By Kota Suzuki, Nami Sumida Oct 22, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
From left, San Francisco’s five mayoral candidates in Vote Compass: Supervisor Ahsha Safai, nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie, incumbent Mayor London Breed, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and Supervisor Aaron Peskin.Carlos Avila Gonzalez
The Chronicle recently launched Vote Compass, an interactive tool designed to help San Francisco residents compare their policy views to those of the 2024 mayoral candidates. With all five major contenders running as Democrats, the tool highlights the nuanced differences between the candidates.
In collaboration with researchers from Vox Pop Labs, the organization behind Vote Compass, the Chronicle collected information on the policy positions of all five candidates on issues such as housing, drugs and crime, offering a clearer view of where each candidate stands. The five major candidates in Vote Compass are current Mayor London Breed, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie, Supervisor Aaron Peskin and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí.
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As part of developing the tool, the researchers from Vox Pop Labs mapped the candidates’ position on a spectrum from strongly disagree to strongly agree, but each candidate had the chance to influence how their positions were categorized. For instance, if a candidate disagreed with how their views were mapped, they could submit documentation and statements to support their policy position. Vox Pop Labs’ researchers, who based their initial coding on publicly available candidate statements and platforms, sometimes adjusted the mapping if the new evidence was convincing.
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This tool lets S.F. voters compare their views to the mayoral candidates
The interactive graphic below lets you explore how each mayoral candidate and researchers coded their beliefs on important social and economic issues. If you want to see how your beliefs match the candidates, you can try Vote Compass at this link: https://votecompass.sfchronicle.com/.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/vote-compass-mayor-policy-positions/
Voter Guide 2024: California and S.F. Bay Area election
Oct 22, 2024
DATA TEAM INTERN
Kota Suzuki is a Data Team intern and an undergraduate at Northwestern University, where he studies journalism, data science and statistics. Before joining the Chronicle, Kota was the data visualization editor at the Daily Northwestern, Evanston’s only daily news source and student-run publication. Beyond the newsroom, he has experience programming chatbots, designing interactive maps using React and analyzing gut microbiome data of animals.
DATA VISUALIZATION DEVELOPER
Nami Sumida is a data journalist at The San Francisco Chronicle where she uses data and graphics to report on local government, elections, education and occasionally sports. Prior to joining the Chronicle in 2021, she worked as a graphics developer at Industry Dive and a research analyst at the Pew Research Center.