Goings-on in SF — Week of June 12-18

Written By Bill Jackson

Happy Sunday, Brionies!


…and thank you! Last Tuesday night, after more than two years of District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s incompetence, corruption, and dogmatism, San Franciscans said “enough is enough” and sent him packing. Word is that he’s already secured a new position – vaya con dios, comrade. Many of you played an instrumental role in making this happen, whether it was through donating, volunteering, spreading the word to friends and family, or just showing up and being a part of centrist, sensible organizations like the Briones Society. Take some time to enjoy this victory. Today we bring you a special edition of Goings-on, devoted to analyzing the results of the election. But, first…

Stuff you should know

Election retrospective

  • Minutes after the initial results came in showing Boudin being recalled by a whopping 22 point margin, a flurry of analysis pieces were published on local and national news websites. That’s because, in the modern era of first-to-print-wins journalism, reporters have to pre-write (at least) three narratives about an election even before the first votes are tabulated: one describing a resounding victory, one describing a resounding defeat, and one describing something in the middle. Needless to say, fact-free analyses aren’t analyses, at all, and we should be wary of crediting them or, frankly, the outlets that publish them (we promise this isn’t another diatribe on the long decline of American journalism). For one thing, it’s looking increasingly likely that, as additional votes are counted, the recall margin will settle at somewhere around 10 points, with approximately 55% of voters choosing Yes on Proposition H. Still a decisive victory, but it doesn’t exactly support some of the more hyperbolic conclusions that observers initially drew from the election. As noted in this digest before, a common mistake in politics is to over-index on the favorable results of an election – in other words, to drink one’s own Kool-Aid – without acknowledging underlying structural factors that may have contributed just as much to one’s success as did the strength of one’s message or candidate. Boudin, who was elected due to a combination of cresting anti-Trump sentiment, ranked choice voting anomalies, backlash against Mayor Breed’s last-minute appointment of a Boudin rival as interim District Attorney, and a very suspicious endorsement by Sing Tao Daily, is Exhibit A for what can happen when you make this mistake.    

  • In that spirit of humility, rather than trying to claim that one or more factors definitively resulted in Boudin’s ouster, let’s instead consider a variety of hypotheses that may or may not be confirmed over the next couple election cycles.

  • First, some of the hyperbolic conclusions dismissed above contain a grain of truth. There does seem to be what the kids these days call a “vibe shift” in the Democratic Party, which is now trying to memory-hole the fact that Defund the Police was party gospel only two years ago. That’s not to say that Democrats have suddenly come to their senses, but a string of wins this year for the left mods over the left progs, including the Board of Education recalls in February, as well as the de-gerrymandering of 2012 district lines and Matt Haney’s trouncing of David Campos in April, indicate that the party’s voters have become slightly less enamored with suicide-pact virtue signalling than they were previously.

  • Importantly, this does serve to bolster at least some of the arguments being made by very online leftists in the wake of the recall. No, I’m not referring to the aggressively ignorant takes about a recall system that is too easily exploited (the last successful recall in San Francisco before the Board of Education vote in February occurred in 1914)  a biased media (the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Bay Guardian, Sing Tao Daily, and Mission Local all endorsed No on H), low turnout (sorry, no), or everyone in San Francisco just being a closeted Republican (the Yes on H campaign was chaired by a woman who has been a Democratic activist for decades and is the former chair of the DCCC – quite an impressive long game for a covert GOP operative). Some people are just going to continue to refuse to get it. Others, however, do have a legitimate point about the role that money played in this election. Significantly more money was donated in support of the recall than in opposition to it. Some news outlets have tried to claim that this imbalance is the result of a deluge of rich out-of-towners writing big checks to the pro-recall camp, and many activists in the anti-recall camp have latched onto this claim – but as previously shown, drawing those conclusions from inherently messy data is risky (especially given that the campaign filings exclude small-dollar donations). The question these activists should be asking, rather, is “Why wasn’t Boudin, who has become a veritable celebrity and the national face of the progressive DA movement, able to raise as much money as his detractors?” There are probably many answers to this question, but it’s hard to imagine that one of them isn’t that Democratic super-donors have bigger problems to worry about than a bozo DA in San Francisco who is increasingly out of step with their national agenda.

  • That’s the macro environment. Now, let’s turn to the mezzo. Boudin appears to have lost most of the majority-minority precincts in the city, save a handful in Western Addition and Bayview, and with the major exception of the Mission. Notably, many precincts with sizable Black populations, whose interests Chesa bafflingly claims to represent better than other city officials, voted to recall him. His strongholds were, rather, in the overwhelmingly white, wealthy enclaves of the Inner Sunset, Cole Valley, Ashbury Heights, Noe Valley, and Bernal Heights. Probably the best way to make sense of this is to note that (a) Hispanic voters, who comprise a large share of the residents in the Mission, are San Francisco’s most progressive constituency, and (b) the foregoing neighborhoods are the centers of organized progressive activism in the city. There’s an important point about organization here that we’ll return to in a moment.

  • The framing of this article isn’t great (especially the misleading “wealthy whites” headline), but it correctly points out that, among those who voted, Asians overwhelmingly supported the recall. This is hardly surprising, given the increasing prevalence of violent criminals targeting Asians over the last two years. The more interesting question is whether this year’s recalls have galvanized San Francisco’s Asian communities, which traditionally did not vote in large numbers, to flex their electoral muscles. The answer appears to be “yes.” The below chart shows a steady uptick in the share of total voter turnout contributed by the city’s majority Asian neighborhoods (disclaimer for all the following charts: the y-axes are truncated for clarity – we’re talking about single digit percentage point increases, but in the world of politics that’s still a significant margin). If you run correlations here between “% Asians” in a precinct and “% Voted,” you’ll find that the result changes from “negative relationship” to “little to no relationship” over the last seven elections. If this trend continues, it will have a considerable impact on the direction of San Francisco politics. In Tuesday’s election, “% Asians” in a precinct correlated with more conservative voting patterns, including No on Proposition A, No on Proposition B, no on Proposition F, and opting for Republican candidates like Bill Shireman, John Dennis, Lanhee Chen, Eric Early, Nathan Hochman, and Brian Dahle.

