Do you know how many votes you get to cast for mayor in November? If so, you’re better informed than many of the folks working this year’s mayoral campaigns — or running in them — who tend to default to ‘a lot.’
They’re not wrong, but the Department of Elections informs us that the exact answer is 10. Ten! Can you imagine it? Can you envision the thought process behind parsing your sixth, seventh and eighth choices? It’d be like asking Elizabeth Taylor to rank her ex-husbands (and Liz would complicate her ballot by putting Richard Burton twice).
Will most San Francisco voters dutifully fill out all 10 spots? Of course not; that’d be a lot to expect out of a voter, especially when, like the roster of a city Little League team, the talent level among the mayoral candidates really drops off after the top four or five.
So, no, most San Francisco voters will not emulate David Letterman and craft their own Top-10 lists. But the vast majority will be voting for multiple candidates, as the system allows. The national ranked-choice voting advocacy group Fair Vote crunched 20 years of San Francisco data, and noted that the median number of city voters who’ve been opting for multiple candidates is 74 percent.
That’s a lot of extra votes out there. Candidates neglecting, ignoring or disdaining the voting system we’ve had in place since 2004 are setting themselves up to be neglected, ignored or disdained. And yet, it happens more than you’d think.
With the dust settling from the March 5 election, we’re entering into a period of what one pithy city player calls “moderate-on-moderate violence.”
Up in the political heavens, our Masters of the Universe are turning on one another. Some of the billionaires will support the incumbent. But some won’t: Don’t look now, but Mark Farrell established a candidate-controlled committee last week to push the mayoral-strengthening ballot measures from Michael Moritz’s TogetherSF … which also enables Farrell to raise unlimited funds.
On a more terrestrial plane, the competition for mayoral endorsements will be fierce. And multifaceted. This is a multi-front war. It will be fought over the now moderate-heavy Democratic County Central Committee, the big-money groups spending with sailor-on-liberty ferocity over the last several election cycles, neighborhood and ethnic Democratic clubs, and influential and quasi-influential individuals. When it comes to bending the ears of individual DCCC member-elects, we’re told, “the wooing season has already started.”
Mayor London Breed’s team has, additionally, made it clear that it is not interested in any dual or ranked endorsements. This is a loaded decree coming from a sitting mayor who’ll be running this town for the next eight-odd months (and may yet win in November). It’d be nice if she picked up the phone for you, right? Political and governmental issues aren’t supposed to bleed into one another, but it often happens here on planet Earth.
At this point, this is just a battle over endorsements. Breed’s demand that she and she alone be recognized makes political sense. It does not benefit her to have other people’s names and photos on the campaign brochures she’d rather have featuring her and her alone. That’s hardly unwise or crazy.
But there’s a difference between consolidating endorsements for a campaign and actually running a campaign. And, at this point, everything seems to point toward the mayor having little interest in engaging with the ranked-choice strategy that has governed San Francisco elections for a generation and will decide this one, whether she likes it or not.
Do you know what percentage of the time the candidate who wins the most first-place votes goes on to win in a ranked-choice election? According to the data sets over at Fair Vote, it’s around 94 percent. Didn’t Mayor Breed finish first in a 2018 election in which she put minimal effort into a ranked-choice strategy, and then hang on to beat Mark Leno and Jane Kim, who put a maximal effort into such a strategy? Yes, that happened. So what’s the big deal?
Let’s address the higher-end issue first. Many elections, if not most, are not particularly competitive. If we had a ranked-choice contest on what to have for dinner and the choices were pizza, haggis or Scandinavian aspic, the permutations of RCV would not likely come into play.
And that leads to the forthcoming San Francisco mayoral election — and how, in some ways, it’s 180 degrees different than the race Breed won in 2018. One thing it certainly isn’t is a pizza-haggis-aspic competition. It seems plain that this one is going to be competitive, and the notion of any of the declared candidates amassing a double-digit first-round lead, as Breed did in 2018, feels more than a bit fanciful. It certainly doesn’t feel like a solid assumption that our deeply unpopular incumbent mayor, who is running in the same ideological lane as two other well-financed competitors, is a lock to finish first at all.
In that 2018 contest, Leno and Kim each garnered about 60,000 first-place votes. That was a good 30,000 behind Breed — but, combined, the two outpolled her handily. Over the course of eight rounds of ranked-choice tabulations, Leno gained on Breed, eventually losing by just 2,500-odd votes, a 50.55 to 49.45 tilt.
In 2024, we won’t have two candidates neatly splitting the pie among voters less ideologically inclined to vote for Breed. Rather, now we’ll have multiple candidates on her side of the sandbox, splitting her voters. There is, clearly, a big center-left lane in which to run. Aaron Peskin is biding his time like Godot — And if he doesn’t come? We’ll come back tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow. Possibly. And so on. But it figures he will eventually arrive. Perhaps as soon as April.
Peskin is in no hurry. Why interrupt this moderate-on-moderate violence? But when he does finally enter, a ranked-choice strategy among his mayoral competitors would seem to be de rigueur. But it remains to be seen if these candidates can get over individual ambitions and personal animosity to agree on anything. Election professionals worry that these sorts of deals, at least early in the election cycle, project weakness. They also give your chosen voter base tacit permission to vote for another candidate.
Election professionals, however, also know the value of (eventually) forming alliances. Candidates, though, often don’t; candidates can be the most inconvenient part of the electoral process for election professionals. So can voters, who are less ideological than political insiders and, messaging be damned, vote for candidate combinations that don’t make intuitive sense. One casualty of moderate-on-moderate violence may be punch-drunk voters.
“There should be genuine concern about confusing voters,” a moderate operative tells me.
Ranked-choice voting needn’t be confusing, but politics often is. In 2018, even up to the penultimate seventh round of ranked-choice tabulations, Kim and Leno held nearly 57 percent of the vote. The electorate, at that time, was clearly leaning progressive, so multiple progressives entered the fray, split the vote, diluted their collective leverage, and the mayoral contest was won by a moderate. It’s funny how that works.
This year, the electorate would seem to be leaning moderate. And, lo, multiple moderates have entered the fray. Moderates have the clear advantage — and, as a result of that, every individual candidate is incentivized to stay in the race, work for his or her own benefit, and dilute their collective leverage. It has the potential to work out funny again.
Regardless, it will be fascinating to see what comes next — if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. Possibly. And so on.
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JOE ESKENAZI
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
