Three months from the November election, San Francisco mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie is launching television ads in the hopes of locking up enough support in the ranked-choice voting system to unseat Mayor London Breed.
Lurie, a nonprofit founder and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, appears in a new advertisement with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, the former surgeon general of California, who worked with the candidate to open a children’s health clinic in the underserved Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco.
The ad was paid for by Lurie’s campaign for mayor, which has spent more than $1.1 million this year in a bid to raise his profile in the highly competitive race.
The campaign reported a cash balance of just $65,000 at the end of June, though Lurie could tap his personal wealth to replenish his campaign coffers at any time. Lurie has raised $1.4 million for his campaign, a figure that includes $590,000 of his own money.
“We invested early in Nadine and her vision because I knew this multi-generational investment would pay dividends by treating the child and the parent at the same time,” Lurie said in a statement.
Recent polling suggests that Breed’s standing has improved since the beginning of the year, when voters largely disapproved of her job performance in light of widespread frustrations over public safety, street conditions, the economy and other issues.
However, with four major candidates in the race — Breed, Lurie, Mark Farrell and Supervisor Aaron Peskin — the mayor’s challengers believe they can beat her under the city’s ranked-choice system, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference and redistributes votes as they are eliminated.
According to a San Francisco Chronicle poll published Thursday, Breed was the first choice for 28% of likely voters surveyed, followed by moderate challenger Farrell, at 20% of first-place votes. The poll showed Lurie winning 17% of first-choice votes, and Peskin, a progressive, securing 12%.
Joe Arellano, Breed’s campaign spokesperson, said Lurie and Farrell are “stuck in the mud with stagnant poll numbers.”
“Buying the election didn’t work for billionaire Rick Caruso in L.A., and it won’t work for the billionaire heir in SF, either,” said Arellano.
Lurie’s campaign pointed out that he had the greatest share of second-place votes in the Chronicle poll, making him well-positioned to defeat Breed given his “significant resource advantage,” according to campaign consultant Tyler Law.
“Our campaign is the only one built to go the distance,” Law said in a statement.
Apart from Lurie’s campaign war chest, a group of supporters has poured millions into an independent expenditure committee supporting his outsider bid for mayor. Lurie founded the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point but has never held elected office.
The group, dubbed Believe in SF, is funded by deep-pocketed donors that include Lurie’s mother, Miriam “Mimi” Haas, who kicked in $1 million; WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who gave $250,000; and biotech founder Oleg Nodelman, also $250,000. The group has raised more than $5 million in total; it has spent a chunk of that on billboards and splashy mailers promoting Lurie and had around half its cash stockpiled as of June 30.
This is the most expensive SF mayor’s race in history, with donors pouring more than $10 million into the contest so far.
Farrell’s campaign plans to run television ads prior to Election Day, and Jade Tu, his campaign manager, argued it makes “zero sense” to run a television ad at this stage. In June, Breed’s campaign ran ads on television and online highlighting her record on a range of issues. Adrian Plaisance, campaign press secretary for Peskin, said his campaign will run ads ahead of the election and argued that Lurie’s spending hasn’t improved his polling.
“[Lurie] has unlimited resources at his disposal, and so of course he will outspend any candidate,” Plaisance said.