With good luck and a free and fair election, Democrats could win in Texas, Maine, Michigan, Kansas, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and elsewhere. In Los Angeles, a democratic socialist is in the catbird seat to win the mayor’s race.
In many of these places, San Francisco is still viewed as a wild realm where barefoot hippies roam the streets, Pigpen McKernan and Janis Joplin will take all your booze and drugs and doped-up vagrants will kill us all by giving everybody syphilis.
But San Francisco is going in a different direction. It’s been going in a different direction for a long time. Voters here, barring unforeseen lunacy, will likely punch a straight or damn near straight ticket that’s a longtime wishlist and lavish recipient of record-breaking donations from button-down billionaires.
Should that wishlist be be fulfilled — and funding differentials and every other indication strongly suggests it will be — San Francisco voters will blithely abridge their ability to place legislation directly onto the ballot, a right granted to them in 1898, 13 years before California women were given the right to vote.
All it took was nearly $14 million dollars (and counting), which has deluged the city’s mailboxes and cellphones and televisions with messages that the road to hell is paved with a system of checks and balances, and that governance is best left to one person (the mayor).
The effort to pass this and other measures to strengthen mayoral power — and drastically curtail the ability of less wealthy politicians, or unions or regular people the ability to signature-gather items onto the ballot (most notably, taxes on big business) — is outraising its opposition by a margin of nearly 19-to-1. Team Lurie has amassed enough money to purchase a high-end M1 Abrams tank to consolidate mayoral power, against around three-quarters of a million bucks aimed at undercutting Prop. D, just one of his three measures (D, E and F)
Is San Francisco still a liberal city? It depends on what you mean by “liberal.” Candidates here who try to whip up the electorate with dire warnings about transgender people trying to infiltrate your restroom or your daughter’s sports team tend to clock about 4% of the vote.
But, for more than 30 years, San Francisco voters have opted for citywide leaders who generally favor less regulation and taxation of business, a police-oriented approach to crime and disorder, tougher sanctions on the homeless and less generous general city services.
That’s not exactly big-city liberalism, let alone socialism. San Franciscans do not get worked up about gun control, abortion rights or minority rights either — these are settled issues. We are fighting about budgeting, public safety, surveillance and other municipal issues.
But the times they are a-changing: In 2024, San Francisco, a renter-supermajority town, voted down a statewide measure seeking to expand rent control by a gaudy 57 to 43 ratio. In prior eras, that would’ve been unthinkable.
In just 2018 alone, San Francisco approved (signature-gathered) measures that gleaned billions from big businesses to fund homeless housing and programming and early childhood care.
That was then. This year, in June, voters spurned Prop. D, a union-led drive to plug a hole in the city budget by levying a tax on businesses whose top executive gets paid more than 100 times the salary of the company’s median employee. The prevailing view had been that, even a small amount of campaign cash would be enough for a measure appealing to San Franciscans — like, you know, a tax on companies with greedy CEOs.
No more: Mayor Daniel Lurie mustered a big-dollar campaign against it. The measure lost and it wasn’t particularly close. It was an epochal moment — and a gut punch for city labor, which blew all its money trying to pass it.
In the last decade, signature-gatherers or a minority of the Board of Supervisors placed tax measures on the ballot no fewer than 15 times. If on Tuesday, voters agree to elevate the ballot threshold, it’s difficult to foresee big businesses being subjected to any unwanted taxes moving forward.
And yes: That’s what this is really about.
So, if the nation goes as Democrats hope and pray, San Francisco will be what it always is: an outlier. But not the manner of outlier San Franciscans are accustomed to thinking of themselves.
There is an established San Francisco election tradition of not even waiting for all the election night votes to be counted to proclaim that the results reinforce your preexisting narrative.
Your humble narrator is violating that tradition — somewhat — by not even waiting for election night; zero votes have thus far been counted.
Could we be surprised? Possibly. But it doesn’t feel that way: If this election were an NCAA Tournament, it’d be one where you could reliably pick all the top seeds and, guess what? Duke and Kentucky in the finals.
Despite a scandal here and there — dubious contracts, poorly vetted appointees, too much coffee and Instagram — Mayor Lurie remains earnest, likeable, omnipresent and popular. He has activated an entirely new donor class (largely wealthy people he worked with in the nonprofit world). He also benefits from big-dollar donations from this city’s messianic tech billionaires, some of whom backed his opponents in 2024.
