SF election analysis: Money can’t buy you competence
Late spending reports (and future ethics penalties ) will roll in after the last few votes. But, barring unforeseen lunacy, we know how things will shake out . There are winners and losers and trends to examine.
San Francisco is a city founded on lust for gold and sustained on lust for everything else. We are no stranger to wealthy people making civic contributions (if you like them) or investing in politicians (if you don't). Money in politics is nothing new. But the sheer level of dollars dropped into this year's local elections remains staggering. All told, at least $62.3 million was spent in this year's local election in San Francisco, a city with 522,265 registered voters.
Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie benefited from over $16 million dollars in money raised by both his campaign and a PAC supporting him, including $8.7 million of his own money. Proposition D, crafted and pushed by the political pressure group TogetherSF , was backed by some $9.5 million.
Lurie, a political novice who not only never held a City Hall job but has had little in the way of conventional employment, triumphed in the mayor's race — and it wasn't exceedingly close. Prop. D, lashed to candidate Mark Farrell like Ahab to the whale, did about as well as the chocolate-flavored toothpaste you might find on consignment in the Dollar Tree (which you should not buy).
It's better to be rich and famous than poor and unknown; neither Lurie nor Prop. D would've been on the ballot without copious amounts of money. But the dichotomy in their respective outcomes illustrates that, for all the things it can get you, money can't buy you competence. And competence matters.
Yujie Zhou's Wednesday writeup on how Lurie handily won the coveted Chinese American vote goes a long way toward explaining why he won, period. Lurie hired the best organizers and operatives and gave them essentially unlimited resources. His Chinese field team had, at its peak, 23 paid canvassers and dedicated teams for each heavily Chinese neighborhood .
So, that's 23 more paid canvassers than Mayor London Breed had. The mayoral campaigns Lurie ran off the road are happy to point out that he paid more in payroll taxes than they paid in payroll. A winning electoral strategy that relies upon battalions of paid canvassers, like a stress relief strategy that relies upon driving a Porsche 911 on the Pacific Coast Highway, is something you can't do without significant wealth.
Again, it's better to be rich and famous than poor and unknown — but polling has shown that voters don't mind if a candidate is rich. They mind if he's a rich jerk. Lurie's opponents have plenty to say about his free-spending campaign and his lack of relevant experience. But nobody has ever said he's anything other than a nice and decent man who wants what he thinks is best for San Francisco. He worked hard and ran an extremely disciplined campaign . Voters had clearly had enough of the incumbent and rewarded this likeable newcomer.
Maybe you've blotted out this year's World Series — the Giants, alas, did not win. It featured the New York Yankees and the (World Effin' Champion) Los Angeles Dodgers — which happen to flaunt the Nos. 2 and 3 payrolls in baseball . So, you'd pretty much expect them to be there. But, most years, it doesn't work that way .All of which is to say: It is hard to overstate how badly big-spending political pressure group TogetherSF, its precious ballot measure Prop. D and its preferred candidate Mark Farrell underperformed. Honestly, it feels like something straight out of " Brewster's Millions. "
In that film, Richard Pryor's character is given the opportunity to fecklessly blow through $30 million in 30 days in order to secretly inherent a sum an order of magnitude larger. Hilarity, as they say, ensues, with disastrous hi-jinks and fantastic quantities of money wasted.
All-told, Prop. D, which would have halved the nebulous total of San Francisco city and county commissions and further empowered the city's strong mayor system, had $9.5 million behind it. Prop. E, a countermeasure tossed on to the ballot by Aaron Peskin, split perhaps $69,000 with two other Peskin good-government measures. At last count, Prop. D was barely able to crack 45 percent while Prop. E had over 52 percent.
So, barring a "Brewster's Millions"-type situation, it's hard to fail this handily when running a measure addressing San Francisco's admittedly ridiculous commission system , buoyed by a nearly nine-digit war chest and facing opposition all but requiring a bake sale to mount any sort of campaign. But fail Prop. D did — hard. And, again, Prop. E passed.
We told you all the way back in February that TogetherSF had, only somewhat humorously, been tabbed as the "Mark Farrell administration in exile." Farrell earning the group's mayoral endorsement was as surprising as Pepsi winning the Pepsi Challenge . But surprises did come: Lurie and Breed were secondary endorsements for TogetherSF — and yet the group savaged them in campaign communiques. This was a credibility-destroying move: Who would compete for TogetherSF's No. 2 or No. 3 endorsement in the future, knowing they'd be subject to treatment like this?
