of Westside voters, she said, and their “reception has been strong” in the avenues.
But Chan appears unfazed. She said her constituents, particularly working people and small business owners, support her and value her local ties.
She recalled one conversation with a neighbor recently: “Connie, you’re gonna be in D.C., then who’s gonna take care of the Richmond?”