With thousands of ballots still to be counted, Daniel Lurie held an early lead in the mayoral race after the first votes were tallied Tuesday night.
Candidates were spread out across The City at watch parties as results came in, capping an arduous monthslong campaign that remained tightly contested until the very end.
The race featured incumbent Mayor London Breed vying for a second full term against Lurie — the Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit leader — as well as Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and former interim Mayor Mark Farrell.
At 12:29 a.m. Wednesday, city election officials reported having counted ballots from 39.8% of San Francisco registered voters. Solely on the 234,453 ballots tallied as of Wednesday morning, Lurie had edged Breed 56.3% to 43.7% after 14 ranked-choice tabulations, while Peskin and Farrell were out of the running.
Throngs of Lurie supporters packed The Chapel in the Mission District and responded to the first vote tally with jubilation. Though there were thousands of votes still to be counted, the initial tally served as vindication for a candidate who displayed increasing confidence as the campaign evolved.
Lurie was careful not to declare victory, but told supporters that the early returns were making him “feel optimistic.”
“We don’t need to know the final results to know what this city means to us,” Lurie said.
Lurie said that, if victorious, he would be the first person elected mayor without previous government experience. He described his campaign as an antidote to cynicism about the city, and said it’s “time for accountable leadership in City Hall.”
Though there are many votes left to be counted, Lurie pointed to at least one cause for celebration after an election season full of television ads and mailers.
“You get your screens and your mailboxes back,” he said.
The Department of Elections will continue to receive and tally ballots for several days. Prognosticating based on partial results is particularly challenging in San Francisco, which receives thousands of ballots by mail after Election Day and uses a ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank up to 10 candidates for mayor in order of preference.
Progressives will no doubt have hope that early vote totals underrepresented their voters. A precinct-level map of early returns shared Monday by Peskin consultant Jim Stearns showed that relatively few votes had thus far been cast by residents of more progressive pockets of The City, such as the Mission district.
However, the neighborhoods that have voted early thus far, such as Pacific Heights, are also those that tend to have higher turnout overall.
Mayor London Breed campaigning for reelection on Election Day morning at Castro and Market Streets in San Francisco on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Breed sought to assure San Franciscans that The City is already on its way to a robust recovery, largely thanks to her leadership. She touted her administration’s expansion of police powers and efforts to increase police staffing, a recent decline in fentanyl overdoses, and a drop in the number of tent encampments so far this year.
The incumbent also promoted her leadership through the COVID-19 pandemic, in which The City saw a death rate below that of other major U.S. cities, and warned that her opponents were not proven leaders in times of crisis.
Farrell jumped into the race in February and ran a scorched-earth campaign against Breed, regularly calling out her “failed leadership.” He leaned into San Franciscans’ concerns about public safety, pledging to fire police Chief Bill Scott and pour resources into hiring new police officers at a rapid clip.
He was dogged by allegations of corruption, however. His opponents — and three former city mayors — questioned the legality of a ballot-measure committee Farrell formed to support Proposition D, which they argued was merely a vessel to fund his mayoral bid. On Monday — a day before the election — Farrell and the Ethics Commission reached a proposed settlement that would result in a $108,000 fine for several violations of campaign finance law.
Shortly after the first round of election results were posted, Farrell arrived at the bar Campus in the Marina district and gave what sounded like a concession speech to a packed crowd of people there to support him and Prop. D, the commission-cutting measure for which he raised more than $2.5 million.
“Let’s get this out of the way — up front, obviously, early results, not why we wanted them to be in this, in this mayoral race,” said Farrell, who stood next to his wife, Liz Farrell, and thanked members of the audience for their support.
“It’ll take a while to sink in for everyone, I know, but let’s make sure, as San Franciscans, that whoever the next mayor is, we all get behind him or her. It is the right thing to do, as we love the city of San Francisco more than anything else in the world,” Farrell said.
Lurie looked to tap into San Franciscans’ disapproval of their government. Although tied to a legendary and wealthy San Francisco family, Lurie pitched himself as the outsider in a field consisting otherwise of City Hall insiders. Each of his major opponents in the race has previously held elected office, and he argued he could do the job better.
His opponents countered that Lurie, who invested $8.7 million of his own money into the race, was trying to buy the election.
