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Ahsha Safaí , Mark Farrell, Daniel Lurie, Mayor London Breed and Aaron Peskin take the stage at the mayoral debate at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. After facing unprecedented challenges brought on by a once-in-a-century pandemic, San Francisco Mayor London Breed believes she has earned four more years to lead The City through a period of renewal and growth.
A field of formidable opponents argues Breed has failed to meet The City’s problems head on, and that it’s time for a change. The mayoral race pits Breed against several well-resourced and prominent opponents from across San Francisco’s political spectrum — Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of antipoverty nonprofit Tipping Point, two-term Supervisor Ahsha Safai, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell. The race poses a central question to voters: Who is to blame for The City’s well-documented social and economic struggles, and who can take credit for its recent progress?. If defeated, Breed would be the first incumbent mayor to lose a bid for reelection since Willie Brown defeated Mayor Frank Jordan in 1996. The candidates have jockeyed to outline their solutions for The City’s most glaring issues, including widespread concerns about public safety, a fentanyl-overdose crisis, the stubbornly high cost of housing, and a sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery. Though it’s a busy election season across the country, San Francisco’s mayoral election has drawn substantial interest and a wave of money. Candidate spending has already soared into the millions of dollars, with much more expected to be spent in the waning weeks of the campaign. All of the major candidates are Democrats. Speaking in the broadest terms, three of the candidates — Lurie, Farrell and Breed — are generally considered to be “moderate,” meaning that they are to theGiven the ideological overlap in the race, the candidates have attempted to distinguish themselves at the margins of policy and by their records, which are varied. Given the cluster of candidates in the moderate camp, many have speculated that any combination of the candidates could form an alliance and encourage voters to support multiple candidates in The City’s ranked-choice voting system. That could mean one or more of the moderate candidates band together and urge their supporters to rank their choices accordingly. However, an alliance across the ideological spectrum is not out of the question. As of this writing, no alliances between candidates have been publicly revealed, though some influential political groups are urging their followers to back a group of candidates.Despite The City’s — and her own — many critics, Breed contends San Francisco is on the upswing.Mayor London Breed endorsed by Chinatown community leaders for reelection, at Hon’s Wun-Tun House restaurant in San Francisco on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. “Things are changing in this city, and I have been on the defense leading this city through some of the most challenging times, making the hard decisions,” Breed said after winning a key“Now that things are starting to look good, and now that people are loving their neighborhoods and things are starting to feel good, I want to live in that moment as your mayor, in the offense, to take us to the next level.”Lurie has highlighted his philanthropic endeavors and his work as the leader of Tipping Point, a nonprofit he founded with the aim of addressing poverty in the Bay Area. At every chance, Lurie highlights his complete lack of experience in city government, unlike each of his main opponents. Pointing to his work for Tipping Point — which he argues was substantially more efficient at providing services than city government — Lurie has presented himself as an antidote for a bureaucracy plagued by lethargy and corruption.Daniel Lurie campaigns for mayor at the Clement Street Farmer’s Market in San Francisco on Sunday, March 24, 2024. Lurie has also unveiled a flurry of detailed policy proposals to fix city government, such as tying the pay of“I’m going to bring people together and work with everybody to make sure that we fix the problems that our city is facing.”Though he served as interim mayor for less than a year, Farrell has trumpeted his stint atop city government as a time period in which government was more effective, such as in Prior to serving as interim mayor, Farrell spent two terms on the Board of Supervisors representing a district including the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights.Mark Farrell at the mayoral debate at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. Farrell has run a campaign largely centered on addressing voters’ concerns about public safety. He has lambasted Breed for her response to crime and street conditions and San Francisco andAaron Peskin at the mayoral debate at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. He has pledged to maintain the character of neighborhoods while paving the way for more affordable housing — a claim disputed by the yes-in-my-backyard advocates for more housing construction and development who are known as YIMBYs. “This handful of billionaires pouring millions of dollars of dark money into ugly smear campaigns threatens to destroy much of what makes this a unique, vibrant, and magical city,” Peskin said at his first campaign rally.Safai was the first major candidate to step into the race and challenge Breed, announcing his candidacy last year. He has pitched himself to voters as a leader who can bridge San Francisco’s political divides. Safai, who has represented neighborhoods including the Outer Mission and Excelsior on the Board of Supervisors for two terms, has beenSupervisor Ahsha Safaí speaking at the Mayoral Forum at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. “Members of the Board of Supervisors, we can tweak around the edges, and we can have an impact,” Safai told The Examiner last year. “But truly, what has to happen in a good, functioning city is for the mayor to bring the board together to find common issues to work on.”In general, voter polls have indicated that it’s a highly competitive race with no clear frontrunner. As of this writing, Breed and Farrell have been neck-and-neck atop the board, with Lurie and Peskin trailing both — but not by an insurmountable margin. Predicting the results is functionally impossible due not only to the nature of San Francisco politics, but