The elected leaders thronging the steps of City Hall one day last October were officially there to honor the recent death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. But every gathering of politicians is on some level a pageant, a performance of status.
Vice President Kamala Harris saluted Feinstein’s unflappable nature. National stars like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sat centerstage alongside Mayor London Breed. Former mayors, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, mourned one of their own from the front row of the audience.
But one former mayor was conspicuously absent: Mark Farrell. Breed hadn’t invited him.
Farrell’s allies considered it a slight. “Classless,” they called it. Breed’s office pointed the finger at Feinstein’s people, saying they had led on the invites. The details of what really went down matter less than the deep vein of feeling exposed by the sniping, one that runs from the beginning of Breed and Farrell’s relationship all the way through this campaign season.
They hate each other.
These two candidates for mayor, incumbent and challenger, enjoy an inside-out, top-to-bottom, nearly tangible loathing, according to confidants of both. This isn’t your garden-variety election-season rivalry. Breed and another mayoral candidate, Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose policies differ far more, have given each other the occasional wink and a smile when they land a zinger in public.
Not so with Breed and Farrell. When they shared a stage in September at KQED, Farrell’s neck tensed as he dug into Breed for “ducking” debates. Her face visibly soured as he laid into her record. Breed struck back, repeatedly calling him a “temporary mayor.”
In election mailers, speeches, press releases, and off-the-cuff remarks, the two hurl insults both subtle and obvious like daggers, sometimes sailing over voters’ heads but always finding their targets. Just in the last few weeks, Breed accused Farrell of abusing his City Hall contacts to speed up permits on a home renovation and Farrell told supporters to leave her off their ballots entirely.
Even political insiders know only portions of the full feud. Roughly a dozen City Hall staffers with a front-row seat to the grudge match — most asking for anonymity — spoke to The Standard, stitching together the history of where things went sour.
“The vitriol you see on the campaign trail today?” one Breed ally said. “I think a lot of that goes back to 2015.”
Breed often tells the story of her rise from public housing to City Hall’s top post. She grew up poor in San Francisco’s Fillmore, at the time a mostly Black neighborhood wracked with crime, drug use, and violence. She attended gritty Galileo High School.
Farrell grew up just a mile and a half away over the hill, in the largely white and ritzy Marina district. He attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, steeped in city history, with storied alumni like Gov. Jerry Brown and widely known as a training ground for police.
Yet Farrell, too, has cast himself as a hard-luck kid who made good on his dreams.
At his first meeting as a member of the Board of Supervisors in 2011, he choked up while recounting his family’s journey out of the working class.
“Who would’ve known that raising your son in the Marina would have led to this?” he said through tears.
The next year, Breed was elected supervisor of the Fillmore, Haight Ashbury, and Japantown. Early on, Farrell invited Breed to grill ribs and sip wine with his family in their stately Jordan Park home, his tradition with new colleagues. The two would soon become part of a bloc of centrist-aligned Democrats called “the moderates,” voting together to swat back regulations on Airbnb and greenlighting transit projects that rolled through their neighborhoods. Two of their legislative aides skied and snowboarded together.
But insiders say that under the surface, the two supervisors irked each other even then.
Those around Breed viewed Farrell as entitled. His Board of Supervisors seat had once been occupied by Newsom, who went on to be mayor, and in the eyes of Breed’s allies, Farrell had designs on the city’s top role. They viewed Farrell as pompous and lazy, serving a district of wealthy constituents who didn’t need much from him.
Breed perceived Farrell as uncomfortable around Black people, particularly women, according to several people close to her. He would bristle when she became animated, wrongly assuming she was angry, and ask her to calm down. One ally recalls Breed saying, “He doesn’t really understand Black people.”
Those in Farrell’s orbit had their own complaint: Breed was — and is — a self-important political chameleon who changed positions to suit her personal ambitions. They saw her as an unproductive legislator who crafted few landmark laws.
Their frustration grew when Breed allied with Supervisor Malia Cohen (now state controller), a Black woman who represented the Bayview, for crucial swing votes, sometimes sacrificing the moderate bloc to bolster their own importance. In one instance, Breed and Cohen stood with David Campos, a progressive Democrat, in a failed effort to halt development in the Mission over gentrification concerns.
“London always looked out for London,” one Farrell ally said.
Dislike and rivalry blossomed into animus, thanks to a power struggle.
In 2014, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu won office in the California Assembly. Chiu’s former colleagues on the board needed to choose a new leader. Among other duties, the board president appoints supervisors to lead committees, but the role can also boost a politician’s name recognition for a mayoral run.
