The year 2000 was the worst-case scenario of an election gone off the rails, what with hanging chads and the high court’s arbitrary declaration of a presidential winner. Since then, we’ve endured more partisanship, spread by the explosion of real-time news and social platforms that we have come to call the internet. While you can hail a ride, deposit a check, book a massage, or buy almost anything with a few taps on a phone, elections remain a 20th-century endeavor: mailing and receiving ballots, staffing polling centers, and collecting and tallying results. Democracy’s painstaking process jars our nerves because it seems to go on forever.
San Francisco’s Election Day was Tuesday, but when the city woke up the next morning, 70,000 ballots remained to be processed — more than a third of all ballots cast. Who was ahead and behind wavered day by day this week. Journalists were drawn to the daily 4 pm-ish data dumps like hipsters to kombucha, and one can only imagine how the candidates and their staffers felt. As of late Monday afternoon, the department has issued 10 reports on the count. (In the mid-2018 election that saw London Breed elected mayor, there were 17.)
The final account should come Wednesday, November 13. But the races are pretty much wrapped up. On Saturday — even with a few hundred votes or so separating the candidates, and some provisional votes yet to count — Dean Preston was headed for the Board of Supervisors, deposing incumbent Vallie Brown, while Chesa Boudin unseated the temporarily appointed district attorney Suzy Loftus.
Second (and third) that emotion
These progressive victories came after tough campaigns. They’re also the product of ranked-choice voting and the accounting of second- and third-place choices among voters who selected neither Preston nor Boudin as their first choices. (RCV, slowly making inroads across the United States, is considered a way to avoid runoff elections, which require reopening polls and restarting campaigns — like this one. Under RCV, voters’ second and third choices are distributed as many times as necessary until one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.)
In fact, in District 5, incumbent Brown received more first-choice votes than challenger Preston, but it wasn’t enough to win under RCV. The second and third choices in ballots that had supported the other two District 5 candidates, Ryan Lam and Nomvula O’Meara, put Preston over the top by 188 votes so far.
You would think that as the winning candidate who got fewer first-place votes, Preston would give a nod to how this electoral system is set up and the paper-thinness of his margin of victory. You’d be wrong: “Our campaign was very clearly challenging the status quo,” Preston told the SF Chronicle. “We won in a low turnout election with that message — I think it makes a statement.” (The turnout, for the record is more than 41% of registered SF voters, casting more than 206,000 votes; roughly 23,400 people voted in D5, which includes the Fillmore, Haight, Hayes Valley, and Inner Sunset.)
Preston’s campaign pledges include a March 2020 ballot measure to make Muni free and the construction of 10,000 units of affordable housing within 10 years. He’ll have to prove himself, since he will be up for re-election in November 2020. (Breed had appointed Brown as supervisor when she became mayor.)
The picture was clearer for far-left Chesa Boudin, who got more first-choice votes than Suzy Lofton then padded his margin with down-ballot votes from the people whose first choice was Nancy Tung, the most conservative of the candidates — one of the oddest artifacts of this year’s RCV . Boudin is now ahead by almost 3,000 votes, with barely any provisional ballots left to count (most of which lean progressive anyway). Worthy to note: Political analyst David Latterman told the Chronicle that there would be “zero chance” that Boudin could beat Loftus in a runoff, calling ranked-choice voting “election by algorithm, not by campaigning.” However: Here’s a great thread countering that comment, hard.
Boudin happened to be flying back to SF when the news of his victory broke. He was visiting his father, David Gilbert, once a member of the Weather Underground, who’s imprisoned in New York state. (Gilbert is in jail for a 1981 armored-truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a guard, and isn’t eligible for parole for a few decades. One of the officers killed was the first African American woman to serve on her police department.) It’s strange that voters didn’t hear too much about that, or about Boudin’s work as a translator with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela — a once-prosperous nation now widely regarded as a Latin American basket case.
In any case, Boudin’s election-night celebrations took on other baggage, by directing vitriol at a powerful constituency for the future district attorney — the San Francisco Police Officers Association, which represents around 2,000 officers as a union.
Richmond supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer took to the mic on stage that Tuesday and said “I got just one thing to say: Fuck the POA!” and led the chant “Fuck the POA! Fuck the POA!” The POA spent heavily in overtly opposing Boudin, who was backed by Fewer and other progressives , so the chanting may have been sweet revenge.
