- By Adam Shanks | Examiner staff writer |
- Sep 8, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)
After facing unprecedented challenges brought on by a once-in-a-century pandemic, San Francisco Mayor London Breed believes she has earned four more years to lead The City through a period of renewal and growth.
A field of formidable opponents argues Breed has failed to meet The City’s problems head on, and that it’s time for a change.
The mayoral race pits Breed against several well-resourced and prominent opponents from across San Francisco’s political spectrum — Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of antipoverty nonprofit Tipping Point, two-term Supervisor Ahsha Safai, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell.
The race poses a central question to voters: Who is to blame for The City’s well-documented social and economic struggles, and who can take credit for its recent progress?
Polls have consistently shown that San Franciscans are concerned about the direction of The City and its leadership, though the picture is improving. If defeated, Breed would be the first incumbent mayor to lose a bid for reelection since Willie Brown defeated Mayor Frank Jordan in 1995.
The candidates have jockeyed to outline their solutions for The City’s most glaring issues, including widespread concerns about public safety, a fentanyl-overdose crisis, the stubbornly high cost of housing, and a sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery.
Though it’s a busy election season across the country, San Francisco’s mayoral election has drawn substantial interest and a wave of money. Candidate spending has already soared into the millions of dollars, with much more expected to be spent in the waning weeks of the campaign.
All of the major candidates are Democrats. Speaking in the broadest terms, three of the candidates — Lurie, Farrell and Breed — are generally considered to be “moderate,” meaning that they are to the political right of those labeled progressives, such as Peskin. Safai resists such labels and is typically considered somewhere in the middle.
Given the ideological overlap in the race, the candidates have attempted to distinguish themselves at the margins of policy and by their records, which are varied.
Given the cluster of candidates in the moderate camp, many have speculated that any combination of the candidates could form an alliance and encourage voters to support multiple candidates in The City’s ranked-choice voting system.
That could mean one or more of the moderate candidates band together and urge their supporters to rank their choices accordingly. However, an alliance across the ideological spectrum is not out of the question. As of this writing, no alliances between candidates have been publicly revealed, though some influential political groups are urging their followers to back a group of candidates.
London Breed
Despite The City’s — and her own — many critics, Breed contends San Francisco is on the upswing.
Pointing to declining crime rates and her fledgling efforts to revitalize downtown, Breed argues she has earned another term in office while her opponents will only drag The City backwards.
She touts her leadership through the pandemic, during which The City saw a death rate from COVID-19 that was below that of its peers.
Breed has also positioned herself as a leader on housing policy, promising to continue to shed burdensome regulations and implement The City’s Housing Element, a plan that calls for the construction of more than 80,000 homes by 2031.
“Things are changing in this city, and I have been on the defense leading this city through some of the most challenging times, making the hard decisions,” Breed said after winning a key endorsement from the San Francisco Democratic Party. “Now that things are starting to look good, and now that people are loving their neighborhoods and things are starting to feel good, I want to live in that moment as your mayor, in the offense, to take us to the next level.”
Daniel Lurie
Lurie has highlighted his philanthropic endeavors and his work as the leader of Tipping Point, a nonprofit he founded with the aim of addressing poverty in the Bay Area.
At every chance, Lurie highlights his complete lack of experience in city government, unlike each of his main opponents. Pointing to his work for Tipping Point — which he argues was substantially more efficient at providing services than city government — Lurie has presented himself as an antidote for a bureaucracy plagued by lethargy and corruption.
Lurie has also unveiled a flurry of detailed policy proposals to fix city government, such as tying the pay of city contractors to their performance on the job.
“I am going to be solutions-oriented,” Lurie told The Examiner after launching his campaign last year. “I’m going to bring people together and work with everybody to make sure that we fix the problems that our city is facing.”
Mark Farrell
Though he served as interim mayor for less than a year, Farrell has trumpeted his stint atop city government as a time period in which government was more effective, such as in clearing homeless encampments.
Prior to serving as interim mayor, Farrell spent two terms on the Board of Supervisors representing a district including the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights.
Farrell has run a campaign largely centered on addressing voters’ concerns about public safety. He has lambasted Breed for her response to crime and street conditions and San Francisco and inability to rectify The City’s police officer shortage.
“This mayor has turned her back to the police department multiple times,” Farrell told The Examiner earlier this year.
If elected, Farrell has pledged to fire San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott and ask for National Guard personnel to be deployed to San Francisco streets to disrupt drug dealing.
Aaron Peskin
Peskin has represented a district that includes North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Chinatown for four nonconsecutive terms.
