Daniel Lurie, candidate for mayor of San Francisco, at his election party at The Chapel, San Francisco, November 5, 2024. SANTIAGO MEJIA / AP
San Francisco is no exception to the sweeping wave of change that the November 5 election represented for the US. The city’s mayor, London Breed, 50, was defeated by a billionaire centrist philanthropist – a political earthquake in one of the country’s most progressive cities. Without waiting for the results to be officially proclaimed, which should take another week, London Breed called her opponent, Daniel Lurie, on Thursday, November 7, to concede defeat. Partial results showed that she had garnered 44% of the vote to her opponent’s 56%, though 140,000 ballots were left to count.
As the city’s first Black mayor, Breed won over her fellow citizens by arguing that her background put her in a unique position to understand the problems plaguing the city and its 800,000 residents – homelessness and open drug dealing in the streets. A city where the tech sector’s opulence has done nothing to reduce social misery. Raised by her grandmother in public housing, Breed had seen her sister succumb to a drug overdose. Her brother is still in prison for an armed robbery.
Her successor, Lurie, 47 has had no such experiences. Heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune, a philanthropist and founder of a non-profit anti-poverty organization, he has no political experience. Lacking charisma, he lagged behind in the polls for long. His wealth allowed him to invest $9 million (€8.3 million) in his campaign and to flood mailboxes with advertisements to promote himself. His detractors accused him of trying to buy the election, but he has argued that his wealth has shielded him from corruption, a scourge that has been common in the Bay Area – for example, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, a Democrat implicated in an FBI investigation, was the subject of a recall vote, which, according to partial results, has garnered 65% approval.
Downtown SF is still depressed
Backed by Grow SF, a group of centrist reformers with backgrounds in tech, Lurie made his status as a political outsider out to be a campaign argument in his favor. In the end, he prevailed over the incumbent, as well as several other candidates – two city council members and a former mayor – who were well-known to voters, perhaps too well-known. Breed, like her friend Harris, a former California district attorney, suffered from her status as an incumbent.
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The mayor bore the brunt of residents’ exasperation at seeing the city’s downtown area still depressed, four years after the pandemic, and affected by regular shoplifting. They have also grown weary of the thousands of dollars in spending, often on associations to help the homeless, which have had no proportional results. Although tents have disappeared from downtown San Francisco streets, since the Supreme Court ruled, in June, that sleeping in the street is not a constitutional right, Breed’s opponents have had a field day blaming her for residents’ insecurity.
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