It tonight’s results show anything, it’s that progressive candidates have a harder time winning in San Francisco when there’s nothing at the top of the ballot to bring out progressive votes.
Joe Biden doesn’t excite a lot of folks on the left, and everyone knows he’s going to win California anyway. Contrast that to eight years ago, when Bernie Sanders was challenging Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, which drew out so many progressive voters that Jane Kim finished ahead of Scott Wiener in the state Senate primary. In the fall, when Clinton was the candidate, Wiener won.
This time around, Mayor London Breed and her allies succeeded in putting measures on the ballot that were designed to bring conservatives to the polls. The idea: Those voters will also support the conservative slate for Democratic County Central Committee.
The preliminary results maps show that it worked: Far more voters from the conservative precincts voted, and turnout in the progressive areas of town was unusually low.
And as of the first round of results, the conservatives are winning the DCCC, and Breed’s attacks on poor people and support for the cops are winning handily.
But it’s not that simple.
Proposition A, the affordable housing bond supported by both Breed and Sup. Aaron Peskin, who might run against her, is winning. (And that was a largely progressive campaign; the mayor and her allies did far, far less to help that pass than the affordable housers, Peskin, and progressive organizations.)
Both of the judges who the right-wing billionaires tried to demonize are holding onto their seats.
And the preliminary ballots are the most conservative.
So if the normal trends continue, Prop. A will pass, the attack on the judges will fail—and some of the progressives will wind up with seats on the DCCC.
That’s a remarkable show of progressive in a resilience in a very low turnout election where the conservatives had millions of dollars in tech money behind them.
We won’t know the final results for a couple of days. But I don’t think the election was a resounding show of support for the mayor and the tough-on-crime agenda.
