Dorsey wins supervisor race for District Six
Matt Dorsey has won election to a full four-year term on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, defeating his main challenger, Honey Mahogany, in a show of strength for the city’s political moderates.
As of Monday, Dorsey had 51.7% of the firstchoice votes compared with Mahogany’s 43.1% in the race to represent District Six, which includes SoMa, Mission Bay and Treasure Island.
The election of Dorsey, a former police spokesman whom Mayor London Breed appointed to the District Six seat in May, does not shift the political balance of the progressive-majority board. But the outcome is nonetheless helpful for Breed, since Dorsey has been in lockstep with the moderate mayor by broadly embracing her views about how to improve public safety and address
the city’s housing crisis.
Dorsey said late Monday afternoon that he had been in touch with Mahogany but declined to comment on the conversation. Mahogany could not be immediately reached for comment.
In a tweet after The Chronicle called the race on Monday, Breed congratulated Dorsey and said he had been “laserfocused on the needs of the residents of District 6.”
“Our City faces steep challenges, but with public servants like Matt helping lead the way, I know we can make a real difference for our residents, workers, and businesses,” Breed said.
Dorsey had a large lead over Mahogany at the end of election night, giving him hope for an easy victory in what many City Hall observers thought could be a much closer contest. This election was the first in which District Six no longer included the Tenderloin, which was moved to District Five this year during the city’s highly contentious redistricting process.
On election night, Dorsey projected confidence to his supporters, telling them “this is your victory,” but he did not declare himself the winner. Mahogany held out hope that her standing would improve enough to overtake Dorsey as more ballots were counted.
While the gap between the leading candidates narrowed in recent days, Dorsey remained 1,184 votes ahead on Monday, and Mahogany no longer had a path to victory based on the number of ballots left to be counted. Lesser-known candidates Cherelle Jackson and Ms. Billie Cooper had 3.2% and 2.1% of the first-choice votes, respectively.
Breed said she picked Dorsey to fill the vacancy created by Matt Haney’s election to the state Assembly because she thought Dorsey was best positioned to address concerns about public safety in District Six, where many voters are worried about public drug dealing, tragic overdoses and erratic street behavior from drug users. Dorsey’s appointment also gave Breed a reliable ally on the board, which has not always seen eye-to-eye with the mayor.
Dorsey, a gay HIV-positive man who is in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, has focused his short time on the board largely on the fentanyl crisis. He has proposed creating police “drug enforcement priority zones” around facilities serving people with substance use disorder, and he spearheaded a resolution that, if passed, would direct numerous city departments to report back on what they need to better respond to overdoses and unchecked drug dealing. Dorsey’s election will allow him to see those proposals through.
“The premise of my candidacy was always that I would approach the problems of open-air drug scenes, drug dealing and drug overdoses from a perspective of someone who is in recovery,” Dorsey said Monday. “This will never be an issue of the month for me. I’ll never stop working on this, and I consider it the obligation of my survival.”
Mahogany, a former City Hall aide to Haney, positioned herself to the left of Dorsey on public safety by emphasizing the need for police alternatives such as community ambassadors and public health workers to improve street conditions and get people into treatment. But she and Dorsey shared similar views on housing. Both endorsed the Proposition D housing measure that Breed favored to accelerate development, although Mahogany was neutral on Proposition E, the competing measure, which Dorsey opposed.
Mahogany hoped to make history by becoming the city’s first transgender supervisor. She raised more money than Dorsey, pulling in around $530,000 from private donors and public financing compared with less than $500,000 for Dorsey, according to campaign finance filings.
Mahogany also benefited from a flood of outside spending by political action committees, mostly from the San Francisco Labor Council. Dorsey, meanwhile, benefited from third-party spending by the moderate advocacy group Grow SF.