The Weekly Digest (Special Edition)

Happy Sunday, Brionies!

Last week’s election was one for the ages. At the federal level, Republicans won the Electoral College, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House. In Oakland and LA, our friends ousted decarceralist, incompetent District Attorneys in stunning fashion. And, here in San Francisco, we’ll have a new mayor in City Hall come January. Give yourselves a round of applause!

If we haven’t met before, let me take a moment to say “Hi.” I’m Jay Donde, president of the Briones Society. I’m taking over this week’s Digest from the far more capable hands of our usual editors to bring you a special edition, devoted primarily to the sort of detail-oriented, data-driven election analysis you’ve come to expect from us.

But before we review the past, I want to talk to you about the future. 

In the run-up to the election, to support our endorsees, Briones volunteers collectively:

  • Sent 40 thousand texts;

  • Posted mailers to more than 33 thousand households;

  • Distributed 3,500 doorhangers;

  • Made 2 thousand phone calls;

  • Gave dozens of interviews to local news outlets; and

  • Hosted multiple in-person ballot explainers.

It’s been a long time since San Francisco saw a Republican outreach effort like that, but we could’ve done much, much more. With additional resources, Briones could have swung a number of races towards mod candidates and causes.

In fact, while I hope you enjoy the election analysis below, I want you to stop here and first do three things:

  • If you have time to read nothing else, read the section at the bottom titled, What could’ve been: More Briones = More Mod Wins.

  • Forward this email to all of your friends, whether conservative, centrist, or moderate left — in fact, especially to your friends who are moderate left.

  • Consider this your invitation to participate in the soft launch of the Briones Society’s official membership program!

Over the past three years, we’ve been building something special here in San Francisco, and many of you have been a part of it. Our story is just beginning, though, and we want to recognize the folks who are here with us now, on the ground floor. So, for a short period of time, we’re offering discounted plank owner memberships that include:

  • Early-bird RSVP access to our 2025 speaker series;

  • Briones merch! 

  • And, most importantly, the opportunity to help us support commonsense candidates who put voters, not ideology, first.

Now, without further ado, (literally) everything you need to know about the local races in one convenient place…

What just happened?

In the state-level races, things mostly shook out as expected, at least in terms of topline results. Nancy Pelosi won another two-year term in Congress, Scott Wiener is returning to the State Senate for a third term, Matt Haney is heading back to the State Assembly, and current District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani cruised to a victory in her inaugural State Assembly race.

A new mayor

By now, everyone knows that in the mayor’s race Daniel Lurie significantly overperformed and Mark Farrell did not. For months, it was widely assumed that Lurie’s path to victory was through capturing enough second-place votes from Aaron Peskin, Ahsha Safai, and either London Breed or Farrell supporters — presenting himself as an inoffensive, nice-guy fallback to each of those constituencies — to put him over the top in the final round. 

That strategy momentarily appeared imperiled when a rift emerged between the Lurie and Farrell campaigns a couple months back. Long assumed to be simpatico due to the candidates’ similarities in both their case to voters (“we need change in City Hall”) and their politics (normie liberal), the friendly fire grew increasingly intense and personal towards the final weeks of the campaign, with Farrell explicitly telling his supporters to not rank Lurie number two and reports of Lurie surrogates telling their supporters the same re Farrell. This buoyed the hopes and expectations of the Breed and Peskin campaigns, until late polling showed that Lurie’s support didn’t seem to be impacted. 

But everyone was wrong. Lurie didn’t win because he captured enough second-place votes from the also-rans. He won because he got the majority of first place votes and enough second-place votes from the also-rans. He got the second highest number of second-place votes from Safai and Peskin supporters, and the highest number of second-place votes from Farrell supporters — establishing a lead commanding enough to officially call the race by Thursday, despite there being almost 150 thousand ballots left to be counted.

A few other things stand out upon closer examination of the mayoral race data (as of today’s ballot drop): 

  • About half of Ellen Lee Zhou’s (the only Republican in the race, but not endorsed by the SFGOP or the Briones Society) second-place votes went to Farrell and Lurie, but nearly a third went to Peskin, Safai, and Breed (in that order), and many were exhausted (meaning the voter only ranked Zhou, or all the other candidates ranked by the voter had been eliminated by that round of RCV). 

