Election 2011

Campaign cash roundup and questions about our sleeping watchdog

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Oliver Luby – the last true public-spirited employee at the Ethics Commission (a campaign lapdog when it should be a watchdog) before being forced out in 2010 – has written an insightful and comprehensive analysis of spending by candidates and outside groups during last year’s election. It’s published by CitiReport.

Among his findings are that the largely unregulated spending by supposedly independent third-party groups totaled $3.6 million, with $1.4 million of that going to support Mayor Ed Lee, and much of it coming so late in the race that voters weren’t able to factor its sources into their decisions.

Those outside groups spent almost as much to elect Lee as the campaign itself raised, which was almost $1.6 million. When those two figures are combined, and one subtracts the $419,891 in independent expenditure (IE) spending in opposition to Lee, the appointed mayor and his supporters spent $33.87 for each first place vote he received, or about 2.5-times that of second-place finisher John Avalos, whose $757,327 in “supportive financing” works out to $13.25 per vote.

Luby has long called for Ethics to get tougher on violators of campaign finance law, playing whistleblower at several key points in his career, starting in 2004 when he and then-staffer Kevin DeLiban exposed notorious campaign attorney Jim Sutton’s alleged scheme to illegally launder unregulated funds being collected for then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s inauguration into paying off some of his $550,000 campaign debt.

In his latest piece, Luby again calls out his old bosses at Ethics for ignoring local laws against maxing out donations to many candidates in order to buy influence at City Hall. Donors are limited to an “overall contribution limit” that equals the maximum individual donation of $500 times the number of offices open, which was three in this election. It allows the city recoup from the campaigns money collected in excess of that, which Luby said totals $29,111 in this election.

“The SF Ethics Commission does not enforce this law. Supervisor Scott Wiener wants to help them get rid of it,” Luby wrote. Ethics Commission Executive Director John St. Croix was out of the office and hasn’t returned a Guardian call for comment.

Among those whose excessive contributions would be diverted to city coffers are Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini (perhaps the city’s most powerful Republican), PR powerhouse Sam Singer, medical marijuana activist Kevin Reed, political fundraiser Wade Randlett, city staffer-turned-developer Michael Cohen, moderate Democrat Mary Jung, and Coalition for Responsible Growth (a pro-development group) President Rodrigo Santo. Not surprisingly, they all contributed to Lee, whose campaign would be on the hook for the most in givebacks, $7,725, followed by David Chiu’s mayoral campaign at $4,700.

Finally, for all their talk about fiscal responsibility, Lee and his supporters couldn’t seem to live within their means in this election. Lee’s campaign finished about $275,000 in debt, while two of the pro-Lee IEs also finished in the red: SF Neighbor Alliance ($11,338) and Progress for All ($35,890), the ethically challenged creators of the “Run Ed Run” campaign that purported to talk Lee out of his pledge not to run for a full term in the office he’d been appointed to.

These are just some of the findings in Luby’s voluminous reporting, so check it.

Lessons from 2011 for 2012

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With the release of precinct results for the 2011 election, we are able to actually see, for the first time, what San Francisco voters did, as opposed to hearing what various nabobs said they did.  There are a couple of key conclusions about the vote that should guide any left-liberal thinking of the key 2012 Supervisor races.

The first thing San Francisco voters did- about 40,000 of them-  was stay home.  Turnout – about 40% – was the lowest for a mayor’s race in 40 years. Moreover, counter to several “expert” narratives, turnout in neighborhoods with large numbers of Chinese voters — Chinatown, the Richmond, the Sunset, and Vis Valley — was lower (average 33%) than in neighborhoods with few Chinese voters — Diamond Heights, Noe Valley, the Castro and West of Twin Peaks — where turnout averaged 40%.

There seems to be four reasons for this curious outcome. A couple of them have lessons for us for the 2012 election that we ignore at our peril.
First, in a City that is clearly center-left, voters were presented with nine center-right candidates, seven of whom were declared by the Chronicle at one time or another to be “serious.” Only John Avalos was a clear center-left choice. This was shown in the huge number undecideds that appeared in poll after poll. Undecided voters are often unhappy at the lack of choice being offered by the field and simply don’t vote.

Second, professional campaign management of the supposedly serious candidates was terrible and actually counter-productive to their candidates’ best interests. The pros actually seemed to have suppressed turnout in key neighborhoods. Ace Smith and Bill Barnes, working for for Ed Lee, spent most of their time trying to distance their candidate from his base and key supporters, made rookie fund-raising mistakes time and again and gave their counterparts in the Yee and Herrera campaigns ample ammunition for a  series of negative ads and mailers.  John Whitehurst and Mark Mosher, working for Herrera, and Jim Sterns, working for Yee, took the opportunity and went negative on the least threatening figure in San Francisco politics in recent memory. 