Farrell wanted it. Among the 11 supervisors, he needed to whip up six votes but had five, including Breed’s. To sew it up, he needed Cohen, Breed’s staunch ally. But Cohen despised Farrell. Like Breed, she represented historically Black neighborhoods worlds apart from the Marina; among insiders, she was and is vocal about her disdain for him.
But as the day of the vote for board president neared in 2015, Farrell needed her.
He pitched himself to Cohen in her office. He touted his fiscal bona fides, noting his work as a principal at investment firm Thayer Ventures while a supervisor. If Cohen backed him, he promised, he would offer her nearly any committee she wanted to lead. She replied that she wanted to be budget chair, a prestigious role. Farrell equivocated, irritating her. “He didn’t have the wherewithal to deliver bad news, to say no,” Cohen told The Standard of the moment. “I thought the board needed a stronger personality than Mark.”
Cohen didn’t back him. As Farrell’s support waned leading up to the vote, Breed warmed to the idea of taking the leadership role. Cohen’s vote for Breed made the difference, and she became board president in 2015.
Farrell’s allies believe Breed influenced Cohen to ditch him. Breed’s allies believe Farrell never had a chance to get Cohen’s vote.
Even as Breed and Farrell continued voting as a bloc, their relationship got rockier.
Some close to Farrell maintain Breed left him with a glimmer of hope, purportedly promising to relinquish the presidency in 2017 in exchange for his support. When Breed didn’t step down, Farrell’s advocates stopped trusting her. Breed’s allies deny she ever made such a promise. In 2017, once again, he simply didn’t have the votes, they said.
The decision to stay on as president soon propelled Breed to a position that would invite substantially more envy.
On Dec. 11, 2017, Mayor Ed Lee suffered a heart attack while in a Safeway on Monterey Boulevard. Early the next morning, Breed emerged from San Francisco General Hospital, her face as gray as her sweater. She announced to a handful of reporters that Lee had died, and she would become acting mayor.
The city and the nation saw the moment one way: Breed, projecting strength and resolve, stepped up to lead San Francisco in a time of crisis. Some city insiders, in the crass context of politics, saw the moment another way
It could’ve been Farrell.
If Farrell had become Board of Supervisors president in 2017, he would’ve been the one to assume the mayorship in the time of need. He had already been planning to run upon the expiration of Lee’s term, one City Hall insider said.
Instead, at the end of 2017, Breed became the city’s first Black woman acting mayor — a position she knew would boost her chances of winning the elected post in 2018.
While San Francisco’s city charter elevates the Board of Supervisors president to acting mayor in the event of a mayor vacating office, it also allows the supervisors to appoint a mayor before an election. Progressives said they didn’t want Breed’s incumbency to give her an unfair advantage in the 2018 mayor’s race. They decided to exercise their appointment power.
Now, it was Breed’s turn to count her votes. Her allies were worried: Farrell was MIA. They called. They texted. He had fallen off the map.
As it emerged — and would be immortalized in city lore — Farrell was busy cutting a backroom deal with the very progressives he and Breed had long opposed — including Peskin, another present-day mayoral challenger — to become mayor.
Just before the vote, Supervisor Hillary Ronen made a teary speech alleging that tech investor Ron Conway, a venture capitalist who had been close to Lee, was secretly pressuring them to back Breed. To shut out white tech billionaires they thought were exerting improper influence on City Hall, the progressives, including Ronen, backed a white tech millionaire: Farrell.
Pandemonium ensued. Breed’s allies in the Black community stood up at the meeting, pointed their fingers at the supervisors, and screamed.
“This is war!”
Farrell’s wife and children were at his side that night, shortly after he won the vote. Breed’s allies later speculated that Liz Farrell looked too put together, too quickly — her hair blown out, her outfit on point. She must’ve known ahead of time that her husband would be made mayor, they surmised. The reasons behind the unreturned phone calls crystalized.
Even now, years later, Breed’s allies refer to it as the “Red Wedding,” a reference to a particularly brutal revenge plot from “Game of Thrones.”
In news stories across the country, Breed’s allies cast Farrell’s choice as a betrayal, a blow to the Black community and a cold, calculated move.
Farrell’s allies saw it as righteous payback.
The tribal feelings stirred up by the episode ultimately helped Breed win the mayor’s seat just five months later, gift-wrapping a stab-in-the-back campaign narrative. Many in City Hall know Breed holds onto her grudges with clenched fists.
In this year’s election, the animus between Breed and Farrell has consequences.
San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system opens a route for an outsider, such as nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, to win by racking up second- and third-ranked votes. Voters are increasingly telling pollsters they’ll back Breed or Farrell, but not both. Until recently, Lurie has been free to sit back and enjoy watching Breed and Farrell cover each other in mud as he stays clean. The squabbling could even pave the way for a Peskin win.
Win or lose, one thing will survive Nov. 5 for sure — their beef.
