SF Voters Less Liberal, More 'Centrist'
New analysis of November election reveals why progressive candidates struggled
Moderate voters proved to be the decisive voting bloc in San Francisco's mayor's race, according to an analysis of ballots by The University of San Francisco. They gave Ed Lee an insurmountable advantage.
In neighborhoods with a large percentage of moderate voters, including Chinatown and the city's west side, Lee was the overwhelming first choice.
“People like to tell us how liberal the city is, but it’s not,” said David Latterman, associate director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at USF. “Internally, we’re pretty centrist.”
Latterman and Corey Cook, a professor of politics at USF, analyzed individual ballots from San Francisco’s first competitive, city-wide ranked-choice election for mayor, district attorney, and sheriff. They released their analysis Tuesday.
They found that progressive candidates could not attract enough moderate voters to win outright. Eleven percent of all ballots cast included three progressive candidates: John Avalos for mayor, David Onek for district attorney, and Ross Mirkarimi for sheriff. Avalos and Onek were both runner-ups in their races; Mirkarimi won, but only because two other candidates in the race split the moderate vote.
"We like progressive ideas more than the candidates," Latterman said.
Under the city's ranked-choice system, voters selected their top three choices for mayor, sheriff, and district attorney. None of the candidates in those races received a majority of first-choice votes, but District Attorney George Gascon came the closest with 42 percent.
Lee received the fewest first-choice votes with 31 percent, but he received the most second- and third-choice votes, indicating that he had a larger base of support than any other candidate.
“The bulk of the city is willing to give Ed the chance to do his job," Latterman said.
Click here to read their report detailing voters’ preferences and voting patterns among communities.
Use the navigation below to see a map for the races for mayor, district attorney, and sheriff. Click on a shaded region of the map to view details from a voting precinct. Click on the different images of graphs to reveal statistics about every ballot cast in a selected precinct and demographic data provided by the 2010 U.S. Census.
The Bay Citizen processed ballots released by the Department of Elections on November 17 to reveal voter preferences precinct-by-precinct. Using block-level data from the 2010 census, these maps incorporate broad demographic statistics showing the race and age of residents living in each precinct.
Browse the map above and tell us what you find in the comments.
Mission Rosalind
Great. This all means that the "progressive" Supervisors will soon try to do some gerrymandering in the name of Electoral Justice. And if they are unable to get a Bay Guardian-approved redistricting scheme passed, they'll toss up yet another one of their ballot measures and get voters to do their dirty work.
Who's ready for the Richmond-Noe Valley, Chinatown-Haight, and Sunset-Tenderloin districts?
Aaron Goodman
when you build only $800,000 condos, and forget to build rentals
when you reduce transit lines and increase fares
when you cut jobs, and pad your own pockets
when you cut services, for the poor, elderly, and youth
you get a moderate voting block.
the liberal base gets hacked, and the effect is a bought election.
if the other "liberal/centrist" runners had swallowed there pride and backed early on Avalos, we would have had a different end result. the unifying call must be a better city for us all, not the 1%
"Michelle Kohlhaas"
Well stated. This city stuck the shiv in the collective back of the middle class decades ago, it's been a long, slow death, but the middle class here has effectively been killed.
R T
“People like to tell us how liberal the city is, but it’s not,” said David Latterman, associate director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at USF. “Internally, we’re pretty centrist.”
A little perspective- it is all relative. In any other city besides Berkeley and Oakland, Everyone from Ed Lee etc., would be considered a flaming liberal. Characters like Avalos, etc., would be considered fringe candidates with no shot at elective office at all.
marc os
It was the progressives, including the affordable housing mafiosi who sold San Francisco's middle class down the river. They did so by cutting deals for the 31%: 10% labor, 20% nonprofit client base who gave the 1% almost all of what they wanted in land use entitlements.
This left 69% of the population out of their political equation and just as Obama's 2008 electoral base stayed home in 2010, San Francisco's liberal and progressive bases saw no real reason to vote progressive after being asked to vote and forgotten after.
Instead of acknowledging that anything is wrong, that 30% progressive stalwart base is reinforcing ties with the neoliberal regime, via anti-worker initiatives like Prop C or the San Francisco Rising Action Fund, that is going to further cement the progressive coalition as marginal in city politics. There is no place for white and/or LGBT liberals and progressives in this coalition.
For now, labor and the nonprofits appear to have survived. But absent any liberal or progressives in office with the power to cover for them and with budgets falling, we'll see labor decimated and the nonprofits likewise dwindle until all there is are pockets of trophy poor dependent on fewer and fewer social services.
