Your Official BoS Election Primer
The stage is set, the battle lines are drawn, the metaphors have been metaphored
Yesterday at 5:00 PM PDT, a significant milestone was passed. A truly once-in-a-lifetime event. One that will surely be commemorated in song by countless future generations. The deadline to apply to run for San Francisco city government in the 2024 general election passed.
OK, maybe it’s not that significant in the grand arc of world history, but it is still important. The passing of this deadline is the firing of the metaphorical starting gun for an election that will shape the future of San Francisco, and by extension the rest of the Bay. As has been discussed here before, the 2024 election is going to be enormously consequential for the city. San Francisco is facing a major budget crisis as a result of rising expenditures and falling revenues, the school district is at risk of fiscal insolvency, and the entire Bay Area is facing a crushing housing shortage that has left tenants paying some of the highest rents in the nation as a result of decades of underbuilding and a glacial permitting process. The Mayor, who nominally controls a city bureaucracy of close to 35,000 employees and a $15 billion1 budget, is up for reelection. A majority of the seats on the Board of Supervisors, which wields tremendous authority over the city, are also up for grabs. Moreover, the balance of political power sits on a knife’s edge. The incumbent mayor, London Breed, has been struggling and is facing several serious challengers on both her left and right flanks. The board is similarly embattled, being closely split between left-wing and moderate blocs, though most of the rest of the country would likely see all of these candidates as communist lunatics.
Some declared candidates may not make it to the November ballot as there are some minor fees and signature gathering requirements that still need to be fulfilled before one is considered qualified to appear on the ballot. Nevertheless, the battle lines for this election have more or less been drawn, so now may be a good time for a quick primer on the districts electing supervisors and the candidates for those roles. As canvassing, fundraising, and general campaigning gets underway, we will try to do a deeper dive into each election in turn. But for now, this article can hopefully serve as a decent reference point into the major names hitting the headlines in the runup to November.
D5
Normally, one would expect a primer for an election taking place in numbered districts to go in ascending numerical order. But that kind of approach is for suckers! Instead, let’s start out by taking a look at what will almost certainly be the most explosive supervisorial race of the cycle in District 5.
This district sits smack dab in the middle of the city, spanning from the Eastern edge of Golden Gate Park to the infamous Tenderloin neighborhood, while also covering the neighborhoods of Japantown, Western Addition, Hayes Valley, and Haight-Ashbury.2 The district is predominantly white, with a smattering of Asian and Black neighborhoods in the Tenderloin and Western Addition.
This race is currently on track to be the most expensive of the cycle, which will either come as a shock or be blindingly obvious, depending on your knowledge of the candidates.
On the left is incumbent supervisor Dean Preston, Socialist, Landlord, and killer of housing. Preston has a fairly notorious track record in the city, having opposed many housing projects including the infamous 469 Stevenson project as well as aggressively opposing the 2022 redistricting process that drew the Tenderloin into his district.
Preston’s primary opposition from the center comes from Bilal Mahmood, a DCCC member, former Obama administration policy analyst, and startup founder. Mahmood had previously run for the state assembly in 2022, coming in 3rd behind David Campos and the eventual winner Matt Haney. Also running against Preston are school board recall leader Autumn Looijen and Allen Jones, an actual flesh-and-blood San Francisco Republican who is incredibly hard to find any details on when Googling.3
As of writing, Preston and Mahmood have raised $150,000 and $63,000, respectively.4 $300,000 has also been raised by PACs opposing Preston, spearheaded by GrowSF, which was a key player in the recalls of the School Board and DA Chesa Boudin in 2022.
This race is going to be a headline grabber and one to keep an eye on, given the big names and bigger money being thrown around.
D11
Going from the top of the District list to the bottom we have District 11, or to use the name given to it by its residents “Wait, you’re telling me this isn’t Daly City?”
In all seriousness, this district has always been a bit of an odd duck, straddling the city’s southern border without touching the water on either side. The race to replace outgoing Supervisor and mayoral candidate Ahsha Safai is currently in kind of a strange state. DCCC member Michael Lai has locked up a number of moderate endorsements from Supervisors Joel Engardio and Matt Dorsey, as well as Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, E.J. Jones has taken out a position slightly to the left with endorsements from Shamann Walton, Myrnar Melgar, and former Mayor Willie Brown, and Chyanne Chen is staking out the leftmost flank with endorsements from the teacher’s union and SF Rising.
Honestly, this race is still kind of underdeveloped and undercovered, so it’s hard to say a lot about what the major issues are likely to be and who’s the odds on favorite to win. Maybe once more debates like the one held on Monday make their way through the system and the candidates’ official fundraising numbers drop, there will be more to say.
D1
Returning to sequential ordering, we have District 1. Roughly covering the area South of the Presidio and North of Golden Gate Park, this district is a relatively suburban collection of White and Asian neighborhoods.
In the incumbent seat is Connie Chan, another left-winger with her own housing related issues, having authored a ballot proposition in 2022 intended to run interference against another, more impactful measure supported by London Breed, as well as opposing the removal of cars from JFK Drive, as well as opposing the 2022 recall campaigns.
Opposing Chan is Marjan Philhour, another recently elected DCCC member5 and Chan’s opponent in her previous BoS race in 2020. A few other candidates are running, but haven’t gained much traction as of writing.
This is an odd election, as the underdog is the incumbent rather than the challenger. So far, Philhour has been beating Chan in the fundraising game. Chan is also facing a GrowSF opposition PAC and some headwinds in terms of electorate fundamentals. Chan’s district is quite similar to the mid-cycle District 4, which made history in 2022 when Supervisor Gordon Mar became the first incumbent to lose reelection since the introduction of ranked choice voting. Both districts are home to a large number of Asian families who were a pivotal voting bloc in the school board and DA recalls, elections where Chan and Mar ended up vocally supporting the losing side. Additionally, while Mar won his first election by 3,000 votes or a 13% margin after all the ranked choice votes were allocated, Connie squeaked to victory with 125 votes over Marjan, or a .4% advantage.
With that in mind and considering the turn against incumbents and left-wing policies that’s taken place in the San Francisco electorate since November 2020, this seems like Philhour’s race to lose. But anything can happen between now and November, so don’t write this race off just yet.
D3
Moving from the western side of the city to the east, we have District 3, where one of the stranger elections to the board is playing out. A powerhouse collection of San Francisco’s most famous locations, including Chinatown, North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Union Square, and the Financial District, D3 has long been the stomping ground of termed-out Board President and mayoral candidate, Aaron Peskin. Peskin is also a canny operator who can play city political actors like a fiddle, as evidenced by his successful campaign to downzone a large and wealthy section of his district over the veto of Mayor Breed. Considering that, it’s a little shocking that someone described by his friends and enemies alike as some combination of Machiavellian and Napoleonic has failed to line up a sole successor to take his seat as he seeks higher office.
Instead he has co-endorsed two of the candidates running to succeed him in the District 3 race, Moe Jamil and Sharon Lai, a pair of city hall insiders. Hoping to take advantage of this puzzling choice is Danny Sauter, a startup founder and nonprofit executive who ran against Peskin in 2020 and managed to get a respectable 43% of the final vote tally. The race also features some also-rans that probably aren’t worth covering.
Of all the races, this one has the greatest possibility for a surprise outcome. Had a single candidate received the backing of Peskin and the formidable political machine in his district, they’d be the odds-on favorite to win if the 2020 results are anything to go by. But the division of resources between Jamil and Lai, paired with the two candidates’ occasional sniping at each other, leaves an opening for Sauter to eke out a victory. The three are currently close in fundraising, with Lai holding a small advantage over Jamil and Sauter. In theory, San Francisco’s ranked choice voting system should allow Lai and Jamil to avoid stepping on each others’ toes as the campaign for the more lefty segment of the D3 electorate. In practice, staunch Jamil and Lai partisans may opt not to vote for the other candidate, exhausting their votes and giving Sauter enough of an edge to pull out a win.
D7
Moving from a race with the potential for a surprise outcome, we arrive at District 7, where the chance of an unexpected result is markedly smaller, though not zero. The awkwardly shaped White-Asian district drops down from Golden Gate Park to cover the Inner Sunset, Forest Hill, West Portal, and St. Francis Wood neighborhoods, before careening to the West towards the Fort Funston oceanfront at the Southwestern tip of the city, snapping up the neighborhoods around SF State.
In all likelihood, incumbent supervisor Myrna Melgar is going to keep her seat. While she’s taken some groan-worthy positions on key votes such as the 469 Stevenson debacle, she’s taken the opposite tack at other times, being one of three votes against Peskin’s downzoning measure this year. All things considered, she’s been a very middle-of-the-road presence on the board in her four years there, which is likely to translate to a comfortable win in November. Her website doesn’t even have any content besides a donation link as of writing, perhaps indicating her confidence in her chances.
However, nothing is guaranteed in life and Melgar does face an opponent who may seriously challenge her. Her main opponent, Matthew Boschetto, has almost tied her in fundraising and has outdone her by having an actual website. He’s also taking a fairly aggressive stance on public safety issues, touting his support for the DA recall and support for overturning Prop 47.6 If the election ends up being a generalized referendum on all incumbents, not just the left-wing faction currently dominating the board, Boschetto could pull off a surprise win.
D9
It’s getting hard to come up with clever and pithy bridges between these segments on the different districts, so you’ll have to settle for the following as we look at the last district with an election this year. Just as District 7 represents a neighborhood that has the word Portal in its name, so does District 9.7 Though that’s where the similarities end. The district covering Portola, Bernal Heights, and The Mission has one of the highest proportions of Hispanic residents of any district in the city. It’s also one of the most left-wing districts, with the Mission and Bernal being notable for being some of the only neighborhoods to vote against recalling Chesa Boudin in 2022.
This would seem to give the advantage in the race to Jackie Fielder, the left-wing standard bearer who previously failed to unseat YIMBY stalwart Scott Wiener in the state senate race back in 2020. Fielder has also been endorsed by the district’s termed-out supervisor Hilary Ronen. In contrast to District 3, where two lefty candidates are facing off against a single moderate, District 9 has a single self-described socialist facing off against two moderate candidates, Roberto Hernandez a community organizer who is probably the only candidate for any BoS seat old enough to be on Medicare, and Trevor Chandler, a teacher and DCCC member. The three have raised comparable sums for their campaigns at this point, with Fielder holding a slight advantage and Chandler trailing slightly.
In theory, this should be Fielder’s race to lose, considering the district’s political makeup and prior history, having given Ronen a crushing 65% victory back in 2016. However, two factors should caution one against handing the race to Fielder too quickly. The first is the issue of crime. Though obviously a factor in every race, it may be particularly salient in D9 given the challenges that district has had with illegal street vendors and a spike in murders last year. Fielder’s close relationship to Ronen may become a hindrance in this regard considering the latter’s inconsistent positions on police funding. Having supported defunding in 2020, Ronen now says she wants more officers on patrol in her district. Beyond that, there is a sense that Ronen is checked out of the business of actually supervising the city, which makes it hard to get enthusiastic about supporting her preferred candidate.
Addendum: Hilary Ronen has also endorsed, candidate Stephen Torres in District 9. This may strengthen the hand of the moderate candidates, as it means left-wing resources and votes are going to be split in a similar way to District 3.
Yes, Billion with a B.
That hippie neighborhood where your dad smoked marijuana back in the 60s
Work on your SEO Allen!!!
Looijen’s and Jones’s fundraising figures have not yet been published.
Gee! It’s almost like there’s some sort of pattern here.
Which reduced penalties for nonviolent property crimes.
Sorry.