The only candidate in the race considered a progressive, Peskin has built his campaign in opposition to the wealth influencing San Francisco politics and policy.
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He has pledged to maintain the character of neighborhoods while paving the way for more affordable housing — a claim disputed by the yes-in-my-backyard advocates for more housing construction and development who are known as YIMBYs.
“This handful of billionaires pouring millions of dollars of dark money into ugly smear campaigns threatens to destroy much of what makes this a unique, vibrant, and magical city,” Peskin said at his first campaign rally.
Ahsha Safai
Safai was the first major candidate to step into the race and challenge Breed, announcing his candidacy last year.
He has pitched himself to voters as a leader who can bridge San Francisco’s political divides. Safai, who has represented neighborhoods including the Outer Mission and Excelsior on the Board of Supervisors for two terms, has been sharply critical of Breed’s leadership style.
“Members of the Board of Supervisors, we can tweak around the edges, and we can have an impact,” Safai told The Examiner last year. “But truly, what has to happen in a good, functioning city is for the mayor to bring the board together to find common issues to work on.”
If elected, Safai has promised to end street homelessness in his first term and promote community policing.
Where the contenders stand
In general, voter polls have indicated that it’s a highly competitive race with no clear frontrunner.
As of this writing, Breed and Farrell have been neck-and-neck atop the board, with Lurie and Peskin trailing both — but not by an insurmountable margin. Predicting the results is functionally impossible due not only to the nature of San Francisco politics, but also to the ranked-choice voting system, which can create a pathway for a middling candidate to rise to the top.
Another complicating factor in making election predictions is that this is the first mayoral race since the passage of 2022’s Proposition H, which aligned elections of major city officials with presidential elections.
The switch is expected to bring higher voter turnout in the mayoral race, meaning there could be voters casting ballots who are normally tuned out of local politics.
Mayoral money pours in
The substantial interest in San Francisco politics and tightly contested nature of the race have spurred a spending blitz.
By the time the first major campaign-finance reporting period ended June 30, the candidates were well on their way to sailing past the amount spent on the last closely contested mayoral election — that of 2018, when Breed prevailed in a special election to fill the vacancy left by former Mayor Ed Lee, who died in 2017.
Lurie has declined to participate in The City’s public-financing program — which would force him to abide by spending limits — and has contributed heavily to his own campaign. As of Sept. 5, Lurie has placed $3.5 million of his own money into the race, while members of his familyhave contributed heavily to an independent committee that also supports his candidacy.
The self-funding is the most transparent way in which Lurie’s wealth has affected the race, but Lurie contends that accepting public financing would be a waste of taxpayers’ money that would be “better spent protecting and educating our community.”
The City’s public-financing program has boosted the contributions to other candidates, who have also spent millions of dollars.
Multiple independent expenditure committees, which are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates, have formed to boost the candidates of their choice. Chief among them is one formed by Lurie’s supporters, boosted primarily by a $1 million donation from his mother, Mimi Haas.
Ethics at the forefront
Ethical considerations have played a central role in the race.
Farrell’s opponents have hammered his use of a separate ballot-measure committee — which he formed to support a charter reform effort proposed by political group TogetherSF — to accept large donations from well-heeled donors and use them to share expenses with his mayoral campaign. The ballot-measure committee is not bound by contribution limits, but his mayoral campaign is.
Critics of the practice have likened it to money laundering, while Farrell’s campaign has repeatedly denied such claims and promised its attorneys have signed off on the setup.
Breed’s opponents, meanwhile, have attempted to tie her to the corruption scandals that have swept through City Hall during her tenure.
Key endorsements
Major endorsements have been split across the field.
Peskin has strong support from organized labor, including SEIU 1021, the largest union in The City. However, the San Francisco Labor Council, an umbrella organization that includes more than 150 unions, has been unable to reach a consensus needed to make an endorsement.
The City’s influential public-safety unions have split, with the firefighters and sheriffs backing Farrell as their lone choice and the police union endorsing Breed. The latter endorsement was not without controversy, as some within the police union were reportedly dissatisfied with the choice and the process by which it was made.
Apart from organized labor, powerful political groups have emerged on the scene to boost moderate candidates. TogetherSF, an organization financially backed by billionaire investor Michael Moritz, has endorsed Farrell first, then Breed and Lurie in any order. GrowSF, a group with deep ties to the tech industry, has also endorsed all three moderate candidates and urged its followers to do the same in any order.
Editor’s note: This story was changed on Sept. 9, 2024, to correct information about TogetherSF Action’s mayoral endorsement and the year in which Mayor Willie Brown was first elected mayor.
