The last incumbent mayor to lose a re-election campaign in San Francisco was Frank Jordan, a bumbling incompetent who was defeated by Willie Brown in 1995. So how did Mayor London Breed, despite the backing of billionaires, falling crime rates, and an improving economy lose her job?
Part of the answer was the move to shift the mayoral race from 2023 to 2024, the same year as the presidential race. If Breed had run a year ago, she might have had no real opposition, since at that point none of the current candidates were talking about a campaign.
But a big part of the answer is that Breed utterly abandoned the progressives, who still make up a powerful voting bloc, and moved hard to the right when two other candidates were already claiming that position.
In other words: She got squeezed into the center—and in San Francisco today, with its volatile politics, there’s not a lot of room in the center.
Breed was never part of the San Francisco left; she was a center-right (and I use that term because “moderate” is so meaningless) supervisor, and at first, a center-right mayor.
But because of her impressive life story, and because a lot of San Francisco voters were excited, as they should have been, about electing a Black woman as mayor, she got just enough support among progressives to defeat former state Sen. Mark Leno and former Sup. Jane Kim, both running to her left.
She could have tried to keep those ties in place; she could have tried to work with people like Sup. Dean Preston, who beat Breed’s hand-picked candidate in D5. Instead, she demonstrated a type of personal vindictiveness that makes it hard to govern effectively in this city.
She even said on the campaign trail this fall that she would “work with people who want to work with me,” essentially saying she’s not interested in any type of relationship with the progressives who have criticized her.
Breed resisted working with the supes to put unhoused people into empty hotel rooms during the pandemic. She blocked affordable housing in D5 because she didn’t want to work with Preston. When she showed up for Question Time and progressives tried to engage with her, she was hostile and dismissive.
Breed sowed the seeds of her own defeat when Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney. Boudin, again, beat Breed’s hand-picked candidate, and she was furious.
So she joined a right-wing billionaire campaign to recall Boudin from office—and the way that campaign worked was to portray the city as a crime-infested nightmare. Breed helped push a media narrative that spread all over the country—and while it succeeded in ousting Boudin and letting Breed appoint her own district attorney, it also got out of control.
Suddenly, the national news media descended on the city and began saying that San Francisco was unsafe, terrifying, and beset with violent crime. None of that was true—but once a narrative like this gets started, it’s hard to stop.
And Breed had to deal with the fact that she was the person in charge when this disaster allegedly happened.
Her response was not to challenge the narrative she helped create, but to move hard to the right.
A mayor who once strongly supported safe-injection sites as a public health response to the opioid epidemic told the police to arrest not just drug dealers but drug users, creating a dangerous crisis in the county jail. Breed supported a Supreme Court lawsuit backed by right-wing groups that sought to give her more power to sweep the unhoused out of tents—and then tried to solve the crisis by dumping homeless people on other cities.
She made it clear that she would treat homelessness, substance use problems, and mental health first as law-enforcement issues. She refused to allocate money that she had promised for social service providers.
The problem: Former Sup. Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie had already claimed the right wing. Breed tried to argue that the city was safer, but she had spent so much time saying crime was out of control that her argument wasn’t going to work.
At the last minute, she tried to get Sup. Aaron Peskin, who had claimed most of the progressive vote, to work with her on a ranked-choice voting strategy. Former Sup. Jane Kim endorsed Breed, saying that the threat of a Mark Farrell win was so alarming that progressives needed to look at Breed as an alternative.
But progressives had to ask: What is Breed offering in return for our support? The answer: Nothing.
The second-place votes from Peskin didn’t go overwhelmingly to Breed. That’s because she never made any effort until it was way too late to reach out to a progressive bloc that’s still worth enough of the electorate that it could have returned her to office.
So what’s Mayor Lurie going to be like? Nobody knows. He’s never held office, never had to take a tough vote—and his policy positions were vague enough during the campaign that it’s hard to pin him down.
A lot will depend on who he hires as his chief of staff, who he keeps and fires as department heads, and frankly, who will run the city while he gets up to speed on what it means to be a mayor.
It also depends on who he is going to work with. Progressives will not dominate the board in the next two years, but depending on how the final results play out in D5 and D11, they may have a workable majority on some issues, and certainly a strong minority presence. (At this point, it appears Connie Chan will win D1, and Chyanne Chen will win in D11, meaning the progressives will hold 1, 9, 10, and 11. D5 is still too close to call.)
Lurie comes from the nonprofit world, and doesn’t start off with the sort of animosity to some of the supes that Breed did (she basically refused to work with Preston or Sup. Hillary).
He’s got a lot to deal with, starting with a massive budget crisis. But he’s also got a deeply divided city, with huge issue of economic inequality—and if he decides he is going to govern entirely from the right, he’s going to run into a lot of problems.
Peskin didn’t win—but he showed that the progressive moment still plays a big role in this city. Despite massive sums of money, the billionaires didn’t pass Prop. D; instead, Peskin’s Prop. E won. If Breed had shown some willingness to work with, instead of against, progressives she might not have lost.
The billionaires didn’t sweep this election. I hope Lurie is paying attention.