  • Rather than it being wealthy whites who joined Asians in the Yes on H voting bloc (again, running correlations here between “Median Household Income” or “Median Annual Earnings” and support for the recall returns “little to no relationship”), it was moderates who turned out in large numbers to oust Boudin. The below chart shows a steady uptick in the share of total voter turnout contributed by the city’s most moderate neighborhoods, as defined by the Progressive Voter Index. This lends credence to a narrative that probably isn’t getting enough attention: Over the last few elections, we seem to be witnessing a “revolt of the normies” in San Francisco, with moderate voters waking up to the fact that you can’t simply check out of political involvement for 20-odd years and expect the activist class will govern responsibly in your absence.

  • Both of the foregoing bullets tell part of the story, but also leave something important out. Asian communities and moderates didn’t just get angry and vote, they organized and mobilized. Over the last couple of years, a number of political clubs clustered around the center of the political spectrum (including, ahem, the Briones Society) have sprung up, and the recall campaigns themselves have provided an important channel through which thousands of normie residents have gotten involved with and trained on political activism. Support for this argument can be found in the following charts, which break out normalized voter turnout over the last three years by Asian and moderate neighborhoods (note: the normalizing factor can result in turnout numbers higher than 100%). What should be immediately clear is that the increase in turnout share discussed in the foregoing bullets was largely driven by higher turnout in West of Twin Peaks, the Sunset, Sea Cliff, the Marina, the Richmond, and Lake Merced. 

Now look at this article – specifically, the graphic showing turnout differences between 2019 and 2022. What you see isn’t an accident – these neighborhoods were intentionally targeted with intensive GOTV efforts, including text campaigns and lit drops. Ironically, it may be that Chesa Boudin, Alison Collins, and Gabriella Lopez’s lasting legacy will be to have catalyzed the rebirth of the moderate political machine in San Francisco. The efficacy of this machine, which largely operated through grassroots networking via alternative channels of communication like Twitter, Slack, and Substack, not only in ousting Boudin, but also in defeating Propositions A and C, is a testament to both its growing strength and the increasing degree to which the city’s establishment media, political clubs, and union chapters are out of touch with voter sentiment. 

  • Finally, let’s look at the micro. Once the recall was on the ballot, Boudin faced a number of structural headwinds, some of his own making. First, without an opponent running against him, he had no one to attack. In politics if you’re playing defense, you’re already losing. Boudin tried to remedy this with an increasingly unhinged campaign to paint the recall as a right-wing takeover of San Francisco, but voters rejected a similar tack by the Board of Education in the run up to February’s election. If anything, it may have alienated a number of voters on the bubble by insulting their intelligence. He also made some half-hearted attempts to transform the recall into a referendum on the SFPD, but this strategy failed for a number of reasons. First, the SFPD is the only city agency viewed net positively by voters. Second, and more importantly, the SFPD didn’t give him what he really needed: a major scandal involving manifest corruption, a bad police shooting, or an overtly racist arrest on video. In part, this was because our police force hasn’t been doing much policing lately. We can give the SFPD the benefit of the doubt regarding this phenomenon and ascribe it in part due to a severe staffing shortage, but it certainly also seems that at least some officers have been engaged in a work stoppage. Nevertheless, this strategy didn’t resonate with voters because when the police did arrest criminals, Boudin routinely released them – even repeat, violent offenders. Boudin came into office promising to stop prosecuting violations of the very laws that make cities livable, including basic prohibitions against “public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.” He told the SFPD to bring him “kilos, not crumbs,” but when they did, he took no action. Ultimately, Chesa’s biggest enemy was Chesa: unwilling to acknowledge his errors, blaming everyone but himself for the failures of his office, making tone deaf remarks about criminals, dismissing victims, and condescending to voters. In person, he and his proxies came across as angry and defensive whenever anyone challenged their worldview. Leave it to former Mayor Willie Brown to say it plainly: “It was a bad idea for him to be a politician in the beginning. The personality isn’t there.”

A Republican recall?

  • While it’s true that the Boudin recall was led, organized, funded, and operated by Democrats, there is something that bears mentioning now that the election is over: The ideas and policy prescriptions that animated the recall are ones that Republicans, not Democrats, have consistently promoted for years. Public safety isn’t an exclusively or inherently conservative notion, but credit needs to be given where credit is due. The dramatic collapse in urban crime rates beginning in the mid 1990s were the result of commonsense policies implemented by Republican mayors and governors – and, in some cases, Democratic mayors and governors under pressure from Republican challengers – who called for more police on the street and more accountability in sentencing. Over the last decade, too many Democrats have embraced substance-free, anti-police and anti-accountability philosophies du jour around criminal justice reform, caricaturing the Republican position as nothing more than “lock ‘em up and throw away the key.” Sometimes, those criticisms were justified. Most of the time, they were not. In coming elections, voters too young to recall the state of urban centers in the 1970s and 80s would do well to remember the impact of Democrats’ break from reality during the 2010s, and note that Republicans, at least on this issue, have been right from the start.

Regards,

The Briones Society

Bill Jackson
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