By a hair, by a thread, by less than 3,000 votes, London Breed is San Francisco’s new mayor.
Mark Leno conceded yesterday. The city’s progressive bloc did all it could to defeat London Breed, beginning with the vote to remove her as acting mayor in January, all the way through the Leno’s team-up with Jane Kim to take advantage of ranked-choice voting. Breed was having none of it; she would not lend her support to anyone as a second- or third-place choice.
(Did the election make ranked-choice voting the true winner, as former SF Democratic Party chair David Campos contends? Our call: Too small a sample size, but we like the experiment. Let’s see it play out over more elections in many places. And read this while you’re waiting.)
The tally means Breed’s mandate is the thinnest of majorities. To create elbow room, she could rightly claim that she won a clear plurality of the first-place votes, 36.6 percent to Leno’s 24.6 to Kim’s 24, from a broad swath of the city. But doing so too loudly, especially if playing defense against critics, could come off as sore winnership.
Breed will have to start campaigning again soon. Perhaps immediately. She is up for re-election in November 2019; this was simply to decide who would finish Mayor Ed Lee’s term through January 2020. There are big challenges to such a short turnaround.
It’s hard to get anything done in San Francisco in 17 months. Breed’s foes on the Board of Supervisors could go obstructionist, taking a page from Mitch McConnell’s anti-Obama playbook, and try to make a Breed administration look hapless.
But wait: Five of SF’s 11 districts are electing supervisors this November. Rival Jane Kim is termed out from running again in District 6. How the candidates position themselves related to Breed — and how voters in their districts respond — will set the tone for 2019. Noted: Kim, who prematurely welcomed a Leno administration after election night, played nice yesterday on Facebook.
Going full #ResistBreed would be unwise, just as it would also be unwise for Breed to exact payback or let resentments from the past six months linger.
Now is the time to get things done that everyone can agree upon. With last week’s ballot measures, voters have already pushed significant cash toward public-school teachers, strengthened protection against eviction, and shot back against a change in SFPD Taser policy. (If you’re tracking our ballot recommendations, we went 8-for-10.)
People will also want to see plans for safer, less congested streets and less hazardous material — needles, garbage, and poop — on our sidewalks. Breed is a supporter of safe injection sites and stronger conservatorship laws. Will she surprise her opponents and knock heads to make Lyft and Uber less of a double-parking, bus-blocking, street-clogging nuisance? Will she work with activists to make SF bike-friendlier, faster — and make sure the knee-jerk anti-tech crowd doesn’t blunt the “last mile” opportunity that e-bikes and e-scooters present in boosting carless trips across the city?
Then, of course, there is housing. We haven’t seen exit polls asking San Franciscans why they voted for Breed, Leno, or Kim. Perhaps many people snuggled in close at campaign stops and liked the way they smelled. That would be awesome — and weird. Or maybe voters went by the issues. As we have noted before, Breed was the only candidate to support housing of all types, not just affordable housing. (Although she’s for that too.) She was not shy, and she supported a pro-housing state bill that went down in flames and was not popular in SF. She won the mayor’s race anyway.
Now she will have the mayoral platform to explain to San Franciscans why more housing of all kinds is important, how neighborhoods historically resistant to new housing need to share the burden, how we all will benefit, and what other changes (to transportation, homeless services, infrastructure, and more) will be necessary to support a Breed-era housing boom. The boom won’t start right away. Consider this 18-month stump of a term her time for closing arguments. Some San Franciscans need no more convincing. Others do. No matter what, the city will continue to grow. It’s already happening here and here.
Mayor Breed should be out front in those discussions, presenting a plan and listening to feedback. But which constituency will she put on the spot? Who will be asked to sacrifice for the rest of the city?
Come November 2019, if San Franciscans vote for a full-term Breed administration, the people will really have spoken.