By Wednesday afternoon’s update, Mark Leno has 50.4 percent of the vote in San Francisco’s mayoral race. London Breed, who was leading early on, has 49.6 percent.
Some political junkies are projecting a Leno victory if the voting patterns remain intact.
That’s a big if. After Leno squeaked into the lead at the end of election night, thanks to 77 percent of Jane Kim’s supporters marking Leno as the No. 2 choice on their ballots, there are around 87,000 ballots to be counted. That’s a lot of votes. That’s 20 percent of all registered voters in SF. That’s also more than 55 percent of the 159,000 ballots counted through last night.
The tote-board watching is likely to continue for days. And days. And days. At 4 p.m. Wednesday, SF’s elections chief John Arntz said his crew hadn’t even counted 5,000 of the extra ballots, and more are still arriving by mail. Arntz will hold a daily update every afternoon until the final tally is in.
This limbo is not a bad thing. Instead of the next news cycle of What an 18-Month Leno (or Breed) Administration Means, we can take a few deep breaths and wonder why, if current numbers hold up, only one-third to one-half of registered voters could be bothered to vote.
Caveat here: Arntz said Wednesday that a 50 percent turnout would be higher than a typical nonpresidential election. What was it George W. Bush once said: The soft bigotry of low expectations? Is 50 percent turnout really a win? And if turnout skews lower, the real story to emerge from Tuesday’s vote would be this: It was a civic embarrassment. (For a breakdown by neighborhood, click here to download a PDF.)
Ground zero of the #Resistance. Center of voting innovations like, ahem, ranked-choice voting. Apparently all those whiny bumper stickers — “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” — don’t apply to municipal matters. And oh boy, do we have municipal matters.
Let’s reserve further judgment until the final turnout numbers emerge. There are, however, many open questions that linger. For example, with ranked-choice voting making second best a viable strategy, plus potentially low turnout, what kind of a mandate will our 18-month mayor actually have?
Will the power of incumbency, so frightening to Breed’s rivals when she was acting mayor, protect either Breed or Leno if their short-term administrations are failures? And will their rivals, gunning for 2019, do all they can to make them failures? In a city that needs so much help and strong, cooperative leadership, that would be the biggest tragedy of all.
UPDATE on June 6: Midnight Measure of Ranked Votes Let Mark Leno Gain on London Breed, Turning Race Into Toss-Up
Maybe it’s best to be No. 2.
As of the latest number crunching for the ranked-choice ballots, where voters selected their first, second, and third names for the city’s next chief executive, former supervisor and state senator Mark Leno is making a serious run become San Francisco’s next mayor — our first gay mayor, if the returns remain in his favor.
With Leno teaming up with termed-out Sup. Jane Kim in the race, each asking voters to mark the other as the second choice, the two hoped the process involved in the ranked-choice ballot would put either one of them over the top—that is, over District 5 supervisor, Board of Supervisors president, and former acting mayor London Breed. With weaker candidates being eliminated and their votes distributed, it just might work.
Leno has long seemed to be a man with a plan, making the rounds: first as District 8 supervisor, then to the state Assembly, then to the state Senate. Now that he’s termed out of that, he’s bringing his game back home. It was 1998, during the first dot-com days, when Leno was appointed to the Board of Supervisors by Mayor Willie Brown.
We can understand putting up straw men as the stuff of campaigning, but progress in San Francisco today means putting actual roofs over actual heads. Leno may have enjoyed a good hand in his campaign, with Breed and Kim representing a sharper contrast of San Francisco’s political camps.
But here’s the thing if he wins this election: Once sworn in as mayor, the author of a bunch of bills in Sacramento that hardly anyone can name will want to write a new legacy. After running to fight against the “failed status quo” he’s been part of for 20 years, Leno won’t have anywhere to hide. Here’s hoping he’s up for the job.
This post will be updated as returns continue to be released.
ORIGINAL POST of June 5: London’s Calling: Former SF acting mayor and board president London Breed leads race, beating back progressive challenges
As of the latest vote count, District 5 supervisor, Board of Supervisors president, and former acting mayor London Breed is in the lead to become San Francisco’s next mayor. If she ultimately prevails, she’ll be the first African-American woman to serve our city in Room 200.
