What just happened in San Francisco politics?

A guest post by Armand Domalewski

Photo courtesy of Michael Lai

The national news has been focused on TikTok this week, but there are also big things happening in my neck of the woods. San Francisco just had an extremely important election, which featured “moderate” victories across the board. I put the word “moderate” in quotes, because actually everyone involved was pretty progressive; in fact, the victory was for a certain brand of results-oriented progressivism, over a more performative leftist sort of progressivism. (San Francisco is a bit like the bar in the movie The Blues Brothers, where the bartender says “We got both kinds [of music], country and western!”.)

Anyway, I was going to write about this election myself, but I thought it would be interesting to have someone who was actually involved in one of the campaigns write a guest post for me. So here’s a post by Armand Domalewski, a previous Noahpinion contributor, a data analyst and old friend of mine who volunteered for one of the campaigns this year. It’s the first of a two-part series, so expect a follow-up at some point!

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San Francisco wants more than progressive ideas—it wants progressive results

As you might have heard, San Francisco had an election recently, and boy, did people have some feelings about it! I grew up in an East Bay suburb of San Francisco, so though I’ve now lived in the City proper for almost ten years, I think I have enough of an outsider’s perspective to understand why our relatively tiny town (at 870,000 people, we are not even the biggest city in the SF Bay Area–that would be San Jose) gets so much attention.

San Francisco is a symbol of America’s progressive soul, a barometer for the state of American liberalism. So of course, when our very own San Francisco Chronicle dropped this banger of a headline into the mix, it caused quite the stir:

The Chronicle reported a variety of perspectives on what the election meant, and as a long time observer of and participant in the wild fever dream we call “San Francisco politics,” here’s how I think I can help you make sense of it all:

— I’ll tell you what actually happened

— I’ll tell you the different theories people have about why it happened, including mine!

— In my next piece, I’ll explain what I think happens next

So what actually happened?

Your humble narrator, phone banking

San Franciscans voted for a lot of things this cycle, but here are the truly contested races (though I will touch on a few others to provide further context for some arguments):

1. The San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee: Every four years, every County in California has elections for seats on a party committee, and while San Francisco does in fact elect people to a Republican, Green, and even Libertarian County Committee, in a City that voted 85% for Joe Biden in 2020, the only game in town that really matters is the SFDCC. There were two competing slates of candidates, the “San Francisco Democrats for Change” slate (associated with the political coalition the San Francisco media dubs “moderate”) and the “Labor and Working Families” slate, (usually dubbed “progressive.) As of this writing, 18/24 seats were won by the Democrats for Change.

2. Two housing ballot propositions, A ($300M housing bond) and C (a temporary reduction in transfer taxes for office to housing conversions), which both won, 70% and 53%, respectively.

3. Three ballot propositions broadly associated with “public safety” concerns. Proposition B (a ballot measure that would mandate tax increases for police staffing increases) lost with 70% voting No, Proposition E, a ballot measuring reforming policing rules to do a variety of things, including more high speed chases and use of drones, won with 54% of the vote, and Proposition F, which would condition welfare benefits on agreeing to undergo treatment if you test positive for drugs, which won 58% Yes.

4. A ballot measure urging SFUSD to re-institute teaching Algebra in the 8th grade, won with 82% of the vote.

(For detailed breakdowns of the vote, I strongly recommend San Francisco’s Mission Local.)

Why do people think this happened?

Here the most popular theories about why we had this result, and my assessment of how correct they are:

Theory #1: The billionaires bought the election

“I think that the piles of money thrown into the more conservative positions and candidate’s campaigns this year serves to obscure what the true sentiment of the SF public is right now.”

-Sarah Shortt, No On Proposition F Campaign Manager, in the San Francisco Standard

I don’t mean to bag on Sarah, while I often disagree with her I think she’s a sincere person who really cares about the plight of the most vulnerable in our City, but her quote is a great distillation of a sentiment I heard A LOT after the election, and it’s just wrong.

Is it true that, broadly, “moderate” causes outspent “progressive” ones? Absolutely. But there are two major flaws in this narrative:

1. In 2016, the “moderates” vastly outspent the “progressives”---and lost badly, as reported by San Francisco Magazine. The former coalition outspends the latter coalition in almost every contest, and the latter coalition still wins a lot of races. (In my experience, the “SF progressive” coalition was basically on the upwards march for roughly 2016-2020, and has had a rough go of it in the elections since then. Mayor Breed’s election in 2018 was the closest the SF Progressives had come to winning the Mayor’s office since 1992.)

2. When you parse individual races, you’ll notice that money spent does not correlate very well at all with results. The supporters of Proposition E spent vastly more than the supporters of Proposition F, but the latter had better results. The rank order of DCCC candidates in terms of spending does not line up with the rank order of DCCC results.

