The City Family came out in force Tuesday for a venerable, if cringey, Election Day tradition: free lunch at John’s Grill near Union Square.
Former Mayor Willie Brown, still impressively nimble at 90, held court on the sidewalk outside. An ebullient Brooke Jenkins, the soon-to-be-reelected district attorney, promised me we’d have “four more years” to continue an earlier conversation about retail theft. Politicians in and out of office, including Aaron Peskin, Scott Wiener, Jane Kim, Joel Engardio, Catherine Stefani, Mark Leno, and David Chiu, all gripped and grinned their hearts out.
But there was at least one key figure who didn’t make an appearance: Daniel Lurie, who by the end of Tuesday night looked to be on a glide path to becoming San Francisco’s next mayor. His absence, of course, was completely by design.
That’s because, for all the talk of nastiness in local politics, the scene at John’s Grill was a vivid reminder that even adversaries inside City Hall are mostly fond of each other (the cup-half-full interpretation). Also, that these insiders are largely in cahoots to maintain their lavish, taxpayer-funded livelihoods (the empty-cup interpretation). Lurie and his minders wanted nothing to do with either of these narratives.
I had gone to John’s to meet two people who, like their boss, didn’t find their way into the gated-off area of the festivities: Tyler Law and Han Zou, the campaign strategist and manager, respectively, of Lurie’s gold-plated bid to become mayor.
“We didn’t even try to make it in,” Law texted me as we failed to locate each other in the scrum. “We’re just chilling on the outside. Like the outsiders we are.”
The duo agreed to publicly discuss for the first time how they ran a campaign that, at minimum, took a little-known candidate who has never held elective office to the precipice of becoming mayor of San Francisco.
Update: On Thursday night, with nearly 248,000 ballots tallied and Lurie leading Mayor London Breed by more than 26,000 ranked-choice votes, Breed called her rival to concede the election.
Lurie’s lieutenants and I walked away from the mayhem and found a quiet ramen shop a few blocks away. Law, a 35-year-old Oakland native and campaign advertising specialist who’s worked on campaigns for Pete Buttigieg and Tim Kaine, told me that the foundational notion of Lurie’s campaign actually is a bit of a contradiction.
“Daniel had never held elective office, but he was not an outsider,” Law said. “This is really important. We did not describe ourselves as outsiders. The press did. We just said he’s not a City Hall insider. There is a distinction there, although it’s nuanced. Daniel knows everyone around town, and they love him.”
Law is referring to Lurie’s years of hobnobbing as the benevolent head of the philanthropic organization Tipping Point. This goodwill, said Law, simultaneously made Lurie palatable to wide swaths of the electorate but also caused his opponents to underestimate him as a genial but weak candidate. “Daniel is a change candidate at a time the city was ready for change,” said Law. “We don’t know why nobody saw him coming.”
Much has been made of the money Lurie spent on his own campaign, which he self-financed to the tune of $8 million. Law explained that his team took that largesse and, in his telling, ran a different campaign from Lurie’s opponents.
“We knew how to run a big campaign,” he said, noting, for example, that Breed had never received more than about 90,000 first-choice votes in a single campaign, due to the lower turnout of her earlier mayoral races. Meanwhile, Mark Farrell, an interim mayor for six months, had never run a race citywide. Neither had Peskin.
“What we felt looking across the competition was that they were running a supervisor campaign,” said Law.
Lurie, instead, availed himself of the levers of large-scale politicking, beginning with massive digital-ad buys in early August, followed by ubiquitous TV spots several weeks later.
The ads served to boost Lurie’s name recognition. Political types call this “introducing” the candidate to voters. Zou, who joined the campaign in the spring after working on the primary victory of Lateefah Simon for a safely Democratic congressional seat in the East Bay, is a “ground game” expert. The 29-year-old from Connecticut told me the campaign knocked on 220,000 doors, with special emphasis on Chinese voters. These efforts appear to have paid off, with a data report from The Chronicle showing that Lurie had secured more first-round votes within majority-Asian neighborhoods than any other candidate for mayor.
Lurie campaign canvassers carried explicit scripts, tailored to voter preferences. When talking to Farrell supporters, Law said, Lurie campaign workers were instructed to point out that Farrell and Breed voted together 95% of the time on the Board of Supervisors. They may personally loathe each other, in other words, but politically they were in lockstep.
Ultimately, the Lurie campaign got a gift in the form of fresh corruption scandals for Breed and repeated ethical violations for Farrell. It was at this point that the candidate who began relatively unknown but with plenty of goodwill — and few negatives other than the stigma of inherited wealth — began to surge.
A Lurie win clearly will put the City Family (ie, just about everybody gathered Tuesday at John’s Grill) on notice. A Lurie administration may end up retaining some department heads and deputies, but they will all have to reapply for their jobs, Lurie has said.
This tension was evident in the near-total absence of elected officials at Lurie’s election party in the Mission Tuesday night. It wasn’t because they were pooped from their boisterous lunch, but because the overwhelming majority of San Francisco officeholders lined up behind the incumbent mayor. So, too, did the Democratic County Central Committee, which, despite being dominated by the vaunted “Democrats for Change” who swept into office in March, voted against change by endorsing Breed for mayor.
The only muckety muck I’m certain was at the Lurie party was State Assemblymember Matt Haney, who told me he offered Lurie “whatever help he needs.” But that was about it in terms of “Insiders.” The City Family that Lurie has promised to shake up may have been shaking in their boots Tuesday night.
In an anodyne, slogan-filled speech he read from prepared notes, Lurie promised to work with his opponents and their backers if he wins. That the nice, rich guy rose to the moment in a campaign that was supposedly too nasty for his kind portends well if he ends up prevailing in this race. Maybe his promises to demand accountability from the long-entrenched City Family will be kept. Maybe he is just enough of an outsider to rattle the insiders.
Indeed, should Lurie win, the question will immediately become whether a cleverly run — if also self-endowed and exceedingly fortunate — campaign can translate into governing. As a reward for his troubles, Lurie will inherit a city with an $800 million deficit and a litany of other complex problems. The question is whether the new mayor will restore or dismantle the machine that created them in the first place.
Judging from the Election Day optics, a dismantling may be in order.