When I win reelection this November — and it is a when, not an if — I’ll have a few people to thank for my incredible good fortune.
The first is someone nobody would ever guess: Supervisor Dean Preston. Yeah, the Democratic Socialist from my old stomping grounds in District 5. It was Preston who, in 2022, helped put a charter amendment on the ballot that would push out the mayor’s race to a presidential election year, a move I opposed at the time. Now I see the genius of this “reform.” Had the mayoral election been held last year, I would have been toast. But not now!
Now I’m beginning to think I’ve got this.
I know the polls show me running neck and neck with Mark Farrell, my predecessor who held the job on an interim basis for six months. (He likes to omit the “interim” bit.) But that’s not the whole story. There are multiple reasons I think I’m going to pull this out — a far cry from what I thought even at the beginning of the year.
The No. 1 reason I expect to prevail is that most people around town agree that things are finally getting better. I can’t prove this, of course. It’s just a vibe, a meme, like Kamala’s coconuts or Tim Walz’s flannel shirts. It’s not like vacancy rates downtown have improved. They haven’t. Or that retail stores, restaurants, and corporations aren’t still closing or moving out of town.
But there’s undeniably a feeling that the worst is behind us. (How could they have gotten worse?) The neighborhoods are thriving. Our outdoor concerts and night markets and street festivals have been electrifying. The artificial intelligence bubble has dulled the talk of tech layoffs.
Crime stats are debatable but clearly moving in the right (my) direction. And I’m making sure people know to give me full credit for funding and equipping the police, no matter that I advocated for defunding them four years ago. (The Police Officers Association got the message: They gave me their sole endorsement last week.)
Similarly, on homelessness, I have struggled for years to get my hands around the largest and most intractable social issue in San Francisco. But then along came the Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass, which gave me a free pass to start clearing encampments just in time for Election Day. Yup, I guess I have Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to thank for my resurgence as well!
This would’ve all gone so differently if I’d been up for election last November. All the doom-loop talk was kryptonite for an incumbent like me, who, despite my smart moves during the pandemic, was getting blamed for my city’s sorry state. I was failing on public safety, with the entire Asian community feeling like I wasn’t protecting them from attacks. The tech bros were even blaming me for Bob Lee’s murder, which nobody but the people he partied with could have prevented.
But now? Now I’m the sole candidate to be endorsed by the Democratic County Central Committee. Whipping by my crew convinced a majority of the self-styled “Dems for Change” to back me, and only me. (Thankfully, change in City Hall isn’t the change they’re after.)
Consider: In a few weeks, when the DCCC unleashes its massive marketing effort of campaign mailers and social media, two names will be more prominent than any in their full-throated endorsements: Kamala Harris and me.
Which brings me to the last and most obvious person to thank for my one-woman vibe shift. I’m going to benefit from the enormous halo of Harris — our former district attorney, my mentor, the woman whose photos I had up in my office long before July — as she runs against Donald Trump to take the White House.
All sorts of San Francisco voters are going to be pumped to vote for the first woman of color to be president. You better believe they’re also going to connect one pioneering politician to another: the first Black woman to be mayor of San Francisco. And if, as everyone expects, voter turnout in San Francisco is off the charts in support of the Democratic ticket, that can only work to my advantage as the incumbent. I’m the name and face of the Dems locally, just as Kamala is nationally.
Am I worried about ranked-choice voting? OK, yes, that keeps me up a little. That game nearly did me in in 2018, when my progressive opponents ganged up on me. But I think it’ll work to my advantage this time, especially because, so far, the guys I’m running against haven’t cut any deals with one another. I’m going to be the No. 2 or No. 3 choice for most Farrell and Daniel Lurie voters, my political consultants tell me. And do you think Aaron Peskin’s small base of supporters is going to vote for the two rich, white guys (or that supervisor they’ve never heard of) as their second choice?
No, not as long as the other two moderates don’t make a pact in the next two months — and they sure seem to detest each other even more than they hate me. Peskin’s voters are going to go with the mayor whose name they know. (Don’t ask me, by the way, where those rumors started that Peskin and I are teaming up and that I’m going to name him as my chief of staff. Not going to happen.)
Have I got concerns? Plenty.
Let’s start with voters’ memories. They’re typically bad. (See above, regarding my attitudes about the police, homelessness, and so on.) But there’s always the chance my opponents do an effective job of reminding them about my association with all kinds of corrupt and questionable characters who’ve swirled around me for years, from Mohammed Nuru, my imprisoned former head of Department of Public Works (and a guy I used to date), to Harlan Kelly, my former Public Utilities head, who’s also in jail. These characters represent a can of worms I’d prefer people keep tightly closed.
Then there’s the budget deficit, on its way to $1.4 billion by 2027 under my watch. Am I to blame for that? OK, maybe I am. I have proposed ever-increasing budgets and giving every city employee a raise. (This is the cost of running the City Family. They better turn out in droves to vote for me!)
There’s also a pesky effort to reform the city’s charter by taking an ax to the commission structure. I might have liked that idea at one time, because it would strengthen the mayor’s office. But it also would cut back on mayoral patronage, what with all those commissioners who get city health benefits along with their unnecessary volunteer positions.
And so I tried to maneuver around Proposition D (written by TogetherSF Action, which has received funding from Michael Moritz, the chairman of The Standard) and around Prop. E (written by Peskin, who says he wants to “study” commissions, that artful dodger) by issuing an executive directive to take two extra years to study commissions. Take that, Aaron. I too know a thing or two about bureaucratically kicking the can down the road, my friend.
Because I’ve got to be honest about something — at least with myself. I’m not all that interested in reforming city government. The government has been my professional home in one way or another for nearly my whole adult life. What I’m most interested in is getting reelected. And I think it’s going to happen.
**The author of this column is not an actual mind-reader. But he is a student of the late, great columnist William Safire, who employed the “mind reading” technique to great effect over a 33-year career and whose biography the author is currently writing.