Voters might have noticed that every last argument in favor of Prop. D in the voter guide was paid for by TogetherSF. They might have noticed the good-government advocates and groups inveighing against it. They might, in the end, actually like the idea of civilian oversight. But voters certainly noticed the tight overlap of Prop. D and Farrell, who sent flier after flier to voters' homes in which he carved out the role of Prop. D's No. 1 pitchman.
The candidate established his own $2.6 million ballot measure committee to raise funds for Prop. D while pushing his mayoral campaign — and, on Election Day Eve, he agreed to pay a stunning $108,000 ethics fine for commingling funds from the ballot measure committee with his mayoral committee.
That was merely the coup de grâce: Farrell's series of alleged ethical missteps served as a political death by 1,000 cuts. Lurie also spent freely to burn him — and Farrell turned out to be a rather incendiary target. Prop. D was supposed to pull Farrell over the finish line , but, in the end, he appeared to pull it — under the waves.
Now, it's hard to get into voters' heads. Again and again we're told that voters just want a city that works — as if past voters wanted to sugar the city's gas tank; as if past voters wandered into the voting booth muttering now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.Did voters want change? When it came to Lurie and a couple of supervisor's races, you could say they did. But not when it came to other supe races o r Prop. D or any number of good government/Aaron Peskin/let's spend money-type measures.
And it certainly wasn't the case with polarizing District 1 supervisor Connie Chan .
After eking out a win by 125 votes over Marjan Philhour in 2020, several conservative-voting areas such as Seacliff were grafted into District 1 via the politically fraught redistricting process .
The conventional wisdom was that Chan was in dire straits but District 5 supervisor Dean Preston would hold off Bilal Mahmood and other challengers. But the opposite worked out to be true.
One of the reasons for this was that perception is not reality: The big-spending third-party groups that vastly altered these races did not realize their assessments were flawed until too late. The tech- and real estate-funded groups backing Philhour thought she was on her way to a cakewalk and focused heavily — if not monomaniacally — on Preston, their bête noire. And the labor groups that executed a costly "all hands on deck" onslaught for Chan in District 1 did not perceive Preston as being vulnerable enough to get heavily involved when it could've made a difference.
Third party expenditures accounted for over $1.56 million in District 1, mostly from labor groups, and nearly $600,000 in District 5, the majority from the political pressure group GrowSF.
"Fix our City SF," a PAC representing a coalition of unions, spent over $1 million in District 1, supporting Chan and opposing Philhour, but only expended $134,178 in District 5, opposing Mahmood.
Conversely, GrowSF spent heavily against Preston but far less against Chan: It put $377,685 into "Dumping Dean" but only $66,437 into "Clearing Out Connie."
Preston, it turns out, was vulnerable: He even lost his own precinct. This was not a favorable political environment for the democratic socialist targeted, for years, by tech- and real estate-funded political action committees. A state proposition allowing cities to expand rent control lost handily in San Francisco. A state proposition ramping up penalties for property crime and diverting drug criminals to services it simultaneously defunded won handily in San Francisco.
Chan, however, appears to have been tossed a lifeline by Prop. K, the measure to close off portions of the Great Highway. She opposed it, vehemently — hardly a "progressive" position, but one a Westside politician running against varsity opposition pretty much needed to espouse, lest they be immolated by voters' great vengeance and furious anger. The Prop. K map formed a physical and metaphysical divide — the west was against it, the eastern half of the city largely came out for it.
Philhour, this election season, wanted to talk about public safety — to the point of dressing up as a cop with a robber in the back of her pedicab for Halloween . But Richmond District voters by Election Day seemed more focused on where the rubber meets the road. Literally.
Chan, you may recall, in 2023 annoyed city progressives by siding with parking-obsessed Geary merchants over the SFMTA and its transit lanes . Say what you will about Preston, he's ideologically consistent. Voters, it seems, value ideological consistency. Until you disagree with them. And then you're on your own.
Finally, it warrants mentioning that Mayor London Breed only won a single precinct in the Richmond District. This boded poorly for Philhour. She was a former fundraiser and senior adviser for the mayor — which Chan or her third-party boosters were happy to remind voters of.
Breed is a lifelong District 5 resident. She did not weigh down Mahmood, who could make claims to be an outsider. Philhour could not.
This was a profoundly mixed election for San Francisco's big-money players. But the outcome brings to mind the old Doritos pitch: Crunch all you want. We'll make more .
There are lessons to be learned and strategies to be adopted. But, in the end, they can raise the money — that's no problem.
Additional reporting by Kelly Waldron