It’s been a nasty contest between Democratic colleagues and erstwhile allies. This being a midyear race that lacks a national contest, turnout skews lower, so it’s not necessarily demonstrative of a broad narrative. Nevertheless, Breed appears to have prevailed, her voters activated by the race’s flash point: her removal as mayor in January.
Fair or unfair, depending on who you backed, the knock on Breed was that she embodied the machine politics of Willie Brown and tech mogul Ron Conway. Rage against this machine motivated her two main rivals, Sup. Jane Kim and former state senator Mark Leno, to team up and game the ranked-choice ballot so that Breed and her Brown/Conway/billionaire proxies would be defeated. (At last check, Leno is running second and Kim third.) Here are the two candidates in their own words:
Leno and Kim’s antagonism was part of a pattern, and it first came up when Breed started her career in politics. After the shocking death of Mayor Ed Lee last December at a neighborhood Safeway, progressives on the Board of Supervisors orchestrated a batshit-baffling ouster of Breed as acting mayor in January in favor of venture capitalist and District 2 Sup. Mark Farrell.
“Pandemonium” ensued, and Breed took to the high ground.
Breed definitely relied on support from Brown and Conway to outraise her opponents, and her opponents used Brown’s imperious image and Conway’s brusque tactics as cudgels. According to an SF Examiner report a couple days before the election, Breed’s $3.2 million as of May 31 had outpaced Leno and Kim. But the two weren’t exactly cash-poor themselves, having raised $2.1 million and $1.8 million, respectively. In addition, they had supporters from real estate and tech, sectors that SF’s progressives have cast as the bogeymen (bogeypeople?) to blame for many, if not all, of the city’s ills.
While the vote count isn’t official yet, a few thoughts: It was hard to figure Leno, who railed against the “failed status quo” he has very much been part of for 20 years, as a change candidate. Voters may not be able to recall any of the legislative milestones marking Leno’s 14 years in Sacramento. (Former District 8 supervisor Scott Wiener took over Leno’s seat in the state Senate 18 months ago, and in that time has proceeded to make waves.) People probably don’t remember him being hand-picked by Mayor Willie Brown in 1998 either. Fair or unfair, that’s the way it goes.
Kim, in turn, sought to resurrect her political career. City supervisors are termed out after two four-year stints in office, and she already had run for Leno’s job in the state capital herself — coming out ahead in the primary and forcing a runoff against Wiener. That race was close, but Wiener won and Kim lost, by about 14 votes per precinct.
As a mayoral candidate, Kim hammered greedy developers and their “seven-story luxury condos,” particularly at a rally on the low-density west side of the city. (Wiener, for his part, just told the Chronicle that Kim’s NIMBY demagoguery there was “the most cynical move I’ve ever seen in politics.”)
We hope we’re now past this ugly and noxious chapter, because San Francisco needs a way forward — a way that will likely require radically changing the way things are done, and fast. The crises of housing and homelessness are connected, and both of these will be metrics for Breed’s administration. She stuck her neck out to back Wiener’s state bill to build denser housing along transit corridors, a proposal that failed a month ago because most legislators could not countenance the loss of local zoning control. Breed has also been adamant about building more housing of all types in SF, which displeased the affordable-only advocates.
Pledging to build affordable housing is a lot easier said than done. Even our numbers on housing construction overall aren’t going in the right direction either. The voters who put Breed over the top amid the coordinated attacks want to see her succeed. She might feel vindicated, but she must not react vindictively, despite her ouster from Room 200 in January. The city cannot afford to fall into a paralyzing fight between the new administration and a raft of supervisors, led by Sup. Aaron Peskin, who will likely have knives out for her just as they did a few months ago. That’s because in 2019, we’ll be doing this again. (Remember that this election is only to finish up what would have been Mayor Lee’s final year in office.) Winning now makes winning next year somewhat easier. Voters didn’t mind when the appointed Lee broke his caretaker promise, running for a full term in 2011 and again in 2015.
For Breed, the months ahead are a huge test. She will have to tap whatever reserves of magnanimity she has left, because the new leader San Francisco needs is going to be disliked, without a doubt.
Editor in chief Alex Lash contributed to these reports. Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus