The future of the country looks terrible tonight. I remember many years ago, when Republicans won most of the statewide races in California, Bob Mulholland, the late political director of the California Democratic Party, sent out an email that started:
“I feel like I am at a train wreck and there are no survivors.”
Donald Trump will be the president for the next four years, if he lasts that long. Republicans will control the US Senate and possibly the House, and they already have the Supreme Court.
It’s going to be a brutal two years, and after things go really badly, the Democrats will probably retake the House and Senate. More on why all of this happened as we take stock in the next few days.
But on the local level, the billionaire takeover of San Francisco politics has not been entirely successful; in fact, progressives appear tonight to have won some critical victories.
Bilal Mahmood was ahead in D5 after the first results came in, but as we predicted, those were the more conservative votes, and Sup. Dean Preston is now in the lead (despite a massive, big-money effort to oust him.) Jackie Fielder appears to be the next supervisor from D9. Sup. Connie Chan appears to be holding on to her seat in D1. It’s possible that Chyanne Chen, with the second-place votes of E.J. Jones, could emerge on top in D11.
The big billionaire ballot item—Prop. D—is going down, handily, and Sup. Aaron Peskin’s Prop. C, which will create an inspector general, is winning even more handily. Prop. F, the measure to spend more money on cops, is going to lose. Prop. L, the tax on Uber and Lyft to fund Muni is winning (although so is the larger business-tax reform, Prop. M, which is getting more votes and my nullify Prop. L—but the message from the voters is clear that Uber and Lyft should be taxed to fund public transportation.
So progressives might wind up with enough votes on the Board of Supes to sometimes forge a majority, and the billionaire forces don’t have enough to control everything.
The mayor’s race is still too close to call, and there are lots of votes still to count. As the more progressive election-day votes come in, Peskin is still in third but moving up, and it’s possible he could overtake Mayor London Breed in second place. Then it would come down to how many Breed voters put Peskin second, and how many Mark Farrell voters put Daniel Lurie second.
Considering the vast sums of money spent against them, the progressives are, so far, clearly holding their own in San Francisco.