Game over, progressives, unless there is any sort of accountability and consequences for leading us all over a cliff. Can anyone imagine Calvin Welch, Randy Shaw, Chris Daly or Aaron Peskin owning up for their errors? Nope, they'll continue to hide their roles in leading us to this debacle behind their good intentions.
There is a model for uniting neighborhoods and progressives against corporate neoliberal power--the Moscone Coalition. But Calvin Welch and the nonprofits cut a deal with power for affordable housing crumbs, alienated the neighborhoods and became silent partners in the downtown/neighborhood governing moderate coalition.
Now that the progressives and liberals have been exterminated politically, downtown doesn't even need the neighborhoods, which are next on the block for profitable over development.
"Michelle Kohlhaas"
"There is a model for uniting neighborhoods and progressives against corporate neoliberal power--the Moscone Coalition."
Maybe you could define what YOU mean by the Moscone Coalition, and how said coalition could be achieved, given that the definition of middle class now requires $250k a year.
marc os
Where does this prejudice come from, that one can divine someone's politics based on their income? Sure, most people making $250K are not going to be swayed purely by an appeal to keep social services funding flowing and to keep organized labor happy.
The history of the Moscone Coalition is clear, is outlined in Rich DeLeon's book "Left Coast City."
Put on your progressive thinking caps and figure out what city services might be lacking outside of the 31%, what deals might have been cut with the 1% to screw the 69% and take steps to ensure that those city services are delivered honestly and without corruption.
Here are a few: Reliable transit: Muni. Clean streets: The DPW. Who used to head the DPW? Who heads it now? Public public parks: Rec and Park is being privatized. Who wants that?
Had progressives delivered on some of these city services above and beyond the nonprofit and labor sectors, progressives always manage to take care of SEIU 1021's interests in this respect, but didn't find time to care about taxpayers/city services consumers, then perhaps 20,000 more people would have had a reason to vote Avalos.
But so long as $250,000 is the new entry into the 1% for the myopic progressives, progressives can never win. Do I have to spell it out for you? Compared to the people who own this city, we are all Very Low Income, including families making $250K.
Mission Rosalind
Using your framework, I fit into your 69% category. I am not posting this to argue with you or to provoke you, but because you seem to be interested in gaining insights into why the "progressives" are not more popular in San Francisco.
Personally, some of the most important factors that prevent me from supporting the "progressives" are:
*Nanny laws. I am an adult and I am capable of understanding the impacts of buying a Happy Meal, taking a bag from a retailer, and placing compostable materials in a black trash bin. I resent the "progressives" continual attempts to micromanage my private life.
*Willful ignorance of the basic tenets of economics, finance, and accounting. San Francisco is not an island. It is not sustainable to have high levels of City government spending while simultaneously indulging an active hostility to both large and small businesses.
*Dogmatism and inflexibility. I dislike extremism of any kind, left or right, liberal or conservative. The "progressives" very often appear to be the mirror-image of the Christian Right to me. Both groups adhere to a strict ideology, dislike compromise, and favor orthodoxy over pragmatism.
marc os
I don't think that progressives had to appeal to the entirety of the 69%, it is not all about you. A good chunk of the 69% are inflexible ideological conservatives who are never going to vote liberal or progressive. Reading you over the years, it is apparent that you have issues of your own which you work out on progressives.
Humans require nanny laws of some sort at this point because it is clear that we've been unable to control our impacts on the ecosystems upon which life depends. We also live in cities where the consequences of our actions cannot be infinitely outsourced onto others. Children should be protected from the poor choices of their parents, whether happy meals or not being deported if they're picked up by the cops and not documented, private auto use should be discouraged and transit made more attractive. No apologies here.
The basic tenets of economics? Really? What are the basic tenets of economics? Perhaps you might head down to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to help them figure that one out. Hint: economic rent seeking runs counter to the basic principles of liberal/classical economics.
I agree that professional progressives have been inflexible and dogmatic. That does not mean that a majority of San Franciscans support neoliberal economic policies that redistribute wealth and resources from the bottom up. This is the error that I highlight.
Brad Johnson
I don't think analyzing ballot measure votes by precinct is a good way to determine the ideological leanings of individual voters or the electorate as a whole. There are too many other variables -- especially the ballot measure campaigns themselves. This is really a measure of how people voted on ballot measures in a particular election. Extrapolating towards larger trends among voters has a lot of problems. Recently the PVI included votes on the ballot measure renaming a sewage plant after Bush. That ballot measure saw no institutional support, no funding, no campaign. Yet the vote totals were assumed to reflect the voters feelings on an organized progressive coalition focused on totally different things.
Regardless, this is an approximate measure and any conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. the PVI has been around for a long time, but I've never felt it was very reliable simply because the measurement is one step away from the actual voters. This is an important question, and deserves being answered by the standard methodology: a large, well-executed truly random poll done by an established academic or a large firm with a solid track record. As far as I know, local SF politics is the only place where precinct-level ballot measure returns are used to determine the ideology of the electorate.
