View the San Francisco for Sunday, August 4, 2024
On a recent Saturday morning, Min Chang planted herself on a plot of sidewalk along the Embarcadero not far from the Ferry Building, and — campaign sign in hand — began flagging down passersby.Few zipping about under a dreary sky even gave a hint they noticed Chang, a longtime executive in the private and nonprofit sectors.
But those who did stop to chat seemed to immediately connect with her central campaign pitch, focused on fiscal prudence and good governance, nodding approvingly as she laid out her plan to leverage her decades of business acumen to helpWhat goes unmentioned in these interactions is that Chang is running with the backing of the local Republican Party and serves on its governing board. Her party affiliation means that Chang’s campaign is paddling very much against the political current in San Francisco, a famously liberal city that. In the decades since, GOP registration has fallen so low that The City’s registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans more than eight to one. Min Chang, candidate for San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024. This November, Chang is among an unusually large contingent of Republican candidates also running for public office in San Francisco. The group includes Yvette Corkrean, a registered nurse whose anger over the pandemic lockdowns has propelled her to become a first-time candidate running to unseat Scott Wiener from the California State Senate; Bruce Lou, a long-time campaigner against hate crimes targeting Asian Americans now making a run for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress; U.S. Army Veteran Jeremiah Boehner, who is running for District 1 supervisor on a platform that — like other local Republican candidates — emphasizes support for law enforcement, pro-business policies and clearing the streets of the unhoused and drug users; and several others. While local Republicans acknowledge that their odds of victory in those races remain long, they’ve expressed confidence the party’s conservative message is one that San Francisco voters are eager to hear this election cycle. Meanwhile, they say, they’re hopeful that Chang and the rest of those running will succeed in spreading that message more widely. Amid simmering voter frustration over crime, street conditions and other quality-of-life issues, GOP leaders say they see signs that many voters are shifting right and growing more open to conservative ideas.After struggling for decades to hold on to electoral relevance in San Francisco, the party hopes to seize — in a moment of political flux — an opportunity to build common cause with The City’s like-minded independents and moderate Democrats, and maybe, just maybe, regain a seat at the table of mainstream city politics.Asked if Chang’s partisan status would affect her vote, one woman out on the Embarcadero who had just wrapped up a friendly chat with the candidate said, “Oh, she is a Republican?” “We have to fix our schools, so I guess I’d be open to what ideas are being proposed,” said the woman, who declined to give her name but described herself as a lifelong Democrat. These days, such interparty meetings of the mind are growing more common in San Francisco politics as conservative priorities gain traction, local GOP leaders say. As one measure, they have tracked modest but consistent gains in Republican voter registration over the past few years. The growing Republican support is a sign, in their view, that more voters are losing confidence in the ability of Democratic leaders to address The City’s many crises.John Dennis, Chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, Yvette Corkrean, candidate for State Senate District 7, Bruce Lou, candidate for Congressional District 11 and Stephen Martin-Pinto, candidate for Supervisor District 7, pictured on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024. “We’ve been saying what needs to be said and what the right path forward is for a long time,” said San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis. “But the Democrats had to go through this progressive era, which has destroyed The City.”in Milwaukee days after surviving an assassination attempt last month, about 40 party faithful squeezed inside the cramped quarters of a Marina bar for an evening watch party. The crowd cheered as Trump called on the Democratic party to stop “weaponizing the justice system.” They booed when he dropped a reference to “crazy Nancy Pelosi.” And attendees were just as fired up about local political grievances, complaining bitterly during the event that “one-party rule” and the leadership of Mayor London Breed have failed The City.What The City needs now most of all, many agreed, is a conservative counterbalance for San Francisco’s progressive excesses. “I don’t think the Democratic Party would have had its progressive era here had there been a bigger, stronger Republican Party, because we would have kept them in check,” said Dennis, who served as a delegate in Milwaukee. Outside the confines of a conservative gathering such as this one, though, many local Republicans say they have been afraid to share their views publicly. Most attendees The Examiner interviewed declined to provide their names, saying they feared blowback from friends or coworkers. “We are at the point where, if you are Republican in San Francisco, you’re not exactly taking your life into your own hands,” Jacob Spangler said, “But you’re certainly taking your career into your own hands.” The 23-year-old conservative, who serves as president of the College Republicans at San Francisco State University, claimed his Republican affiliation has gotten him kicked out of house parties and rejected from a fraternity’s pledge process. Even an ex-girlfriend, he said, decided that she did not want to make their relationship publicly known.Hoping to untangle the local Republican Party from a thicket of toxic associations — which members contend have been applied unfairly — one local Briones Society co-founder and president Jay Donde said his group wants to steer the party away from a brand of politics that “embraces conspiracy-mongering and reactionism” as well as “post-liberalism,” and instead focus on core conservative values such as small government, public safety and free markets. The effort to shift the party has opened up an ideological rift among local Republicans that has at times grown bitter. Over the past few years, the Briones Society has found itself frequently at odds with many in local Republican leadership.for