The Engardio recall and the failure of conservative politics in SF

The voters of District 4 have recalled Supervisor Joel Engardio, one of the city’s most conservative supervisors. 

With irony not lost on anyone, it was Engardio who played a major role in creating San Francisco’s recall machine. Recalls were once a tool for removing officials who had engaged in misconduct, but Engardio helped lead a reactionary movement to recall progressive leaders like District Attorney Chesa Boudin—not for misconduct, but over policy differences. Now that recall machine has come back to bite him. 

Engardio ran for supervisor and lost three times, but after the district was gerrymandered for conservative control, he defeated labor leader Gordon Mar to assume the D4 seat. While in office, he governed from the right, with full support of tech and real estate billionaires. Engardio embraced massive police funding increases, diverting affordable housing funding, and banning RVs where homeless families live. A recent Chronicle analysis of voting records found him to be part of a conservative block that votes virtually identically, along with Supervisors Bilal Mahmood, Danny Sauter, Stephen Sherill, and Matt Dorsey. He was a rising star of the self-described “moderate”—but in fact, conservative—political movement of San Francisco. 

It’s striking how quickly things have unraveled once conservatives took over City Hall. With a new majority on the Board of Supes, along with control over the Mayor’s and District Attorney’s Offices, the School Board and the local Democratic County Central Committee, political power in San Francisco has been consolidated in the hands of politicians funded by and friendly to the interests of the tech and real estate industries. 

San Franciscans are suffering more than ever in just about every measurable way since the conservatives took over. San Franciscans are experiencing rising rents, surging evictions, employment uncertainty, counterproductive criminalization of poverty, loss of neighborhood services, and corrupt privatization to benefit billionaire campaign donors. Installing tech-industry aligned conservatives to run all branches of government has been a failed experiment. They don’t know how to work with people. As the current upzoning project shows, they seem more interested in wrecking balls than community input.

But you wouldn’t know any of this from the nonstop, “SF is back” spin coming out of City Hall and echoed in the billionaire-owned press. To them, rising rents is a wonderful sign of economic progress, not a devastating blow to working people. Meanwhile, San Franciscans watch as detached politicians tell them everything is great. As Judge Judy famously said, “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” A resentment in neighborhoods is building, even as politicians try to gloss over it and celebrate a “boom” cycle.

This first referendum on how it’s going is significant. It’s the first vote since voters moved SF political leadership to the right. It’s also the first local vote since the tech billionaire crowd—from Musk to Thiel—has been completely unmasked on the national stage. And it sure looks as if SF voters are having second thoughts about the tech billionaires and their conservative, dystopian vision for the city. 

Just as the recall of progressive politicians is consistently deemed a rejection of progressive policies, so too must the recall of this conservative politician be viewed as a rejection of his conservative ideology. Voters are seeing what “moderate” politicians have to offer San Francisco, and just nine months in, are already starting to say, “no thanks.” 

Dean Preston is the former supervisor for District 5