Voters make it clear: San Francisco can no longer be called a progressive city
By Joe Garofoli, Aldo ToledoMarch 6, 2024
For now, at least, San Francisco can no longer be called a progressive city.
Not after voters approved ballot measures Tuesday to loosen restrictions on the police and screen welfare recipients for drugs, while a measure to boost developers was leading and likely to pass.
Voters also backed a slate of moderates to run the local Democratic County Central Committee, whose endorsements could reshape who is elected in San Francisco for years. Four years ago, progressives won all but two seats on the DCCC.
Marjan Philhour, a moderate candidate for supervisor, said Tuesday’s results show how the progressive-dominated DCCC “has been out of touch with actual everyday Democrats in San Francisco. San Francisco Democrats want representation in their local Democratic Party.”
Progressives are looking at a thin bench of future leaders and staring down a deep-pocketed tech community that thinks their policies are destroying the city.
Yet progressives are split on how to regain power, who should lead them and how they should change to win back voters. And they’re worried that moderates are going to continue to steamroll them with a massive financial advantage, fueled largely by wealthy donors.
Steven Buss, co-founder of the moderate advocacy group Grow SF, said at an election night party that voters have become dissatisfied with progressive San Francisco politicians in recent years and have turned against them.
“They had their turn. They failed,” Buss said. “Now it’s time for the city to move on.”
Some leading progressives dismissed Tuesday’s results as just another skirmish in the long history of San Francisco’s forever war between its shades of blue. A better barometer of San Francisco’s progressivism, they say, will be November’s election, when moderate Mayor London Breed will face voters — likely with Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, carrying the progressive banner.
Besides, some say, San Francisco’s status as a progressive city has long had an asterisk next to it, given that moderates have controlled the mayor’s office for more than three decades.
“If a couple of mods are elected, so what?” said Art Agnos, who, as the city’s last progressive elected mayor, was voted out in 1992 after one term, about the hotly contested DCCC race. “This city has survived much bigger political trauma. This town is big enough to absorb that kind of point of view and we’ll handle whatever comes because of it.”
But others argue that progressives need to rally behind better solutions when it comes to the problems that voters care about most, like public safety, housing, homelessness and the drug crisis.
Progressives generally support affordable housing, tenant protections, a proposed public bank, treating the drug crisis like a public health emergency and diverting people accused of low-level offenses into treatment to reduce incarceration. They generally oppose coercing drug users and those with mental illness into treatment and reject a law enforcement-led response to the drug and homelessness crises. But they don’t always have a unified message.
Jane Kim, a progressive former member of the Board of Supervisors, said that after the pandemic, “voters’ priorities changed from affordability to substance abuse and public safety.”
“Progressives have always had very clear solutions on affordability,” said Kim, who is the state director of the progressive California Working Families Party. “Progressives need a credible vision around public safety.”
David Campos, another progressive former member of the Board of Supervisors, who is now vice chair of the California Democratic Party, said that vision doesn’t have to mean compromising progressive values.
“We want progressive values driving criminal justice, but at the end of the day everyone has to feel safe,” said Campos. “Progressives need to articulate that. Nothing works if people don’t feel safe.”
Progressives also need to better articulate their vision on housing.
Over the course of just a few years, many local and state political leaders have gotten behind the push to build new housing at all income levels as the city has to build 82,000 units by 2031, 46,000 of which are supposed to be affordable.
Voters have overwhelmingly backed housing champions like state Sen. Scott Wiener, who has said that “the progressive position is the YIMBY position.”
Campos, meanwhile, lost a race for an Assembly seat in 2022 after his record on approving new housing projects came under intense scrutiny.
Campos said progressives who’ve opposed new housing projects need to convince voters that they aren’t knee-jerk NIMBYs.
“We all want housing. There has to be a better articulation that it’s not that we don’t want housing,” Campos said. “We want housing for everyone, including affordable housing.”
But Peskin and Supervisor Dean Preston disagree. One thing a progressive is certainly not is a YIMBY, they both said.
But that may be at odds with voters. A 2022 Chronicle poll found that 74% of city residents surveyed said it was either “extremely” or “very” important for city officials to create enough housing for everyone who works in the city to afford to rent or buy here.
Preston said the way progressives win is by sticking to what they know: centering the needs of working people.
That means supporting housing policy that is focused on affordability, tenants’ rights and protecting labor, Preston said. Progressives can win, he said, if they speak to the working-class people who haven’t been priced out of San Francisco.
“I don’t think there’s a shortage of (progressive) ideas,” Preston said. “I think there’s an unwillingness of many of the more conservative or moderate political leaders in this city to implement the things that we know work.”
One message progressives agree on is that they’re in danger. They say the biggest challenge they will face in returning to power will be overcoming the enormous amount of money their opponents are wielding.
Moderates raised more than $1.5 million to elect candidates to the Democratic County Central Committee, which has often been ignored but holds enormous power: It endorses candidates, including for the upcoming mayoral, district attorney and Board of Supervisor elections.
Some progressives pointed to the rising influence of wealthy tech executives, some of whom have discovered a newfound interest in San Francisco politics. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, pledged to contribute $100,000 to oppose Preston’s reelection.
Others pointed to the rising influence of Garry Tan, co-founder of the tech incubator Y-Combinator and a prolific donor to moderate causes. He has also come under fire for his crass political opinions on Twitter, and for threatening city supervisors with “slow deaths” in an admittedly alcohol-infused rant in January.
“We are currently being overwhelmed by the monumental amount of money for the first time in this city’s history,” Agnos said. “It’s millions and millions instead of thousands and thousands. That’s going to require a huge adjustment.”
The biggest adjustment progressives have to make in the wake of Tuesday’s defeats is to answer fundamental questions: What does it mean to be a San Francisco progressive in 2024? And how can they differentiate themselves from moderates?
“Everybody is progressive in San Francisco until money is involved,” Kim said. “Where we have been divided is actually on bread and butter issues,” like raising the minimum wage, tenants’ rights and how much affordable housing to build versus market-rate units.
Agnos said that if progressives want to win in the future, they have to fight big money with grassroots activism and concoct a grand vision for the city along left-leaning lines.
One way to do that is to win the mayor’s race. Progressive hopes rely on the 59-year-old Peskin, who acknowledged he wouldn’t have been considered a progressive two decades ago.
“In the old sphere, I was a moderate,” Peskin said. “What the Garry Tans of the world have done is normalize far-right-wing behavior and changed what the definition of moderate is.”
He said there has been a “scourge of toxic, earth-scorching billionaire” money used to fund a “campaign of negativity” about San Francisco that has turned off progressive voters and incensed moderates and conservatives.
The bad news for progressives is that those moderates are winning. And they’ve got a lot of money behind them. And now, momentum.
“In San Francisco, people keep on being sold progressive ideas without progressive solutions,” said Joe Sangirardi, a member of the moderate slate of DCCC candidates that won. “And the result is that we’ve been stuck in a status quo for a long time, with people parroting the same policy ideas that aren’t actually addressing our issues, while the same people remain in positions of power. And they’re finally ready to change things.”
Still, Preston was optimistic, but also realistic about what might be ahead.
“Is the mayor’s office winnable in 2024? Absolutely,” Preston said. “Is it a sure thing? Is it easy? Of course not.”