  • Most of Safai’s second-place votes went to Peskin, but only around a 1,200 more than went to Lurie. Similarly, most of Peskin’s second-place votes went to Breed, but only a couple thousand more than went to Lurie. On the other hand, not only did Lurie get most of Farrell’s second-place votes, he got nearly 25 thousand more than went to the next highest Farrell voter fallback, Breed.

  • Farrell and Safai pursued an RCV compact strategy, in which each told his supporters to rank the other in second place. That appears to have been a smart move by Farrell. Yes, he only ended up with less than 20 percent of Safai supporters’ second-place votes, but the natural level for that number, given the two candidates vastly different politics, is zero.

  • More than a third of Peskin’s ballots were exhausted after he was eliminated, probably due to the fact that his supporters only ranked Safai as a fallback, who was already gone by that round. Interesting to consider what could have been if Breed and Peskin had formed a strange-bedfellows RCV compact in response to Farrell and Safai’s. Breed might be celebrating her reelection right now.

The Board of Supervisors: Not great, Bob!

My back-of-the-envelope taxonomy for our Board of Supervisors divides candidates into Moderate Left, Left, Far Left, and Left of Lenin. Despite the claims of some of our good friends on the other side of the aisle, there are no real centrists or true mods on the Board — at least not as the terms “centrist” or “moderate” are understood outside San Francisco’s blue bubble.

Currently, the Board looks like this:

  • D1: Connie Chan — Far Left

  • D2: Catherine Stefani — Moderate Left

  • D3: Aaron Peskin — Far Left

  • D4: Joel Engardio — Left

  • D5: Dean Preston — Left of Lenin

  • D6: Matt Dorsey — Moderate Left

  • D7: Myrna Melgar — Far Left

  • D8: Rafael Mandelman — Left

  • D9: Hillary Ronen — Far Left

  • D10 Shamann Walton — Far Left

  • D11: Ahsha Safai — Far Left

That breaks down to six Far Left supes, two Left supes, two Moderate Left supes, and one Left of Lenin supe. 

Come January, the Board is going to look like this:

  • D1: Connie Chan — Far Left

  • D2: Catherine Stefani’s replacement after she leaves for the Assembly (appointed by Breed) — probably Moderate Left

  • D3: Danny Sauter — Left/Far Left

  • D4: Joel Engardio — Left

  • D5: Bilal Mahmood — Left/Far Left

  • D6: Matt Dorsey — Moderate Left

  • D7: Myrna Melgar — Far Left

  • D8: Rafael Mandelman — Left

  • D9: Jackie Fielder — Left of Lenin

  • D10: Shaman Walton — Far Left

  • D11: Chyanne Chen — Far Left

So, the new breakdown will be four Far Left, two Left/Far Left, two Left, two Moderate Left, and one Left of Lenin. A marginal improvement, at best. In fact, at least with respect to the Board, I would not describe this election as a victory for moderates. It was more of a stalemate.

As for the usual jockeying for influence amongst activist groups: We now have a more pro-housing city government, but in some ways this election must be seen as a disappointment for the YIMBYs (I’m speaking here specifically about YIMBY, the political organization — not the broader pro-housing movement). They went 3-and-3 with respect to their supervisor endorsements, which is not bad. But they lost the big prize, having gone all-in on Breed for the last 6 years — support that she readily acknowledged and courted as a key component of her political base. Will Mayor Lurie pick up the phone for YIMBY? Of course. But not at 2 AM, like Mayor Breed probably would.

In terms of heightened influence, the big winner is probably Grow SF. Two years ago, they had lots of money, but little power. Now, they can fairly claim to have been indispensable to the elections of two supervisors (Engardio and Mahmood), and have been friendly to and materially supportive of a majority of the other supes, as well as the new mayor. Not too shabby.

The propositions: Now is the time to open a bottle of scotch

Let’s not mince words: This was a bloodbath for moderates. Anyone telling you different on Twitter is either lying or smoking some very strong copium.

San Francisco’s budget deficit is expected to surpass $1 billion within the next five years. Nevertheless, voters passed eight(!) new spending measures. In fact, the only spending measure they didn’t pass was Prop F, which would have provided retention funds to stop the bleeding at SFPD, where officers are quitting and retiring in droves. And Prop K, which would permanently close the Upper Great Highway and was opposed by most of the city’s moderates and — not for nothing — practically every precinct on the west side (where the voters who’ll actually be impacted by the closure live), cruised to a comfortable 55-45 victory.

