Absolutely no one was shocked Tuesday night when early returns in the District 4 recall election sealed the political fate of District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio. Almost 65 percent of those early returns voted to recall him. Early ballots from every single precinct in the district overwhelmingly supported the recall.
In a telling comparison, the 65 percent result echoes another significant number: the percentage of voters in District 4 who opposed Proposition K, the 2024 ballot measure to close the Upper Great Highway to vehicle traffic full-time, setting the stage for converting the highway into Sunset Dunes park. Now that he’s lost his job, Engardio takes solace in “being on the right side of history” in supporting the park.
Engardio steamrolled the measure through the Board of Supervisors. Five of his colleagues supported it, assuming that if the home supervisor is carrying it, he must have the support in his home district. Fifty-five percent of voters citywide supported it, believing that any new park must be a good thing, like Mom, apple pie, and free ice cream. The problem is that most District 4 residents view Sunset Dunes as turning a valued thoroughfare into a dead end. Any poll, or even a quick survey of people who supported Engardio’s election as supervisor, would have revealed that.
There are also indications that Engardio wore out his welcome within the walls of City Hall as well. Despite identifying with the supervisors’ current “moderate majority,” he recently and inexplicably sided with the body’s performative progressives to send contracting reform legislation, which could save the city millions of dollars, back to committee to protect an oversight board that hadn’t had a proper quorum in years.
Mayor Daniel Lurie, despite his need to retain a majority of supportive board members to implement his agenda, would not take a position on the recall. Tuesday night, he released an ambivalent statement describing how he had heard “countless west side families say what San Franciscans have been feeling for years: that their government is doing things to them, not with them, and that government is not working to make their lives better.” Lurie now gets to pick Engardio’s immediate successor, but if he wants that person to survive an electoral gauntlet, he’ll need to compromise in his selection criteria.
Engardio is the first sitting San Francisco supervisor to be recalled. He’s also the first person ever to have been elected as supervisor under the city’s district elections system, which took effect in 2000, after defeating an incumbent.
Most District 4 residents view Sunset Dunes as turning a valued thoroughfare into a dead end. Any poll, or even a quick survey of people who supported Engardio’s election as supervisor, would have revealed that.
He overcame long odds to defeat an incumbent with robust establishment backing, in part because he identified himself with a movement that had germinated in various corners of the city in 2022, aimed at recalling elected officials whose actions, or at least their associations, had sparked mass public outrage. This included three members of the Board of Education over that body’s series of parent-enraging actions, ranging from ending middle school algebra classes to renaming a third of the city’s public schools because they memorialized “problematic” figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, as well as the controversial “reform” under then District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Engardio reiterated this in his run for supervisor against incumbent Gordon Mar, a progressive who was heavily backed by the city’s powerful Labor Council, which also supported Boudin and the school board commissioners. He sold his candidacy with promises to increase police patrols in the neighborhoods and a low-impact plan to build more housing. However, these efforts were overshadowed by the sudden push to close the Upper Great Highway, which ultimately sparked a whirlwind of outrage against both Engardio and housing development in general.
Engardio’s election in 2022 was seen as a second step toward building a more centrist majority on the Board of Supervisors. The first was then Mayor London Breed’s appointment of Matt Dorsey to replace Sacramento-bound Matt Haney in District 6 earlier that year, and Dorsey’s subsequent election in his own right that November. The third step was the election of Danny Sauter and Bilal Mahmood in November 2024, the same election that featured Proposition K.
That election also featured a contest in District 1 between moderate Marjan Philhour and Labor Council-backed incumbent Connie Chan, a staunch opponent of the centrist pro-public safety, pro-housing agenda. Philhour lost to Chan by a slim margin in a heavily contested race, which featured misinformation that Philhour supported Proposition K (she didn’t). Some say Philhour’s loss is among several instances of collateral damage from the ballot measure.
Progressives are now crowing about “payback” after their nominal leader, former Supervisor Aaron Peskin, took over the campaign to recall the supervisor. Moreover, there are now indications that policy victories enabled by the earlier recalls, at least at the Board of Education, have basically evaporated. The “moderate majority’s” stated goal of building more housing to restore some semblance of affordability, especially for young professionals, is now also in danger with Engardio’s political self-immolation.
Like many American big cities, San Francisco has a long history of political battles between the performative left and liberal figures with more pragmatic sensibilities toward economic development. Unlike most of them, San Francisco’s left has often been able to win the day by fracturing centrist coalitions. This time, it would appear they were able to co-opt mostly conservative west side voters, who had joined with the center on public safety issues, by amplifying the “war on cars” represented not so much by the Great Highway closure but its hastening by Engardio at the blindered behest of donors overly focused on a vanity project. He literally made a road to nowhere for himself, and quite possibly for his putative allies as well.
