Understanding Pooper Tuesday, or San Francisco Voters Are Not Pod People
San Francisco has always been a liberal city. The question of where "progressive" fits into its policy mix has always been subject to debate
This year’s Super Tuesday came and went with nothing redefined on the national scene: Donald Trump continues to preside largely unopposed over the enshittification of the Republican Party and Democratic voters’ ambivalence over Joe Biden despite his administration’s achievements [at least domestically]. David Rothkopf and the Deep State Radio Crew have dubbed it “Tepid Tuesday.”
I prefer to call it “Pooper Tuesday,” and I suspect San Francisco’s establishment progressives will agree with me. However, it will be for different reasons - as everyone now knows, they suffered significant setbacks in last night’s local votes. These setbacks directly affect the political Ragnarok over who gets to be mayor or supervisor coming this November.
Democratic Party Leadership Blowout
The race for Democratic County Central Committee - up until this season, generally considered to be an inside baseball nomenklatura venue by the city’s media - was a total washout for progressives. Early votes had Supervisor Connie Chan as the only one to make the cut; the later votes solidified her position and saved former supervisors John Avalos and Jane Kim.
Todd David’s Democrats for Change slate took every other seat, with Supervisor Matt Dorsey getting the most votes of any candidate in either assembly district.
Elite-captured progressives - mostly recycled apparatchiks like former supervisors Gordon Mar and Sandra Lee Fewer were primarily wiped out apart from Chan, Avalos, and Kim. You can count on this Gang of Three to be very vocal dissenters in the coming November election cycle. While they will have a lot to say about housing development issues, which will loom large in November’s contests, sadly, they will be nowhere near as entertaining as Jeremy Lee could have been.
The race for AD 19’s committee seats also has implications for November’s District 1 Supervisor contest. Marjan Philhour, facing off against incumbent Chan again, was safely ensconced on the committee, just below leading name recognition holders Catherine Stefani and Michela Alioto-Pier and four places above Chan. Jenn Nossokoff, a venture capital-adjacent District 1 hopeful some regard as a stalking horse for Chan, came in dead last.
Breed's Ballot Measure Victories
Three ballot measures sponsored by Mayor London Breed and her allies won early voting. Unless there’s a radical change in late votes, all three will pass handily. The most secure wins were for Proposition E, which promises to free cops from the perceived depredations of an activist Police Commission, and Prop. F, which will require some public assistance clients to agree to drug screening and rehab to get benefits. The latter may face a lawsuit over claims it violates state labor law.
Prop. B, the so-called “Cop Tax” measure sponsored by Supervisor Ahsha Safai, lost big time. While the vote represents a significant political victory for Dorsey, its most visible opponent, it’s meaningless on a policy level because even if the measure passed, it would never be implemented. The real fight over the issues behind Prop. B are taking place inside City Hall.
At the same time, local voters strongly supported state Proposition 1, the mental health and homelessness housing bond measure opposed by many Republicans. Prop. A, a local bond measure funding affordable housing supported by both major City Hall factions as a result of a legislative deal to approve some breaks for some market-rate projects, also looks to pass with the required supermajority. Board of Supervisors President and progressive caudillo Aaron Peskin claimed that Breed had thrown the bond under the bus by pushing her measures.
Progressive Judges Survive
Two Superior Court judges, Michael Begert and Patrick Thompson, who were singled out for challenge by law-and-order groups, appear to have survived, despite their challengers benefiting from significant campaign spending and riding piggyback on other centrist issues.
The City’s Voters Are Not Pod People
Given that both Begert and Thompson got more votes than Adam Schiff, the city’s top vote-getter to inherit Dianne Feinstein’s senate seat, we can conclude that the moderate consensus didn’t necessarily align on everything with the pro-business Families Together for Abundant Abundance constellation of PACs, and that tends to give the lie to the narrative from the self-officious Phoenix Justice League Alliance that city voters have no agency and that they can be appropriated entirely like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The real story here is likely that San Francisco’s self-described progressive establishment is increasingly seen as self-dealing and politically bankrupt. But there may also be some lessons for the tendrils of the Republican Grift Machine that have been peripheral players in San Francisco’s political struggles over affordability, public safety, and quality of life issues. Indeed, even the local Republican party is now mainly in the hands of a Never-Trump reform group as of today.
Whether San Francisco has ever been “a Progressive City” depends upon how you define it. If you look at the city’s post-World War II history of social change, its record of progressivism is both solid and imperfect. But San Francisco has most certainly been a liberal city from its inception, often with classical and left-liberalism competing for an electorate far from monolithic.
And that explains why, in City Hall, the politics in Room 200 [the mayor's office] has tended to be a synthesis of the two, while the politics in Room 250 [the Legislative Chambers] and the voting booth tends to be where that synthesis is hashed out.