Brad Johnson
The problems are worse when you're using candidate ballot returns instead of ballot measure votes.
Judith Berkowitz
I work with folks who define themselves as pretty liberal and middle-of-the-road.
This is what I saw:
Progressives did themselves a damaging disservice by not clearly elucidating their agenda in terms of land use, zoning, planning.
Without a self-definition, it's left up to voters to define what a progressive is. Usually that definition begins and ends with social issues.
Those voters who do not self-identify as progressive also do not see that their views on land use are closely aligned with those of progressives.
They do not see that the more moderate candidates are pro-developer.
Had progressives defined themselves in terms of land use and zoning, they would have captured a lot more votes on SF's West Side while keeping their base.
marc os
Judy, progressives defined themselves out of the land use debates by cutting crappy deals with developers for crumbs of affordable housing.
Judith Berkowitz
Yah. Well. There is that.
What I was thinking about is if they were to have been elected to office then how they would vote on, say, a project appealed from a Planning Commission decision.
As attorney Steve Williams said of certain of the supes elected in 2010, "They may call themselves progressive, but they aren't supportive of or even friendly to the neighborhoods."
marc os
The dynamic has been that Calvin Welch has been there on one hand, commandeering the entirety of the progressive project to keep the CCHO funded and the developers have been there on the other hand threatening political oblivion to any elected who challenges their divine right to entitlements.
Welch demolished the Moscone Coalition between progressives, liberals and neighborhoods challenging downtown when he sided with them to get his housing crumbs.
I tried my hardest over the past five years to change that dynamic but met with more resistance from progressives than I received from developers, and I got much push back from developers.
The neighborhood groups were likewise AWOL because of fear of progressives, and now the entirety of the eastern neighborhoods has been offered up to developers like sacrificial lambs and both the progressives and neighborhood groups which, to put it delicately have not met with much renewal themselves, have been successfully marginalized.
What we need is ongoing independent political power sited outside of City Hall, city supported district and neighborhood councils, where average citizens can come together in an unowned political forum, trust one another and in the common wisdom of our neighbors, and allow the cards to fall where they may independent of developers or nonprofits.
That is the only way that I can see to challenge corporate ownership of government and that corporate corruption of supposed community representing nonprofits. It is probably too late already.
Jamie Josh
This is more idiocy from Shane Shifflett. Ross Mirkarimi had more votes than Ed Lee, for heaven's sake. John Avalos had fourth most votes in the city, after the three winners in the mayor, DA and sheriff's races. So liberal/progressive candidates took two out of the top four spots of highest vote-getters, and suddenly SF voters are more centrist? What dumbed-down "analysis." The multi-shade reality is that SF is an interesting amalgam of liberals, progressives, moderates/centrists who have long contested for power, with each winning their share and the balance fluctuating between them over time depending on issues, whether there are polarizing figures like Willie Brown to organize against, etc. Neither side has ever really dominated for long. Prof Rich DeLeon from SF STate has done some excellent analysis about this that shows the granular complexities of SF politics, see his book Left Coast City. But Shifty Shifflett, who hates RCV, isn't capable of complex, multishade analysis, his is a polarized black and white world where he bleats in story after story like a one-note tube: "RCV bad, runoffs good", "RCV bad, runoffs good", "RCV bad, runoffs good", "RCV bad, runoffs good".
REally, the Bay Citizen has become an emabarrassment to the NY Times. The Times might as well have an alliance with the Revolutionary Communist Party newspaper, since both publish dogmatic filled drivel.
Erica Byrne
It's not true that Mirkarimi won "only because two other candidates in the race split the moderate vote".
This was a ranked-choice ballot.
Thus, it is clear from the numbers that moderate voters who selected a moderate candidate as their first choice did not choose the other moderate candidate as their second choice. They chose Mirkarimi as their second choice.
Erica Byrne
It wasn't moderate voters who "gave Ed Lee an insurmountable advantage" in the mayor's race.
It was the 52,524 disenfranchised voters who weren't allowed to participate in the "instant run-off" between Lee and Avalos that allowed Lee to claim victory in the race.
Looking at the numbers shows that Ed Lee was proclaimed the winner with 84,457 votes compared with 57,160 votes for Avalos, a difference of only 27,297.
Had there been just four candidates for mayor, a ranked-choice ballot with three slots would have been correct. However, with over 15 candidates, there should have been either a ballot with 14 slots, or a run-off among the top four candidates.
Thus, we can't know the true result of the mayor's race until there is a run-off among the top four candidates.
Does anyone think the final winner will really be Ed Lee?