San Francisco Mayor London Breed believes she has four more years in office to lead the city into an era of renewal and growth after facing unprecedented challenges brought on by a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Strong opponents say Breed has failed to address the city’s problems head-on and that it’s time for change.
The mayoral race will pit Breed against a host of well-funded and well-known candidates from across San Francisco’s political spectrum, including Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, two-term Supervisor Aisha Safai, Board of Supervisors Chairman Aaron Peskin and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell.
This election raises important questions for voters: Who is to blame for New York City’s well-documented social and economic woes, and who deserves credit for the city’s recent progress?
Polls have consistently shown San Franciscans are concerned about the city’s direction and leadership, but things are improving. If Breed loses, she will be the first incumbent mayor to lose reelection since Willie Brown defeated Mayor Frank Jordan in 1996.
Candidates are vying to outline solutions to New York City’s most prominent issues, including widespread concerns about public safety, a fentanyl overdose crisis, stubbornly high housing costs and a slowing post-pandemic economic recovery.
Amid a busy election season across the country, the San Francisco mayoral race is generating a wave of interest and funding, with candidates’ spending already soaring into the millions and more expected to pour in in the final weeks of the race.
All of the major candidates are Democrats. In the broadest sense, three of the candidates — Lurie, Farrell and Breed — are generally considered “moderates,” siding to the right of popular opinion on the political spectrum than so-called progressives like Peskin. Safai rejects that label and is generally considered to be in the middle.
Given the ideological overlap in the race, candidates have sought to differentiate themselves through policy edges and diverse track records.
The clustering of candidates in the moderate camp has led many to speculate that they may work together to encourage voters to support multiple candidates under the city’s ranked-choice voting system.
This could mean that one or more of the moderate candidates band together and encourage their supporters to rank their choices accordingly. But alliances across the ideological spectrum are not impossible. At the time of writing, no alliances between candidates have been made public, but some influential political groups are urging their supporters to back groups of candidates.
London Breed
Despite much of the criticism from the city and from Breed herself, she maintains that San Francisco is on the rise.
She touts her leadership in helping the city have a lower COVID-19 death rate than other cities during the pandemic.
“Things are changing in our city, and I’ve led this city through some of the most challenging times, being on the defensive and making tough decisions,” Mayor Breed said after receiving a key endorsement from the San Francisco Democratic Party. “Now that things are starting to get better, and people are starting to love their neighborhoods and feel good about things, I want to use that moment as mayor to be on the offensive and take us to the next level.”
Daniel Lurie
Lurie highlighted his philanthropic work and his leadership of Tipping Point, a nonprofit he founded to address poverty in the Bay Area.
Lurie takes every opportunity to emphasize that, unlike his other main opponents, he has no experience in city government, pointing to his work at Tipping Point — which he claims is far more efficient at delivering services than the city government — and pitching himself as an antidote to a bureaucracy plagued by lethargy and corruption.
“I’m going to be solution-oriented,” Lurie told the Examiner after launching his campaign last year. “I’m going to bring people together, work with everybody and try to solve the problems that are facing our city.”
Mark Farrell
Farrell served less than a year as interim mayor, but he has touted his time at the helm as a more effective administration, including by removing homeless encampments.
Prior to taking on the role of interim mayor, Farrell served two terms on the Board of Supervisors representing a district that includes Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights.
“This mayor has turned his back on police too many times,” Farrell told the Examiner earlier this year.
Aaron Peskin
Peskin has represented a district that includes North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Chinatown for four terms.
Chief Sandra Tong, the department’s first Chinese American leader, will serve as chief, while the selection for a permanent successor to Janine Nicholson continues.
San Francisco Giants President and CEO Larry Baer celebrated the completion of Verde, a 23-story apartment building in the Mission Rock development that the Giants built in partnership with the franchise.
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Peskin is the only candidate in the race considered a progressive, and has campaigned against the wealthy who influence San Francisco politics and policy.