Theory #2: San Francisco isn’t really progressive

There are two versions of this argument:

1. The stupid one, which argues that SF is actually full of closet Republicans and that the only reaction to losing a County Central Committee election is domestic terrorism:

   

2. The more sophisticated, but still wrong argument that San Franciscans are basically sort of libertarians, and that San Francisco’s moderates are essentially socially liberal Republicans

“And yet, they’re impossible to decouple: A Republican who sorts their recycling; does yoga; believes in women’s bodily autonomy; believes in LGBTQ, immigrant and minority rights; doesn’t think everyday citizens should be allowed to possess military arsenals and takes canvas bags to the grocery store would be hard to discern, ideologically, from a San Francisco moderate thought-leader. ”

— Joe Eskanazi, Editor in Chief of Mission Local

Joe is another person who I disagree with often but who I nonetheless have a lot of affection for, but I just think he is dead wrong here. San Francisco just voted 70% for an affordable housing bond and 73% for California Proposition 1, a $8 billion $6.8 billion mental health bond. San Francisco voters routinely approve tax increases to fund transit, housing, education, and so on. Even our “law and order” ballot measures were significantly more nuanced than the media narrative would have you believe. Proposition E’s critics pointed to it allowing police officers to engage in more vehicular pursuits and expanded the use of drones, but failed to note that it specifically authorized the use of drones as an alternative to vehicular pursuits. Proposition F’s critics declared it to be mandatory drug testing for welfare scheme copied from Ron DeSantis, but failed to note the distinction between a program that allowed you to stay on benefits if you agreed to treatment versus a program that straight up cut you off. I personally supported E (with a lot of qualms) and opposed F, but I think it’s misleading to characterize San Francisco voters as closet reactionaries—even the policies that people brand the most “reactionary” have to work in a lot of San Francisco specific nuance to win over our voters.

Theory #3: San Franciscans are progressives who want results

“The electorate hasn’t changed, it’s just that elected officials have stopped doing their jobs well.”

— GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss 

“San Franciscans want to make sure our streets are safe,” she said. “They want better public education. They want a government that works. When did those stop being Democratic values?”

— Nancy Tung, victorious DCCC candidate

The argument, articulated well by Lee Edwards in the SF Standard, is that while San Francisco’s ideology hasn’t changed, but that the voters are trading in grandstanding progressive declarations for tangible progressive results. While this is the sort of broad cliched proclamation you could honestly make in every election here, I think it rings the most true. San Francisco has been dysfunctional in its governance for a very long time, but two major shifts have brought that dysfunction to the forefront.

The 2010s tech boom made the city’s dysfunctional housing approval process to forefront of our politics: While the surge in rents birthed the San Francisco YIMBY movement, politically speaking I’d argue its most immediate short run impact was to boost the fortunes of San Francisco’s “progressives.” In a functioning city, a surge in economic growth would lead to a surge in housing, but because we are not a functioning city, the wave of money that flooded into San Francisco hit the hard constraints of our byzantine permitting process. This resulted in skyrocketing evictions and rents, and the SF Moderate coalition, under Mayor Ed Lee, took much of the blame.

The pandemic brought our dysfunctional public safety and education systems to the forefront of our politics: San Francisco’s school board elections have traditionally been a fairly inside baseball affair, because the percentage of San Franciscans with kids is famously small. However, the pandemic meant that a particularly ideological school board was left to handle a particularly fraught situation, and the results were…not pretty. General frustration with school closures and remote learning boiled over when board members generated national headlines over school renaming efforts denouncing Abraham Lincoln and bizarre tweets stoking racial resentment towards Asian-American students.  The voters got the message that San Francisco’s educators had priortized ideology over their kids’ education and they didn’t like it, which is why the School Board recall succeeded with 70%+ of the vote and a ballot proposition urging SFUSD to reverse its removal of 8th Grade Algebra passed with 80%+ of the vote. This has been very damaging for the reputation of San Francisco’s “progressive” coalition.

The pandemic, of course, also skyrocketed voter concerns about public safety. There’s a lot more I want to say about this, but this piece is already long, so for now what I’d like to say is the dynamic here is very similar to what happened with education. San Francisco elected a uniquely ideological District Attorney—Chesa Boudin, who became a national symbol of criminal justice reform—just as the pandemic made public safety concerns incredibly salient for voters. The juxtaposition of a District Attorney pushing progressive criminal justice reforms and a surge in crime sent voters the strong message that SF Progressives were more interested in redeeming criminals than keeping old Chinese grandmothers safe from getting their heads bashed in. Do I think this perception is entirely fair? Of course not. But is it how voters feel? Absolutely.

The politics of housing, education, and public safety have morphed and transmuted a lot since those initial inflection points—housing is an issue where the growth of the YIMBY movement now gives SF “moderates” an edge, education is less about kicking the crazies out and more about trying to deliver tangible results, and public safety is about fentanyl and general feelings of public disorder more so than assaults and robberies—but taken together, they reflect an electorate deeply frustrated with grand ideological visions and hungry for better nuts and bolts of governance.

So if you want to know what happened in San Francisco, that’s my take–if you want to know what’s going to happen, tune in next time!

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