The sole bright spot is the result of the strange workings of some legal arcana. Prop L, which would sink more money into a Muni system that fails its riders in practically every respect — whether that’s cleanliness, safety, or on-time performance — by taxing rideshares, garnered over 56 percent of the vote. But since Prop M is passing with nearly 70 percent, Prop L is null and void. That’s because Prop M not only overhauls and streamlines the City’s tax code (in a good way!), it contains language that effectively kills Prop L’s tax if Prop M passes with more votes. This explains why so many Moderate Left politicians and civic groups, who are normally quite business friendly and would look askance at this ill-conceived measure, endorsed Prop L: it was a costless way to virtue signal support for public transit, because they knew that even if the proposition won, it would ultimately lose.

Analysis of paralysis

Let’s get some of the high-level table setting out of the way before looking at the nuances of particular races. 

First, I think it’s fair to say that this election represented a sort of reversion to the mean in San Francisco, and that mean is Left — not moderate, not progressive. This is a diverse city with neighborhoods that have wildly different politics, but if you average everything out, you end up with a politician that looks a lot like Joel Engardio or Rafael Mandelman. To escape that center of gravity in any given race, you need to make something happen (or pray that it does). So, what matters?

  • An exogenous trend. For example, BLM in 2019 and 2020 resulting in Chesa Boudin’s election and the passage of various anti-policing measures.

  • Prog group endorsements. These seem to have played a role in pushing Chyanne Chen ahead of Michael Lai in District 11, as well as in pushing Sharon Lai ahead of Moe Jamil in District 3 (though both failed to overtake Sauter). 

  • Candidate quality. Speaking of Sauter, the guy’s basically been laying the groundwork for this victory since he moved to District 3 in 2014, volunteering for leadership positions in a multitude of neighborhood groups, getting to know merchants and residents, and — to be frank — just being a likable dude. He ran a trial balloon race in 2020 against Peskin and got more than 40 percent of the vote. Lai, Jamil, and Matt Susk were good candidates, but it’s hard to beat someone that’s been carefully orchestrating his campaign for 10 years.

  • Party endorsements. The DCCC went 3-and-3 with their Supervisor endorsements and flubbed the mayoral race (they backed Breed), but basically ran the table on the propositions, Board of Education, and Community College Board.

  • The Chronicle’s endorsements. Similar results to the DCCC’s.

  • Turnout. Election after election, turnout is consistently high in the moderate strongholds of West Portal and the Pac Heights/Lake Street corridor, and similarly high in the progressive “donut hole” at the geographic center of the city: Inner Sunset over to Cole Valley, down to Noe Valley and over to Bernal Heights. The perennial question is whether the mods can get the Outer Sunset and Excelsior vote out, and whether the progs can do the same in Western Addition, the Mission, and Potero Hill/Dogpatch.

  • District boundaries. 2022’s redistricting process devolved into a bloodsport for good reason — it likely tipped the scales in at least two races by altering the makeup of their electorates to be more mod or more progressive. 

  • The fork-in-socket factor. One of my favorite quotes is by HL Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Well, eventually — even in California — voters tire of getting it good and hard, as we saw with the ousters of multiple soft-on-crime DAs and the (partial) repeal of Prop 47.

What doesn’t seem to matter, or at least didn’t tip the scales last week?

  • Union endorsements.

  • Endorsements by mod groups like Together SF or Grow SF. This is likely attributable to fundamental differences between prog and mod politics. Lots of progressives are hyper engaged, “Terminally Online” types. When SF Rising or SF Berniecrats endorses someone, progs hear about it and take notice. Moderates, on the other hand, suffer from the distinct disadvantage of having careers, families, friends, and other things that make life worth living. They’re not waiting with bated breath on the latest round of endorsements. 

That’s not to say that unions and mod groups don’t matter. Rather, their significance is in mobilizing money. And, for better or worse, money was arguably the single most important factor in almost every (but not quite every!) single race this election. For example, taking into account both campaign spending and independent expenditures, more than twice as much money supported Chyanne Chen than did Michael Lai. And, of course, Daniel Lurie dropped more than $15 million on his campaign, eclipsing Mark Farrell, London Breed, and Aaron Peskin’s spending combined — even if you take into account Farrell’s candidate-controlled Yes on D committee.

With the above in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of the races.

  • District 1 Supervisor:

    • This one’s a heartbreaker, because despite Chan’s advantages of incumbency, I thought it was Philhour’s to lose. Yes, the Richmond has elected progressive supervisors for the past two decades, but the 2022 redistricting was very favorable to mods in District 1 (arguably moreso even than the addition of the South of Sloat neighborhood to District 4, which helped Joel Engardio oust incumbent Gordon Mar). And turnout was strong along Pac Heights/Lake Street.

    • However, a few things conspired against Philhour. First, she didn’t vocally oppose Prop K, which is deeply unpopular in the Richmond, with some precincts voting more than 80 percent against it.

    • Second, too few of Jeremiah Boehner and Jen Nossokoff’s ballots transferred to Philhour — further underscoring the lesson for both mods and progs that they must ruthlessly cull the field rather than hoping that voters ever really “get” Ranked Choice Voting.

    • And, most importantly, almost $1.5 million was spent supporting Chan, while only about half that was spent supporting Philhour. Despite all the attention paid (no pun intended) to Grow SF’s spending in District 5, this Supervisor race was by far the most expensive this cycle — largely driven by union money. On that note…

  • District 5 Supervisor:

    • About $800 thousand dollars was spent by Mahmood and his primary backers, Grow SF, but Preston and his allies spent almost the same amount. Yes, Scotty Jacobs dropped another $200 thousand mostly on attack ads, but it took a few other things to sink Preston, who not only had the winds of incumbency at his back, but is actually a very talented campaigner.

    • First, redistricting did him no favors — District 5 lost the reliably high turnout and very progressive Inner Sunset and gained the much more heterodox Tenderloin and Civic Center. That was likely compounded by the impacts of the Big Red Shift that propelled the GOP to victory last Tuesday, with Donald Trump improving on his margins across almost every single demographic group and county in America. That’s not a good exogenous trend for a Democratic Socialist like Preston.

    • Second, Mahmood did a good job building inroads into Preston’s coalition, making friends with enough progressive leaders and groups to convince them to, if not support outright support Mahmood, at least temper their enthusiasm for Preston. In many ways, that’s the same playbook Lurie ran by doing things like hiring former Boudin staffer Max Szabo or holding fundraisers at prog-leaning Zuni Cafe.

  • District 7 Supervisor:

    • Another heartbreaker. Melgar was probably the most vulnerable incumbent up for reelection, and the Big Red Shift should have benefitted challenger Matt Boschetto. Unfortunately, the flip side of District 5 losing the Inner Sunset in 2022 was that District 7 gained it, so there were material headwinds facing the moderate candidate.

    • For various reasons, Boschetto’s campaign also got a late start and, similar to what played out in District 1, too few Stephen Martin-Pinto ballots transferred to him.

    • Taking into account Boschetto’s candidate-controlled No on K committee, he outspent Melgar, but clearly not by enough to overcome these hurdles.

  • Props C, D, and E:

    • Like it or not, Aaron Peskin is very good at what he does. He’s been doing it for decades, and now, on his way out the door of City Hall (hopefully forever), he did it again — sponsoring three successful propositions.

    • Two of those propositions, C and E, likely benefited from low-information voting. Prop C establishes an Inspector General position under the City Controller, and was billed as an anti-corruption measure. That sounds sensible, especially in a city where federal indictments of government officials have become a sort of annual tradition. But as we explained in our voter guide, the Inspector General under Prop C is a poor substitute for the kind of empowered, independent auditor that San Francisco really needs.

    • Prop E, on the other hand, likely confused voters due to its similarity to another measure, Prop D. Both promised to streamline the City’s unwieldy, undemocratic, and wasteful complex of more than 100 commissions and committees, but D would do so more aggressively and immediately, while E would simply establish another commission to study the problem of too many commissions (yes, you read that right). This kind of thing — opposing a measure not by campaigning against it, but by placing a similar, but toothless, measure on the ballot in order to confuse voters — is a well-worn dirty trick employed by Peskin and his prog allies. In fact, they did the exact same thing two years ago to sink a ballot measure that would have streamlined housing approvals.

    • These results should drive home the point that it’s not enough just to inform voters. You have to flood the zone with mailers, texts, door hangers, and earned media if you want a measure you care about to rise above the noise of a ballot with 90+ candidates and 25 propositions. That takes money, yes, but the money has to be spent well.

    • And therein lies the rub. An enormous amount of money was spent supporting Prop D and opposing Prop E — altogether over $8 million. But it’s unclear where that money went. I did an informal straw poll and couldn’t find anyone who reported having seen more than a dozen, at most, pieces of Yes on D literature since the start of the race. By comparison, Lurie’s campaign spent twice as much money, but produced what felt like 30 times more material. I was getting multiple pieces of mail from him every day. I couldn’t go five minutes without seeing his face on a billboard or in a commercial. 

  • Prop K:

    • Prop K won for three reasons. First, the proponents of the measure spent almost three times as much as its opponents. Second, they did what Yes on D did not and spent their money to good effect by more or less, well, lying to voters that Prop K would not just close the Upper Great Highway but would also replace it with a park (something that is neither planned for nor funded in the legislation). And third, No on K got murdered by comparatively low turnout in the Sunset.

What could’ve been: More Briones = More Mod Wins 

With additional resources, Briones could have likely altered the results in a number of races, including Props D, E, and K, as well as Supervisor District 1 and Supervisor District 11. The overarching lesson here, particularly for moderate and moderate left candidates and activists looking ahead to 2026, is that you ignore San Francisco’s conservatives at your own peril.

The argument I intend to make is that when Republican voters are properly targeted with outreach, they behave like Matt Boschetto voters. What does that mean? Although we don’t have complete, individual-level data for this election, it’s possible for us to run linear regressions at the precinct level. Regressions are a mathematical tool, one output of which is a coefficient between -1 and 1 that indicates how closely related the movement of one thing is with the movement of another. -1 indicates a perfectly negative relationship, 0 indicates no relationship, and 1 indicates a perfectly positive relationship. For example, the correlation between Boschetto votes and Prop D votes is 0.9. That means, roughly speaking, that when the Boschetto vote share in a given precinct went up, that was very strongly correlated with the Yes on D vote share going up. On the other hand, the correlation between Boschetto votes and Prop K votes is -0.82, so when the Boschetto vote share in a given precinct went up, that was very strongly correlated with Yes on K vote share going down.

But beware! The correlation coefficient doesn’t tell you that one thing necessarily caused another; it just quantifies the extent to which two things move in tandem. And it doesn’t directly translate to a quantity of votes or vote share gained for one thing when another thing moves up or down by a certain amount. 

So, why focus on Boschetto voters? Because the Briones Society focused the overwhelming majority of its GOTV and voter education efforts on District 7 Republicans, and almost all of our materials had Boschetto’s name or face on them. We simply didn’t have the resources to compete across the city, so we decided to concentrate our fire on the west side. The fact that most of Boschetto’s voters were not Republicans, were not contacted by Briones, and may have some progressive policy preferences only underscores the point: the impact of our efforts, reflected in how closely Boschetto’s ballots hewed to the conservative candidates and causes endorsed in our voter guide, is if anything diluted. If we could run regressions only on the Republicans who voted for Boschetto, it would be fair to assume that their votes would be even more closely related to our endorsements. In other words, this analysis probably understates what can be accomplished by outreach to Republicans.

Of course, given the data available, this analysis is more of an art than a science, and there are at least two reasonable objections one might raise to it. First, one might point out that Briones wasn’t the only organization targeting Boschetto voters in District 7. That’s true, but not entirely relevant. The central question is, “How do Republicans and conservatives vote when someone reaches out to them?” not, “How do we apportion credit among the multiple parties that did so?” Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to conclude that Republican voters were more influenced by literature and contacts from an identifiably Republican-aligned organization like Briones than by the same from Grow SF, Connected SF, or others who probably held more sway with Democrats (and did fantastic work!).

One quick-and-dirty way to test this hypothesis is to look at the voting behavior of likely Republicans (again, we don’t have the individual-level data to actually isolate registered Republicans) in other parts of the city, where Briones was not active but other organizations were. For example, take Steve Garvey voters. Garvey is a good benchmark for comparison because he ran in a citywide, top-of-the-ballot race that yielded almost as many total votes as the presidential election, had almost no ground game in San Francisco, and offered very little cross-party appeal. He’s basically the living embodiment of the “Generic Republican” option in a survey sampling all San Francisco voters. As I’ll detail below, his supporters voted less conservatively on propositions than Boschetto’s did across the board, which suggests the messaging they received from non-Republican organizations didn’t penetrate.

Second, one might argue that District 7 conservatives are naturally more conservative than those in other parts of the city. I’ve never seen any evidence to support that, but I suppose that one might reasonably claim that due to income and education-level effects, District 7 conservatives tend to be more informed regarding what’s on their ballots and thus vote in a more consistently conservative fashion.