As we all know negative campaigns generally suppress turnout — and that seems to be the case in this election. Avalos, who after September had no professional management, stayed positive and gained votes by doing so.

Third, organized labor, for the first time in living memory, did not endorse the winning candidate for mayor. Indeed, its official candidate, Yee, came in FIFTH. It’s as if labor decided to concentrate only on its issue — pension reform — and devote no energy, people or money to the myors race. Without labor’ support,effective GOTV in left-liberal neighborhoods is all the more difficult and was clearly beyond the ability of the Avalos campaign to carry by itself.

Labor knew who it wanted to vote on pension reform and narrowly focused only on those voters. That it still has the ability to do electoral politics can be seen in the fact that more total votes were cast on  Proposition C (186,336) — labor’s pension- reform measure –than were cast for all candidates in the mayors race (179,888).

Finally, there were 160 fewer polling places this election than last year, and to make matters worse the Department of  Elections mailed 115,000 voter handbooks with the wrong polling place address causing them to send postcards with the corrections. While this in no way was responsible for the 40,000 fewer votes cast, it was probably worth several hundreds of missed votes.

The lessons for next year? We need good candidates who actually align with political sensibility of the voters. This will be especially true in District Five after Mayor Lee appoints some center-right clone in the most left-liberal district in the city, and equally true in District Three with David Chiu, who has certainly turned to the right since his election. 

Supervisor David Campos in District 9 will be fine in this regard as will Supervisor Eric Mar in District 1 — where he will face a real fight.
Avalos’ showing in the mayors race should do him well in District 11 and offers a real chance for him to be board president in 2013.
Community-based left-liberals and labor must come together closer than in this election and perhaps closer than at any time since the Great depression. Labor’s support for the Occupy movement is a good indication that fruitful common ground can be found. We need each other more than ever in 2012.

We need to work to get good lines for the new districts and have a grand meeting of the minds on how we address the absentee voter issue.  Both labor and the Mirkarimi campaign did absentees well enough to win.  We need to apply their lessons to the Supervisors races.

Dare to struggle, dare to win.

Calvin Welch is a housing activist who has been watching San Francisco elections for more than 40 years.

 

Is SF moving to the right?

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The Bay Citizen/New York Times thinks so. The headline on the story — “more conservative is the new normal” — says it all. Matt Smith (formerly of our price-fizing rival SF Weekly) and Gerry Shih say the Nov. 8 election signals a turn to the right for this famously liberal city:

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.”

Well: It’s interesting that they call Lee a “pro-business moderate,” which is probably accurate but differs from how Lee’s more progressive supporters see the new mayor. But while they talk about Gascon, they conveniently leave out the fact that San Francisco has elected the first solid progressive to a citywide office in a long, long time. Ross Mirkarimi — a former Green Party member and without a doubt one of the most left-leaning supervisors — won a tight, contested race for sheriff running honestly as a progressive. I think you have to go back to 1987, when Art Agnos ran for mayor as the candidate of the left, to find another example of a progressive champion winning all across town.

The interesting element of all of this — and something I think Smith and Shih got absolutely right — is that the demographic makeup of the city is changing, and has been for a while:

“From a political perspective, the tech companies are employing young workers who often prefer to live in San Francisco, even if they commute to Silicon Valley, said Wade Randlett, a Bay Area technology executive and top fund-raiser for President Obama.”

Wade Randlett is not my favorite person in local politics, but the point he makes is valid — and it’s not happening by accident. Virtually all of the new housing that’s been built in San Francisco in the past decade has been aimed at wealthy people, a lot of them young tech types who commute from the city to Silicon Valley. The other people moving into new housing are empty-nest retirees from places like Marin County. If you walk through the new condo buildings in Soma, the residents are mostly white, with a few Asians; there are almost no African Americans, very few families and essentially zero working-class people.

For years, downtown groups (including Randlett’s former employer, SFSOS) have pushed for this kind of housing, and some of them have been very open about their goal: By bringing in more rich people and tech workers, you can change the politics of the city. Housing activist Calvin Welch puts it succinctly: Who lives here, votes here.

That’s the reason why land use and housing are so critically important in this town. If poor and working-class people are pushed out to make way for a more upscale set of residents, then progressives who talk about taxing the wealthy to provide services for the poor will have a harder time getting elected.

It’s not a conspiracy; it’s an open, stated policy goal of the people who spent vast sums of money electing Ed Lee.

 

 

Mirkarimi victory seems assured

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The San Francisco Elections Department counted more than 25,000 ballots today and just posted new ranked choice voting tallies that continue to indicate Ross Mirkarimi has been elected sheriff, widening his margin of victory from yesterday’s count. Mayor Ed Lee and District Attorney George Gascon saw their margins shrink slightly, but they are also the clear winners.

With only about 7,000 provisional ballots still be counted, it’s unlikely that these results will change. Lee’s share of first place votes dipped by about a half percentage point to 31 percent, while second place John Avalos, third Dennis Herrera, fourth David Chiu, and fifth place Leland Yee each gained a bit of ground.

It took 12 rounds of reallocating votes, one more than yesterday’s tally, but the latest count shows Lee winning with 60 percent of the vote to Avalos’s 40 percent.

In the sheriff’s race, the only variable after yesterday’s count was whether Paul Miyamota might be eliminated before Chris Cunnie – raising the question of whether Mirkarimi would get a big enough chunk of Miyamoto’s votes to put him over to top. But with Mirkarimi gaining ground in first place votes to 38 percent, and with 1,117 votes separating Cunnie and Miyamoto in the second round, it would be almost impossible for the winner to change.

In the DA’s race, Gascon dropped and David Onek rose by about a half percentage point, but with more of Sharmin Bock’s votes going to Gascon, he wins in the third round with 63 percent of the vote.

The next D5 supervisor

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Now that it appears Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will be the next sheriff — and Ed Lee will be mayor for the next four years — the speculation is starting over who Lee will name to replace Mirkarimi as District Five supervisor. There are an abundance of qualified candidates, but my sources tell me the Mayor’s Office is looking right now primarily at two people — London Breed, director of the African American Art and Culture Complex and a former redevelopment commissioner, and Malcolm Yeung, an attorney who is president of the Asian American Bar Association and longtime policy person at the Chinatown Comminity Development Center.

Both, of course, were Lee supporters.They have a history of working on progressive causes (Yeung, at CCDC) and strong ties to the community (Breed at AAACC). Breed has spent more time as an activist in D5 (and was appointed to her job by former mayor Willie Brown), but Yeung is reportedly popular with Rose Pak, who clearly has the mayor’s ear.

I don’t know who Lee will be taking to about the appointment, but you can be sure both Brown and Pak will be giving their advice. And so far — although it’s still early — nobody has been talking to the current supervisor.

I called Mirkarimi and asked him who he would suggest, and he told me there were plenty of people — although neither Breed nor Yeung would be on his short list. He didn’t want to name names, but I can: queer/labor activist Gabriel Halland and Community College Board Member John Rizzo are both eminently qualified for the job, and Julian Davis would also be on a lot of short lists. So would Christina Olague, a planning commissioner (and Lee supporter) — but one City Hall insider told me that “Willie would never let that happen.”

Mirkarimi did suggest that he ought to be consulted. “I would think after all the work I’ve done in the district over seven years and two administration that  Mayor Lee would at least want my input,” he said. We’ll see.

