Despite being telegraphed months earlier, San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin’s plunge into the race for mayor in early April made a big splash, leaving some supporters of leading candidates — including incumbent London Breed, former Interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and philanthropist Daniel Lurie — uneasy. Can he win? He seems to think so. His path to victory may be uphill, but opponents must take care not to hand it to him.
Peskin’s rise to power has always depended on that “progressive” label. In reality, he represents a bloc of institutions and voters that is perhaps better referred to as “preservationist.” They share a reactionary and outwardly populist outlook on city planning and governance, with a zero-sum game perspective. He’s also cultivated a reputation as a fiscal hawk, making him appealing to some relatively conservative voters despite his chosen label.
There is another side to Peskin’s vituperative, activist mien. According to an opposition research memorandum commissioned in 2015, he developed a reputation as “power-hungry, petty and vindictive, a bully, uncooperative, verbally abusive and confrontational.” The conventional wisdom has always been that he could not win a citywide vote.
On top of this, the last few years have not been great for progressives.
The year 2022 featured wildly successful recalls of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and similarly aligned Board of Education commissioners, as well as the election of more centrist members of the Board of Supervisors. The primary election this past March featured ballot measure wins for Mayor London Breed and a blowout in the race for Democratic Central Committee that gave centrist Democrats a supermajority on the politically powerful body.
Polls from earlier this year seem split on whether Breed, Farrell, or Lurie are win, place, or show. A Feb. 22 San Francisco Chronicle poll had Farrell leading Breed but within the margin of error; others have had Breed leading but vulnerable. The latest poll commissioned by tech-backed advocacy group GrowSF continues to show Breed in the lead despite low favorables, but again, within the margin of error. Surprisingly, Peskin is only in fourth place above Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who, as the other self-identified progressive, is the most likely to hand second-choice votes to the board president. But there’s still a large pool of undecided voters.
“All races tighten as November gets closer. I still think Peskin will get an ‘automatic Progressive vote’ of more than 20%, which makes him formidable,” political analyst and former consultant David Latterman told The Voice in an e-mail. “He won’t get [the Democratic Party] but don’t underestimate his ability to make a deal for other endorsements. And he’ll make a hard NIMBY push for the Westside. I think undecideds will wait until the end to make a choice, and [they] aren’t monolithic.”
The possibility of a Peskin win was credible enough for TogetherSF, a centrist political group, to halt plans for a November ballot measure to give the mayor’s office more power.
Peskin also wants his campaign to have coattails. He hopes to help save the reelection of beleaguered District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan and boost his agenda on development issues. Along with this election season’s battles comes politicking over the city’s evolving plans for upzoning neighborhoods, which Peskin will certainly highlight.
Apart from benefiting from the expected higher turnout in a race during a presidential election year, Peskin sees a viable win in a ranked-choice voting contest. He could leverage his reputation as the smartest guy in the Supervisors’ chambers and unaddressed pain points from other parts of the city’s political spectrum to gather enough lower-tier and undecided votes to win a race where frontrunners get eliminated in multiple ranked-choice rounds.
It’s happened before in Bay Area races.
“If this were a normal election, I would’ve won in a landslide,” former State Senator Don Perata told supporters in a concession speech at the end of Oakland’s 2010 mayoral contest. At the beginning of the race, he was seen as the odds-on favorite and led in campaign spending. Instead, Jean Quan, a city council member to his left, won the race. She became Oakland’s first Asian-American mayor and female mayor and the first city council member to win the post in 50 years.
Quan won by focusing attacks on Perata, the big-money outsider from Sacramento, appealing to supporters of other candidates to make her their second choice.
“It seemed clear to me that you had Don Perata and a bunch of non-Perata contenders, so consolidating those votes in the multiple rounds seemed the clear path to victory,” Parke Skelton, who was Quan’s campaign manager in the 2010 race, told The Voice in an interview. “It didn’t take a lot of genius to figure that out, so that’s what we did.”
However, Skelton doesn’t see many parallels between this year’s contest in San Francisco and the 2010 Oakland race. And Jason Overman, who ran the field campaign for Rebecca Kaplan, whose second-choice votes helped Quan win, doesn’t completely buy into the narrative.
Whether Peskin can leverage ranked-choice voting to win ultimately depends on how much of the vote he has to start with.
Overman told The Voice in an interview, “I don’t think it’s comparable to what you’ll see in San Francisco in 2024. The race was for an open seat, and I don’t think people sat down and said, ‘Hey, let’s do this together.’ It was essentially a three-candidate race, and two candidates already had overlapping support bases; I think it happened much more organically.”
Quan’s victory wasn’t the only ranked-choice-voting upset in 2010. In San Francisco’s own District 10, Malia Cohen won the race for supervisor after placing third in the first round. There were 21 candidates in that race, and no contender garnered a majority until after 20 passes of ranked-choice votes.
Experienced sources we’ve spoken with praised Peskin’s messaging so far (though one may take issue with his “leader in recovery for a city in recovery” talking point). His April 6 kickoff rally at Portsmouth Square had a large crowd, and he already has a brick-and-mortar campaign office on Market Street, across from the Castro Safeway, smack dab in the middle of the city and straddling precincts long labeled “progressive.”
The board president is also aggressively touting endorsements from emerging front groups like Small Business Forward, an advocacy group started late last year. It’s just the beginning of efforts by Peskin’s campaign and traditional allies to chip away at frontrunners’ assumed support. Initial reports describe his fundraising as modest, but that goes with his brand, and allied 501(c)4 nonprofits such as San Francisco Rising and the Phoenix Project will likely campaign for him or at least push narratives that help his campaign.
Whether Peskin can leverage ranked-choice voting to win ultimately depends on how much of the vote he has to start with.
“I do think there’s a lot of reason to believe that through various endorsements and campaigns, Peskin will get the 30 percent or so of voters who strongly and regularly support progressive candidates,” Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University and an expert on urban politics and voting behavior, told The Voice in an interview. “That puts him in a strong position.”
If Peskin starts to poll well, the frontrunners will have to counter by turning the tables on him with an “Anyone but Peskin” strategy. But now, centrist candidates are still in backbiting mode — a possible presage to the “moderate-on-moderate violence” one outlet predicted before Peskin declared.
Farrell has already cast shade on Breed’s record. Lurie has done the same to Farrell. Breed is flogging new stats to convince voters she’s dealing with the city’s political “bull—t.” But her campaign is mulling backing out of a debate cosponsored by a political action committee now seen as too close to Farrell’s campaign.
And, lest we forget, Breed and Farrell have a history. Serving together on the Board of Supervisors in 2017, Farrell allowed himself to be used by the board’s progressive faction to block Breed from being named Interim Mayor after the death in office of Mayor Ed Lee.
As a result, it may be hard to keep what should be a beauty contest for the frontrunner representing the city’s consensus from looking like a brawl. “What’s complicated is that you need to take down the other candidate without turning off their supporters,” Todd David, political director at centrist PAC AbundantSF, told The Voice in a phone call.
If the beauty contest turns nasty or takes too long, campaigns could remain distracted from reminding voters that Peskin and his record symbolize a Board of Supervisors more loyal to narrow interests than everyday voters and whose oppositional relationship to the mayor’s office drives much of City Hall’s destructive gridlock.
“From his years-long behavior to the simple fact he’s been in government for 20 years (and thus an institutional problem) — he’s never faced deep city-wide scrutiny of his conduct,” says Latterman. “Imagine ad after ad of his greatest hits and word-for-word transcripts. I’ve heard several [independent committees] will do this, but who knows? No campaign should ever count on those to do its work for them.”
