2022 General Election Preview Part III
Local elections (California only)
You can read the rest of our preview here, for congressional and state elections, and here, for local elections outside of California.
Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward, Fremont, East Bay suburbs)
District Attorney
Pamela Price vs. Terry Wiley
Round 1: Price 43% - Wiley 27%
Alameda County could have had double-barreled DA and Sheriff elections, each with a hard-right tough-on-crime fearmonger locked in a runoff with someone at least slightly less nuts. Then the hard-right sheriff, Gregory Ahern, unexpectedly lost in the first round as former deputy Yesenia Sanchez managed to get an outright majority—and in local elections, that prevents a runoff. Civil rights attorney Pamela Price is a reformer (like, Angela Davis-endorsed, not the increasingly usual timid stuff) promising to take on police corruption and brutality; a series of scandals in Alameda County law enforcement, from high-profile incidents of unpunished police violence to a rash of deaths in a county jail, make it a particularly appropriate message for the county. Price also lucked out by drawing classic tough-on-crime lock-’em-up type Terry Wiley as her November opponent, rather than either of the two more moderate, less bombastic, reform-hesitant alternatives who were also on the first-round ballot. Not only is Wiley the most conservative candidate who ran (in the county containing Oakland and Berkeley, mind you), he’s also the third-ranking official in the county DA’s office, which makes it harder for him to convincingly argue that current policy isn’t punitive enough or that the status quo is leading to a spike in violent crime. Of course, he’s still arguing that (what other choice does he have?) but it rings hollow.
Because Price came somewhat close to 50% and got the easiest of her three possible opponents, we think this is a coin flip. If she wins, it could deal a major blow to mass incarceration in a jurisdiction home to 1.7 million people and one of America’s largest, deadliest jails.
Los Angeles County
Sheriff
Alex Villanueva (i) vs. Robert Luna
Round 1: Villanueva 31% - Luna 26%
Alex Villanueva is a fascinating case study: first elected in 2018 as the first actual Democrat to hold this office in years, he promptly revealed himself to be every bit the hard-right psycho his predecessor was, and more. Villanueva has spent his four years in office fighting increasingly deranged battles against anyone vaguely left-of-center in LA County government, and before long his critics soon started waking up to police raids on spurious grounds, Controversies abound around Villanueva, and while we wish a more reform-minded opponent had emerged, we’ll take police officer Robert Luna over him, as will LA County, as shown by a recent poll with Luna up 40-32 over Villenueva, and by the broader trend of how incumbents tend to fare in a runoff after they get 31% in the first round.
County Commission District 3 (San Fernando Valley, Westside, and northern coast of LA County)
Robert Hertzberg vs. Lindsey Horvath
Round 1: Hertzberg 31% - Horvath 28%
In the first round, the vote was nearly split three ways between West Hollywood Councilor Lindsay Horvath, an actual progressive who did best in urban Westside Los Angeles; state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a straightforward moderate who was Speaker of the Assembly 20 years ago and now represents a Senate district in the San Fernando Valley, where he performed best; and state Sen. Henry Stern, who existed between the two, both geographically and ideologically. Horvath has, since the primary, managed to shore up traditional Democratic constituencies: in addition to progressive groups like Working Families Party and environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, she has the LA County Democratic Party, the LA Times, all 4 sitting Democratic County Supervisors, and First Partner of California Jennifer Newsom. That last endorsement is kind of awkward considering the Hertzeberg’s biggest, most advertised endorsement is her husband, Gavin Newsom.
What Hertzeberg has instead are the most important structural advantages a candidate can find in a race like this: money and organized labor. Hertzeberg raised $5.6 million to her $1.6 million, most of it after the runoff, and is the endorsed candidate of the AFL-CIO, while Horvath only has a scattering of unions, mostly AFSCME.
Sacramento County
County Commission District 5 (Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Galt)
Pat Hume vs. Jaclyn Moreno
Round 1: Hume 42% - Moreno 33%
This seat may well determine control of Sacramento County (pop. 1.6 million) government. On one side is Elk Grove City Councilor Pat Hume, who is effectively the Republican candidate; Jaclyn Moreno, the de facto Democratic standard-bearer, might be able to just coast on pure partisanship were this a partisan election, but she can’t. Outgoing Democrat Don Nottoli is backing Hume, so Republicans have a real chance of seizing control of the board in a county where both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won by more than twenty percentage points. (Nonpartisan elections in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are a scourge, only Republican voters should be allowed the opportunity to accidentally elect the other party because there aren’t labels on the ballot.)
Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley)
Sheriff
Kevin Jensen vs. Bob Jonsen
Round 1: Jonsen 32% - Jensen 31%
Yes, this is a contest between Jensen and Jonsen, yes, local press has had plenty of fun with that. But this election is quote a serious matter. The current sheriff, Laurie Smith, is retiring after a 24 year tenure in a swirl of controversy, corruption allegations, and inmate deaths. Just last week, she abruptly resigned two days before a jury found her guilty of public corruption. Former police Capt. Kevin Jensen, the frontrunner and choice of every cop union in the county, shows little appetite for changing anything about how the jail operates, outside of vague promises of “transparency”. Unfortunately, neither does his opponent, former Palo Alto Police Chief Bob Jonsen. The election has focused on back-and-forth between the candidates: Jonsen accused Jensen of buying an endorsement, while Jensen accused Johnson of being secretly backed by Laure Smith. Unfortunately, the issues have gotten lost in the scuffle, and the biggest discernable policy difference between the two that we could find is that Jonsen wants to pause construction of the new county jail and Jensen doesn’t, though both want it to be built eventually.
County Commission District 1 (South County)
Sylvia Arenas vs. Johnny Khamis
Round 1: Arenas 29% - 27%
For reasons beyond anyone’s understanding, in 2010 Republican Mike Wasserman won this officially nonpartisan office, and then simply never faced a challenger again. He’s retiring this year, allowing Democrats to finally control all 5 seats on the Commission.
Or at least you would think that’s what’s going to happen, but San Jose Councilwoman Sylvia Arenas needs to beat former San Jose City Councilman Johnny Khamis to make that happen. Khamis is, technically, not a Republican…currently. He was a registered Republican on the San Jose City Council for years, but once Donald Trump was elected he saw the writing on the wall for his electoral prospects and dropped all party affiliations in 2018. A failed state Senate campaign as an independent later, and now the moderate faction in San Jose politics, including the city’s mayor Sam Liccardo, is teaming up with business interests, cops, and the remains of the Republican Party in Santa Clara County to prevent progressives from creating a permanent 3-member majority on the Commission. (As it stands, there are two progressives, one conservative, and two swing voters).
The battle lines of the campaign are familiar: Arenas wants more affordable housing built; Khamis doesn’t. Khamis wants more police and more felony crime laws; Arenas doesn’t. The results promise to be close and Arenas is taking nothing for granted, sending out hard negative mailers in the home stretch focused on tying Khamis to the party he nominally left a few years ago.
Irvine
Mayor
Farrah Khan (i) vs. Tom Chomyn vs. Katherine Daigle vs. Branda Lin vs. Simon Moon
Farrah Khan broke a decade of Republican mayoral control over Irvine, California, a city that’s a lot bigger than you think (over 300,000 people, in case you were wondering, bigger than Pittsburgh, Richmond, Salt Lake City, or Durham). Khan has been a moderate as mayor, and has already had a couple mid-level controversies, including accusations that she was palling around with Armenian genocide denialists and that she leaked texts from Rep. Katie Porter to the media in an act of revenge.
For reelection, she’s being challenged by two serious Republicans (Katherine Daigle and Simon Moon), as well as Branda Lin, a City Councilmember and former Irvine Community Services Commissioner, running somewhat to Khan’s left, and somewhat as a mayor who won’t keep getting bogged down in the scandals of Khan’s administration.
City Council (At-Large, Top 2)
Larry Agran (i) vs. Anthony Kuo (i) vs. Scott Hansen vs. John Park vs. Navid Sadigh vs. Kathleen Treseder
Larry Agran is one of the few DSA members who was in elected office before 2016. Agran’s time in Irvine politics all the way back to the 70s. After three non-consecutive stints as mayor, and four as a city councilor, Agran is once again where he started—on the council, pissing off the mayor and monied business interests. Recently, the LA Democratic Party opened up a PAC to spend on Irvine elections, with roughly a quarter million dollars in the bank. That PAC, which Agran allies allege was really set up by developers with the LA Democratic Party as a go-between, spent roughly $100,000 on supporting Farrah Khan for mayor, and at least that much to attack Larry Agran. This is all despite the other incumbent, Anthony Kuo, actually being a Republican, and Republicans trying to elect a second Councilmember this year, John Park. Kathleen Treseder, a doctor, has the support of the Democratic Party and most Orange County Democratic elected officials, with the hope that she defeats Kuo and brings the Council back to all-Democrat status. There is, however, a possibility of Kuo winning more votes than anyone, and Agran losing his seat to Treseder, which is probably the goal of the outside spending.
Los Angeles
Mayor
Karen Bass vs. Rick Caruso
Round 1: Bass 43% - Caruso 36%
Rep. Karen Bass is no leftist or anything, but at least she’s a reliably liberal Democrat. (And not a billionaire.) Neither can be said of Rick Caruso, the recent Republican running a somewhat centrist, blandly anti-corruption campaign by blanketing the airwaves with ads paid for with ungodly amounts of his own personal wealth. He’s hoping he’ll be able to buy up enough of the political oxygen in Los Angeles that voters won’t notice he’s a Republican, or realize that a billionaire developer and political megadonor is quite likely to be incredibly corrupt. It might be working: a recent poll showed the race tightening to 45-41 after Bass had opened up a healthy lead over the summer. Bass’s team was concerned enough to call in the mother of all endorsements, Barack Obama, just last week. It’s bad.
City Attorney
Hydee Feldstein Soto vs. Faisal Gill
Round 1: Gill 24% - Feldstein Soto 20%
Faisal Gill is a former Republican candidate for the Virginia state legislature who became a Democrat in the late 2000s and got active in Democratic politics; he’s also the left’s candidate, because he was the only one, in the primary or the runoff, with a platform or rhetoric that anyone on the left might describe as progressive or left-leaning, and he evidently seems sincere enough about his party switch and ideological journey to stick to those new principles even when they’re not convenient. In a field full of candidates to his right, he wound up in a runoff with liberal, vaguely reformist prosecutor Hydee Feldstein Soto, but he’s refused to triangulate away some of his more controversial policy stances, even as his plan not to prosecute most misdemeanors cost him Karen Bass’s endorsement. It’s important to remember that while Feldstein Soto may have a better position in the ideological space of the primary candidates, voters don’t just vote on ideology, and if you looked at a map of this race, you might conclude it was Feldstein Soto who was the factional candidate with limited room to grow, not Gill, as he got a significant share of the vote across the city, but she was heavily reliant on white, wealthy neighborhoods, and tanked elsewhere. That’s all to say this race is a jump ball, and we probably won’t know the winner for days.
City Controller
Paul Koretz vs. Kenneth Mejia
Round 1: Mejia 43% - Koretz 24%
“Kenneth Mejia is one of the most interesting candidates of the year—a young ex-Green running on a message of competency and experience. Mejia has made a big deal of his status as the only CPA in the race, and has attempted to demonstrate his utility in the office by producing tools for residents to track everything from police payroll to affordable housing designations. “
It’s still a little surreal that we wrote those sentences days before Mejia would go on to utterly body City Councilor Paul Koretz in the first round 43% to 24%. Koretz has been on a terrified defensive every moment since then, and we don’t know what good it’s going to do him. Mejia has run just a phenomenally good campaign, and Paul Koretz is the kind of guy you can forget about while watching one of his own ads.
City Council District 5 (Palms, Pico-Robertson, UCLA, Bel Air, Wilshire)
Sam Yebri vs. Katy Young Yaroslavsky
Round 1: Young Yaroslavsky 49% - Yebri 30%
Katy Young Yaroslavsky is a sorta-liberal, sorta-progressive, broadly palatable candidate who nearly won outright in Round 1, and she’s going to coast. Young Yaroslavsky faces businessman Sam Yebri, a conservative backed by big business, landlords, and police unions who couldn’t even manage a third of the vote in the first round. The two eliminated candidates were both running to her left, and they both endorsed her over Yebri after the primary. She even has the benefit of a somewhat-well-known last name: her father-in-law, Zev Yaroslavsky, spent twenty years on the LA City Council and another twenty on the LA County Board of Supervisors before leaving elected office in 2014 but remaining politically active. Yebri has kept pace in fundraising, and he has some endorsements from more conservative-leaning labor unions and politicians he’s previously worked with and/or for, but there’s no way he’s stopping Young Yaroslavsky from getting that final 1.04% she needs to clinch victory.
City Council District 11 (Westside)
Erin Darling vs. Traci Park
Round 1: Darling 35% - Park 29%
Mike Bonin was more progressive than anyone could have expected for a district like this had any, and Traci Park initially entered this election primaying him from the right. Bonin eventually decided not to run for reelection after all to spend more time with his young son. To succeed him, he endorsed civil rights lawyer Erin Darling, who has slowly, but surely won over the Democratic establishment, to the point where he now counts the LA County Democratic Party and LA Times among his endorsements.
City Council District 13 (Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Glassell Park)
Mitch O'Farrell (i) vs. Hugo Soto-Martínez
Round 1: Soto-Martínez 41% - O’Farrell 32%
Mitch O’Farrell is one of the council’s more conservative members. On the recordings that upended LA politics, then-LA County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera said he wanted “to protect Mitch [O’Farrell],” and Herrera and the three recorded councilors discussed plans to save O’Farrell in redistricting by giving him more moderate territory. They didn’t do a particularly good job—redistricting only modestly benefited O’Farrell, and it turns out he needed more help than they gave him. Way more. DSA-endorsed union organizer Hugo Soto-Martínez led O’Farrell 41-32 in Round 1, and has the endorsement of third-place finisher Kate Pynoos (16% in Round 1), plus a lot of unions and progressive groups. Soto-Martínez is in an enviable spot, facing an incumbent in a runoff who couldn’t manage a third of the vote in the primary.
O’Farrell isn’t going down without a fight, though, and he’s taking advantage of the recordings—the same ones detailing a gerrymandering scheme to protect him. He briefly stepped in as the interim city council president after Nury Martinez resigned amidst public furor over the tapes, and immediately hammed it up for the camera, demanding the resignation of the same allies who had gerrymandered to protect him, all while casting himself as a solemn anti-racist unifier in troubled times. It’s self-serving in the extreme, but it’s not like he has any other, more promising paths to reelection. Soto-Martínez is still a strong favorite to become DSA’s third member on the city council, joining District 1 Councilor-elect Eunisses Hernandez, who defeated Councilor Gil Cedillo (of racist recording infamy) in June, and District 4 Councilor Nithya Raman.
City Council District 15 (Harbor City, Harbor Gateway, Wilmington, San Pedro, Watts)
Tim McOsker vs. Danielle Sandoval
Round 1: McOsker 38% - Sandoval 29%
Police union official Tim McOsker and an even more conservative candidate combined for 54% of the Round 1 vote, so progressives’ only alternative, Harbor City Neighborhood Council President Danielle Sandoval, already had a steep hill to climb before reports of widespread wage theft at her restaurant cost her some critical endorsements. She’s since apologized and settled a lawsuit, but the damage is done.
Oakland
Mayor
Loren Taylor vs. Sheng Thao vs. Allyssa Victory Villanueva vs. Ignacio de la Fuente vs. Greg Hodge vs. Treva Reid (vs. Tyron Jordan vs. Seneca Scott vs. John Reimann vs. Peter Liu)
Oakland’s mayoral election is an absolute mess, with a ludicrously crowded field of candidates. The leading contenders appear to be councilors Loren Taylor and Sheng Thao, with fellow councilor Treva Reid and former councilor Ignacio de la Fuente not far behind. Former Oakland school board president Greg Hodge and labor & civil rights attorney Allyssa Victory Villanueva are also running campaigns with a pulse, and Oakland’s use of ranked-choice voting means every candidate could be a factor. Reid and Taylor, two of the more moderate candidates, have formed a ranked-choice alliance, each encouraging their supporters to rank the other on their ballots. Thao, the leading candidate in the progressive lane, has not made an alliance with any other candidate, but Victory Villanueva and Hodge, who are both running to Thao’s left, have wisely made their own RCV alliance. de la Fuente is running more clearly to the right than any other credible candidate, and his relationship with facts is tenuous at best—if you’d like, read this interview with the news website Oaklandside and look at how much they had to fact-check his answers. (We also looked at Oaklandside’s interviews with the other five candidates we’ve discussed; none of them had to be corrected for false or misleading statements as much as de la Fuente.)
Council District 2 (Downtown and the San Antonio district)
Nikki Fortunato Bas (i) vs. Harold Lowe
Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas has been a left-wing counterweight to Mayor Libby Schaaf, so naturally she drew an opponent in Harold Lowe, who opposes a ballot measure Bas has proposed to tax large businesses at higher rates.
Council District 4 (Oakland Hills)
Nenna Joiner vs. Janani Ramachandran
Janani Ramachandran got a respectable 43% of the vote in an Assembly special election to winner Mia Bonta’s 57% back in 2021; Mia Bonta is the wife of Rob Bonta, whose appointment as California Attorney General left the Assembly seat vacant in the first place, while Ramachandran was a first-time candidate. Ramachandran is now the progressive pick for Sheng Thao’s open council seat, running with the backing of organized labor; Nenna Joiner, the choice of Mayor Libby Schaaf’s more moderate faction in Oakland politics, recently made headlines for tweeting her sympathy for Kanye West in the midst of his ongoing, weeks-long antisemitic meltdown.
Council District 6 (East Oakland)
Yakpasua Michael Gbagba Zazaboi vs. Kevin Jenkins vs. Kenneth Session vs. Nancy Sidebotham
Kenneth Session and Nancy Sidebotham don’t seem to be running serious campaigns, which leaves tech-y business owner Yakpasua Zazaboi and community college trustee Kevin Jenkins. Both are evasive on policy, though Zazaboi is definitely more vague, and that leaves us with little to go by but endorsements. Zazaboi has the local paper explicitly because they think he’s less left-wing, while Jenkins has support from not just the progressive faction but mainline Oakland Democrats like the Bontas. When progressives and more mainstream Democrats agree in races without a Republican to worry about, it’s usually because they think the other candidate is bad news.
San Diego
City Council District 2 (Claremont and Peninsula)
Jennifer Campbell (i) vs. Linda Lukacs
Round 1: Campbell 30% - Lukacs 25%
Jennifer Campbell lucked out this cycle. Despite not even hitting 30% of the vote in the primary as an incumbent, Campbell is getting to face a known Republican in the runoff. Lukacs, a realtor, is barely even getting real estate money.
City Council District 4 (Paradise Hills and Encanto)
Monica Montgomery Steppe (i) vs. Gloria Evangelista
Round 1: Steppe 71% - Evangelista 22%
In the least competitive election San Diego has to offer, fringe conservative Gloria Evangelista is going to see if she can get a quarter of the vote.
City Council District 6 (Mira Mesa and University City)
Tommy Hough vs. Kent Lee
Round 1: Lee 41% - Hough 37%
Kent Lee, the executive director of Pacific Arts Movement, is the establishment pick in the only really competitive election on the San Diego Council. He has the Democratic Party, Mayor Todd Gloria, and a ton of money. Opponent Tommy Hough, a radio host, is running something of a populist campaign. He’s not a left-wing populist, mind you; a combination of support for a vacancy tax, increasing the police force by 50%, “a uniquely San Diego version of rent control”, anti-”Downtown lobbyist” rhetoric, and believing a 30-foot building height limit is “sacrosanct” for the nature of San Diego is certainly populism of some sort. Hough has endorsements from some environmental groups, as well as the San Diego Progressive Democratic Club, but his most impactful is probably the San Diego Tribune. It’s tempting to say Lee has the inside lane here, but it’s absolutely unpredictable who Republicans are going to support, and, with both candidates so close in the first round, their vote could matter.
City Council District 8 (South San Diego)
Vivian Moreno (i) vs. Antonio Martinez
Round 1: Moreno 63% - Martinez 37%
This is a rematch of 2018, when now-Councilman Vivian Moreno narrowly defeated School Board member and Juan Vargas staffer Antonio Martinez. Normally we’d be happy to see Vargas fail to build his network, but Martinez was actually the more progressive of the two candidates, so it’s a shame that his second try didn’t go well in the primary, and that the second round doesn’t look like it’s going to go any better.
San Jose
Mayor
Matt Mahan vs. Cindy Chavez
Round 1: Chavez 39% - Mahan 32%
A tech CEO is running for mayor by repeating the phrases “Common Sense”, “Accountability”, and “Ideas” as often as possible, and complaining that the city “[sees] more than our fair share of homelessness because we are acting compassionately.” Meanwhile, the entire Democratic establishment, aside from the outgoing mayor, is backing his opponent. What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously, this has all the tell-tale signs of a disaster in the making: a politician with no record running a doggedly non-ideological campaign, except to tell the city’s homeowning class what they want to hear about homelessness. We can at least rest better knowing that Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez has support from most of the city’s political establishment in addition to the state and federal level Democratic Party, but blank slate types like Matt Mahan are dangerously effective in mayoral races for some reason, and we suspect he’d be even more so if he actually had the money to fully self-fund.
City Council District 3 (Downtown)
Irene Smith vs. Omar Torres
Round 1: Torres 44% - Smith 20%
Omar Torres, a Community College Board Trustee, is both the progressive and establishment choice in this race. However, it’s neither labor nor the Democratic establishment in the area that gives him the biggest vote of confidence to us. No, that would be his opponent Irene Smith, who, in attacking him for not supporting increasing police staffing or parking in the city, does more to bolster our confidence that he’ll be a good councilmember than anything else. Smith was the most conservative candidate in the first round, and hasn’t been able to do anything with her runoff slot beyond complaining about Torres. Her biggest supporters are still the cop unions and a couple ex-Councilmembers.
City Council District 5 (East San Jose)
Nora Campos vs. Peter Ortiz
Round 1: Campos 31% - Ortiz 22%
Nora Campos has had a long career in San Jose politics. First elected to the Council in 2001, Campos later moved to the Assembly, but failed at a pair of Senate campaigns, and it’s more than a little apparent that she’s coming to the Council as a fallback after her state political ambitions fizzled out. She’s fine by California Democratic standards, but the more progressive option is Peter Ortiz, a School Board member running on a platform of universal childcare and more community investment.
City Council District 7 (East San Jose, Downtown)
Maya Esparza (i) vs. Bien Doan
Round 1: Esparza 48% - Doan 29%
Maya Esparza is a liberal and fairly mainstream member of the City Council. The moderates (including incumbent mayor Sam Liccardo), trying to build a cohesive moderate majority, see her as vulnerable, but she looks like a solid favorite for reelection anyway. She fell just shy of 50% in the first round, and the moderates running were far from carbon copies of each other. Unless the electorate is very different today, it’s hard to see her losing.
San Francisco
District Attorney
Brooke Jenkins (i) vs. Joe Alioto Veronese vs. Maurice Chenier vs. John Hamasaki
Brooke Jenkins pulled off a neat little trick: she made six figures off the campaign to recall Chesa Boudin while pretending to be a mere volunteer, then got appointed by Mayor London Breed to serve as interim DA. As an ADA, she sent police records and a rap sheet to a colleague’s personal email (a serious ethical breach and, in the case of the rap sheet, a crime under state law unless she and her colleague were connected to the case, which they weren’t.) As a handsomely-compensated “volunteer” she later used those confidential materials in the campaign against Boudin. It’s a mix of underhanded corruption and simply bizarre lying for lying’s sake. Why Mayor London Breed appointed Jenkins, instead of an ADA with a modicum of political sense, is beyond us; Jenkins is fumbling endorsements and stumbling through public appearances, including a particularly memorable one where she admitted she’s just doing the war on drugs again after another moderate politician at the press conference, appointed District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, insisted San Francisco isn’t trying to “return to the war on drugs.” (It is.) Had Breed appointed someone better at politics than Jenkins, the War On Drugs 2.0 might be on track to win without much of a fight—but she didn’t.
Criminal defense attorney and former San Francisco Police Commissioner John Hamasaki is the candidate for voters who opposed the recall. To win, he’ll also need some voters who either supported the recall or didn’t vote in the lower-turnout recall election; he hasn’t faced the same headwinds as Chesa Boudin, who had a cottage industry of conservative media dedicated to cranking out industrial-grade bullshit to scare people and redirect attention away from the San Francisco Police Department, which hated Boudin so much they went on a de facto police strike and actually let criminals roam free. (Boudin’s office had to rent a U-Haul to make arrests in at least one burglary ring because the police department refused to help.) He has the San Francisco Democratic Party and the San Francisco teachers’ union on his side. Joe Alioto Veronese is the candidate who’s probably going to come in third, as he awkwardly tries to find a niche for moderate and liberal voters who might have supported the recall, but find Jenkins’s corruption and rhetorical excesses distasteful. How supporters of him and minor candidate Maurice Chenier break in ranked-choice tabulations will likely determine whether Jenkins or Hamasaki wins.
Board of Supervisors District 4 (Sunset District)
Gordon Mar (i) vs. Joel Engardio
Sometimes municipal politics can be straightforward, and San Francisco is often one of them. Gordon Mar is, loosely speaking, one of the members of San Francisco’s progressive faction. Therefore, the moderates (led by Mayor London Breed) want him gone. They’ve chosen Chesa Boudin recall organizer Joel Engardio, and pumped him full of campaign money. If San Francisco’s reactionary crime backlash has gotten really bad, Engardio wins; if it hasn’t, Mar does.
Board of Supervisors District 6 (SoMa, the Mission District)
Matt Dorsey (i) vs. Ms. Billie Cooper vs. Cherelle Jackson vs. Honey Mahogany
While Supervisor Matt Dorsey, appointed by London Breed and supported by Brooke Jenkins, is clearly a moderate, his main challenger, Honey Mahogany, is one of the few San Francisco politicians who doesn’t fit into either category cleanly. Fittingly, she’s supported by newly minted Assemblymember Matt Haney, another politician who straddles the two sides. Mahogany’s politics are similar, distinguishing herself from progressives by embracing YIMBY politics, and staying on good terms with both statewide progressive and mainstream party groups. In fact, she has both the CA Working Families Party and the SF Democratic Party.
Board of Supervisors District 8 (The Castro, Noe Valley)
Rafael Mandelman (i) vs. Kate Stoia
Just like District 4: Rafael Mandelman is a progressive, therefore the moderates are supporting a challenge to him. That challenge is coming from developer Kate Stoia. Unlike in District 4, though, District 8 is one of the three progressive districts, and if moderates are winning here, it’s apocalypse territory for San Francisco progressives.
Board of Supervisors District 10 (Potrero Hill, Bayview)
Shamann Walton (i) vs. Brian Sam Adam
The contours of this race could be familiar: moderate incumbent, therefore progressive challenger, except in this case the progressive challenger is more of a YIMBY type, and also isn’t really being supported by the city’s progressive faction. If any race spells blowout, it’s this one.