Breed’s foes making race about tech titan
Having successfully campaigned to push San Francisco Supervisor London Breed out of the mayor’s office, her rivals in the June election are turning their attention to her friend and financial backer Ron Conway.
Their goal: Make the tech titan the leading issue in the mayoral sweepstakes.
Reacting to news that Breed’s allies had formed a political action committee on her behalf — the first to jump into the June campaign — mayoral candidate and former state Sen. Mark
Leno declared in a statement that “we’ve had enough of billionaires throwing money around in San Francisco politics.”
Leno didn’t cite Conway by name in adding that “deeppocketed donors have enough power,” but it was hardly necessary. The early investor in such high-flying tech firms as Google and PayPal has funded campaigns and causes going back to the mayoral days of
Gavin Newsom, and he was a major financial backer of techfriendly former Mayor Ed Lee.
But in case anyone missed the point, Leno’s campaign
manager, Erin Mundy, said in a news release that Conway “frequently utilizes” super PACs to run “nasty and expensive campaigns.”
This, despite the insistence of both Conway and the new group’s backers that he has no connection to the super PAC.
Leno has the most to lose if big-time money starts flowing to Breed, the Board of Supervisors president who lost her temporary mayor’s job last week to Mark Farrell. Leno got a jump in May on what everyone thought would be a 2019 election, until Lee died in December and a June vote suddenly became necessary.
Now, Leno has amassed $400,000 for the campaign — far more than Breed or any other candidate. But tech or real estate interests, both of which far prefer moderates such as Breed to Leno, could flip the switch in no time.
Hence, Leno’s blast at “billionaires” — and a call for candidates to reject outside money, like the cash that the newly formed PAC, “In Our Time, S.F. Women Supporting London Breed for Mayor 2018,” will raise. Such committees can spend unlimited amounts on a candidate’s behalf, as long as they don’t coordinate with her.
“I sincerely hope Supervisor Breed will join me in rejecting the corrupting influence of super PACs,” Leno said.
Julie Edwards, campaign spokeswoman for progressive mayoral candidate Supervisor Jane Kim, echoed the anti-PAC stand.
“This is our city, and it shouldn’t just be run by a handful of billionaires,” Edwards said. “Of course, we knew the billionaires would fight back.”
There’s just one problem, the super PAC’s backers say: “Ron Conway has zero to do with this committee.”
That was the word Tuesday from longtime activist Andrea Shorter, a member of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women and an officer for the newly created money group.
Shorter said the committee was formed because women were “outraged and stunned” by the Board of Supervisors’ decision to oust Breed as acting mayor — she was the first African American woman to hold the post — and replace her with Farrell, a white investment banker who represented the Marina district on the board.
“The filing shows that this is a group of women who have formed in support of board President Breed,” said Maggie Muir, a consultant to Breed’s campaign. “Why would Mark Leno tell this group of women supporters to sit down and be quiet?”
Asked about the committee, Conway told us Tuesday, “I don’t know about it, and have no involvement with it.”
Shorter and another committee member, Andrew Sinn, have worked to elect Conway-backed candidates in the past, including Assemblyman David Chiu.
So even though Conway says he’s got no connection to the group, to the Leno campaign it’s all the same.
“Ron Conway has jumped the shark, and gone from bullying ... supervisors in back rooms to armed robbery in broad daylight,” said Leno campaign consultant Jim Stearns.
It’s clear that making tech cash — and its political personification, Conway — the big issue is the logical play in a city where the fear of being priced out is pervasive.
That means trying to paint Breed as the agent of “more of the same” at City Hall.
Roller coaster: First came a poll showing Breed holding a 2-to-1 lead in San Francisco’s mayoral race. Now there’s a new survey that shows the contest as being much closer.
This one, however, was commissioned by Leno’s mayoral campaign — so take it for what you will. It shows Leno at 20 percent of first-place votes in the ranked-choice election, just behind Breed and her 21 percent. The poll has Kim at 13 percent and former Supervisor Angela Alioto at 8 percent.
More than a third of the 312 voters surveyed by phone from Jan. 20-23 were undecided. The survey’s margin of error was 5.5 percentage points.
The poll’s rankedchoice simulation showed Leno picking up enough support from other candidates’ voters to nose out Breed at the end. However, as pollster David Binder noted, there’s no way to guess how all those undecided respondents would affect the final count.
Oddly enough, Binder was the same pollster who did a survey a few days earlier for the Chamber of Commerce that showed Breed way ahead. He explained that the chamber poll question was a toss-in on a broader survey geared toward the November election, when more young and minority Breed voters would be likely to turn out than in June.
Binder also said Breed appeared to be receiving a significant bounce as acting mayor when that poll was taken — a bounce she won’t be getting now that she’s back to being a full-time Board of Supervisors president.