This piece was published last week in Tim’s Agenda newsletter for paid subscribers. Upgrade your 48 Hills newsletter subscription, or join us as a $10 monthly donor, to receive his exclusive newsletter every week!
The day after Zohran Mamdani won election as the mayor of New York, I started getting texts that had about the same message: How come New York gets Mamdani and AOC, and we get Daniel Lurie and Scott Wiener?
Well, we might not have Scott Wiener in Congress. The race with Sup. Connie Chan is close. But a lot of the local news media, including most recently the SF Standard, are asking: Why are the socialists winning in New York, but not in supposedly progressive San Francisco?
Gabriel Greschler has some valid observations: New York is much bigger and more economically diverse. When you get priced out of Manhattan be gentrification you can move to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. Here, you have to leave town; you don’t vote here any more.
Three tech booms have driven tens of thousands of working-class people out of San Francisco. As longtime political observer and activist Calvin Welch likes to say, “who lives here, votes here.”
Also, California has this rotten top-two primary system. If the Democratic Party primary chose the party’s candidate, then Jane Kim, not Wiener, would be in the state Senate; she beat him in June, 2016.
And big money has a bigger impact in a smaller market.
The media narrative here is also, with a few exceptions, wildly conservative, particularly when it comes to crime and housing. Mamdani won with record turnout; fewer than half the voters cast ballots in San Francisco in June.
In New York, data shows, college educated voters tend to support socialism. In San Francisco, thanks to (conservative) city leaders thinking for 30 years that a tech-based economy was San Francisco’s future, a lot of young, educated residents support getting really rich off a tech IPO.
All of that is true, but let’s take a moment to look at something else that happened this week. A democratic socialist organizer, Anya Worley Ziegman, and a labor and community-based People’s Budget Coalition, forced the mayor to back down from $28.5 million worth of budget cuts to critical services.
She did it with massive mobilizations, bringing together the city’s biggest labor unions, neighborhood groups, LGBTG+ groups, and community-based nonprofits. She won the support of Chan—and made it impossible for the other supes to stand with the mayor’s cuts.
I don’t know how this translates into electoral victories in the fall, or if it does. But as Welch has told me many times, “it’s good to know you’ve got it on the ground.”