Lurie and supporters spent some of the final hours before polls closed Tuesday rallying voters on a street corner in Chinatown, a political nexus for The City’s powerful AAPI voting bloc.
“As Chinatown goes, so goes San Francisco,” said Lurie in between handshakes and photos with voters in front of an entrance to the Chinatown-Rose Pak Muni station on Stockton Street. He said his campaign has made the voting bloc a high priority since it first launched.
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“I’ve invested in this community and I will continue to invest as mayor,” he said.
His campaign has won support from at least some in the neighborhood. About a dozen supporters turned out to wave signs alongside him.
“He is a good guy,” said one Cantonese-speaking supporter who declined to be named.
Peskin supporters also turned out at the Chinatown street corner. They chanted a pro-Peskin slogan in Cantonese that one supporter translated as “the bearded man is good. Aaron can do it!”
As the representative for District 3, which includes Chinatown, Peskin has also made strong political inroads into the neighborhood.
Peskin volunteer Jen Chan said she wasn’t much impressed with Lurie’s campaign, which has spent more than any other candidate in a historically expensive race. She said she believes that money could have been better spent investing in San Francisco.
“So values are a little bit different for me,” she said.
Aaron Peskin, left, campaigns for mayor with Sharon Lai, a candidate for supervisor in District 3, on Election Day in Chinatown.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
Peskin, the lone progressive contender in the race, pitched himself as experienced enough to know how to get things done in City Hall, but still a breath of fresh air after decades of leadership by moderate mayors.
Peskin’s battle was an uphill one, as polls routinely showed that voters held negative views of him. He had earned the scorn of well-funded moderate groups and officials, who pointed to Peskin’s tenure on the board as one of obstructing progress.
Each candidate brought a different set of qualifications to the race.
Lurie spent about 15 years leading the nonprofit organization he cofounded, Tipping Point Community, to combat poverty in the Bay Area largely through providing grants to nonprofit service providers. That work, Lurie contended, would translate well to City Hall, where he would hold city-funded nonprofits accountable.
Breed is a former supervisor who won the 2018 special election to replace deceased Mayor Ed Lee. She led The City through a tumultuous six years, including the pandemic; she has routinely cited her swift action to shut down The City and credited it with saving lives.
With roots as a neighborhood organizer, Peskin has served five nonconsecutive terms on the Board of Supervisors and looked to make the jump to The City’s top office. He highlighted his personal journey as a recovering alcoholic and assured voters he could likewise help San Francisco heal.
Farrell spent two terms on the Board of Supervisors before his appointment to serve as interim mayor after Lee’s death in 2018. After he left office, Farrell co-founded a venture-capital firm, giving him a mix of private-sector and government experience he argued set him apart from the others.
By almost any measure, the next mayor of San Francisco will be staring down a number of serious challenges that voters were forced to consider who is best-equipped to lead The City through.
The City’s economy has struggled to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, in large part due to the shift from a five-day workweek to a hybrid or work-from-home schedule for many workers who once made downtown’s economy buzz.
That buzzing economy generated tax revenue for San Francisco that it used to support its ever-growing budget. Now, The City is facing a projected budget deficit that could exceed $1 billion before the end of the decade, a gaping chasm that will have to be reconciled by the next mayor.
The winner of the mayoral race will also have to confront residents’ widespread concerns about public safety, despite evidence that crime has steadily declined this year.
Public safety largely defined the race, with Farrell going as far as to promise that he would request the California National Guard deploy personnel to San Francisco to help deter fentanyl dealing.
Lurie tried to offer a pragmatic approach to crime issues, often highlighting his proposal to ask that courts place ankle monitors on people accused of dealing drugs and ensure they don’t return to the neighborhoods in which they were arrested.
In her corner, Breed had strong support from YIMBYs — housing advocates untied under the rallying cry “yes, in my backyard” — who have pushed to remove regulatory shackles on the construction of new housing. They championed Breed, who has promised to veto any legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors she views as antihousing, and backed her reelection bid with considerable resources.
On the other end of the spectrum was Peskin, who traveled across San Francisco assuring neighborhoods that San Francisco — and all of its charm — need not be destroyed in order to save it.
Farrell promoted housing growth that is more concentrated in and around downtown, while Lurie promised to simplify and hasten The City’s notoriously complex permitting process.
Examiner reporters Greg Wong and Keith Menconi contributed to this story.
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