Lee, Mirkarimi, and Gascon win first ranked choice tally

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San Francisco’s first run of ranked choice voting tallies for yesterday’s election shows Ed Lee winning the mayor’s race (with progressive favorite John Avalos in second), George Gascon remaining district attorney, and Ross Mirkarimi becoming the new sheriff in town.
“Progressive victory, citywide, that’s huge,” Sup. David Campos told Mirkarimi this afternoon outside the Elections Department, where a scrum of journalists and politicos gathered to get the results. It would indeed be a rare citywide victory for progressives, which analyst David Latterman says constitute about 19 percent of the electorate, compared to 39 percent who identify as moderate and 36 percent who call themselves liberals.   
About 7,500 provisional and 24,000-25,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted over the next few days, said Elections Chief John Arntz, telling reporters, “I’m not saying these are the final results by any stretch.” But there is good reason to believe these winners will stick.
In the sheriff’s race, where Mirkarimi faced off against three candidates with long law enforcement backgrounds, David Wong was the first to be eliminated, and the lion’s share of his 9,487 votes went to fellow Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Miyamoto rather than Chris Cunnie, the former head of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, knocking Cunnie out of the race.
Of Wong’ votes, 3,828 went to Miyamoto, 2,637 were exhausted (meaning Wong voters had no second choice), 1,682 went to Mirkarimi, and just 1,325 went to Cunnie, who had been in second place. That gave Mirkarimi almost 40 percent of the vote, compared with 30.7 percent for Miyamoto and 29.8 percent for Cunnie.
On the next round, Cunnie’s 42,877 votes were redistributed as follows: 16,820 to Miyamoto, 14,675 exhausted, and 11,322 to Mirkarimi, giving him 53 percent of the vote. “I’m optimistic, but I’m not declaring victory,” Mirkarimi told reporters. He said that he hopeful that he’ll get the chance to continue the 30-year progressive legacy of retiring Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who endorsed Mirkarimi.
The only real variable in the sheriff’s race is how Cunnie’s second place votes break in the event that incoming ballots change who gets eliminated after Wong, but Mirkarimi said he was happy with how well progressive campaigns did in this election.  
“I want to say how proud I am of the Avalos campaign. It did a good job at getting people out who have felt disenfranchised,” Mirkarimi added.
Indeed, Avalos surprised much of the political establishment by finishing strongly in second place with 18.3 percent of the vote compared to Lee’s 31.5 percent and Dennis Herrera’s 11.3 percent. In the first ranked choice run, it took 11 rounds of eliminations for Lee to break the 50 percent threshold of victory. And when he did, he jumped all the way to 61 percent, mostly because voters who chose Herrera as their third choice exhausted their ballots.
When Herrera was eliminated in Round 10, 18,276 of his 29,717 votes were exhausted, and of the balance, 6,683 went to Avalos and 4,705 went to Lee, where they had been at 28 percent and 49 percent respectively. Avalos then finished second with 39 percent of the vote.
Other notable rounds in the mayoral runoff were when fourth place finisher David Chiu was eliminated and his nearly 20,000 votes broke most heavily in favor of Ed Lee and being exhausted, reinforcing the idea that he draws his support mostly from moderates and is no longer part of the progressive movement that helped elect him to the Board of Supervisors.
Avalos got just 2,376 of Chiu’s second place votes, compared to 5,894 for Lee and 3,832 for Herrera. By contrast, when Leland Yee was eliminated a round earlier, his votes were redistributed fairly evenly among Lee, Chiu, Herrera, and Avalos. Part of the reason that Avalos never gained ground on Lee was that the mayor got more second place votes than his progressive challenger on every elimination between Round 3 and the final round.
In the DA’s race, Gascon’s 42 percent total of first place votes is an insurmountable lead, particularly given that he also did well on the second place votes, showing that attacks on his secrecy and police connections didn’t do much to hurt him. When third place finisher Sharmin Bock was eliminated in the third round, Gascon got 13,301 of her votes, compared with 10,430 for David Onek, and 11,840 exhausted.
The Elections Department will run new totals every day at 4 pm

35,000 votes still out

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The Department of Elections says there are about 34,500 ballots still to be counted — 27,000 election-day absentees and 7,500 provisionals. That would be about one sixth of the total votes. Not enough to make a huge difference, but if they break the way the election-day votes did, the mayor’s race will get tighter (although probably not enough to make a difference) and Ross Mirkarimi will pull further away in the sheriff’s race. The only other difference: Prop. H may wind up losing — not that it matters, since it’s only a policy statement anyway and the school board is not about to change a system it developed over two years of public hearings.

Analyzing the numbers

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I keep looking at the election numbers, trying to make sense of it all, and the more I look and count and add, the more a couple of things become clear:

1. The absentee vote wasn’t just about Ed Lee. Clearly, the Lee forces got their troops out and did an absentee drive, but the total absentee votes for mayor (62,446) were about the same as the total votes for district attorney (63,354) and most of the propositions.So the people who voted early voted the entrie ballot.

2. The election-day votes were so dramatically different from the absentees that several factors had to be at work. One of them was the phenomenal campaign for John Avalos, which moblized thousands of people and demonstrated how much of a force progressives can be. Keep in mind — Avalos, who had no independent expenditure groups and less money than many of the other candidates — actually came in first on election day. His team worked hard and smart and pulled off a near miracle.

3. The drop-off in support for Lee between the absentees and election day suggests that his popularity was, indeed, declining fast in the past few weeks. The voter fraud scandals had something to do with it, but so did the attacks on Lee by the Herrera and Yee campaigns and by IE groups supporting those two candidates. If Lee hadn’t been so far out in front a month ago, he might not have won. As it is, if he holds on, it won’t be with the kind of mandate he would like to claim.

When the Department of Elections runs the first pass at ranked-choice voting, we’ll get a better idea of how much Lee’s support has fallen; RCV won’t be such a big deal with the absentees since Lee got so many of those first-place votes. The election-day votes will be more telling; when Adachi, Yee and Chiu are eliminated, where do those seconds go? How many will go to Lee — and how many will go anywhere but?

