On its face, the year-old race has striking parallels to the upcoming election in Boston, where barrier-breaker Mayor Michelle Wu faces a challenge from Kraft, the nonprofit leader and third son of billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The West Coast race showed how a wealthy outsider can unseat an incumbent mayor in a famously progressive city. It’s a story line that has not escaped the notice of either major campaign here in Boston and outlines the path by which Wu’s wealthy rival believes he might win. Kraft has already spoken twice with Lurie, conversations that left the candidate feeling encouraged, advisers said.
For Kraft, the San Francisco race is a model to emulate; for Wu, it offers a cautionary tale.
But as Wu allies point out, there are major differences between the Boston race and the San Francisco contest, which makes it far from predictive. Among those contrasts: Breed and Lurie were far more ideologically aligned than the progressive Wu and more business-friendly Kraft.
If Kraft wants to recreate what happened in San Francisco, he’s got his work cut out for him. Political operatives who worked on the Bay Area race said Lurie’s win was not an inevitable or expected outcome, but rather the result of a well-funded, well-drawn campaign strategy. It’s also the result of a host of circumstances that simply broke Lurie’s way. A third candidate who had been seen as a front-runner dropped in the polls, and a scandal erupted at City Hall weeks before the election, when a Breed official was accused of financial mismanagement, later resigning at the mayor’s request. The high-profile shooting of a San Francisco 49ers rookie shook trust in the city’s public safety. It also didn’t hurt that Lurie put as much as $9 million of his own money into his campaign.
The bottom line, though: San Franciscans were ready for something different.
“The city needed a change,” said Jay Cheng, head of the powerful political group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which endorsed Lurie and another candidate over the incumbent mayor.
“She had six years to tackle the problem,” Cheng said. “[Voters] weren’t gonna be persuaded that the incumbent was going to be able to turn everything round in a second term.”
Unlike Wu, Breed, in many ways, entered her reelection race on the backfoot.
As of February, Wu’s favorability ratings were notably higher than Breed’s were at the same time last year. Just 20 percent of San Francisco voters thought the city was heading in the right direction in February 2024, compared to 57 percent in Boston this February, polling shows.
San Francisco also faced more severe challenges than Boston around homelessness and petty crime. While San Francisco’s population is roughly 20 percent bigger than Boston’s, San Francisco recorded nearly twice as many burglaries and thefts as Boston in 2024. Both cities saw drops in their murder rates last year, mirroring a broader national trend. San Francisco saw 35 homicides in 2024, compared to 24 in Boston.
In part because of those challenges, San Francisco voters had already revolted against incumbents. Voters there recalled their progressive district attorney and three members of the school board in 2022.
Boston has not seen that sort of revolution. Wu launched her reelection campaign earlier this month as the front-runner.
Still, not everyone is happy with her leadership, and Kraft is seeking to capitalize on that discontent. He is hoping to put together a coalition of voters who opposed Wu in her first election, along with disaffected business leaders and communities of color he believes have lost faith in the mayor.
“Lurie’s win proved that incumbent mayors are not invincible, especially in a city where the high cost of housing is forcing people out of the city, where there has been poor fiscal management, and where homelessness, public drug use, and street crime are impacting the quality of life,” said Will Keyser, a Kraft adviser.
Wu’s team did not comment on the San Francisco race, but emphasized her decade-plus career in government.
“Now is not the time for a mayor who needs on-the-job training,” said Julia Leja, a spokesperson for the mayor’s reelection campaign.
Structural factors require very different strategies for candidates running in either city. San Francisco political hopefuls compete in a crowded field in a ranked-choice voting system, while Boston holds a nonpartisan preliminary round in September to whittle the field down to two candidates for the November general. Activist Domingos DaRosa, city employee Kerry Augustin, and restaurateur Jorge Mendoza Iturralde have also said they plan to run for mayor. Candidates must gather at least 3,000 signatures to qualify for the preliminary.
Wu has perhaps the most important advantage of all: incumbency, which historically has been an almost insurmountable advantage in Boston and across the country. But there are indications that its power may be waning everywhere — and Lurie is one of them.
“Michelle Wu should not underestimate voter dissatisfaction,” said Todd David, a Breed ally and political director of the advocacy group Abundant SF. “Her name ID on its own is not going to carry her to victory against someone who can spend basically unlimited money to raise their name ID.”
Much as Lurie did, Kraft intends to self-fund, but it remains to be seen how much he will spend. The now-San Francisco mayor also enjoyed support from an outside Super PAC backed by his wealthy mother. The money allowed Lurie — a relatively blank slate in city politics — to introduce himself the way he wanted to be seen, said strategists who worked on the race.
David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University, said Lurie’s staggering war chest allowed him to be “hugely prominent on the air” in a media market that can be a tough and inefficient way to reach voters.
When local political candidates buy ad time on TV news, they’re “not [just] capturing regular San Francisco voters, what you’re really capturing is the environment of Bay Area television of 8 to 9 million people, so there’s a lot of loss. [But] it didn’t matter to him, because he had resources,” McCuan said.
Of course, the other side of that coin is a disadvantage: Voters may not want to elect an ultra-rich mayor they see as buying the city’s highest office.
One of Kraft’s main vulnerabilities — the wealthy background that sets him apart from many in the city he seeks to lead — did not dent Lurie enough to prevent him from capturing the mayoralty in San Francisco.
Questions of identity were not central to the San Francisco mayor’s race, according to half a dozen California political operatives and experts. That may be because San Francisco is both whiter and wealthier than Boston. Lurie also made strategic hires on his campaign team, bringing on prominent activists in the Asian American community to reach San Francisco’s highly influential Chinese neighborhoods.
It’s true that voters could look at Kraft and dismiss him as an out-of-touch rich guy, said Boston political consultant Cameron Charbonnier, who is not working on either campaign, but “voters in New York seemed to look past that with Mike Bloomberg … and voters in Illinois looked past that when they elected JB Pritzker.”
Lurie was also a longtime resident of San Francisco, while Kraft lived most of his life in Chestnut Hill, a wealthy suburb just outside Boston’s borders. Kraft moved to the North End in October 2023, when an LLC linked to the Patriots purchased his $2 million condo on the waterfront.
Strategists who worked for Breed said their campaign erred in not going after Lurie harder, sooner. In part, they explained, that was because Lurie was not seen as a top competitor in the crowded field until late in the race.
It was also a result of limited resources. One of Breed’s most effective attacks was that Lurie was inexperienced, and thus “dangerous,” said Joe Arellano, communications director and senior adviser to Breed. But she didn’t make that case until too late, he said.
“If we had the resources to make that argument about experience … a little sooner, perhaps it could have made more of a difference,” Arellano said.
The lesson for Wu, Breed advisers said, is to use the luxury of time to overcome any potential cash disadvantage.
“If you are Michelle Wu, you need to start beating up on Josh Kraft yesterday,” said David, the Breed ally. “There’s no world where Josh Kraft is not going to have the resources to communicate to the public in exactly the way that he wants to be communicated about.”
Emma Platoff can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @emmaplatoff. Niki Griswold can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @nikigriswold.
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