The general response to the June 2 election in San Francisco is summed up by the headline on Joe Eskenazi’s Mission Local column:
“We’re all living in Daniel Lurie’s America—and most San Franciscans are content.”
The Chron and the SF Standard had pretty much the same line: Lurie got everything he wanted.
I will take issue with two elements here: First of all, most of us, including most San Franciscans, are not living in Daniel Lurie’s America, a place where the mayor and his allies never have to worry about getting evicted, going hungry, lacking the funds for their kids health care and education … most Americans, and most San Franciscans, are not billionaires, not heirs to giant fortunes, and not economically secure.
Most San Franciscans also didn’t vote June 2.
The mayor is clearly popular, and the election will go down as a victory for his agenda and the candidates he supported. But the real winners are not any elected official. The real winners are the handful of billionaire tech plutocrats who have been trying for years to take control of this city.
We have never seen the kind of money that the plutocrats poured into Districts 2 and 4. The money to defeat Prop. D was also astounding.
These folks have their own agenda: A city by and for the rich, where homeless people are arrested, the mentally ill are locked away in jail, and big businesses pay low taxes and avoid any form off real regulation. They want San Francisco to be a showcase for unbridled Abundance-style neoliberalism where market-based solutions are always best and the poorer residents are just guinea pigs for the latest teach innovation.
I’m not sure that everyone in San Francisco, or even most people, will like that vision.
Eskenazi is right that San Francisco is getting richer and more conservative as the population changes. As Calvin Welch, who has been watching local politics for more than half a century, likes to note, “who lives here, votes here.”
But I don’t think the progressive movement is gone, or even isolated or marginalized. One of the most dramatic examples: More than half the voters chose someone other than the Big Tech Abundance candidate, state Sen. Scott Wiener, for Congress. He came in below what the polls projected, and Sup. Connie Chan, who ran on a clear progressive agenda, did better than most observers expected.
There’s a path—not an easy path, but a path—for Chan to take over one of the most important and powerful positions in San Francisco.
The Department of Elections still has more than 100,000 votes to count, but some patterns are clear: The Chinese vote came in heavily for Chan, who won most of the precincts in the Outer Richmond and Outer Sunset. The East Side progressive vote was not a strong for Chan (at least early results), and she will have to make inroads in those areas.
Remember, Wiener has won citywide twice, and has about 100 percent name recognition. People know what his record has been after more than 20 years in public office. It’s not as if he is going to get a lot of undecided voters.
Chan is less well known on the East Side, and has less than 20 percent as much money as Wiener did to get her message out. In the general election, that’s going to change: The endorsement of the incumbent, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelsoi, should unlock millions in national donations.
(People keep asking me why Pelosi, an establishment Democratic if ever there were one, endorsed Chan and not Wiener. Some of it is probably personal, but there’s more going on here. I think Pelosi, of the Old Guard, is also getting a bit sick of the selfish tech plutocrats, many of whom are now sucking up to Trump.)
Wiener will raise millions more for the fall, and will run a tough campaign, and either he or an IE on his behalf will try to attack Chan to erode her support on the more conservative side of town. She would have to hold those voters, pick up a lot of votes in the progressive precincts—and get a majority of the Saikat Chakrabarti votes.
That would mean Chakrabarti following through on his promise to endorse and support her.
If I were Scott Wiener, I would be a little nervous right now. He’s not going to cruise to victory.
Also interesting, in terms of local politics: The candidate for governor who came in first in SF, by quite a bit, is Tom Steyer, who ran on a platform of taxing the rich.
And Jane Kim, a former SF supe running as the candidate of the Working Families Party, is leading and will be a finalist in the race for insurance commissioner.
So: Maybe not everyone is living in Daniel Lurie’s America.
