Ballot Order Bingo and the DCCC Race
Winning the March contest for control of the local Democratic Party depends mainly on money and name recognition, but keeping your name from getting lost on the ballot also matters
The contest for the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) in San Francisco exemplifies the dilemmas of down-ballot voting. As a farm team for emerging Democratic leaders, most candidates are either political neophytes or insiders with no name recognition, and most people don’t grasp the significance of the contest.
2024 is looking to be a particularly tumultuous presidential election year that also features a contentious primary race to succeed a legendary U.S. Senator, and based on past elections, more than a third of those who do vote will end up leaving a lot of ballot bubbles blank after making their choice for the top of the ticket. “Downballot roll-off” is particularly common with Democratic voters in presidential battleground states.
While San Francisco isn’t exactly a swing district, the passage of Proposition H in 2022 moved the Mayor’s race to November of even-numbered years, meaning that the politics of that race, as well as for the Board of Supervisors, are much more present in this year’s March primary.
The big local prize in the DCCC race is controlling a supermajority of seats to maintain the body’s endorsements for mayor and supervisor. Now, the timeline for securing or blocking that supermajority is much tighter, and the stakes for this usually obscure race are much higher, with lots more money to be spent on it.
Like most years, two organized slates represent the usual factional divide within the party, competing for seats. San Francisco Democrats for Change represent business-backed centrists who want to either take over outright or blunt the impact of the current progressive majority on the committee, represented on the ballot by the Labor and Working Families slate. Essentially, it’s a reverse of the 2016 race.
Right now, the centrists are raising heaps of campaign cash. Still, given that the San Francisco Labor Council has a lot invested in Proposition B on the same ballot, one can expect at least some last-minute labor largess for the Working Families slate (although some unions, like the carpenters and laborers, support the change slate).
The Working Families slate also has an advantage in name recognition, cornering the market on current or former elected public officials. Former progressive supervisors John Avalos and Jane Kim are running on the slate for Assembly District 17 seats, and former supervisors Gordon Mar and Sandra Fewer are running on the slate for District 19 seats, as is current Supervisor Connie Chan. Also on the slate are Public Defender Mano Raju and Community College trustees Anita Martinez and Vick Chung.
Meanwhile, the centrist slate boasts current Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Catherine Stefani (also running for Assembly this year), and former Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier. The centrist slate also has the lion’s share of candidates for supervisor (Trevor Chandler, Bilal Mahmood, and Marjan Philhour) plus a popular former candidate for District Attorney, Nancy Tung.
Running for DCCC is also attractive for these candidates for fundraising purposes, as many campaign finance limits don’t apply to the Committee race when running for public office.
There is one catch with relying on known names to serve on the DCCC, however: they tend to disappear from it once the demands of their day jobs come calling or when they tire of the factional shitshows that sometimes show up on the committee’s agenda. They end up letting proxies handle their votes on the committee or quitting altogether to be replaced by an appointee.
When progressives won back the committee majority in 2016, they did so on the backs of a ticket heavy with known names, four of whom resigned soon after being elected.
This brings us back to another overlooked factor in who gets elected to the DCCC: where your name lands on the ballot.
Brian Quan is president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, one of the city's oldest and most well-known political clubs, and he’s also a busy neighborhood activist in the Richmond. He’s running for DCCC on the centrist slate and is the dead last name on the AD 19 ballot.
Like other registrars in the state, San Francisco’s Department of Elections uses a randomized alphabet to determine ballot order. That alphabet is created by a randomized drawing by the California Secretary of State on the 82nd day before each election.
“(The California Elections Code) Section 13111(f) specifies that the order of candidates for local district offices, such as Supervisor, and central committees are to be set by the drawing the SOS conducts and requires the rotation of candidate names be based on Assembly Districts starting with AD 1,” Department of Elections Director John Arntz related in an email.
So ultimately, if you don’t have name recognition on your side, or a growing base the powers that be have yet to account for, your chances of winning could be a crap shoot.
But as it turns out, Quan may have good karma after all.
“Ballot order effects are real,” Jason McDaniel, professor of political science at San Francisco State, tells us. “They are more prominent in more complicated elections with many candidates, multiple winners, and without party label cues. Candidates in top positions get the most advantage, especially if they are well-known or incumbents. Additionally, candidates at the bottom are advantaged compared to those in the middle.”