Past SF Mayor's Elections Reveal the Path to November 2024 Race

Many political experts have plausible — yet potentially contradictory — theories about the path to victory in this November’s mayoral election.

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Theory A:  Political winds are on the side of moderates and the centrist candidate with the best campaign wins.

Theory B:  The glut of moderate candidates will compete for the same slice of the electorate — enabling the candidate most accepted by progressives to win.

Theory C:  Because of ranked choice voting, the candidate with the lowest negatives — and hence the highest potential for number 2 votes — will prevail.

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So which is it?

For clues, we can look to past San Francisco mayoral elections and use them to help answer four fundamental questions:

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Question 1:  What is Mayor Breed’s path to re-election?

If elections are ultimately referendums on incumbents, Mayor Breed and her team could look to Mayor Willie Brown’s successful 1999 re-election campaign.  

At the time of his re-election, forces were already lining up to oppose Brown’s mayoral power — and a whole new wave of supervisors, commissions, and charter amendments would soon limit that power.  Despite this fast growing opposition and rapidly declining approval ratings, Brown persevered by deploying a massive field organization and outspending his closest opponent by 10-to-1 — winning in the end by 20 points.

Brown also planned ahead by converting past and potential political opponents into allies by appointing them to boards, commissions, panels, and paid positions within the government.  Per his reputation, Brown was playing chess while others played checkers.

Although sitting mayors can easily command audiences and media attention that make other candidates jealous, Breed’s saving grace may be her ability to marshall the city’s governance infrastructure, mayoral powers, and bully pulpit to deploy allies and foot soldiers at scale.

Just one problem:  Unlike Brown, Breed doesn’t have a clear fundraising advantage nor the proven political machine to deploy this level of ground game.  Could she have appointed Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie to plum posts that would have removed them from the competitive mayoral playing field?  Would they have accepted?  We’ll never know.

One more underlying factor that I’ve heard discussed:  Because Breed was first elected in an abbreviated 2018 special election after the death of Mayor Ed Lee — then re-elected in 2019 largely without much opposition — she never had the opportunity to pressure test her campaign organization and grassroots activation skills.

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Question 2:  Is there a greater opening to the right or left of Mayor Breed?

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Supporters of newly announced mayoral candidate Mark Farrell could look to the 1991 election of Frank Jordan over Mayor Art Agnos as an example of how a tough-on-crime agenda could lead to City Hall’s top job. 

Like Farrell, Jordan was a former high-ranking city official — in this case police chief — who was making a triumphant return.  In Jordan, voters chose a candidate who promised to clear the streets of rampant crime and homelessness and reverse years of mismanagement at City Hall.  Sound familiar?

For Farrell, however, this strategy is complicated:  Breed’s steady move to the right on issues like police powers and drug testing for city services has removed a clear campaign lane.  To distinguish himself, Farrell needs to go even further to the right — hence his “zero tolerance” policy proclamation — which may rally some support but potentially at the cost of alienating two-thirds of The City that doesn’t identify as moderate or conservative.

Farrell could emphasize that he’s something of a unicorn — with 6 months of mayoral temp experience and a private sector alibi for City Hall’s dismal performance over the past 5 years — but that’s just a few lines in a campaign bio rather than a cohesive message to inspire voters.

So what about outflanking Breed on the left?

That’s the best option for Supervisor Ahsha Safai if no true progressives get in the race.  Safai could look to Mayor Brown’s initial 1995 election, when Brown marshaled support from substantial forces on the left including labor unions cultivated during his time as California Assembly Speaker.  Safai also has union ties dating to his work as political director for Service Employees International Union Local 87.

But for Safai, moving to the left to gain that group of voters while not alienating reform-minded moderates is a very delicate balancing act.  Debate over his controversial amendment to Proposition B that added future taxes to a police full staffing bill shows just how precarious that balancing act can be.

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Question 3:  Will ideology or identity have a greater impact on voters?

Tipping Point founder Daniel Lurie could look to the 2011 election of Mayor Ed Lee, whose identity as a city administrator without a dominant political ideology, was key to his rapid rise.   Because Lee was mostly viewed as a bureaucrat, and therefore an outsider to San Francisco’s dominant political power structure, he was able to consolidate identity-based support in a way that many other ideology-minded Asian candidates could not.

Because Lurie hasn’t differentiated himself at all from Mayor Breed on an ideological basis — he even extensively fundraised for her Proposition E police powers bill on the upcoming March 5 ballot — he needs to keep playing up his outsider’s identity.

But that’s tricky for him:  Although he has not previously held elected office, he and his prominent family are anything but outsiders in San Francisco’s old money socioeconomic pecking order.  Even more problematic, the word “billionaire” is the specific trigger word used to define the enemy by those who cater to the left-third of San Francisco’s populace.

That’s why the candidate who probably benefits most from identity politics is actually Mayor Breed herself:  Many politicos point to her compelling personal story as a young girl raised in poverty by her grandmother in the Western Addition — plus the excitement surrounding her rise as The City’s first female mayor of color — as determining factors in her 2018 win.

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Question 4:  Will this be a high turnout or low turnout election?

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Political pundits and pollsters expect voter turnout to perhaps be 30% higher in 2024 than prior mayoral races in non-presidential election years.

But while that’s predicted, it’s not guaranteed.  If turnout is substantially smaller — perhaps because the Biden/Harris ticket doesn’t inspire excitement or people vote for president but don’t move down the ballot to vote for mayor — groups like labor unions or the Democratic County Central Committee can have a greater impact on the final outcome.  

Donald Trump himself could even play a role:  Will his likely presence on the ballot heighten the perceived threat to civil, immigration, and reproductive rights?  A focus on national issues over local ones could drive the type of turnout that helps Breed.

Also, if turnout is high, other mass outreach channels play a bigger role.  Yes, that could mean that an advantage to the candidate with the most TV ads, but it also means that creative ways to communicate with voters at scale takes center stage.  Who is the best candidate at social media, earned media, viral marketing, or thought leadership content creation?  It’s not clear, but whoever that person is, she or he may be making Instagram reels and Tiktok videos from the mayor’s office this time next year. 

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And the final wild card is that all of this is taking place under ranked choice voting — an election feature that wasn’t yet available for many of the races I’ve just described.

So what’s the answer?  Which of our three theories — moderate campaign skills, progressive king-making, or candidate non-negativity — is the correct one for on-the-money mayoral stock picks?

Maybe the answer is all of the above:  The best campaign with the most diverse coalition for the least objectionable candidate wins. 

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