Almost one year after a contentious mayoral election that saw one candidate call out the San Francisco Chronicle for bad reporting, an unusual alliance between two candidates late in the race, and an agonizing weeklong tally of votes — not to mention total spending of over $8 million — winner and incumbent mayor London Breed is “sitting pretty in the catbird seat,” in the words of James Taylor, a local political observer and professor at the University of San Francisco.
Though the so-called moderate leader has been jeered in public, criticized by district supervisors and others on issues including budgeting and housing, and is facing national scrutiny for the May 10 SFPD raid of a freelance journalist’s home, Breed’s broad appeal and relatively short time in office seem to be protective padding.
As she wraps up her post to finish out the late Ed Lee’s term, she faces no serious challenger in her November re-election campaign. (A handful of not-well-known citizen candidates have filed declarations to run, including Mike Caccioppoli, an activist, and social worker Ellen Lee Zhou, who ran in 2018 as well.)
Having already beaten two of the city’s most formidable progressives, and with the cost of running for office — like everything else in San Francisco — astronomically expensive, the mayor has fended off potential opponents from the city’s progressive faction. This raises an interesting question: In such a politically volatile town, are people really that scared to run against her?
Boardroom intrigue
First, it’s important to remember how we got here. Breed is mayor because Lee died suddenly in December 2017 after suffering a heart attack while grocery shopping with his wife. Breed, then president of the Board of Supervisors, became acting mayor, until she was removed by her colleagues five weeks later and replaced by Sup. Mark Farrell.
Six of her fellow board members — all part of the city’s progressive camp — voted her out, claiming her support from tech billionaire Ron Conway would hinder her ability to serve the city’s not-billionaires.
The blowback of removing a black woman who represents the Fillmore and Western Addition in favor of a white man who represented Pacific Heights and the Marina was manifest once sheriff’s deputies cleared the room and escorted supervisors back to their offices.
By then, a host of candidates had stepped up to run for Lee’s job, including then-Supervisor Jane Kim and former state Senator Mark Leno. Breed joined the race as well. For the next six months, San Francisco voters were subjected to election madness. Accusations were ugly, mailers littered the streets, and the candidates seemed to be everywhere, all the time.
Breed’s perceived support from the tech community drew ire from voters and fellow politicians; Kim and Leno endorsed each other in an effort to hack the city’s ranked-choice voting system. In the end, none of that made a difference: Breed won more than 36 percent of the vote in the initial tally and finished at almost 51 percent. (Neither Kim nor Leno cracked the 30 percent level.) She won the plurality in every neighborhood across the city except northern Bernal Heights, the Mission, and Upper Market.
Breed’s victory was a blow to local progressives. “They’ve been burned,” KPIX political analyst Melissa Caen says of the city’s far left. “In terms of fund-raising and really getting mobilized, they’ve experienced some serious losses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re either going to be more careful or pick their battles more closely.”
Taylor at USF points out that the issue for progressives isn’t just that Breed won, but who she beat: “She defeated two of the most prominent progressive politicians in the city of San Francisco, and after a great deal of maneuvering and machinations,” he says, referring to Breed’s replacement by Farrell. Given Kim and Leno’s loss, Taylor and others say it’s no surprise that prominent politicians are wary of getting in the ring.
Then there’s the mayor’s record in office so far. After opposing 2018’s Proposition C, the measure that would tax the city’s highest grossing companies and use the money for homelessness and housing programs, Breed has since helped ferry that initiative through legal challenges, and recently concocted a plan that allows companies to voluntarily give up that money in exchange for a tax break.
Other actions on homelessness, which has become Breed’s “signature issue,” in the words of several political observers, include advocating for a controversial new Navigation Center on the Embarcadero and pushing for an extra $185 million the city earned last year to be dedicated to homeless services and affordable housing. That has ingratiated Breed with skeptical voters who feared she was too cozy with tech, and solidified her reputation as someone committed to the city’s most pressing but polarizing problems.
“She’s doing a very significant job on all fronts in trying to address very difficult issues that have vexed the city in the past,” says longtime PR strategist Sam Singer. Though approval polls of the mayor aren’t kept, several analysts say Breed remains popular citywide and across demographics.
Central to this image is that in her tenure, Breed has avoided gaffes or missteps that rivals could exploit. Despite being dragged into the fallout from the leaked police report of Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s death in February, Breed has been scandal-free — a privilege her predecessors did not enjoy. (Even the not-into-drama Ed Lee got wrapped up in the 2014 FBI sting of former state Senator Leland Yee.)
Though she’ll have years in office to give opponents material for the 2023 vote, if Breed were to run again, Caen and others say the mayor’s unlikely to falter. “She’s been incredibly conservative with her media [appearances], and I think part of that is to really to prevent anything that could be turned into campaign commercials,” according to Caen. “[Breed] appears a lot, but doesn’t do many interviews. That seems like a good strategy if you’re just trying to maintain the status quo.”
