Close race + margin of error = a nail-biter of an election ahead
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For the last two weeks before the election, Mission Local’s campaign dispatches are switching daily between the major candidates. Read earlier dispatches here.
This Sunday, mere days after telling Mission Local that he never releases a poll to the press, Jim Stearns, campaign consultant to Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin’s campaign for mayor, released two polls to the press.
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One poll, conducted by the polling firm Public Policy Research in early October, showed Peskin in third place, at 17 percent. The next, an identical poll taken weeks later on October 18 and 19, shows Peskin tied with Daniel Lurie at 25 percent; London Breed in third with 18 percent, and Mark Farrell in fourth place with 15 percent.
“Terrible, right?” said Stearns, when contacted about his reversal of policy. “This is a dire circumstance.” That dire circumstance is several other polls that don’t show Peskin in the lead, including one, done by Sextant Strategies & Research and released today by the San Francisco Chronicle, based on data collected on October 15 and 16. “We thought we should add ours to the mix, because ours is literally the last, most recent poll,” says Stearns.
The Chronicle poll shows Lurie and Breed nearly tied with 23 and 24 percent of first-place votes, respectively — and Lurie walking away with 56 percent of the vote once all the ranked choice votes were tallied. Out of the people who responded to that poll, 18 percent said that Peskin was their first choice (up from 12 percent in August, but he was knocked out by the fourth round.
In a race that is shaping up to be this close, the margin of error makes a lead of a few percentage points in any poll pretty dubious. The most recent poll released by Peskin’s campaign sets its margin of error of 4 percent — and says 11 percent of San Francisco voters still haven’t decided who they will support for mayor. The Chronicle poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percent, and pegs the number of voters who haven’t decided at 13 percent.
The race is on to persuade those undecided voters. And plenty of money is going into that. Mission Local reported on Friday that, in October alone, Daniel Lurie gave another $1.75 million to his own campaign, bringing his total fundraising to $8.93 million, with $8.04 million of that from his own pocket. According to recent campaign filings, much of that is being spent on advertising.
For months, the Peskin campaign has been running a volunteer-heavy grassroots campaign with a strong emphasis on door-to-door canvassing, house parties, merchant walks, and face-to-face conversations with undecided voters, as well as securing progressive endorsements. In recent weeks, those efforts have only intensified.
So have the efforts of heavy-hitting donors pursuing an “anyone but Peskin” strategy in the mayor’s race. On the same day that the New York Times published an anti-Peskin op-ed written by local billionaire Michael Moritz, Ron Conway, a tech investor who donated heavily to Ed Lee’s mayoral run and against Peskin’s most recent run for the Board of Supervisors, gave $100,000 to Residents Opposing Aaron Peskin for Mayor 2024, a PAC whose purpose is exactly what the name says. It’s Conway’s first major donation to the mayor’s race.
Sunny Angulo, Peskin’s former chief of staff and current campaign manager, chooses to see this as a good sign. “You know Aaron is surging in this race,” Angulo told the San Francisco Standard for its Power Play newsletter, “if they’re resurrecting Ron Conway and his money bags from the dead.”
Politicians and influence groups are releasing polls right now, says Stearns, because everybody’s trying to keep voters enthusiastic, margin of error or no margin of error. “We’ve consistently been in third place. This is the first time we’ve been in first place. Not that much reason to hide it. You know what I’m saying? Let’s just go for it.”
H.R. SMITH
H.R. Smith has reported on tech and climate change for Grist, studied at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and is exceedingly fond of local politics.More by H.R. Smith
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