also to the ranked-choice voting system, which can create a pathway for a middling candidate to rise to the top. Another complicating factor in making election predictions is that this is the first mayoral race since the passage of 2022’s Proposition H, which aligned elections of major city officials with presidential elections. The switch is expected to bring higher voter turnout in the mayoral race, meaning there could be voters casting ballots who are normally tuned out of local politics.The substantial interest in San Francisco politics and tightly contested nature of the race have spurred a spending blitz. By the time the first major campaign-finance reporting period ended June 30, the candidates were well on their way to sailing past the amount spent on the last closely contested mayoral election — that of 2018, when Breed prevailed in a special election to fill the vacancy left by former Mayor Ed Lee, who died in 2017. Lurie has declined to participate in The City’s public-financing program — which would force him to abide by spending limits — and has contributed heavily to his own campaign. As of Sept. 5, Lurie has placed $3.5 million of his own money into the race, while members of his familyhave contributed heavily to an independent committee that also supports his candidacy. The self-funding is the most transparent way in which Lurie’s wealth has affected the race, but Lurie contends that accepting public financing would be a waste of taxpayers’ money that would be “better spent protecting and educating our community.”Multiple independent expenditure committees, which are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates, have formed to boost the candidates of their choice. Chief among them is one formed by Lurie’s supporters, boosted primarily by a $1 million donation from his mother, Mimi Haas.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. separate ballot-measure committee — which he formed to support a charter reform effort proposed by political group TogetherSF — to accept large donations from well-heeled donors and use them to share expenses with his mayoral campaign. The ballot-measure committee is not bound by contribution limits, but his mayoral campaign is. Critics of the practice have likened it to money laundering, while Farrell’s campaign has repeatedly denied such claims and promised its attorneys have signed off on the setup. Breed’s opponents, meanwhile, have attempted to tie her to the corruption scandals that have swept through City Hall during her tenure.Peskin has strong support from organized labor, including SEIU 1021, the largest union in The City. However, the San Francisco Labor Council, an umbrella organization that includes more than 150 unions, has been unable to reach a consensus needed to make an endorsement. The City’s influential public-safety unions have split, with the firefighters and sheriffs backing Farrell as their lone choice and the police union endorsing Breed. The latter endorsement was not without controversy, as some within the police union were reportedlyApart from organized labor, powerful political groups have emerged on the scene to boost moderate candidates. TogetherSF, an organization financially backed by billionaire investor Michael Moritz, has endorsed Farrell, Breed and Lurie, in that order. GrowSF, a group with deep ties to the tech industry, has also endorsed all three moderate candidates and urged its followers to do the same in any order.Morning fog at sunrise surrounds the Golden Gate Bridge with a view of San Francisco from the Marin Headlands on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024.The City is coming back to life. Coffee shops are filled in the Financial District, you still can’t get a table at Elena’s, and don’t even think about getting close to the corner of Greenwich and Fillmore on a Saturday night — it’s pandemonium! Whether you are new here or a fifth-generation San Franciscan, I want to welcome you back to The San Francisco Examiner. This is the publication of William Randolph Hearst, and we have been through our own booms and busts. There were the Republican years, the progressive years, and the Phil Bronstein years. Through it all, through every earthquake, fire, boom time and bust time, from the tragedy of Jonestown to the triumphs of Feinstein, Pelosi, the 49ers, Giants and Warriors, we have covered it all. This historic newspaper is 68 years older than the Golden Gate Bridge, 50 years older than the Palace of Fine Arts and only 15 years younger than the State of California itself. Over the past several years, we have faced some of our greatest challenges as we chart a path forward in an uncertain media landscape, but we are still here and — just like you ‚ we are fighting for San Francisco. In our coverage of The City, we have witnessed citizens rolling up their sleeves and investing in San Francisco. With every wave of gold-rushers and exodus of naysayers, there is an ever-present group of devoted leaders and believers, countless people who refuse to give up and choose instead to work together towards a stronger community. Today, this icon of San Francisco history announces an initiative to celebrate the icons of San Francisco’s future. The San Francisco Examiner is launching the inaugural San Franciscan of the Year awards, to celebrate and honor the leaders and stewards of our community., our readers, will choose the top 10 San Franciscans whose innovative work and leadership have left an indelible mark on our city and who inspire us all to be better San Franciscans., or using the form embedded in this article, by signing up to receive our free morning newsletter, The Examiner Daily, in your inbox six days a week. You can San Francisco is a town of innovators, idealists and iconoclasts. We invite you to nominate the diverse individuals who make significant contributions to the City’s social, economic and cultural landscape. Join us in honoring these icons and along the way we hope you will be enlightened by The Examiner’s coverage of The City and inspired by our tireless commitment to San Francisco. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSexbD_vUF_bm1-Dar1DS-OnSYN0ARuvGiYubvt6aLwJACa7cA/viewform?embedded=trueClick 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. If you forget it, you'll be able to recover it using your email address.Forgot Password An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the email address listed on your account.
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