First of all, and perhaps most important, this was an election with rather low turnout. These odd-year affairs always disappoint, with no midterms or presidential races to fire up the masses. But turnout was particularly latent this time, with 23 percent of registered voters casting ballots, according to the SF elections department.
Update: The elections office announced Wednesday morning that there are an estimated 70,000 ballots yet to count. If that figure holds up, it would boost turnout to about 37%. It would also mean that nearly 40% of all ballots cast were not available to count on Election Night, which is interesting.
In 2015, with similar circumstances of an incumbent mayor expected to cruise to victory, 45 percent of registered voters cast ballots. In 2013, without a mayoral race, it was 29 percent.
Low turnout is unfortunate for a few reasons. First, we need more civic participation. There must have been something on the ballot to fire people up. Public health? Affordable housing for teachers? Very different candidates vying to be SF’s district attorney? No?
Second, anyone dabbling in statistics, even sports fans, know that the smaller the sample size, the less authoritative the data. If a large majority of voters weigh in, their choices carry more political weight than the choices of a small (and motivated) bloc.
That said, the results are no less valid. So let’s get to them, starting with the top of the ticket.
London’s bridge
In June 2018, when London Breed won the right to serve out the remainder of Ed Lee’s mayoral term, The Frisc wrote that she had 17 months to convince voters that her ideas were worth a longer take. Some of her allies and positions have taken hits since then — not least of which was her opposition at that time of Proposition C, the tax for homeless and housing services, which won last fall but not by enough to avoid getting tangled in court.
But Breed encountered little resistance to re-election, with leading progressives who see her as a puppet of the city’s tech and real-estate interests sitting on the sidelines. She coasted to victory tonight. The mayor is now squarely on the clock. Housing, homelessness, street cleanliness and congestion, property crime, and so on: All are problems requiring long-term fixes, but fairly or not, San Francisco will judge her by the progress on her watch. Her four-year term begins now, but she might have two fewer allies by her side.
Too close for comfort
In the races for District 5 and for San Francisco district attorney, polls leading up to Election Day said they were too close to call. Looks like they got that right.
In ranked-choice voting, when no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote after the first tally, the next phase kicks in. The second and third choices of voters who went with the marginal candidates get resorted, then things become … more complicated. (When Breed was first elected in June 2018 her margin was razor-thin, decided by down-ballot choices days after the vote.)
We still don’t know the resolution of the D5 and DA races. But by the time the final stragglers were heading home on Election Night, some numbers were taking shape.
In District 5, the race that will tip the ideological balance on the Board of Supervisors, ranked-choice voting gave challenger Dean Preston a roughly 200-vote lead over incumbent Vallie Brown.
If Preston holds on after final ballots, such as late mail-ins, Breed will have one fewer ally on the board and face more potent opposition to building more housing of all kinds, as she has unwaveringly promoted. Preston, a tenants’ advocate, hammered all summer and fall on Brown, painting her as pro-developer, but if there’s to be a nail in her coffin, it could be of Brown’s own fashioning: In 1994 Brown evicted low-income tenants from a Fillmore Street building she bought with friends.
When the story broke last month, Brown said the tenants hadn’t been paying rent. That turned out to be false (or as Brown’s attorney described it in a statement, “inaccurate” and “wrong”). Both Preston and Brown say they want a Navigation Center for unsheltered youth in District 5. The city has the funds in hand. But given the neighborhood’s traditional love-Haight relationship with street kids, it may well be the biggest fight of the next four years for whoever wins the seat.
Boudin rising
Those reading the tea leaves on Breed and SF’s machine politics were also focusing on the race for district attorney. Once George Gascón bailed out to run for the same job in LA (you a Dodgers fan, George?), the mayor installed one of the candidates, Suzy Loftus, as interim DA a few weeks before the election to lend her the power of incumbency.
As returns rolled in last night, Loftus’s main challenger, Chesa Boudin, bragged that he had the best outreach and ground game. Maybe a combination of his organization, Breed’s machine power play for Loftus, and Boudin’s background as a public defender put him in the early lead. But neither Loftus nor Boudin won more than half the first-round votes, which left more than 35,000 votes from other candidates to be divvied up. Now, after the final ranked-choice tally, Loftus is leading by 240 votes.
As with the D5 race, last-minute mailed ballots could make the difference.
Election-night parties seldom get too exciting, but the San Francisco Police Officers Association’s decision to put its money against Boudin made his shindig— and one supporter, D1 supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer, in particular — sound like a vintage rap track. Except that Fewer is no Eazy-E; her husband is, wait for it, a retired SF cop who has been the subject of citizen complaints.
Let’s build
Again, with less than a quarter of registered voters casting ballots, it’s harder to make pronouncements about what it all means. But we do know this: Those who showed up really want more affordable housing in SF. The catch for Proposition A, the $600 million bond to build, buy, and renovate affordable housing, was that it needed two-thirds of the vote for passage. At last check it was above that number. (For those doing the math, $600 million will buy us roughly 2,800 new units.) Voters also overwhelmingly passed Proposition E, which streamlines the construction of affordable housing for SF’s teachers on large plots of public land. Together, A and E mean more money, more sites, and faster permitting. They’re not perfect— the product of months of combat between the mayor and the supervisors — but in a housing crisis, we can’t quibble over everything.
Voters didn’t hesitate to spend more on their own transport. By barely passing Proposition D with a two-thirds vote, we’ll be levying a tax on Uber and Lyft rides within city limits: 1.5 percent for rides in zero-emission vehicles or shared rides, and 3.25 percent for all others. (The average tax on a ride from the SF Zoo to Pier 39 would be 78 cents, according to SPUR.) With political winds no longer at Big Tech’s back, and nearly everybody aware of the effects of ride-hail companies on traffic, the slight increase was apparently an easy, um, lift.
By passing Proposition B, voters basically said the city could change the name of its Department For Aging and Adult Services and tinker with the qualifications of three of the seven commission members. It will have little to no fiscal impact.
Proposition C, the so-called Juul rule, went down to a sounding defeat, which seemed obvious once Juul, an early sponsor, backpedaled away from the steaming cloud of bad publicity. The defeat means the Board of Supervisors’ ban on e-cigarettes within city limits will stay in place, only to be lifted if the FDA approves them, which it emphatically has not.
Proposition F, which would increase restrictions on campaign cash, has been approved by roughly three-quarters of the vote.
One more thing
In the single Board of Education race, incumbent Jenny Lam appears to have won another term with more than 70% of the vote … City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Public Defender Manohar Raju, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, Treasurer José Cisneros, and Community College Board member Ivy Lee all ran unopposed and suprise, surprise, won.