- By Adam Shanks | Examiner staff writer
- Sep 20, 2024 Updated Sep 21, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)
As San Francisco’s election season began to heat up in June, I wrote a column in this fine newspaper urging readers to tune into at least one debate.
My reasoning was that while mayoral debates should not be the only factor weighed by voters, they do offer a great way to see the differences between candidates at least in terms of comportment, if not in the finer details of policy proposals.
The five prominent candidates for San Francisco mayor shared the stage for a debate hosted by KQED and The San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday. So three months after I wrote that column and a handful of debates later, was I right?
I’ll let the reader decide. But I do think there were some trends that emerged in the debates that are worth highlighting.
The Nov. 5 election features Mayor London Breed, who is attempting to secure a second full term in office, fending off challenges from Supervisor Ahsha Safai, anti-poverty nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin.
London Breed’s presence is her present
Thursday’s debate was not actually the last one before Election Day, but it is set to be the final one to feature all five of the candidates, as of this writing. Breed has declined to participate in a Sept. 25 debate hosted by The San Francisco Standard and KGO-TV.
Her reluctance to take the debate stage has become a pattern called out by her opponents. Breed also didn’t attend a Sept. 11 debate hosted by The Examiner and its media partners.
The back-to-back debates, one with Breed and one without her, offered an interesting contrast.
Breed’s defense has been that she’s too busy running The City to participate in debate after debate, and that they’ve offered diminishing returns to voters. But in her absence, opponents still readily attacked her record and fitness to be mayor. In the Sept. 11 debate, such attacks were met with silence. On Thursday, she was there to offer a rebuttal.
With Breed there, for example, she answered Farrell’s repeated allegations that she has failed to adequately address public safety and things were better when he was in office in 2018
“I don’t know why we’re still listening to Mark Farrell talk about what he’s done, the same thing over and over again. The fact is, crime is at its lowest level that it’s been in 10 years,” Breed said.
Breed going positive
Breed has never been hesitant to decry The City’s problems, famously lamenting the “bulls— that has destroyed our city” in 2021. But with her opponents focused on everything in San Francisco that’s going wrong — and why she’s to blame for it — Breed has changed course.
She has consistently tried to portray San Francisco as a city that, thanks to her battle-tested leadership, has weathered unprecedented challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and is in the nascent stages of a profound rebound.
On Thursday, she even tried to ride the wave of enthusiasm generated by Democratic presidential nominee and Bay Area native Kamala Harris by borrowing the catchphrase “we’re not going back.”
Mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin hits different
Peskin has spent much of his adult life behind a microphone talking politics. Normally able to abruptly pull a Mark Twain-like quote out of thin air, he is relatively stifled and scripted on the debate stage. It was true in the first debate, and it was still true Thursday.
I’m not sure if it was conscious change or just a man meeting the moment, but Peskin appeared a bit more reserved, more polished and carefully on-message during the mayoral debates than he is while talking on the fly about city policy during a supervisors’ meeting.
It’s unclear what impact the approach has had on his candidacy, if any, because most polls show him continually stuck in fourth place behind the three leading candidates (Breed, Farrell and Lurie), all of whom are part of The City’s moderate political contingent.
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As the only candidate in the race considered a true progressive by San Francisco’s political definition, Peskin’s main goal is to contrast himself with the other candidates — which he feels he has done.
The attacker gets attacked
Lurie’s rise in the polls has drawn him more attention from his opponents as fog season has turned into ballot season. On some level, it’s a blessing to be attacked, which shows he’s perceived a legitimate threat. Candidates are now ready to pounce on Lurie, but barely offer Safai a mention.
Lurie’s opponents have repeatedly pointed out his inexperience, with Breed doing so brutally Thursday and calling him “one of the most dangerous people on this stage, so we definitely should be scared.”
“He has absolutely zero experience,” Breed said.
Lurie appeared to me to be a bit more flustered this round, which might be reflective of his clear status as a frontrunner. But when on message, he was obviously effective at articulating his platform. Lurie has tried to use their own attacks against them, by repeatedly noting that he’s the only candidate who hasn’t spent time in City Hall. It’s a tactic he has stuck to since launching his campaign last year.
“If you’re watching at home, you see what the City Hall insiders are doing, they’re circling the wagons, they are so scared of somebody coming from outside this broken system,” Lurie said.
Ahsha Safai tries to stand out
Safai is really trying to stand out by offering balance of policy wins, personal story, future plans, and criticism of Breed, who he accused of “gaslighting” San Franciscans. It’s a message that places him squarely in the middle of San Francisco’s political spectrum without an obvious base of support he can rely on, aside from backing from organized labor.
He’s mostly stuck with the same message, and he appears stuck in the polls.
Farrell locks in on voter discontent
Candidates were asked hard questions Thursday, so they mostly answered the ones they wished they had gotten. For example, when asked about his previous positions on housing policy, Peskin quickly veered into a scripted answer — he could be seen reading from his notes — that focused on his efforts to rein in corruption.
The moderators pressed Farrell on his controversial campaign fundraising tactics, nearly — nearly — forcing him off his San-Francisco-is-broken message.
“There is no mayor that has overseen a steeper decline in our city’s history than London Breed,” Farrell said.
There was talk in recent weeks of him potentially swinging to a more positive message as voters’ views of The City have begun to improve.
He didn’t.
Instead, he claimed that crime is at “record” highs in San Francisco, which Breed quickly refuted and police data of reported crimes does not support. But Farrell is banking on voters trusting their gut.
“If you believe those stats, I got a bridge to sell ya,” Farrell said. “The reality is here in San Francisco, Mayor Breed has overseen an incredible decline in our city government.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected Sept. 20 to reflect that it was Safai who accused Breed of gaslighting San Franciscans.