denouncing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, as well as the group’s pronouncement that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe to use. However, the Briones Society is now set to gain more sway over the local party, after a slate of aligned candidates secured a However fraught the internal politics of this realignment have been, the external politics stand to be even more daunting, given the simple fact that changing minds about the Republican Party in San Francisco will be a tall order. “People’s understanding of the Republican Party is dominated by their perceptions of Donald Trump,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. For many local voters, the Trump connection immediately calls to mind his controversial stands on immigration, gender, race and abortion, McDaniel said — all issues that have inflamed public opinion in San Francisco during the former president’s time as a leading figure in the party.Republicans looking to make headway in San Francisco’s political arena must contend with the fact that voter-registration tallies indicate they’re currently a small minority in The City. “These kinds of connections are decades in the making of people’s sense of identity and who they are,” McDaniel said — and, he said, the national Republican Party’s longtime demonization of San Francisco hasn’t helped its local image problem either.If the Trump factor is a sticking point for the would-be allies of local Republicans, it’s not going away anytime soon. Support for Trump continues to run deep among San Francisco Republicans, with some candidates flaunting their love for the former president as a central pillar of their campaigns. Perhaps the most prominent of these candidates is Ellen Lee Zhou, who has run for mayor twice before. This November, she will berunning on a platform that includes promises to resist the “globalism agenda” and “Let God Arise in government to cast out darkness.”San Francisco Republican leaders have been closely following the party’s registration numbers.Currently, the party’s voting share stands at 7.6%, a full percentage point higher than it was at the time of the 2020 election. San Francisco Democrats still make up just over 63% of The City’s electorate. {span}All the same, while the Democrats’ 8-to-1 voting advantage represents a massive lead, that figure is somewhat smaller than it was a year ago. It’s a sign that Republicans’ relative electoral influence is trending up, albeit from a low starting point.{/span}, pointing out that Democrats now claim a larger share of The City’s voting public as well, a trend that could suggest that the Republican uptick is simply the result of greater partisan polarization, driving voters without party preferences into one of the rival camps. But those to the right of center can also be found in large numbers among the roughly one-third of city voters who registered with no party preference, Dennis said. “I think that the vast majority of those NPPs listen to what we say,” he said, even if they don’t take the step of registering as Republicans themselves., it appears that none of the top contenders — all of whom are Democrats — see a political upside in receiving a Republican endorsement. All five — Breed, nonprofit executive Daniel Lurie, Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safai, and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell — suggested or stated explicitly to The Examiner that they are not pursuing endorsements from the Republican Party.All this seems to indicate that regardless of any partisan shifting taking place in the electorate, the political calculus for candidates when it comes to Republicans has remained largely unchanged from years past. “It’s still one of the worst things you could be called in San Francisco politics is a Republican,” McDaniel said.During a July 16 fundraiser for Farrell’s campaign, Politico reported the event’s host offered up opinions that sounded an awful lot like some of the most, at one point bemoaning The City’s international reputation for “lawlessness and wokeism” and mocking its pandemic-era vaccine mandates at another. During the event, Farrell offered no pushback, Politico reported. He later distanced himself in response to the report, and Breed pounced. “Depending on who he’s in front of, he’s saying what he needs to say,” she told Politico. “I don’t have to go around telling people I’m a Democrat. He has to say it because people think he’s a Republican.”School-board candidate Mia Chang, pictured campaigning along the Embarcadero in July, said she was a lifelong Democrat before moving to San Francisco two years ago. She found camaraderie among the ranks of the local Republican Party.Given all these political headwinds, this year’s Republican candidates are facing a daunting uphill battle — a fact that is not lost on Chang’s supporters. Over the course of the hour of sign-waving during Saturday morning campaigning, two such supporters joining Chang that day stole a few moments to press her on her decision to run with the Republican Party. “Do you have to be in a party to run?” supporter Maya Altman probingly asked. “Can’t you declare as an independent?”All the more confusing for these two, Chang was a lifelong Democrat before moving to San Francisco two years ago, switching allegiances only when happenstance led her to volunteer for the SF GOP and she found camaraderie among its ranks.Now, her loyalty is unshakable, even as she acknowledges that her Republican affiliation will most likely cost her a number of potentially vital endorsements with left-leaning political organizations that might otherwise support her candidacy.Donde of the Briones society said he is already looking ahead to the 2026 elections and the victories that he argues could very well be within reach of Republican candidates — if the groundwork is laid now. “San Francisco is never going to be a red city — let’s be realistic,” he said. “But it can be a much more purple city than it currently is if we can run competent, credible, appealing candidates supported by well-organized campaign infrastructure.”Left-right: Mark Farrell, Ahsha Safaí, Daniel Lurie, Mayor London Breed and Aaron Peskin on stage for the mayoral debate at UC Law San Francisco on Monday, June 17, 2024. San Francisco mayoral candidates say they’re supportive of The City’s sanctuary law for immigrants, regardless of who is the next president of the United States., and his return to office could mark a return to a combative stance toward sanctuary cities by the White