Good morning. Here’s what we’re covering today:
In San Francisco, the race against progressive politics
There are 46 days left until the general election, and in California outrage over the progressive agenda is playing out in an unlikely place: The San Francisco mayoral race.
My colleague Hannah Wiley looked into the race this week and found that only one of the race’s five candidates, San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, is running on a progressive agenda. And he’s the underdog.
What does it all mean? Is San Francisco no longer a bastion of progressive politics? What even is progressivism?
Famous for being a pioneer of progressive political discourse, San Francisco has in recent years tottered toward the center.
In March 2024, voters approved ballot measures to broaden police surveillance powers and impose drug screening and treatment mandates for people receiving county welfare benefits who are suspected of illicit drug use.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed championed both measures. That same evening, a group of moderates took control of the governing body of the local Democratic Party.
San Francisco’s slow recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the city’s culture and shaken voters’ trust in the city’s leadership.
Michael Johnson gathers possessions before a homeless encampment was cleaned up in San Francisco.
(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
In February 2022, voters recalled three school board members after parents expressed frustration that while the city closed its schools for more than a year — longer than most in the nation — the school board persisted to engage in an effort to rename a third of the city’s public schools whose existing names, critics claimed, celebrated historical figures associated with slavery or oppression of women or “who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Four months later, voters also recalled then-Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin, a leading reform advocate criticized by opponents over progressive policies on sentencing and incarceration.
San Francisco’s ascendent tech class has led the rightward shift.
In recent decades, it hasn’t been unusual for San Francisco to elect mayors who are centrist Democrats alongside a more progressive Board of Supervisors.
Tech executives and wealthy business owners are pouring money into the campaigns of moderate candidates — including the current candidates, apart from Peskin.
And a growing number of voters, including those tech titans, want to see more punitive measures against the sprawling tent encampments and the outpouring of retail and property crimes that have diminished their understanding of a safe, functional city.
What does progressive even mean?
Peskin says he joined the race to keep San Francisco a “beacon” for the artists, creatives, immigrants and LGBTQ+ leaders who have defined the city for decades, and to fight for working-class people to reposition San Francisco as an affordable city.
He’s promised to prioritize low-income housing and expand rent control, and says he wants to open more treatment facilities and expand shelter capacity for homeless people. But he also touts “neighborhood preservation” and has resisted attempts to amend zoning rules for certain neighborhoods to allow for denser housing.
And so, for some, Peskin, who opposes the idea that development is key to bringing costs down, claims the “progressive” mantle when it comes to housing. But for others, Peskin’s perspective reflects an impractical, even conservative, approach to the city’s housing crisis.
Whether Peskin is a textbook progressive is up to interpretation — including his own. He told The Times he’s willing to defy the label and supports a controversial November ballot measure that would reverse a 2014 voter-approved law that turned some nonviolent drug and theft felonies into misdemeanors.
It just goes to show you: Few candidates fit under a neat box, even if they try to claim or eschew one. It’s the policies, not the label, that will define the next few years of San Francisco’s political landscape.
Today’s top stories
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell appears on a monitor on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange.
(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)
The Fed cut interest rates — and the impacts may be greater in California than in many other states
A wall of secrets may crumble as feds call out enablers of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ alleged sex crimes
An L.A. couple is accused of wielding an AK-47 in a brazen string of dispensary heists
A young couple targeted four cannabis dispensaries for robberies during a six-week-long spree, prosecutors say. Detectives titled the case file “Romeo and Juliet.”Testimony and video of the takeover-style heists offered a startling example of the violence that shadows California’s booming cannabis black market.
A California zoo, an advancing wildfire and a delicate rescue operation
The Big Bear Alpine Zoo, which houses rehabilitated animals that are unable to be released into the wild, launched an evacuation as it came under threat from the Line fire.“I had two foxes in the back of my personal car,” said zoo curator Jessica Whiton. “It’s not ever going to smell the same.”
More big stories
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Enough with the lube jokes. The charges against Sean “Diddy” Combs are no laughing matter, columnist Mary McNamara writes.This bellwether county picked the presidential winner 11 straight times. Here’s how it views Trump vs. Harris, columnist Mark Z. Barabak writes.Trump and his family have jumped into crypto, which the FBI calls a hive of “pervasive” criminality, columnist Michael Hiltzik writes.Nobody’s ever talked the way Trump does. It’s like no one before. Or so it seems, writes Laurie Winer, a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.California’s AI safety bill is under fire. Making it law is the best way to improve it, writes Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Today’s great reads
(Bilal Hussein / Associated Press)
Motivation is a mystery in apparent Israeli attack on Lebanese militia’s communications network. The deadly sabotage of pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah is widely blamed on Israel — but what was attack’s real aim?
Other great reads
How could pagers in Lebanon have been rigged to explode?A Taiwanese company denied responsibility for making and distributing a batch of exploding pagers that killed at least nine people and wounded thousands more.
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For your downtime
Elvira at Knott’s Scary Farm.
(Sean Teegarden Photography)
Going out
Staying in
And finally … from our archives
Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” which raised the bar on gangster films, was released in the U.S. on Sept. 19, 1990.
“To see an artist working at the peak of his power, everything extraneous stripped away, every element there for a purpose, is an extraordinary exhilaration,” Times critic Sheila Benson wrote of Scorsese in her review.
Have a great day, from the Essential California team
Ryan Fonseca, reporter
Defne Karabatur, fellow
Andrew Campa, Sunday reporter
Hunter Clauss, multiplatform editor
Christian Orozco, assistant editor
Stephanie Chavez, deputy metro editor
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters
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