London Breed is Falling Down (Don’t tell Tech Bros)
The point: Yet another major poll reveals catastrophic numbers for San Francisco Mayor London Breed. With multiple surveys showing Breed's political career in a doom loop, her politically amateur Tech Bro supporters face a simple electoral IQ test: Stick by a failing and flailing incumbent, or to start inching over to a new candidate?
(Gift link: "'In very serious trouble.' Chronicle shows Mayor Breed's re-election bid is in danger" in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
The Backstory: One of the stranger developments of S.F.'s mayoral race has been the tech zillionaires’ fawning embrace of Breed. Though she is highly unpopular and lacks an ideological core, they've been unusually supportive of her reelection.
They screech about the progressives on the Board of Supervisors as part of the ongoing political blame game. Yet they generally lavish praise on the mayor who has presided over the supposed Doom Loop they so abhor.
"It's SF matching season for political fundraising, so I want you to donate to Mayor London Breed," wrote Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan on X-Twitter last summer. "She has been hamstrung by a captured Board of Supervisors (SF is city AND county) but in 2024 we retake the board, and she can move common sense mountains..."
Just yesterday, one of Tan's political minions at GrowSF was touting an alleged tiny bump in her poll numbers. (They seem really fond of short-term thinking. Who wants to tell them?)
But the Chronicle's poll provides a dramatic wake up call. It shows Breed sinking even further behind candidates Mark Farrell and Daniel Lurie.
“Obviously, with the number of undecided voters that we have, you don’t want to draw too firm of a conclusion,” said Jonathan Brown of Sextant Strategies, which produced the Chronicle poll. “But … if this is the field of major candidates right now, it certainly looks like Breed is in very, very serious trouble.”
Key number: 71% of voters disapprove of Breed's job performance:
“That looks to me like a death sentence. I don’t know what she can do,” former state senator and Oakland mayoral candidate Don Perata told the Chronicle of Breed's poll numbers. (Gift link.)
It's hardly surprising that voters have turned their wrath on Breed. In fact, it was quite predictable. By ousting District Attorney Chesa Boudin, voters made it clear they were in a punishing mood.
With Boudin gone, it was logical that their next target would be the person who traditionally bears most responsibility for the city’s problems: the mayor. With Breed always shifting positions and shifting blame, she is well-suited for the scapegoat role.
I’m no fan of either Farrell or Lurie, with their harsh Republicanesque policy platforms that are doomed to fail (as always). But at least voters would be making a clear choice to go in a specific direction.
With Breed, you don’t know where you're going. She’s against what she was once for, she is for what she was once against, and it’s all likely to change again depending on the circumstances. She’s just a finger in the wind.
Now, I can understand why the tech plutocrats have wanted to support her. First, she’s the incumbent who currently controls the city’s most important office. That’s a good deal of power, even if half of the time she feigns powerlessness. (The other half of the time she is taking credit for headline-grabbing police crackdowns and temporary fluctuations in crime.)
More importantly: Breed is desperate for reelection and thus amenable to whatever schemes her wealthy donors have in mind. Just look at how quickly she jumped behind the senseless Republican effort to repeal parts of Prop. 47, California’s major criminal justice reform law.
The only thing Breed really believes is that she deserves to be mayor, and she’ll serve whatever interest promises to keep her there. And more than anything, the Tech Bros want a puppet.
The Big Problem: But this pro-Breed strategy has a catastrophic flaw. The Tech Bros argue that the city needs a major political revolution. Yet they also contradict themselves by also arguing that the incumbent mayor is the right person for the job.
This is a huge glitch in the narrative, one that makes it hard to send a clear message to voters. It’s a case of “throw the bums out … except for the main bum who has been failing and flailing in the mayor’s office for most of the past decade.”
It sounds like a strategy dreamed up by a zillionaire with no clue about how politics works (in politics, the zillionaire is usually the dumbest person in the room, though no one will say so for obviou$ rea$on$).
But voters are making their disdain for Breed exceedingly clear. By clinging to the faded hope that S.F. voters are as dumb as Breed's donors, her supporters reveal just how far out of touch they are with voters.
The Caveats: Of course, the right-wingers – ahem, I mean, the anti-progressives – have three candidates in the race. So there'll be no shortage of mayoral wannabes pushing regressive policies in 2024.
The city may very well end up with someone even more staunchly anti-progressive than Breed. But with 45% of voters still undecided according to the Chronicle poll, and without a major progressive in the race, there’s still a lot we don’t know.
Until a progressive steps into the void, the anti-progressives must battle it out for dominance in a race to wield the golden scepter of cruelty against the teeming poor (Ahsha Safaí, with just 8% of voters saying they'd pick him as their first choice, does not appear to be catching fire).
Heck, with that pool of 45% undecided voters looking pretty good, perhaps Breed will try tacking left again to claim the progressive lane.
Just kidding. I don't think she'd fool anybody (but I also wouldn't put it past her to try). The question is whether her genius tech funders have the "common sense" to "do the Algebra" on this one.
Final Thought for the Day: "The government you elect is the government you deserve." – Thomas Jefferson
