Voters tune out on tame mayor’s race
It had all the makings of a riveting race to run San Francisco.
The sitting mayor suffered a heart attack while shopping at Safeway and died in the middle of the night on Dec. 12. The president of the Board of Supervisors, an African American woman raised in public housing just blocks from City Hall, took his place immediately, as prescribed by the City Charter.
Six weeks later, the supervisors shocked her and many of the city’s residents by voting another supervisor in as interim mayor — a supervisor who happened to be a wealthy, white male venture capitalist — to serve until Tuesday’s election was decided.
Meanwhile, San Franciscans were irate. Irate that City Hall seemed incapable of dealing with the homeless tent camps filling the city’s sidewalks. Irate that injection drug users were turning BART station hallways into shooting galleries. Irate that police shrugged as car break-ins swelled to an all-time high. Irate that despite all the misery and filth on the streets, residents still needed to earn $333,000 a year to buy a median-priced house.
If ever there were a moment to get excited about picking a new leader, this was it. Until it wasn’t. What could have been an edge-of-your-seat race to select San Francisco’s next mayor, and potentially shape the city’s direction for the next decade, fizzled like a brilliant idea for a tech startup going belly up.
“They’re all kind of the same,” said Sasha Lekach, a 29-year-old Potrero Hill resident, of the top three candidates for mayor: Supervisor London Breed, Supervisor Jane Kim and former state Sen. Mark Leno.
Lekach, a San Francisco native and a tech reporter for Mashable, said she’s very concerned about the city’s affordability, or lack thereof, and is sad that so many of her childhood friends have been priced out. But she didn’t hear much from the candidates separating themselves on the issue.
She joked she was going to “let the spirit catch me in the voting booth.”
At least she was going to vote, which is more than can be said of most of San Francisco’s registered voters.
The Department of Elections issued more than 320,000 mail-in ballots, and by Tuesday afternoon, fewer than 80,000 had been returned. That’s lower than in previous elections — even some primary elections. And of those 80,000 ballots, two-thirds came from voters age 50 and older. Just 3 percent came from people who had registered to vote since November 2016. The early returns were looking good for Breed, though final results weren’t expected until later this week.
Political observers said overall turnout, which also won’t be finalized for days, would be low. They estimated anywhere from 36 to 42 percent. By contrast, 80 percent of registered San Francisco voters turned out for the November 2016 presidential election that saw Donald Trump squeak to victory. (Interestingly, that race, in which San Francisco made no difference, drew far more people than a race to lead the city itself.)
Nicole Derse, a political consultant who ran an independent expenditure committee backing Breed, said she thinks those San Franciscans who are politically engaged are concentrating on fighting Trump and ensuring that Democrats win more House and Senate seats. The mayor’s race, featuring a pack of liberal Democrats, just hasn’t registered.
“Most San Franciscans are not seeing any of these candidates as the enemy or at all emblematic of what they’re motivated to fight against,” she said.
Liberal, hard-working and well-intentioned? Yes. Napinducing? Also yes.
“The lack of clarity between the candidates on issues is frankly putting a lot of voters to sleep,” said John Whitehurst, a political consultant who didn’t work on any of the mayoral campaigns. “We’re seeing a difference in political posturing, but not on the issues.”
Whitehurst said the turnout was unlikely to reflect the new San Francisco — the influx of young people who have moved here to work in tech. A 20something in the newsroom said many of her friends didn’t even know Tuesday was election day.
Even older voters were uninspired. I had many friends — whose ages don’t start with the number two — ask me for guidance on how to select a candidate, when they all seemed pretty much the same. When they settled on their top pick, they often shrugged and said they liked him or her “well enough.”
A mom at my son’s school whom I barely know called me in desperation Tuesday afternoon, saying it seemed like a “Sophie’s Choice” — picking which of your children will live or die — to select from among three liberal Democrats who would all make history in one way or another.
Should she vote for Breed, who would be the city’s first African American female mayor? Or Kim, who would be its first Asian American female mayor? Or Leno, who would be the city’s first gay mayor? Former Supervisor Angela Alioto was also running, but seemed to make news most often for the wrong reasons.
Polls showed that a third of frequent voters were undecided just weeks before the election. One of them was an old friend of mine from college, John Calhoun, who’s whipsmart and follows politics closely. He’s raising two daughters in Noe Valley and works at Salesforce.
“I have no clue,” he said Monday of who he’d vote for Tuesday. “They all want to end homelessness and build more housing. If you strip the names off the ballot, all their positions basically sound the same.”
Erica Sandberg, a personal finance writer who lives on Nob Hill, said she found it “very difficult to get 100 percent — or even 50 percent — behind any of them.”
Sandberg said she wants the next mayor to say, “I’m going to make sure that order is restored, that the streets are clean. I will do it, and you will see a marked difference.”
She said all the current candidates have been too vague on quality-of-life issues, so she’s going to challenge Tuesday’s winner in November 2019.
Yes, that’s right. Whoever wins Tuesday’s election will hold the office for just a year and a half. And then we’ve got to do this all over again.