D.A. candidates enter race early to boost chances
When San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón announced in October — more than a year before the election — that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2019, he started an early rush for the job.
So far, five candidates are in, and Gascón’s decision removed one big obstacle from the race. San Francisco’s Nov. 5 election will be the first time in more than a century without a sitting district attorney in the race — not since William Langdon bowed out in 1909 has the city had an open field in the contest for top prosecutor.
None of the five candidates is an elected official, and while some are known in political and criminal justice circles, they’re not household names.
So even though the deadline to file papers isn’t until Aug. 9, the field is already shaping up with
candidates who need all the time they can get to introduce themselves, pitch their messages to voters and — importantly — raise money.
“You have a lot of really unknown candidates who are all jockeying, and everyone thinks they have a chance,” said San Francisco political analyst David Latterman. “In an open field, people try to get in early and monopolize the conversation.”
Announcing early is becoming a more common strategy for political office seekers locally and nationally. For example, veteran San Francisco politician Mark Leno declared his mayoral candidacy more than a year before last June’s election, which he lost to London Breed.
And last month, Sen. Kamala Harris, San Francisco’s former district attorney and California’s former attorney general, began dominating news coverage when she announced her bid for president. She’s one of nearly a dozen Democratic candidates in a still-growing field leading up to the 2020 election.
Previous district attorneys, like Harris and former Gov. Pat Brown, used the position as a steppingstone to higher office. And with Breed having no challengers so far, the district attorney’s race is shaping up as the major contest on the November ballot.
“It’s an important seat,” Latterman said. “Other than mayor, it’s probably the secondmost-important position in the city.”
The candidates so far are Suzy Loftus, assistant chief legal counsel in the San Francisco Sheriff ’s Department and former president of the city Police Commission; Chesa Boudin, San Francisco deputy public defender; Nancy Tung, Alameda County deputy district attorney; Leif Dautch, California deputy attorney general and Joe Alioto Veronese, attorney and member of the San Francisco Fire Commission.
All of the candidates except for Boudin, who announced his candidacy last month, filed financial reports that show their fundraising numbers through Dec. 31.
Loftus raised the most, $157,684, but the lesser-known Dautch was not far off with $128,740. Tung’s filings show she’s raised $27,805, and Veronese still has the $1,999 he reported last summer.
“Fundraising is going to be disproportionally important when you have no candidate with name ID,” said San Francisco political consultant Dan Newman, who was working on Gascón’s campaign before he pulled out.
“People are going to need to introduce themselves to voters,” he said. “They may be known in the insular San Francisco criminal justice and politics scene, but they’re not on the tip of the tongue of average voters.”
Even for a city like San Francisco, where political ideologies range from liberal to more liberal, the district attorney’s race offers some sharp contrasts. So far, Tung, 43, is offering the most moderate campaign, with a platform to clean up city streets by prosecuting drug dealers, particularly in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin.
But even as the candidate with the most tough-on-crime positions, Tung said the district attorney’s office needs to address the origins of criminal behavior “so people don’t come back into the system.” She’s also the only Asian American and person of color in the race.
She jumped in less than a week after Gascón announced he was dropping out. And knowing the field would likely grow, she said she needed all the time she could to make herself known.
“I think that people want somebody that knows how to do the job and can step into it on day one,” she said.
On the other ideological end is Boudin, 38, whose politically radical parents were members of the Weather Underground and went to prison for a 1981 armored car robbery that ended in a triple murder. He was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn — also Weather Underground members — in Chicago before studying law at Yale and going to working as an adviser to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Boudin — a former Rhodes Scholar — has worked at the public defender’s office since 2012, where he’s been instrumental in upending the state’s cash bail system. He has the support of progressive city Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Hillary Ronen and has already begun steering the debate toward issues like criminal justice reform and reducing recidivism.
He knows that to win, he’ll have pitch his message of reform to individual voters neighborhood by neighborhood.
“That requires giving the campaign time to build a strong volunteer base to conduct person-to-person outreach in every San Francisco community, especially those hit hardest by our failed criminal justice system,” Boudin said.
In the middle politically are Loftus, Dautch and Alioto Veronese.
Loftus, 44, the most visible because of her time on the Police Commission, has already totted up an impressive list of endorsements, including Sens. Harris and Dianne Feinstein, Assemblyman David Chiu, state Sen. Scott Wiener and Breed.
The native San Franciscan worked as a prosecutor in the city’s district attorney’s office before heading to the state Department of Justice under Harris. Later as president of the Police Commission, she helped lead the department into a new reform-minded era following a series of fatal police shootings.
Loftus is running on a platform focused on tackling property crimes like auto burglaries while also “addressing the drivers of crime — poverty, trauma from violence, mental illness and substance abuse — without relying on incarceration.”
“I wanted to enter the race early so that I would have as much time as possible to talk with San Franciscans about the D.A.’s office and what it can do for our city,” she said about her campaign strategy.
At 33 years old, Dautch is the youngest one in the race. As a first-time candidate, he said “I needed to start early.” After hosting 20 house parties and setting up a table at local farmers’ markets, he’s already proved to have a capable ground game that has translated into impressive fundraising.
He also said he’s the only candidate running on issues like environmental justice and preventing fraudulent evictions, “to cut off the tap of people becoming homeless in the first place.”
Veronese, 45, may have filed his candidate papers way back in December 2017, but he’s still working on putting his campaign team together and launching a website. With less than $2,000 raised, he will turn things around if he’s going to be seen as a serious candidate.
But he does have name recognition — at least middle-name recognition.
The grandson of former Mayor Joseph Alioto and son of former Board of Supervisors President Angela Alioto has been a civil rights attorney for 20 years in San Francisco and has served on the city’s Fire Commission for 2½ years.
He said he will be tough when it comes to criminal justice, but as an Alioto, he has “strong progressive values.”
“It’s not OK to defecate on a doorstep, or to kick someone’s dog at the park,” he said. “These are things that people are getting away with, and that’s just not the San Francisco I know.”
Ultimately, every candidate knows their message needs to break through, and by getting in early, they’re trying to boost their chances.
Whether the invigorated voters who turned out around the country for the 2018 midterms will show up again in November is another big question, said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University.
When voters are less engaged, and turnout is low, it tends to favor candidates with better endorsements, he said.
“Voters don’t vote on policy differences between the candidates on a fine-grain policy level,” McDaniel said. “They’re usually guided by partisan and ideological identity. They’re looking for stability.”