Despite a fierce mayoral contest and a much-despised Republican challenging a hometown Democrat for president, San Francisco voters went to the polls this month at the lowest rate for presidential elections in over a decade.
Among registered voters in the city, 79% cast ballots this month, according to Department of Elections data, down from a record 86% in 2020, which was likely an anomaly due to the pandemic.
The downturn mirrors that of the nation as a whole: 64% of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots versus 66% four years ago.
“There’s no doubt that turnout was down this year,” said Eric McGhee, a senior fellow and policy director at the Public Policy Institute of California. “It is just a question of how far down. It doesn’t really surprise me. It wasn’t a disastrously low-turnout election. But it wasn’t a super high-turnout election like 2020 was.”
The San Francisco neighborhoods with the lowest turnout were Chinatown, the Western Addition, and the southern crest of the city, which includes Excelsior and Bayview.
In one Bayview precinct, just 37% of eligible voters cast ballots.
The highest-turnout neighborhoods were in the center of the city: Twin Peaks, the Castro, the Inner Sunset, and Noe Valley. In one precinct, nearly every registered voter (97%) went to the polls. (Neighborhoods with universities, such as San Francisco State in the Lakeshore and the University of San Francisco in the Inner Richmond, see close to or more than 100% turnout because of provisional ballots.)
The last time the city saw turnout below 80% was 2012, when 73% hit the polls, likely because an incumbent presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was on the ballot.
James Taylor, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, blamed this year’s dip in turnout on a general sense of apathy among Democratic voters.
“There’s a strand of Democrats, about a third, who for ideological reasons didn’t want to support Kamala Harris,” said Taylor, who specializes in urban and African American politics. “They knew the alternative — not voting or voting for a third-party candidate — would have minimal effect. It was almost like, ‘I don’t have to vote. The Democrats are going to win in California.’”
At the local level, voters in some neighborhoods drifted toward Donald Trump. In Visatacion Valley, for example, more than a third of residents voted for the Republican candidate, up about 10 percentage points from 2020.
Other Trump hot spots included Chinatown, Bayview, the Excelsior, and the Sunset.
“People just chose not to turn out,” said Taylor, “largely because they have issues with candidates or parties. And they will engage in a kind of political indifference.”
Taylor said low turnout in the Bayview and Western Addition, where a high Black population helped elect Mayor London Breed six years ago, was one of the contributing factors to her loss this year. He said a schism arose among Black voters when Breed faced a corruption scandal involving her signature Dream Keeper Initiative during election season.
Local changes to the electoral calendar may have also had an influence on the poll numbers.
Jason McDaniel, a politics professor at San Francisco State University, said Proposition H — which passed in 2022 and aligned mayoral elections with national ones — did not play out as intended.
The law was intended to increase turnout, with the idea that more voters are likely to come out for presidential elections than in off-year races; a prevailing theory was that the measure would also increase progressive turnout since young, minority, and non-homeowner residents are more likely to vote in a presidential election.
But McDaniel said this year’s election — in which progressive mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin came in third — shows that wasn’t the case. Anti-incumbent fervor, a worldwide trend that in San Francisco pushed Daniel Lurie into the mayor’s office, was a more powerful force.
“They are less attached and less connected to local politics,” McDaniel said of those who vote only in a presidential year. “They’re going to be more connected to these national moods.”