House. Despite pushes on San Francisco’s political edges to reconsider parts of its sanctuary-city policy, the five prominent candidates for mayor surveyed by The Examiner all said they would stand by it — even under pressure from a Trump administration. “This is very personal to me, so I think it’s a time that San Francisco should lean in, stand up and say we proudly are a city of immigrants, we proudly are a sanctuary city, and we should reaffirm that in every way possible,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who immigrated to the United States as a child.who was shot while walking along The Embarcadero by Jose Inez Garcia Zarate. Garcia Zarate, who claimed to have fired the weapon by accident, had been deported at least five times for crimes he committed in the years leading up to the shooting. “Sanctuary cities and states like California put innocent Americans at the mercy of hardened criminals — hardened murderers, in many cases,”The prospect of a return to a Trump presidency also shines renewed light on The City’s sanctuary policy — but he is not the only leader to question the wisdom of sanctuary policies. Though President Joe Biden promised upon taking office to honor sanctuary cities’ stances, administration officials pushed earlier this year for, with a spokesperson telling Fox News “we welcome local law enforcement’s support and cooperation in apprehending and removing individuals who pose a risk to national security or public safety.” Mayor Eric Adams of New York — another deeply Democratic city with a substantial population of immigrants — proposed weakening its sanctuary ordinance earlier this year, but the idea waswhen, shortly after taking office, he issued an order limiting federal funding for cities that do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, told The Examiner in a statement that Trump “relentlessly targeted our Sanctuary ordinance and our immigrant communities, but his attacks failed every time.” “Our city won lawsuit after lawsuit upholding our ordinance because, under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, local jurisdictions cannot be forced to carry out a federal responsibility, and that includes immigration enforcement,” Chan said. In 2017, California adopted a statewide law that also limits cities’ ability to collaborate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Chan noted. But in the years since, there has been movement on the fringes of San Francisco politics and talk of at least revising The City’s sanctuary policies. First adopted in 1989, the law prevents The City from notifying federal law enforcement when it releases a person from its custody — unless that person has been accused or convicted of a violent felony.last year that would expand the list of reasons that local authorities could collaborate with federal officials to facilitate the deportations of individuals accused or convicted of felony drug distribution, so long as they had already been convicted of dealing fentanyl within the last seven years. Citing the fentanyl-overdose epidemic, Dorsey argued that the brisk deportation of those accused or convicted of selling drugs in San Francisco would help curtail the supply of lethal substances. The proposal quickly stalled, finding no supporters among Dorsey’s colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. Dorsey openly mulled bringing the issue before the voters in the form of a ballot measure, but has not done so.“I am in favor of San Francisco continuing to be a sanctuary city, and am proud of our status as one; however, it’s deplorable to use sanctuary cities as a cover for illegal behavior that is ultimately poisoning our most vulnerable citizens on the backs of honest taxpayers,” Jacobs states on his campaign website. Stephen Martin-Pinto, who is challenging incumbent Supervisor Myrna Melgar in District 7, wrote on X recently that “without reservation,” he does notBut mayoral candidates who support keeping the sanctuary policy as is argue that drug dealers can be deported without The City changing its sanctuary policy. “While San Francisco continues to battle organized crime rings coming from other countries to deal drugs in our city, we’re working with the U.S. Attorney in the Tenderloin to target international drug operations,” Mayor London Breed, who is eyeing a second full term, told The Examiner in a statement. Daniel Lurie, founder of antipoverty nonprofit Tipping Point and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, said that The City does not have to change the sanctuary ordinance in order to tackle the drug crisis. He noted that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is already deporting drug dealers. “Upending our longstanding sanctuary policy would make immigrant communities more hesitant to cooperate with law enforcement, and unreported crimes and criminals present a danger to our entire community,” Lurie said in a statement. Former interim Mayor Mark Farrell has made an aggressive approach to public safety the hallmark of his campaign, pledging to swiftly fire police Chief Bill Scott and call forFarrell told The Examiner he’s usually open to rethinking policies — but not this one, which he said and increased trust between immigrants and police. “Numerous studies and research show that sanctuary cities are safer and have stronger economies than non sanctuary cities,” Farrell said in a statement. “San Francisco has always been a beacon of hope and a shining city on the hill for people across the world, and as mayor, I will do everything in my power to keep it that way.”“Using local police to enforce federal immigration laws takes time and resources away from local public safety. And, it undermines the trust between police and the immigrant community which is critical to a safer San Francisco,” Peskin told The Examiner. Like other candidates, Safai said he doesn’t view amending the sanctuary ordinance as essential to deterring the drug trade, and that immigration is a matter best left to federal authorities. “Bringing immigration status into the conversation only complicates it and slows things down,” Safai said. “It’s not something we can handle at the local scale. It’s something the federal government can choose to do.”Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. When you're happy with your selection, click the checkmark icon next to the clipping area to continue.This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. Choose wisely!Create a password that only you will remember. 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