Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Ed Lee waves to supporters while campaigning in Chinatown on election day, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011

To celebrate his unofficial victory in the San Francisco mayor’s race Tuesday night, Ed Lee was joined onstage at the Palace Hotel by one of his most influential backers, Ron Conway, the Republican Silicon Valley investor.

For many political observers, it was a symbolic moment: The most liberal city in America had just tacked to the right.

San Francisco is still a one-party town; for years, the BART Commissioner James Fang has been the only elected Republican.

But Tuesday’s election signaled a palpable shift: In addition to Lee, a pro-business moderate, voters overwhelmingly picked George Gascón, the law-and-order former police chief — and former Republican — as district attorney.

“To whoever thinks San Francisco is loopy and left-wing, this election basically said, ‘No, it’s really not,’” said David Latterman, associate director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco. “We just elected an ex-Republican, pro-death penalty district attorney by a landslide. Just ponder that.”

“More conservative is the new normal,” Latterman added.

Analysts said that Lee and Gascón — both appointed to interim positions after their predecessors were elected to state office a year ago — benefited from a ranked-choice voting system that tends to favor incumbents. And John Avalos, the left-leaning supervisor, finished a strong second to Lee, an indication that the progressives are still very much alive in San Francisco.

But analysts said the city’s changing demographics and a tough economic climate were pushing San Francisco toward the political center.

That shift is personified by Lee, a political neophyte who owed his victory to two increasingly powerful constituencies: the city’s growing Chinese-American community and a booming technology sector.

Both groups are a source of significant financial resources and typically hold more conservative views than the progressives, particularly on fiscal issues.

“The progressive movement is getting weaker,” said former Mayor Art Agnos, one of its standard-bearers. “They have not been organizing and doing the kinds of things I did when I was in office. They can’t raise money to compete with wealthy contributors.”

The progressives — led by Aaron Peskin, the Democratic Party chairman, and former Supervisor Chris Daly, liberal firebrands who cemented their reputations by opposing development — began to falter last November, when a wave of moderate supervisors were swept into office. Two months later, former Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. and Rose Pak, the Chinatown political consultant, made an aggressive behind-the-scenes push to appoint Lee, then the city administrator, as interim mayor.

Since August, when Lee announced that he would seek a full term, he pushed a pro-business agenda, often drawing attention to the tax break he had negotiated with Twitter to prevent the company from leaving San Francisco. Although the city lost tens of millions of dollars in forgone payroll tax revenue, Lee emphasized the potential for creating new jobs as Twitter continued to grow and revitalizing a blighted section of Market Street.

Avalos and the Service International Employees Union, the city’s largest labor union, criticized the deal as a corporate giveaway. But Lee won support from the tech industry, including Conway, who raised $600,000 for a high-profile independent expenditure campaign in support of Lee’s candidacy. The campaign included a highly successful video featuring the entertainer M.C. Hammer, the Giants pitcher Brian Wilson, the Google executive Marissa Mayer and Biz Stone, the Twitter co-founder.