The Greenberg Brief: The San Francisco Mayoral Election That Isn’t

The mayors of San Francisco could be household names- if they had wanted to be. Joining Chicago’s Daley, Los Angeles’ Bradley and Garcetti, New York City’s Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg, our  San Francisco’s mayors could have been elevated to nationally-recognized celebrity status. It’s a club, a term of endearment and harking back to trusted leadership. Instead, our current mayor London Breed exudes the shame of city hall elected leadership. She personifies fiscal mismanagement and mistrust between San Francisco’s residents, business owners, law enforcement agencies (and tourists) – ultimately, the voters – and her contentious administration. Rife with obfuscation of success or failure of city program and funding sources, her failed “declarations of emergency,” the raced-based and equity-based grants through dubious non-profits, the horrendous waste of time and effort with reparations, her diverting funds from the SFPD, extended Covid lockdowns, homelessness, crime, drug dealing, the list goes on.

With all this mountain of obvious reasons to end Mayor Breed’s occupying City Hall, the reality is we should be having an election now, Tuesday November 7th, 2023. It was already on our calendars; it’s the Tuesday which every four years is the city’s top officials’ day of reckoning: mayor, the district attorney, the city attorney, sheriff and city treasurer. They have routinely been held a year prior to a presidential election year. The last being held 2019, it’s time for voters to chime in once again. But under the guise of, and scheming of, none other than the leftist/progressive activists like the DSA (Democratic Socialists), a proposal was floated to the eleven-member San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Those supes approved placement of the proposal on the November 2022 ballot: Shall elections be postponed and moved to presidential years? San Franciscans bought the line that postponing and moving the top-elected-officials’ election to the same year as presidential elections are held would result in higher turnouts. Well, this may technically be true. Statistics do indeed show presidential years bring out big percentages of voters to the polls. But does it mean a better election? A better group of candidates, a shift towards moderation that this city dearly needs? More democracy? Yes, that’s how the proposition supporters promoted it. Presidential years’ voting means more democracy. The San Francisco League of Conservation Voters hyped it. They claim it “doubles the vote.”

Well, last November 2022 the voters spoke, under influence of leftist/progressives of course, and voters approved Proposition H canceling this year’s (2023) election season, moving it to November of 2024. It’s a very quiet time right now in San Francisco; no election frenzy, no advertisements on TV nor on social media or in the mailbox, no campaigning. But it also has given these current office-holders an extra year in office, unelected.  The mayor, DA, city attorney, sheriff and city treasurer now get a 5-year term instead of four, this one time.

So San Francisco will then vote in 2024 to retain embattled Mayor Breed for yet another four-year term – or to give her the boot. Initially supported by many, she gradually lost the narrative (as well as lost much control in general) during and after COVID, especially on issues previously outlined like extended lockdowns decimating our economy, on rampant crime, a string of unfulfilled “emergency” decrees, and the unlawful/unconstitutional race-based and racial equity programs which have been exposed while we considered and dug deep into the “Reparations Plan.” There will be no landslide win for Breed come next year, if she indeed wins at all. It will be hard for her to run on her track record. What it will come down to is who, credibly, will challenger her.

As of print time there are twenty-five initially declared candidates for San Francisco mayor, according to the Department of Elections. All but five or six will most likely finalize the required candidate paperwork by the deadline next June and pay the $7,000 filing fee. There’s still plenty of time for last minute entries. Can London Breed clean up her mess in time to win back voters? She’s been handed an extra year to work on it. Time will tell.