Jack Davis, a controversial bare-knuckle political campaigner whose work was instrumental in the election of three San Francisco mayors —Frank Jordan, Willie Brown, and Gavin Newsom, and helped define an era in local politics, passed away in San Francisco last Friday. He turned 79 on May 1.
Originally from Tamaqua, a mining town in Pennsylvania, Davis attended American University during the 1960s and became involved in the anti-war movement, joining Students for a Democratic Society, a group which would define the politics of that time. He came out to his father as gay at age 24, was told he was no longer welcome at home, and moved to San Francisco.
Jack Davis’ 50th birthday party became a notorious touchstone for San Francisco politics in the ’90s, but it wasn’t all that he is remembered for. He was instrumental in a number of policy and development milestones in San Francisco, up through the election of Brown’s successor, Gavin Newsom.
As a gay rights activist, Davis became involved in the campaign to defend an antidiscrimination ordinance protecting individuals based on sexual orientation, which had been passed in Dade County, Florida, and was under attack by conservatives. Anita Bryant, the singer and spokesperson for Florida’s citrus growers, was the public face of the campaign, which drew national attention.
It was there, ironically, that the gay activist Jack Davis first had meaningful contact with San Francisco’s new political establishment in the form of Willie Brown, the assemblyman and future mayor who sponsored and got passed California’s antidiscrimination law, and political consultant Clint Reilly, who spotted Davis’ talent for campaigning and invited him to work for him.
“Jack Davis met me at the airport and drove me to every place I went for the next two or three days in Florida; that’s how I got to know him,” Brown told The Voice in an interview. “And we became friends. He then hooked up Clint Reilly and Quentin Kopp, none of whom were my people. They weren’t Burton or Pelosi people. They were the more conservative Democrats, and he was part of that brain group for that purpose. But he never lost touch with me.”
Davis would eventually go his own way as a campaign manager and developed a reputation for strategic genius. At the same time, his politics shifted to the right in San Francisco, and he became identified as the political go-to for landlords and developers, and an ally of figures like Supervisor and state Senator Quentin Kopp and the Fang family, which operated the San Francisco Independent newspaper.
Davis’ notoriety grew during the late 1980s when then-Mayor Art Agnos, a vassal of Phil Burton’s Democratic establishment, implicated him and four others in a scheme to derail a ballot measure to build a new baseball stadium. The mayor made the accusation in an extraordinary front-page Chronicle editorial, and pushed then-District Attorney Arlo Smith to prosecute the so-called “Ballpark Five.”
A number of factors, not to mention the Loma Prieta earthquake, helped convince voters there were more important things to spend money on, and when Smith’s case against the Ballpark Five went to court, it was thrown out by the judge.
It was true that Davis, along with fellow consultant Richard Schlackman, was brought on to campaign against the stadium measure, in part by then-Sacramento Kings owner Gregg Lukenbill, who had his eye on the Giants and moving them to Sacramento. It’s also true that no laws were broken.
From that point on, Davis had his eye on Agnos, and increasing public restiveness over Agnos’s handling of San Francisco’s growing homelessness problem made him vulnerable. The champion Davis and allies picked to run against Agnos was then-police chief Frank Jordan. Davis ran Jordan’s campaign, which featured withering attacks on Agnos’s custodianship of the city by Independent columnist, former leftist muckraker, and Davis associate Warren Hinckle. Jordan won the 1991 election with 52 percent of the vote.
Jordan’s four-year stint as mayor saw the beginnings of a new stadium for the Giants, the conversion of the Presidio of San Francisco into a public park and the extension of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System to San Francisco International Airport. But according to some accounts, Davis felt frozen out of Jordan’s administration, and the homelessness and street conditions problem again came to the fore — this time, city policies were seen as too strict and ineffectual.
Davis went on the warpath again, and this time he reached out to Brown. And he worked his magic with inconsistent voters and absentee ballots to secure a runoff victory for Brown, with 57 percent of the vote.
The next eight years would see sea changes for San Francisco, with the first emergence of the tech industry and significant development and city infrastructure spending, including the renovation of City Hall, the redevelopment of South of Market, and the birth of Mission Bay as a neighborhood. When Brown was challenged for reelection by both conservatives and progressives, Davis went to bat for him again, and challenger Tom Ammiano was defeated in a 1999 runoff, with Brown winning 60 percent of the vote.
Davis himself would be a magnet for controversy during this time. Shortly after Brown’s election as mayor, he championed a ballot measure to finance $100 million in lease revenue bonds toward a $525-million stadium and outlet mall at Candlestick Point for the Forty-Niners. Davis ran the campaign, and much of the coverage focused on him.
The campaign coincided with his 50th birthday, and he threw a party at his campaign headquarters at the Merchandise Mart building — now known as the Twitter building. The party could best be described as an extraordinary affair featuring unusually salacious live entertainment that climaxed with what the New York Times described as “something about a dominatrix with a razor blade and a whisky bottle urinating on the prostrate body of a satanic priest.”
Jack Davis’ 50th birthday party became a notorious touchstone for San Francisco politics in the ’90s, but it wasn’t all that he is remembered for. He was instrumental in a number of policy and development milestones in San Francisco, up through the election of Brown’s successor, Gavin Newsom. In the 2003 election against Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez, Newsom’s campaign banked on absentee ballots, where he ended up with a 65 percent lead that allowed him to overtake Gonzalez’s election day surge, winning by 53 percent.
In recent years, Davis had dialed down his involvement in politics, dividing his time between the Bay Area and Arizona, and later, Cowbridge, a market town in Wales. But in 2014, he managed to again catch the ire of San Francisco progressives when he worked on a “Clean Up The Plaza” campaign targeting public safety problems at the corner of 16th and Mission streets on behalf of small businesses and Maximus Real Estate Partners. He also made a turnabout in his personal politics, at first supporting the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, and later Donald Trump.
In a 2000 profile of Davis by Susan Sward in the Chronicle, campaign consultant Eric Jaye, who worked on Newsom’s campaign with Davis, said, “Jack is inaccurately portrayed as fighting merely for the sake of it. The Jack Davis I know is tremendously sensitive to underlying issues at play.”
