San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Moderates with big goals take over S.F. GOP
While the moderate turn that San Francisco Democrats took in this month’s primary got national “Look at what’s happening in crazy San Francisco!” attention, the city’s Republicans just made a similar centrist shift — and its leaders’ goals are even wilder.
They want Republicans to be relevant in San Francisco.
They hope that the path to relevancy began in this month’s primary election, when a more moderate slate of Republicans won 17 of 25 seats on the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, securing the ability to endorse more centrist candidates and reallocate local party funding.
But the group’s larger goal is politically mindblowing: It wants to use San Francisco as a “beta test case” to eventually show how moderate Republicans can win elections in left-leaning big cities that they say are failing to govern effectively.
“We see what’s happening here as reflective of what’s happening in many other places: A breakdown of the twoparty system,” said Jay Donde, the leader of the more centrist group that won control of the San Francisco Republican Central Committee.
Donde hopes to tap into the frustration of San Franciscans who “open up their ballot and on the (politically) left side they see people whose ideas don’t align with their own values. And they look on the right side and they see people who think wildfires are ignited by space lasers,” he said. “So, they hold their noses and vote for the progressive.”
Donde thinks there is a sizable chunk of voters in San Francisco who feel they don’t have good options. Not enough to elect a Republican mayor any time soon, but maybe enough to win a seat on the Board of Education or the Community College Board or to elect sheriff or city attorney. “What we want to do is revitalize the Republican Party so voters have better choices at election time,” Donde said.
It will be the most uphill of climbs in the city of seven hills. George Christopher, San Francisco’s last elected Republican mayor, left office in 1964, the same year the Republican National Convention took place in the Cow Palace, just south of San Francisco in Daly City.
The San Francisco Republican Party’s ensuing, decades-long irrelevance is shown in how only 7% of the city’s voters are registered Republicans, while 63% are Democrats. That irrelevance is compounded by how many voters equate all Republicans with Donald Trump, who won 63% of the party’s vote in the March 5 primary in San Francisco and 79% statewide. But Trump’s disapproval rating among voters statewide is 63%, according to a March Berkeley IGS Poll. So Donde and others began planning out a long game.
Three years ago, Donde, an attorney, cofounded the San Francisco Briones Society. Named after Juana Briones, known as the “founding mother of San Francisco,” for her involvement in the early days of the city, the group has been hosting casual happy hours and meetups to try to form a community of people who want to shrink government, build more housing, improve public safety by doubling the size of the Police Department and see elected leaders spend more time on governing and less on what they call “virtuesignaling” to progressives.
On social issues, the group either expresses vague opinions or tries to cling to whatever shred of middle ground remains in 2024 America.
It has expressed a desire to be LGBTQfriendly, and one of its core principles is “Diversity: America is an idea, and we welcome all who embrace it — no matter where they come from, whom they love, or how they worship.”
On reproductive rights, the group said in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned the right to an abortion, that it “unequivocally opposes any laws that would criminalize abortion.” But that’s far from condemning the decision, and the group didn’t offer specifics on when abortion should be legal.
Last year, a Briones member proposed a resolution to the local party that called for it to say it “opposes efforts by other states to criminalize gender-affirming healthcare,” while at the same time calling for the repeal of SB107, authored by San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, which created safeguards for people who come to California to obtain gender-affirming health care that has been banned and criminalized in red states such as Texas.
The resolution said repealing the law was necessary in order to “allow the complex legal issues relating to genderaffirming healthcare to play out according to the values and preferences of each state.” The local party rejected it.
Perhaps most telling is that the group’s top core value isn’t one often heard on Fox News or other conservative media outlets: “Optimism. We believe San Francisco can be the best place to live in America.”
When it comes to Trump, Donde said, “it’s hard to have a nuanced conversation. One camp says he’s the devil incarnate. And the other says he’s the second coming. We are, for the most part, in the not-fans-ofTrump camp. But we’re not the (anti-Trump) Lincoln Project. We’re not spending our time beating up on Trump.” John Dennis, a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention who chairs the San Francisco Republican Party, said the Briones group is “a bunch of ‘Never-Trumpers’ who are fueled by ‘NeverTrump’ money.”
The group made its move in the March primary to take over the local party’s central committee, a typically lowlevel race where a slate of candidates raises a few thousand dollars — if anything — to get elected.The Briones Society PAC raised $95,751, $40,000 of which came from Martha Conte, a national vice chair at the No Labels Party and opponent of Trump.
But California has seen waves of moderate Republicans come and go, from former South Bay Rep. Tom Campbell to former top Assembly Republican Chad Mayes, who drew heat for supporting California’s capand-trade program and for endorsing Harvey Milk Day. He later left the party.
It was another sign that just because California is overwhelmingly Democratic, it doesn’t necessarily mean state Republicans want to move to the center.
“This is something that’s been tried before and I don’t know if it’s ever worked anywhere, but they’re going to try to
Benjamin Fanjoy/The Chronicle be like, ‘Oh, we’re kind of centrist Republicans who will work with the centrist Democrats,’ ” said Dennis, whose slate was defeated by the Brionesbacked candidates.
“So the promise that ‘We’re gonna start winning elections,’ is a rookie promise. It’s an amateur promise,” said Dennis, who leads the California Republican Party county chairs. “Show me where one party has 7% (share of ) registration and their candidates are able to win.”
Yet Donde envisions a path to relevancy through San Francisco’s 118,015 no party preference voters, who make up 24% of the electorate. Granted, they’re not all future Republicans. Many of those voters aren’t registered with a political party because they think the local Democratic Party is too conservative.
But Donde believes that there are roughly 40,000 conservative no party preference voters and about 20,000 persuadable conservative Democrats.
Donde and other Republicans also point to the growing number of Asian Americans born abroad in Chinese-speaking countries and regions who have registered with the party. The San Francisco Standard found that 4,526 registered San Francisco Republicans were born in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia or Singapore as of early 2024, a jump from 2,841 in 2019.
But that’s still a long way from winning.