He’s got old money, he’s got new money, he’s got his own money. It’s a lot of money. That helps when you’re also subsidizing a 24/7/365 political PR campaign.
There have always been wealthy and powerful San Franciscans and this has always been a big-money town. But San Francisco’s wealthiest now have unprecedented control of city politics. Given the city’s serial boomtown status, this is a significant claim to make: Historian Gray Brechin notes that, for many decades, all of California was de-facto ruled not from Sacramento but from 1 Market St. — which was formerly known as the Southern Pacific Building, named for the railroad that, yes, de-facto ruled California.
But what’s different now is not just the level of inequity but the utter weakness and rudderlessness of even token opposition to this concentration of wealth and power.
A decade ago it was a scandal that VCs were sending around emails soliciting four-digit donations from their colleagues or telling CEOs how to lecture their employees to vote. Now VCs drop $500,000 on their preferred political candidates with all the nonchalance of someone buying a pitcher of hoppy lager at the local tavern.
In the olden days of 2019, no millionaire or billionaire saw fit to put serious money into the DA’s race. Those days are over. After Chesa Boudin eked out a narrow victory, during the pandemic, the city’s haves staged something of an ideological Brooks Brothers riot. The level of vitriol and money and vitriolic money skyrocketed. Donors playing .500 ball politically with hefty donations have supersized their gives — a strategy akin to “blitz scaling.”
He’s got old money, he’s got new money, he’s got his own money. It’s a lot of money.
Many millions of dollars as a political ante is irrelevant to the city’s richest. The $500,000 recently dropped by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen to back his preferred District 10 supervisor candidate is akin to a person with a $1 million net worth donating around $37. The city’s neighborhoods-vs.-Downtown power struggles of yesteryear are now neighborhoods-vs.-global wealth.
Even before they were drowned in cash, the city’s so-called progressives were underwater — their progressive social and governmental ideals that didn’t threaten the wealthy, like marriage equality or universal healthcare, were long ago appropriated by the city’s moderates. Everything else that can’t be explained in an Instagram stand-up — housing, public safety, evidence-based methods of treating drug addiction — splintered the coalitions that once propelled grassroots candidates into office.
The city’s remaining progressives have lost more than political power: They’re losing the demographics game. There is less and less of a viable working class living within San Francisco city limits. Tenants are no longer a coherent political force. The young progressives who once flocked to the city can’t afford to live here. The ones who gained a foothold when the gaining was good skew older and older, and aging progressive leaders are struggling to speak the same political language as the city’s younger voters. And city progressives have long skewed disproportionately white.
For some time, it’s been hard to put a finger on what city progressives stand for. They do complain — accurately — that their opponents are funded by billionaires. But the solutions, so far, have looked mostly like proposing revenue measures to soak big business, and using that money to fund programs and nonprofits that can barely patch the hole that the rising cost of housing (and everything else ) has torn in the city fabric. And voters will on Tuesday likely implode the ability to signature-gather for such revenue measures.
If and when Lurie’s charter reforms are enacted, he will be one of the most powerful mayors in the city’s history — and this city already had a strong mayor system. Lurie will have a free hand to remake city departments and reshuffle hundreds of employees and the majority of city commissioners will find themselves sitting atop a figurative trap door, ready to be dropped into a pit of fire for a single displeasing vote. Or, in fact, for no reason at all.
He all but certainly won’t have to worry about signature-gathered revenue measures anymore.
But even a mayor blessed with electorally mandated bionic enhancements won’t have the ability to counter the city’s biggest problem. San Franciscans worked themselves into a lather about lawlessness and chaos when the city’s reported crime rates hit historic lows. But San Francisco really is facing an affordability crisis, which figures to go to infinity and beyond with the coming IPOs of Anthropic and Open AI.
If and when residents begin laying affordability problems at Lurie’s feet, he’d be in trouble — because no mayor can expediently lift this city out of an affordability crisis. San Francisco’s chief executive cannot unilaterally lower interest rates. Even if the mayor wanted to, he or she couldn’t staunch the reams of international wealth that flow into the city — which drives up prices at speeds far outstripping even the most expedited construction schedules.
That’s San Francisco’s challenge for the future. What this city will look like in the coming years is anyone’s guess. But what it won’t look like is the city of Pigpen and Janis, where rent was cheap and life was wild. Sooner or later, the rest of the nation may catch on to that.
Sooner or later, we may too.