Voters in District 4 (Sunset, Parkside, Lakeshore, and adjacent neighborhoods) are receiving ballots for the Sept. 16 election to recall their supervisor, Joel Engardio. They’re also being inundated by tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of online advertising– almost as much as what’s being spent for canvassing– from Engardio supporters. There are also bitter arguments in online forums between recall opponents and supporters, and some alleged censorship and favoritism by online platforms. But questions arise as to whether the strategic or personal online wars will be of any consequence, given that the question of whether to recall Engardio, one with significant implications for both the Sunset and San Francisco, will ultimately be decided by comparatively few people.
Engardio is facing a recall mainly due to constituents’ anger over his role in closing the Upper Great Highway to vehicles and its subsequent incorporation into a new park fronting Ocean Beach. Christened as Sunset Dunes by the Recreation and Park Department, the process was stunningly fast: The supervisor requested the hearing for the required ballot measure in July 2024, and the park opened the following April, upending previous, more incremental planning.
Usually, such projects take enough time that the opening of and credit for the end product are easily claimed by a successor of the responsive elected official. In this case, Engardio gets to keep all the credit — or rather, blame.
The ballot measure that authorized the closure of the Upper Great Highway, Measure K, passed last November with almost 55 percent of citywide voters in support, but with 64 percent of District 4 voters opposed. Residents claim the vote was patently unfair and also violates state law. The Great Highway issue, along with possible traffic impacts, also rubbed salt into earlier grievances of Westside residents, including anxiety over development that makes approval of pro-housing policies an uphill battle, and even resentment over the use of Golden Gate Park for concert attractions, which generate parking, traffic, and noise burdens.
“The overarching problem is that the internet is very good with haystacks but not very good with needles.”
It almost seems as if San Francisco elites want to turn the Westside into some kind of border zone, where gringos can cross the border, get pissed, poop in the streets, and then safely go home with no consequences. And rather than representing home constituents, some Sunset residents see Engardio as a sort of quisling.
The emotional aspect of the recall election is playing out in online social platforms like Nextdoor and Reddit. Recall supporters have alleged that Engardio’s campaign is colluding with platform moderation teams to squelch posts supporting the recall. In the case of Nextdoor, at least one person associated with Engardio’s campaign is part of the moderation team on Nextdoor and appears to have let his bias come through in his moderating. On the other hand, sources close to the anti-recall campaign have pointed out that Nextdoor has also censored messages from their side, including posts by Engardio, which could be considered constituent communication and not campaigning. (As this article goes to press, we were advised by a source close to the anti-recall campaign that Nextdoor has removed all of Engardio’s posts and that he now has only read-only privileges on the platform.)
(We reached out to both Nextdoor and Reddit for comment. We also reached out to the Nextdoor volunteer moderator, Tyler Stegall, who responds: “I take my responsibility as a volunteer Nextdoor community review team member very seriously, and posts are only removed after voting from multiple community review team members has occurred. Nextdoor has clear community guidelines, and posts that are reported and determined to break those guidelines are removed.… I have volunteered for almost a year helping Joel because I believe in the work he’s doing.… after being personally targeted by the recall campaign with slander and misinformation, I am now even more motivated to stand with Joel.” Stegall admits the anti-recall campaign compensated him, but for video editing work, not for being a keyboard warrior. )
Joe Arellano, spokesman for the Stop the Engardio Recall campaign, told The Voice that allegations of collusion “are just more ridiculous claims from tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists. We aren’t going to dignify this BS with a response.”
The “more” refers to allegations that Engardio and company tried to conceal a May 2024 meeting with Todd David, the political director of Abundant SF, and Lucas Lux, president of Friends of Great Highway Park, from a schedule report submitted to the city’s Ethics Commission.
But how valuable is all this wailing into the wires in terms of getting enough voters out to either save Engardio from or sink him for his political mistakes?
“Advertising on local news sites is always going to be a lot more effective from a campaign standpoint than the squabbling of activists and fanboys and fangirls on social platforms,” Chris Nolan, former business columnist and founder of Spot-On Ads, told The Voice in a phone call. “But the problem with places like Reddit and Nextdoor is that they don’t really take political advertising. You either engage in the fray or try to pretend it doesn’t exist, which is a pretty dumb idea.”
Meanwhile, more consequential online moves are occurring with advertising. So far, San Francisco’s ethics commission reports that the anti-recall campaign has garnered more than $720,000 in campaign cash, mainly from a few tech-enriched parties. They’ve spent almost $83,000 on digital ads so far. Meanwhile, the recallers have a war chest of $221,000 from a much larger cohort of donors. Targeted online political advertising means that most times a Sunset resident opens a YouTube cat video or streams a movie, they’re getting a message opposing the recall.
But how much juice is left in the online ad squeeze when you’re targeting such a small group of voters? Less than 27,000 people voted in the November 2022 contest that elected Engardio to his current job.
“Political people want to emulate the winning strategy of a presidential campaign. That’s the equivalent of a brand advertising campaign,” Nolan adds. “They have billion-dollar budgets, they want to talk to different slices of the American population at different times for different reasons. But once you start to scale that down, the costs become prohibitive, and the effectiveness decreases. The overarching problem is that the internet is very good with haystacks but not very good with needles.”