She’s been more progressive on homelessness than the progressives have.
University of san francisco political science professor James Taylor
What’s trickier to ascertain is whether Breed’s overall popularity extends to her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. After their initial vote against her in January 2018, the board’s progressive members have since worked with Breed on a number of proposals, including traffic safety improvements and the allocation of that extra $185 million.
“Despite what’s often written, we do work together,” says Kim, who’s now serving as a member of San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee, of the relationship between district supervisors and the mayor. “I don’t think people would say that Mayor Breed has been a progressive policy stalwart or been behind all the progressive policy initiatives. There is disagreement. But they’re figuring out what they can do together.”
Yet if elected officials strongly disagreed with Breed’s policies or actions, we would likely have heard about it by now. Instead, notes Singer, “the progressives see that they can work with Breed and that she is pragmatic in pushing her own agenda, as well as adopting the best of the progressive agenda.”
Exactly what that agenda is, though, remains unclear. “The progressives, while they share a variety of viewpoints, aren’t as organized as they could be, and I think it makes it harder for them to band together to mount a significant campaign,” says Singer. “They have particular platforms and areas that they want to oppose, but they don’t really have a vision per se for what San Francisco ought to be.”
Given that none of San Francisco’s progressive supervisors would talk to The Frisc, it’s hard to know where this lack of cohesion is coming from, or how significant it really is. Sups. Matt Haney, Aaron Peskin, and Hillary Ronen, all stalwarts of the progressive wing, declined repeated requests for comment on this story.
Caen agrees that without clear proposals, progressives will continue to struggle. “Simply saying ‘we have to house the homeless’ is perfectly legitimate, but it’s not new,” she says. “If you don’t have a brand new thought on how to deal with some of our problems, I think it’s hard to break through.”
Given Breed’s approach, the days of progressives versus moderates may be waning. “What Breed has shown in the period she’s been mayor, combined with her good relations across the board, has kept progressives from jumping into the race,” adds Singer. “Looking at it from their perspective, why should they run against her and waste time and money when they can work with her and everybody essentially gets a win?”
Progressive, tomato, moderate, tomahto
There’s also the matter of how big the divide between Breed and her opponents even is. “Everyone in San Francisco is progressive until money is involved,” says Kim. “When it comes to regulating developers and businesses and short-term rentals — and how much wealth they can accumulate — that’s the traditional line we divide under.” USF’s Taylor explains that the meaning of the label “progressive” has changed over time. “Black politics, going back to the Fillmore in the 1940s, is the source of progressiveness in San Francisco,” he says.
While Peskin, Ronen, and others are usually presented as the faces of far-left politics in San Francisco today, the ideology’s origin is often forgotten, according to Taylor. “All of the issues that progressives support are inherent in the neighborhood that London Breed comes from,” he adds. “Housing, jobs, crime, poverty, health care, schools — those are the issues that were born in the Fillmore in the 1940s and are in the community’s DNA, and Breed is a byproduct of that.”
In this context, the mayor’s focus on the issue that’s most vexed politicians is both pragmatic and strategic. “She’s been more progressive on homelessness than the progressives have,” says Taylor. By beating her critics at their own game, Breed has silenced the main argument used against her in 2018 — that she would favor the city’s wealthiest while ignoring those who need help the most.
Of course, almost nothing in SF is fought about unless there are big bucks attached; so too goes local politics. Last year’s mayoral race was the costliest local election in recent history, with Kim and Leno each raising close to $500,000, and Breed a staggering $1.3 million. As of late March, the mayor had already raised $271,000 for her re-election. “If you want to mount a legitimate challenge to someone like London Breed, you’re not going to be able to do it with crayons, sitting around a table in your apartment,” says Caen. She suggests that big backers like Conway aren’t necessarily as much of a political move as they are a necessity. As with our national politics, we may even see the city’s wealthiest residents — such as Marc Benioff or Daniel Lurie — ply their millions into legitimate political campaigns in the next decade.
For the time being, it’s all but guaranteed that Breed will be our mayor for the next four and a half years. By 2023, no one will be able to say she hasn’t been given a fair shot, or that it’s too soon to tell whether she’s been effective. Homelessness will be better or it will be worse; either way, we’ll still be talking about it.
Who will be doing the talking, however, is the great mystery. Peskin will be termed out as supervisor; his colleagues Sandra Lee Fewer, Haney, and Ronen will likely still be in office and eligible to run. Kim, Leno, former supervisor David Campos, state Assemblymember David Chiu, and former supervisor and Matt Gonzalez, the chief attorney at the Public Defender’s office, are still solid possibles, with enough track records, name recognition, and potential resources to mount serious campaigns. While 2023 is up in the air, from the vantage point of 2019 it looks like London Breed is giving adversaries very, very short runways to gain any altitude.