The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC), the governing body of the local Democratic Party, is in turmoil over its handling of sexual assault allegations against District 8 supervisorial candidate Manny Yekutiel.
Now the committee’s chair, prosecutor Nancy Tung, is facing calls to resign. And Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi appears to be helping turn those calls into something more organized.
The Voice has confirmed with multiple sources at the DCCC and City Hall that Eskenazi has contacted San Francisco elected officials, would-be candidates and DCCC members with the following message:
Hello. This is Joe Eskenazi.
Mission Local is reaching out to every San Francisco elected official, aspiring elected official and all the members of the DCCC to ask this question. Please respond promptly. This will be printed up in an article and graphic akin to this one:
[Mission Local link]
The question:
“Should Nancy Tung resign from the DCCC and/or step down as San Francisco Democratic Party chair? Why or why not?”
In other words: Who’s with Tung, and who isn’t?
On one level, what Eskenazi is doing is perfectly defensible journalism. But timing matters. Sending the questionnaire between Tung’s apology and the scheduled reconsideration meeting means the published results could become a scoreboard for DCCC members to consult before they vote — turning a “survey” into a mechanism for building the very outcome it purports to measure.
The questionnaire comes on the heels of calls for Tung’s resignation from the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee (SFWPC), congressional candidate Connie Chan and rage farming by numerous progressive-aligned social media accounts.
It also comes as the DCCC prepares to reconsider how it handled the Yekutiel endorsement — the very controversy that put Tung in the hot seat in the first place.
The Yekutiel controversy
The DCCC endorsed Yekutiel for District 8 supervisor on Aug. 26, while the candidate was facing allegations from progressive political operative Brad Chapin that Yekutiel groped him at a house party in early 2020.
Chapin filed a police report in April 2026. SFPD investigated the allegation but determined that there was insufficient evidence to establish probable cause for criminal charges and placed the case on inactive status, pending possible additional evidence. Chapin subsequently took his account to The San Francisco Standard, which published the allegation June 30.
The Chronicle followed with its own report July 6, treating the allegation as serious but unproven. Its reporting included evidence supporting Chapin’s account, while also making clear that the newspaper could not independently establish that the alleged assault occurred.
The DCCC had delayed its District 8 endorsement vote while conducting its own investigation. On Aug. 26, the committee concluded that it could neither substantiate nor determine whether the alleged assault occurred.
It then voted 12-10 to endorse Yekutiel.
Mayor Daniel Lurie endorsed Yekutiel in September after discussing the allegations with him. By then, Yekutiel had the backing of a majority of the sitting Board of Supervisors, other elected officials and roughly 100 political and community leaders.
There were obvious reasons for that support: Yekutiel had deep political and social connections in San Francisco, the DCCC investigation had failed to substantiate the allegation, and Chapin was a political operative with his own history in progressive circles.
But there was another story circulating inside political circles.
Supporters of Yekutiel’s chief rival, Gary McCoy, said there were other people who had experienced inappropriate behavior by Yekutiel and suggested that more allegations could emerge.
Catie Stewart, a spokesperson for McCoy’s campaign, put it more explicitly after the Aug. 26 endorsement vote.
“We believe Mr. Chapin,” Stewart told Mission Local. “We also believe the whisper network of other survivors who, for several years, have experienced inappropriate behavior, sexual harassment and assault from Mr. Yekutiel.”
That statement is worth remembering now.
The allegations arrive
For more than a month, those additional allegations remained behind the scenes.
Then, on Oct. 1, The Standard reported allegations from Ryan Clark and his male partner, who accused Yekutiel of groping them at a Pride event at The Midway in June 2023.
Clark and his partner subsequently told The Chronicle that Lurie’s Sept. 11 endorsement was the “last straw” that persuaded them to go public. They said they were disturbed that political leaders appeared to be giving greater weight to Yekutiel’s denial than to Chapin’s allegation.
The new allegations changed the political calculus almost overnight.
Yekutiel dropped out of the race. Lurie and most of his prominent political supporters withdrew their endorsements, with many shifting their support to McCoy.
And Tung apologized for the way the DCCC handled the endorsement process and investigation.
That might have been the end of the political postmortem.
It wasn’t.
Enter the whip count
Progressive activists and politicians are now pressing for Tung’s resignation.
Among them is Chan, who is simultaneously a congressional candidate, a sitting supervisor and a member of the DCCC. Chan did not play a substantial public role in the controversy over Yekutiel before the committee’s endorsement, but she is now calling for Tung to step down.
And now a prominent member of the local press appears to be joining the effort — not by endorsing Tung’s removal, but by asking virtually every person who matters in San Francisco Democratic politics to publicly declare where they stand.
Eskenazi’s questionnaire is, technically, a survey.
But the timing makes it something more interesting.
The DCCC has a scheduled meeting at which members are expected to reconsider the controversy. In the days immediately preceding that meeting, Eskenazi is asking DCCC members and virtually every relevant elected official to answer whether Tung should resign — and informing them that their answers will be published in an article and graphic.
That is not merely documenting a vote.
It is potentially counting the votes before the vote happens.
The distinction matters.
A published tally could give DCCC members a preview of where their colleagues stand. It could identify who is prepared to break with Tung and who is not. It could make staying silent politically conspicuous. And it could give wavering members a sense of where the political winds are blowing before they enter the room.
In other words, the “survey” could function as a whip count.
And a whip count does more than measure political support. It can help organize it.
Journalism or political pressure?
There is nothing inherently improper about asking politicians where they stand. In fact, aggressively asking public officials uncomfortable questions is one of the things political journalism is supposed to do.
But journalism has a peculiar relationship with political power: Sometimes shining a light on a decision changes the decision.
That is particularly true when the journalist publishes a running tally of who supports or opposes a sitting party chair immediately before the body that chair leads is preparing to reconsider its handling of a controversy.
Officials who want Tung gone can use the questionnaire to demonstrate momentum.
Officials who want to keep her can see who else is standing with them.
Officials who are undecided can see which way the crowd appears to be moving.
And officials who would prefer not to take sides can discover that declining to answer may itself become a political statement.
That has the structural characteristics of a loyalty test.
It also has the characteristics of a campaign.
Mission Local and Eskenazi have long practiced a highly opinionated, adversarial form of local journalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Local journalism does not have to be polite, neutralized or deferential to the people it covers.
But there is a meaningful difference between reporting on a political revolt and helping organize the pressure surrounding one.
The former is journalism.
The latter is a much more complicated role for a news organization.
Whether Eskenazi’s questionnaire ultimately amounts to one or the other will depend partly on what he does with the responses — and how the DCCC responds.
For now, however, there is an unavoidable irony: A journalist asking politicians to publicly declare whether the chair of the local Democratic Party should resign looks an awful lot like a political operative conducting a whip count.
And in a city where everyone knows everyone, the difference may be less clear than anyone would like.
