The Bay Guardian news staff has been meeting with a host of politicians and local movers and shakers recently, to help inform our decisionmaking on the Endorsements issue for the upcoming November election, which hits newsstands Oct. 8.
You can thumb through it for our full package of voting recommendations. In the meantime, we’re offering a closer look at the candidates here on our Politics Blog, where we’ll post the full audio recordings from most of the endorsement interviews we conducted in recent weeks.
Tune in here to learn more about each candidate and ballot measure, and decide for yourself which ones seem worthy of support.
This installment features a pair of audio recordings from our interviews with David Campos and David Chiu, opponents in the race for California Assembly District 17, who represent Districts 9 and 3, respectively, on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
As Chiu notes early on in his endorsement interview, “You have in this race two guys named David C., who both have immigrant backgrounds, who both went to Harvard Law School, who are both progressive Democrats by any standard of the state, who have served together for the exact same period of time. And I would also point out that we have voted together 98 percent of the time. I think the key distinction between David and David is, I have moved forward, I have built consensus at the Board of Supervisors time after time on the most difficult and challenging issues that we’ve had … and I have passed … 105 ordinances, while David Campos has done that about a third as often.”
Listen to the full Bay Guardian interview with David Chiu:
Campos, meanwhile, presented a different narrative when comparing himself to Chiu.
“What this race presents to voters is, I think, a clear choice, between two different visions for where San Francisco should be headed,” Campos said. “I think that there are two good people who are running for this office, who have notwithstanding some similarities, real differences in terms of where the city needs to go. I believe that we need to first recognize that we have an affordability crisis, and I’m proud that I was the first member of the Board of Supervisors who started talking about a crisis. And I think that what we need is someone who is going to be a champion for working people, middle-income people in Sacramento. I am running for the most … progressive Assembly district in the entire state of California. And I believe that the person who follows in the footsteps of Tom Ammiano has to be a champion of the underdog.
Listen to the full Bay Guardian interview with David Campos: