By Kota Suzuki, Nami Sumida Nov 8, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie speaks in St. Mary’s square on Nov. 8, a day after winning the San Francisco mayoral race.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Daniel Lurie has been elected mayor of San Francisco. For much of his campaign, the Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder leveraged his political inexperience to portray himself as a City Hall outsider ready to clean up the mess left behind by longtime politicians.
Lurie and Mayor London Breed, who he’ll replace, share many of the same policy positions and are both moderates in the context of San Francisco politics. Both prioritize increasing police presence and shutting down open-air drug markets. Both support more housing. Both want to build more shelter and homes for the homeless. But where do their policies diverge? What does Lurie believe about clearing homeless encampments and opening supervised drug consumption sites?
Results from the Chronicle’s Vote Compass tool give insight into where Lurie stands on 30 key policy issues. Last month, the Chronicle launched the interactive tool designed to help San Francisco residents compare their policy views to those of the 2024 mayoral candidates.
In collaboration with researchers from Vox Pop Labs, the organization behind Vote Compass, the Chronicle collected information and surveyed the five major mayoral candidates on their policy positions on issues including housing, governance, transportation and public safety. The tool looked at policy positions held by Lurie, Breed, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí.
Vox Pop Labs’ researchers mapped the candidates’ positions on a spectrum from strongly disagree to strongly agree, but each candidate had the opportunity 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 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.
The Vote Compass results reveal where our new mayor stands on some of the critical issues facing San Francisco. The topic of public safety seemed to host the most divisive policy issues, especially between Lurie and Breed. In regards to potentially closing city parks in high-crime areas, the two were on polar opposites of the spectrum, with Lurie strongly agreeing to the policy, whereas Breed strongly disagreed.
Lurie and his team submitted a comment on that survey question, saying, “Too often we see criminal activity leading to tragedy overnight in our city parks and until we can make progress against our crime and drug crises, closing parks at night is in the interest of public safety.”
Lurie aligns with Breed on 11 out of the 30 policy questions in the survey. In most cases, the two found themselves on adjacent tiles, such as “Neutral” and “Somewhat agree” or “Somewhat agree” and “Strongly agree.”
Other differences among the candidates include their positions on managing unvaccinated San Francisco firefighters and implementing rent increase limits on all residential units.
Use the interactive graphic below to explore Lurie’s policy positions and how they differ from Breed’s, and read statements provided by Lurie and his team that add context to where he stands across all 30 policy questions.
Reach Kota Suzuki: kota.suzuki@sfchronicle.com, Reach Nami Sumida: nami.sumida@sfchronicle.com
Nov 8, 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.
