Results not all kind to Breed’s key agenda
There was a lot on the line for Mayor London Breed on Tuesday night as she walked into a cramped pizza restaurant on Irving Street, where her preferred District Four candidate, Jessica Ho, was holding a modest election watch party.
“We know that these are just early results, so let’s not give up,” the mayor said to cheers, after the first ballot count showed Ho slipping behind her progressive competitor, Gordon Mar. “I need her on the Board of Supervisors because I want to get the job done for all of you.”
But election night didn’t exactly turn out the way Breed had hoped: Mar, a longtime labor activist, beat Ho in the preliminary counts, potentially flipping the District Four board seat, which has long been held by a moderate.
Across the city in District Six, Breed’s favored candidates, Sonja Trauss and Christine Johnson, who were running as a team to take
advantage of the city’s ranked-choice voting system, were trounced by progressive candidate Matt Haney. Then Proposition C, a ballot measure that would tax big businesses to raise money for homeless services that Breed opposed, got a big thumbs-up from San Francisco voters.
To some political observers, the outcome of these races amounts to one of the first major setbacks for the mayor, who needs to run for re-election in 2019. It also puts into question how many allies she will have on the 11-member Board of Supervisors when it comes to passing key issues on her agenda, like homelessness and housing.
Others don’t think it will make much of a difference.
“I don’t think voters are thinking ‘anti-mayor’ when they vote in those elections. Not yet,” said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. But “Her lack of ability to sway (voters) toward the candidates she desires shows that she will have to keep working at that. ... Her endorsement is not automatic gold.”
The traditional divisions between San Francisco progressives and moderates were hazier than usual during the fall campaign, as many of the candidates’ platforms focused on increasing services for the homeless and building more housing. Their differences mainly lay in personality, style and approach.
Still, Breed campaigned heavily for those likely to side with her on the board. She appeared in TV ads, on campaign flyers and even personally texted voters who had yet to send in their ballots early this week on behalf of Trauss and Johnson.
With many of the votes tallied, the results showed Breed’s preferred candidates in two other other districts — Catherine Stefani in District Two and Shamann Walton in District 10 — holding commanding leads. A number of propositions she spoke out on also went her way, including the victorious statewide Propositions 1 and 2, which will steer $6 billion in bonds toward affordable housing and mental health funding, and local Proposition A, which will raise $450 million for rebuilding the Embarcadero seawall.
But the key races were in Districts Six and Four, where the contests were between progressives and moderates, and on Prop. C, which became by far the most contentious proposition on the local ballot as Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff waged a loud, expensive campaign in its favor.
The mayor took a big political gamble throwing her weight in close races so early in her term, said political consultant Jim Stearns. Perhaps her riskiest bet was endorsing Ho, current Supervisor Katy Tang’s legislative aide, who had lived in San Francisco for only a few months before entering the race.
If Ho won, she would be a safe ally for Breed on the board. With Mar, not so much.
“It’s a big deal in that Gordon Mar is much less of a reliable vote than Tang,” McDaniel said. “That will impact her ability to get policy across the board.”
While Haney was considered the progressive in the District Six race, he is expected to be less polarizing on the board, as he said he plans to focus on cleaning up the streets in the Tenderloin and SoMa and building more housing. The political divides, however, will likely play out on such issues as how much affordable housing should be built into new developments.
Political consultant Nate Ballard said the fact that some of the board seats didn’t go to Breed’s preferred candidates won’t hurt her ability to govern the city effectively.
And when it comes to Prop. C, he said, that was more of “an extraordinary confluence of circumstances where tech titans were battling each other on Twitter and pouring tens of millions on what had been a littlenoticed ballot measure.”
“I’ve often seen this with incoming mayors, and it in no way lessens their ability to govern the city,” he said of the board seats going to candidates the mayor didn't favor. “If anything, this will spur Mayor Breed to get out into the neighborhoods more and take her agenda directly to the people. Mayors govern best when they aren’t focused on counting votes at the Board of Supervisors.”
On Wednesday, Breed said she viewed election night as a net win for her choices, despite losses for some of the candidates she had championed as well as the success of Prop. C.
“You can’t win ’em all,” she said. “But the fact is — not bad for someone who just started in the mayor’s office a few months ago.”