He has promised to preserve the neighborhood’s character while paving the way for more affordable housing, but this has been challenged by “build a house in my backyard” advocates known as YIMBYs who support more homebuilding and development.
“This handful of billionaires are pouring millions of dollars of dark money into an ugly smear campaign that threatens to destroy much of what makes our city unique, vibrant and fascinating,” Peskin said at his first campaign rally.
Asha Safai
Safai announced his candidacy last year and was the first major candidate to enter the race and challenge Breed.
Safai has presented himself to voters as a leader who can bridge San Francisco’s political divide. As a two-term city council member representing a district that includes the Outer Mission and Excelsior neighborhoods, Safai has been a vocal critic of Breed’s leadership style.
“As members of the Board of Supervisors, we can fine-tune and influence the details,” Safai told the Examiner last year, “but really, what a well-functioning city needs is for the mayor to bring the committee together and find common issues to address.”
If elected, Safai has pledged to eliminate street homelessness and promote community policing during his first term.
Candidate’s position
In general, voter polls suggest a highly competitive race with no clear front-runner.
As of this writing, Breed and Farrell are neck and neck, with Lurie and Peskin trailing behind them, but not by much. The nature of San Francisco politics, as well as a ranked-choice voting system that can create an avenue for a middling candidate to rise to the top, make the outcome virtually impossible to predict.
Another factor complicating election predictions is that this is the first mayoral election since the passage of Proposition H in 2022, which linked elections for key city officials to the presidential election.
The change is expected to increase voter turnout in the mayoral election, potentially enticing voters who normally aren’t interested in local politics to vote.
Mayor’s money flows in
The intense political interest in San Francisco and the fierce contested race prompted the spending offensive.
As of the end of the first major campaign finance reporting period on June 30, candidates were on track to significantly outspend what they spent in the last close mayoral race, the 2018 race that Breed won in a special election to fill the seat vacated by former Mayor Ed Lee, who died in 2017.
Lurie has declined to participate in the city’s public funding programs, is required to adhere to spending limits, and has donated heavily to his own campaign. As of September 5, Lurie had committed $3.5 million of his own money to his campaign, and his family has also donated large sums to independent committees supporting his candidacy.
Self-funding is the most visible impact of Lurie’s wealth on his campaign, but he argues that accepting public funding is a waste of taxpayer money that would be “better spent on protecting and educating our community.”
Independent expenditure committees, which are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates, have formed to support candidates of their choice, including one formed by supporters of Mr. Lurie and boosted primarily by a $1 million donation from Mr. Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas.
Ethics first
Ethical considerations have played a central role in this race.
Farrell’s opponents have accused him of using a separate ballot action committee he formed to support a charter reform initiative proposed by the political group TogetherSF to take large donations from wealthy donors and use them to fund his mayoral campaign. Ballot action committees don’t have contribution limits, but mayoral campaigns do.
Critics of the practice have likened it to money laundering, but Farrell’s campaign has repeatedly denied those allegations and promised that his lawyers approved the setup.
Meanwhile, Breed’s opponents are trying to tie her to the corruption scandal that swept through City Hall during her tenure.
Main Recommendations
Primary support is split across the field.
Peskin has strong support from unions, including the city’s largest union, SEIU 1021. But the San Francisco Labor Council, an umbrella organization for more than 150 unions, has been unable to reach the consensus needed to endorse him.
The city’s powerful public safety union was divided, with the firefighters and sheriff’s departments backing Farrell as the only choice, and the police union endorsing Breed. The latter endorsement was not without controversy, with some in the police union reportedly unhappy with the choice and the decision-making process.
Beyond the unions, powerful political groups have emerged to back moderate candidates. Together SF, an organization backed by billionaire investor Michael Moritz, is endorsing Farrell, Breed and Lurie, in that order. Grow SF, a group with deep ties to the tech industry, is also backing all three moderates and urging its supporters to do the same, in any order.