We can do another quick-and-dirty test of that hypothesis by looking at how supporters of the two more conservative candidates in the 2020 District 7 Supervisor race, Joel Engardio and Stephen Martin-Pinto, voted on the progressive-coded Props C, E, G, J, and L that year. In each case, the relationship between being an Engardio supporter or a Martin-Pinto supporter and voting against one of those propositions was much weaker (ranging between 0.31 and 0.67 in absolute value) than the relationship between being a Boschetto supporter and taking a conservative position on the propositions in 2024. More to the point, however, comparing Engardio and Martin-Pinto supporters’ voting behaviors in 2020 to those of conservatives citywide (using Donald Trump supporters as a proxy) doesn’t reveal a consistent pattern of District 7 conservatives voting in a more ideologically “pure” fashion. 

So how did Boschetto supporters vote? 

  • For every 10 additional percentage points supporting Boschetto in a precinct, there were:

    • Roughly 5 fewer percentage points for Prop C;

    • Roughly 5 more percentage points for Prop D;

    • Roughly 3 more percentage points for Prop F; and

    • Roughly 7 fewer percentage points for Prop K.

What about Garvey supporters?

  • For every 10 additional percentage points supporting Garvey in a precinct, there were:

    • Roughly 3 fewer percentage points for Prop C;

    • Roughly 2.5 more percentage points for Prop D;

    • Roughly 2 more percentage points for Prop F; and

    • Roughly 7 fewer percentage points for Prop K.

So, if Garvey supporters (i.e. Republicans citywide) had been targeted in the same way as Boschetto supporters, we may have seen shifts of up to 2.5 percentage points in some of the races. Again, this is admittedly a very, very rough accounting, and it must be acknowledged that even if all Garvey conservatives voted like Boschetto conservatives, the disparity in numbers between Republicans and Democrats in the city will mitigate the magnitude any potential shift. On the other hand, as noted above, these numbers understate Briones’ impact due to the dilution of conservative votes among Boschetto supporters. In addition, if Garvey supporters voted like Boschetto supporters, the “consistency” with which they voted conservative positions would also increase (because Boschetto votes’ correlation coefficient with those positions was much higher), reducing noise among Garvey ballots and further bolstering a potential shift.

There are two other reasons to assume that greater shifts are within reach. First, by running a disciplined campaign, Yvette Corkrean is proving Briones’ longstanding hypothesis that, while there are just under 40 thousand registered Republicans in San Francisco, the actual number of right-of-center voters in the city is closer to 100 thousand — the number of votes she’ll ultimately garner if overall turnout matches what we saw in 2020. If Corkrean’s supporters are the audience that Briones can reach, that means shifts of up to 5 percentage points or more are possible, enough to swing Prop E, maybe Props D and K, and certainly the razor-thin margins by which Connie Chan is defeating Marjan Philhour and Chyanne Chen is defeating Michael Lai.  

Second, none of the above takes turnout into account. In fact, the most Trumpy precincts in this election not only saw the lowest turnout, but the coefficient was negative: The more Trump voters there were in a precinct, the lower the percentage of voters in that precinct cast a ballot. The opposite was true for Harris voters. In other words, there were a lot of voters out there who would have readily voted No on C, Yes on D, Yes on F, and No on K had someone gotten them out to the polls. And notably, the majority of the most Trumpy precincts are in District 11, where Michael Lai is currently losing by fewer than 100 votes.

Now I’m going to deliver the final kick-in-the-you-know-whats: Not only did moderates leave large numbers of votes on the table in this election by ignoring conservatives and Republicans, and not only could those votes have swung key races — but those votes were also cheap! And I mean that literally. Every vote costs money, whether its spent on mailers, TV ads, or paid volunteers. Democratic votes in this city are expensive, because you’re competing with dozens of other Dem-aligned organizations for influence. But there’s hardly anyone — and, often, no one — talking to Republicans.

Oscar Flores’ campaign for District 11 supervisor is a great example. Flores was the only Republican in a field of seven candidates. He spent a little over $4 thousand on the race and came in fourth. The candidate who came in fifth spent $90 thousand. Once all the votes are counted, the winner, Chen, will have spent close to $125 per first-place vote. Lai, the runner-up, will have spent $45 per first-place vote. Flores’ first-place votes cost $1.60 a piece.

Friends, what more is there to say? Help us help you, and let us do it at a fraction of the cost of other organizations. Take these steps now:

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