I’m not going to make predictions about the San Francisco election; the races, especially for mayor, are way too close. But I will offer a few things to watch for Tuesday night.
About 30 percent of the voters have already cast ballots, and those have been opened and counted. The Department of Elections will count more tomorrow, and will add in the votes cast on ballot machines in precincts on Election Day.
Vote by mail ballots dropped at polling places won’t be counted until a few days later.
It’s likely that fewer than half the projected votes will be counted when the first data is released at 8:45 pm. More data will be released every hour until 10:45, and at around 11 the department will run a first-time ranked-choice-voting algorithm. (You can track your ballot here.)
If the races for mayor and supes are close, that won’t tell us a whole lot.
Here’s why:
So far, as of Sunday night, data from the Department of Elections shows that the districts with the highest percentage of ballots received and counted are 7, 2, and 8. The lowest are 5, 10, 9, and 11:
D1: 34.41
D2: 37.05
D3: 33.03
D4: 33.26
D5: 31.49
D6: 31.41
D7: 36.87
D8: 39.57
D9: 30.30
D10: 26.66
D11: 30.62
That means the early results are going to skew conservative (progressives tend to wait until closer to Election Day to vote).
So it’s entirely possible that Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie will show up strongly in the early results. But all of the polls show Farrell dropping over the past few weeks, and it’s unlikely that when all the votes are counted he will be in the top two.
Sup. Ahsha Safai is far behind in the polls, and of the five major candidates, he will likely be eliminated first. Farrell has made a big bid for Safai’s second-place votes, but I don’t it working: They are too far apart politically. Those votes will be split between all of the other candidates.
When all the votes are counted, if Farrell is in fourth place, the polling shows a plurality of his votes going to Lurie, who would then likely be in first place.
Then it comes down to who else is in the top two.
If it’s Mayor London Breed, then Sup. Aaron Peskin drops off, and more of his second-place votes (I would predict) got to Breed than to Lurie. That could be wrong, but if I’m right, there might, might be enough for her to catch up.
If Peskin in in second place (or if there’s a strong progressive turnout and he’s in first place), then Breed drops off—and I predict more of her second-place votes go to Peskin than to Lurie.
Breed, Lurie, and Farrell have all been vicious to each other; other than plutocrat Ron Conway, nobody is really attacking Peskin.
So there’s a path for Lurie, Breed, and Peskin, and it all depends at this point on turnout.
Again: This is all so complex that it’s very unlikely we will know on Election Night. It was at least five days after the last mayoral election that Breed finally emerged as the winner over Mark Leno, who was 1,000 votes ahead on Election Night.
Same goes for the tightly contested supes races. Only 27 percent of D9 voters have returned their ballots. Those will likely be the more conservative voters, the ones more likely to support the billionaire’s candidate, Trevor Chandler. He and Jackie Fielder are almost certainly going to be at the top of the pack, but Roberto Hernandez, who got the Chron’s endorsement, could come in third—and there’s no easy way to figure out where his second-place votes go.
D1 and D5 are more clearly two-person races. Turnout in D5, one of the most progressive districts in the city, is among the lowest of all of the city’s districts in early voting, which would give the billionaires’ candidate, Bilal Mahmood, a boost. If Sup. Dean Preston is well ahead in the early returns, that race will be over.
In D1, Sup. Connie Chan is in a tight race with the billionaire candidate, Marjan Philhour. The early turnout (and thanks to MissionLocal for the nice easy-to-read chart, although it only includes the districts with contested supe races) is higher in D1, which now includes the very conservative Seacliff area. Again: If Chan is even slightly ahead in the early returns, she will almost certainly win.
So we could, and probably will, wake up Wednesday morning not sure who the next mayor is, not sure who the next Board of Supes is—and not sure how to deal with the reality that for the first time in the history of the United States, a candidate for president has said in advance that he will not accept the election results if he loses.
We will be doing live election-night coverage at 48hills. I will be on KPFA Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning to share what we know and try to make sense of it.
Full disclosure: Both of my kids work on the Aaron Peskin for Mayor campaign.
