SAN FRANCISCO — For decades, the Bay Area has been celebrated — and sometimes mocked — as a progressive beacon, a proud throwback to hippie-era values with its embrace of love and tolerance.
But in the Nov. 5 election, voters across the region made it clear there are limits to their compassion.
Motivated by pent-up frustrations with property crime and homelessness — and a sense that San Francisco and Oakland had lost control of city streets — Bay Area voters tacked right in last week’s election, ousting the mayors of both cities and rejecting a handful of left-wing candidates. And in a stunning rebuke to the progressive movement to reform criminal justice that the region once championed, a majority of voters in all nine Bay Area counties voted in favor of Proposition 36, a statewide ballot measure that will impose stricter penalties for repeat theft and crimes involving fentanyl.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed lost her reelection bid in a race against four high-profile Democrats, two of them fellow moderates. Voters instead chose a political outsider, wealthy philanthropist and Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie, who promised to shut down open-air drug markets and make San Francisco less welcoming to street encampments.
In the East Bay, voters recalled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price, two progressive leaders elected in 2022.
Both Breed and Thao emphasized in their efforts to retain office that crime levels had fallen in their cities in recent months, and asked for more time to make change. But they were unable to break through the widespread perception among shopkeepers and residents that the current crop of city and county leaders did not have forceful answers to the region’s ongoing struggles with homelessness, street crime and lackluster economies that have not yet bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People are tired of feeling like government is unable to solve the most difficult problems,” said Keally McBride, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco. “It really is more about frustration with dysfunction.”
The rightward shift was bankrolled on both sides of the Bay by tech titans and wealthy investors who are relatively new to local politics. In San Francisco, tech executives contributed millions of dollars to campaigns in an array of local races, systematically working to elect moderate candidates competing against progressive incumbents.
The Oakland recall against Thao, meanwhile, was heavily funded by hedge fund executive Philip Dreyfuss, who lives in Piedmont, a picturesque city surrounded by Oakland’s borders.
The tech industry has become increasingly involved in Bay Area politics as more executives and their workers put down roots. They see their vast wealth as a vehicle to infuse local governance — including the mayor’s office, county boards of supervisors, city councils and school boards — with more centrist leanings.
Their efforts started in earnest in 2022, when a crop of political organizations funded by the tech industry backed the recall elections of former San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin and three school board members. Boudin was accused of being more focused on reforming the criminal justice system than on prosecuting crime; while the school leaders were blasted for keeping classrooms closed during the COVID emergency for months longer than most other districts in the nation.
Breed, the first Black woman elected mayor in San Francisco, took office in 2018 in a special election following the unexpected death of Mayor Ed Lee. She was hailed as a hero when she took bold steps to shut down the city in the early days of COVID.
But she lost political clout as property and retail theft grew more brazen and homeless encampments sprouted beyond downtown’s borders and through all corners of the city.
Over the past year, Breed has tacked right on those issues, successfully pushing two ballot measures that bolstered police surveillance powers and required drug screening and treatment for people receiving county welfare benefits who are suspected of illicit drug use. Since August, she’s overseen an aggressive campaign to clear out large tent encampments.
But she failed to persuade voters that she is the change the city needs to get back on track.
Breed won 24.3% of first-choice votes in the city’s ranked-choice system, which allows voters to select multiple candidates by order of preference, compared with Lurie’s 26.7%, as of Monday evening’s count. When the race was called on Thursday, Lurie had won an overwhelming 56% of the total ranked-choice ballot vote compared with Breed’s 44%.
“We are going to declare a fentanyl state of emergency on Day 1 of our administration,” Lurie pledged during a Friday news conference. “We are going to get tough on those that are dealing drugs. And we are going to be compassionate, but tough, about the conditions of our streets as well.”
Lurie, 47, was born in San Francisco, the son of a rabbi. His parents divorced when he was a young boy. His mother, Miriam Haas, went on to marry billionaire businessman Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, and a longtime executive at the denim company Strauss founded. Peter Haas died in 2005, and Lurie and his mother are among the primary heirs of the Strauss family fortune.
Lurie is the founder of Tipping Point, a San Francisco nonprofit that funds efforts to lift people out of poverty. He has never before held elected office, and his status as a political outsider resonated with voters tired of politics as usual.
Lurie said he believes the election results speak to a hunger for accountability. “They want change, and just common sense,” he said.
Lurie could face less friction than Breed did in getting the county’s powerful Board of Supervisors to support his agenda. Tuesday’s election added at least two centrist Democrats to the 11-member board, which has long had a progressive majority.
In the East Bay, nearly 62% of Oakland voters supported recalling Thao, the city’s first Hmong mayor, and 64% voted to recall Price, Alameda County’s first Black district attorney.
Thao won her election two years ago by fewer than 700 votes against a more moderate Democrat. She took office amid a post-pandemic crime wave and economic slump that she has said made her first two years difficult.
But her detractors had little patience for any missteps — and Thao made a few.
Her critics blasted her for firing the police chief soon after she took office, leaving a leadership vacancy in the department for a year even as the city experienced a surge in violence. A looming budget deficit and the departure of the Oakland A’s baseball team didn’t help.
In June, the FBI raided Thao’s home right around the time the recall measure qualified for the ballot. The home of a waste company official who has contracts with the city and had made campaign contributions to Thao and other elected officials was raided the same day. Thao said she has been told she is not a target in the investigation, and the FBI has yet to comment on what prompted the raid.
The recall campaign against Thao accused her of lacking the “competency, judgment and ability to lead what was once a great American city.”
Thao rejected that criticism, most notably in an open letter to Dreyfuss, the hedge fund manager, that accused him of “trying to buy our city government.” In a statement late Friday acknowledging her defeat, Thao touted recent statistics showing crime in Oakland was falling and her administration’s approval of 1,500 units of affordable housing.
A former civil rights attorney, Price was elected two years ago after vowing to bring criminal justice reform to the prosecutor’s office. She focused on alternatives to incarceration and promised to prosecute police misconduct.
“Price’s recall should be viewed as part of a broader conservative strategy in California and across the nation to roll back criminal justice reforms aimed at interrupting the cycle of mass incarceration of Black and Brown people,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which opposed the recall, said Friday.
But Seneca Scott, spokesperson for the recall campaign against Thao, said the voter frustration rippling through the Bay Area should be seen as an indictment of local leaders who prioritize progressive politics over a well-functioning community.
“The progressives in Oakland did the same thing they did in San Francisco. They ignored the crime. They ignored the poverty,” Scott said. “They need to do some soul-searching.”
