When I went to be last night, after watching the deranged Trump rant, it looked pretty clear that Connie Chan was winning in District One, which would give the progressives another solid majority on the board.
With several thousand election-day votes counted after midnight, the RCV algorithm now has Marjan Philhour up by 54 votes.
Chan is still in the lead in the overall vote count – she has 1,133 more votes than Philhour. But David Lee got 5,000 votes, and they are favoring Philhour by 56 percent.
Lee and Chan endorsed each other in an RCV strategy, which probably helped Chan, since Lee’s political stands are much more conservative and in line with Philhour’s.
So now we wait, again.
At around 5pm, we will get the next round of votes – and these will be VBM ballots that were dropped off on Election Day at the polls or arrived too late to be counted. In San Francisco, as around the country, the VBM ballot have trended progressive – and if that pattern holds, and the votes counted today are more like the ones counted early, Chan will probably win.
Meanwhile, RCV gave a clear victory to Myrna Melgar in D7, after most of Vilaska Nguyen’s second-place votes went to her over Joel Engardio, who has conceded.
Overall, it was a good night for progressives, and depending on D1, could be a very good night.
Mayor London Breed got the two ballot measures that mattered to her passed – Prop. A, which she strongly supported, and Prop. F, which she needed to balance the budget.
The city was way more progressive than that state. San Francisco voters are okay with taxing the rich; the state’s voters were not willing to raise taxes on commercial property, allow increased rent control, or allow affirmative action to once again be part of the state’s college admission and contracting practices.
For the record, San Francisco voters backed Prop. 15 by 70 percent and opposed Uber and Lyft’s measure by 60 percent. They also, more narrowly, supported stronger rent controls.