Once the chant clip went viral, though, Fewer issued a statement, which she called an open letter, saying her words were aimed at the leadership of the POA, not rank and file cops, and ending with a nonapology apology (“If that language has offended you“). She ghosted reporters after that, which is probably wise, since by then people were sharing on social media that the supervisor’s spouse, John Fewer, is a retired SFPD officer who has been the subject of complaints about his excessive use of force.
Breed bashing
Speaking of self-owns, the mayor pushed hard for Brown, her former legislative aide, and for Loftus, whom she appointed to interim DA a few weeks before the election. But the best-laid plans often go awry, with voters choosing a democratic socialist in Preston and a change-oriented public defender in Boudin.
Now Breed will almost certainly have a harder time pushing her agenda with yet another progressive on the city’s board. City Hall’s balance of power has shifted just as the city needs to move forward, not get ground down in political squabbles and sophomoric ideological debates. If voters feel that San Francisco keeps going south, not showing improvement, they’ll blame Breed first — regardless of the crazy rants of progressive supervisors or the changes the new district attorney pushes through. (“We will not prosecute cases of involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin said in late October.)
Perhaps the concern of Breed blowback is overblown, though. There are instances where progressives have allied with the mayor. District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, who gloated about the Boudin/Preston victories, is all-in for the new Navigation Center in his district despite neighborhood opposition that has led to a lawsuit and ugly civic moments. District 8 supervisor Rafael Mandelman is pushing hard for more conservatorship to compel mentally ill and addicted people to get treatment. Both Boudin and Breed have members of their family who are incarcerated; maybe they can work together on humane and sensible approaches. And Preston campaigned for a youth Navigation Center in D5; let’s see whether he follows through.
Preston’s work to fight new market-rate housing isn’t going to help Breed’s housing agenda, but there’s common ground on affordable projects. Proposition A, strongly supported by Breed, was the largest affordable housing bond ever and made it over the two-thirds threshold to pass.
But the moments of “bipartisanship,” San Francisco-style, will be limited as long as a vision of the city prevails—considered by many to be “progressive” because it pins blame for our ills not on long-standing city policies, but on corporations and billionaires — that is actually reactionary, antisocial, and conservative.
Talk of the town
Consider this recent discussion on San Francisco history and politics at the Commonwealth Club with two longtime progressives, former supervisor and city attorney Louise Renne and former mayor Art Agnos, among others. The whole thing was a paean for simpler times, when an apartment at Parkmerced used to rent for $90 a month and commuters from far-flung areas didn’t clog the city’s streets and highways. Agnos says:
“Who do we build for? Because today the market forces are building for one population, and that is wealthy people, because they will pay the prices that expensive condos that are popping up all over San Francisco require.” (This is at the 56th minute.)
Agnos rambled further about how middle-class folks are priced out of the real estate market and that voters need to decide who the city should build housing for:
“Frankly a radical [decision] would be to say ‘We’re not going to allow any more housing for wealthy people, we’re going to build just for the middle class and low-income.”
That remark, followed by applause, is neither radical nor accurate. Multifamily housing, also known as apartment buildings, is not allowed in most of San Francisco, a legacy of postwar red-lining and racism. But by all means, let’s demonize developers who build places for people to live and employers that are sucking the lifeblood out of this once-charming and welcoming town.
Even if the city were to try to suppress housing demand by limiting job growth and commercial development — pushing out the companies that are drawn to San Francisco to tap its talent, its links to transportation, and so on — it might just find that people make adjustments and commute from here to those jobs and back. We’ve been watching this happen for years with the infamous shuttles for Apple, Google, and others. To wit, fintech startup Stripe is decamping to South San Francisco; its workforce probably won’t.
RCV may make elections more open to more candidates, and that’s a good thing. RCV may also make elections tighter and more unpredictable, and that’s nerve-wracking but part of the package. The progressives in the race made their views clear, and the voters made their choices by slim margins. A year from now, District 5 can vote for someone else if Preston’s performance isn’t to their liking. We have democracy, as agonizing as it is, and everyone is capable of conveying their displeasures and demanding that officials respond.
Our best hope is that the best ideas are broached and that the urban benefit, not hidebound doctrines, carry the city through this time of crisis. As the Commonwealth Club speakers above reminded listeners, in the not-too-distant history of San Francisco we’ve been through far, far worse.