On Tuesday night, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors named termed-out Supervisor Mark Farrell as the city’s interim mayor, following the death last year of Mayor Ed Lee. Farrell will serve until the June special election for the final year-and-a-half of Lee's term. Candidate filing for the special closed weeks ago, and Farrell is not running, which partly explains why he was chosen. The board first voted down Supervisor London Breed, who had been serving as acting mayor in the month since Lee's death, and unlike Farrell, is running for mayor. After the board then voted to install Farrell, a white venture capitalist who represents one of the city's most prosperous areas, over Breed, who was the city's first black woman mayor and had grown up in public housing, there were cries of racism and sexism from the audience.
However, intra-city politics seemed to play the biggest role in what transpired. Elections in this very Democratic city often break down into battles between the moderates, who count both Breed and Farrell in their ranks, and progressives. Both factions would be considered hard-core liberals almost anywhere else in America, but there are real differences between them on the local level. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Rachel Swan recently explained, the two wings tend to be divided on the issues of land use, taxation, and regulation. "Progressives push for more affordable housing, tighter restrictions on tech companies, and higher taxes for corporations," explained Swan. "Moderates tend to be pro-development, pro-tech, and pro-business." Moderates have controlled City Hall since the early 1990s, and progressives very much want to change that in June.
Farrell had been planning to run in the regularly scheduled 2019 race to succeed the termed-out Lee, and under those circumstances, progressive politicians wouldn't have wanted anything to do with him. But in an odd twist, it was the progressive members of the board who voted to make Farrell the interim mayor in order to make sure that Breed didn't have the advantage of incumbency in June.
But the progressives knew how bad the optics were in swapping Breed out for Farrell, so they tried to argue that it was Breed's wealthy white allies that made her an unacceptable choice. Supervisor Hillary Ronen notably declared that the "same white men" who had created a city where poor people and people of color couldn't afford in the city "are enthusiastically supporting your candidacy, London Breed."
Ronen specifically called out tech billionaire Ron Conway, a prominent Lee supporter who is backing Breed. Conway, who has helped finance groups to support moderate candidates in local elections, is reviled by progressives, who say his policy preferences favor the tech industry at the expense of everyone else. There had also been reports that Conway was pressuring moderate supervisors to vote for Breed and even used Lee's funeral to stump for her, which only encouraged progressives to do whatever they could to stop her on Tuesday.
Now, though, it’s on to the special election. Breed is one of few noteworthy candidates in the race, all of whom are Democrats. Former state Sen. Mark Leno, who represented the entire city in the legislature until he was termed-out in 2016, and Supervisor Jane Kim, who lost a tight all-Democratic general election to succeed Leno, appear to be Breed’s two main rivals. Former Supervisor Angela Alioto, the daughter of a former mayor and an unsuccessful candidate for mayor herself in 1991 and 2003, is also running, but she looks like a longshot.
Both Leno and Kim are progressives, and under a traditional American electoral system, they could cost each other support and allow a moderate like Breed to win. (Alioto, somewhat confusingly, calls herself a “moderate liberal.”) But San Francisco elects its mayors via instant-runoff voting, where voters are allowed to rank their choices. If no one takes a majority of first-place votes, then second and third choices are redistributed from the candidates with the fewest votes to those still remaining. That means even if Leno and Kim split the first-place vote, there’s a good chance that one will pick up second-place votes from the other. How the final outcome will look, though, is hard to say, as we haven’t yet seen any polls that try to mimic the instant-runoff process.