Shawn Richard, one of 10 candidates running for San Francisco’s District 10 supervisor seat, told The Voice he plans to endorse fellow candidates DJ Brookter and JR Eppler. Sources close to the other campaigns confirmed mutual support among the three was in the works.
“We’re supporting each other,” Richard said. “I think that you have to team up with others in ranked-choice voting, and I believe that this is the best team that can actually come together to get something done.”
Formal mutual endorsements remain relatively rare in San Francisco supervisor races, even though the city’s ranked-choice system was designed in part to reward exactly this kind of coordination.
The last possibility came in 2022, when District 4 challengers Joel Engardio and Leanna Louie explored campaigning as a team against then-Supervisor Gordon Mar, with Louie pledging to direct her supporters’ second-choice votes to Engardio. The alliance never got the chance to be tested at the ballot box: the cty attorney’s office removed Louie from the ballot that August after finding she couldn’t prove she had legally established residency in District 4 in the required 30-day window before filing her candidacy — a determination a judge later upheld. Engardio went on to win the seat outright.
“My sense is that it isn’t common, especially among viable contenders,” Professor Jason McDaniel of San Francisco State University’s Political Science Department told The Voice in an interview. “It also may be that when it does occur, it’s not outright endorsement but rather a range of campaign activities and messages, from mutual friendly messaging and outreach to each others supporters, to outright joint campaign events to announce a slate strategy to voters asking them to rank each candidate, etc. It probably happens more when the candidates are running against a clear favorite such as an incumbent.”
“In S.F. I think it’s more common among progressive coalition candidates,” McDaniel added. “My thought is that slate strategies can be effective, but the candidates and campaigns and groups and clubs need to work hard to send the information signal to voters. They can’t just hope the voters pick up on it — they have to drive the message home.”
The three D10 candidates have already found common ground on policy, having separately voiced support for curbing new data centers in the district — with Brookter and Richard going furthest by calling for an outright, permanent ban, while Ellington and Eppler have backed a moratorium pending an environmental review.
The apparent coordination comes in a crowded race to succeed termed-out Supervisor Shamann Walton, with coverage largely framing the contest as a three-way fight between Brookter, Eppler and frontrunner Theo Ellington.
Under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system, coordinated slates can consolidate votes against a frontrunner in later rounds — though analysts have noted Ellington is likely a common second choice across both progressive and moderate voting blocs, complicating an “everyone-but-Ellington” strategy.
It’s not the only ranked-choice alliance on this fall’s ballot. In District 8, candidates Gary McCoy and Darshini Patel are encouraging their supporters to rank each other second, a move that could help push one of them past rivals Manny Yekutiel and Michael Nguyen.
None of the D10 campaigns has issued a joint statement confirming the arrangement yet. The Voice has reached out to Brookter’s and Eppler’s campaigns directly for comment.