Ed Lee’s absentee coup

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The most remarkable number in the election results was clear before a single election-day ballot was counted. The absentee ballots were released around 8:30 p.m., and they were stunning: Ed Lee has 26,621 votes. The nearest competitor, John Avalos, was at 7,080.

That’s right — Lee was almost 20,000 votes ahead before election day. And that turned out to be the margin of victory — Avalos actually got more votes than Lee from the people who voted Nov. 8.

The reason Lee is likely to be the next mayor is because — through a combination of traditonal hard work on identifying supporters and getting them to vote by mail and quite possibly some degree of illegal conduct — he had 26,000 votes in the bag long before the polls opened.

He was, of course, helped by the independent expenditure committees and by the fact that he had a natural base in Chinatown (and people on the ground there to get that base to vote). But none of the other campaigns managed to come close to that level of organizing. It’s something progressives have to keep in mind — elections in San Francisco are no longer won and lost on election day.

Ed Lee, Leland Yee and the progressive vote

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A couple of months ago, I got into an argument with Enrique Pearce, who runs Left Coast Communications, the firm that set up Run Ed Run and ran one of the independent expenditure committes for Ed Lee. I told him that his firm was misnamed, that Lee was not a “left” candidate; he told me that Lee was the best bet for progressives because he was the “only candidate who could stop Leland Yee.”

Now: We can all argue forever about Yee’s progressive credentials (I’ve done that in detail here). But if Pearce was telling the truth, he was wrong, so wrong, and the numbers show it. Leland Yee came in fourth. Lee didn’t prevent Yee from becoming mayor; he prevented John Avalos or Dennis Herrera from becoming mayor. Very different story, Mr. Pearce.

Willie Brown and his rich friends were all ecstatic at his party at the Palace Hotel, and why not? They’re back in the game, back in charge at City Hall. And if Brown — who, by the way, engineered this whole thing in one of the most brilliant political moves in San Francisco history — is that happy, there’s a reason for it. The wealthy and powerful interests in San Francisco think Lee is going to do what they want. That’s why they’re celebrating his election.

I’m not trying to be a downer here — it’s still possible that the ranked-choice voting system will put Avalos in first. But it’s not at all likely. The only way that could happen: If the “anybody but Ed” vote was so strong on election day that virtually all of the second-place votes from Bevan Dufty, Jeff Adachi, Yee, David Chiu and Dennis Herrera went to Avalos. Possible, but don’t be on it.

The reality is we’re probably facing four years of Mayor Ed Lee, and I hope he proves me wrong and shows that he’s willing to stand up to the people who put him in power. Possible, but don’t be on it.

Avalos campaign revives the progressive movement

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As I walked into the John Avalos campaign party in Roccapulco around 11 pm, Sup. David Campos told me, “It’s the best party in town!” And he was right. The speeches were just getting underway on the stage and there was a palpable energy in the large crowd even though many of them had been out campaigning since early in the morning.
Avalos’ wife, veteran progressive organizer Karen Zapata, set the tone. First, she recognized Eric Quezada, the longtime housing rights activist who died in August, and the rest of the progressive leaders, such as Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly, who laid the foundation for a campaign that finished the night strongly in second place, less than 13 percentage points behind with voters’ second and third choices still to be tallied.
If Ed Lee hangs on to win, she said, “We could be screwed unless we work together and organize.” It was a theme and a feeling that would permeate the event, this sense that Avalos and the progressives are enjoying a resurgence in the last month thanks to what’s happening in the streets, both with this campaign and the OccupySF movement that Avalos has taken a lead role at City Hall in supporting.
“We have to stick together and we have to push from outside the system. We have to push John and we have to push everyone in the system,” Zapata said, firing up the young crowd as she introduced her husband.
Avalos praised the campaign for having so much heart and with filling his. “This has been a campaign of the people,” Avalos said, seeming genuinely touched by the energy in the room.
The progressive movement has been fighting for the soul of this city for a long time, he said, citing the anti-displacement movement that became a political force in 2000-01, a struggle that continues today with the latest tech boom. “In a way, we’re embracing change that is accelerating our displacement here in San Francisco,” Avalos said.
But he said people are waking up to the idea that the people need to stand up to the super rich and their political enablers. “The Occupy Wall Street movement is changing the consciousness of this country,” Avalos said, noting how it is echoing themes that progressive San Franciscans have been sounding for years. “Everyone is talking the same language we’ve been talking, because we’ve been talking about the 99 percent for a long time.”
But between that movement and this campaign, he said the battle was just beginning, praising the “new generation of leadership, that’s what this campaign is about. We’re going to take back this city one way or another!”
And he closed with a chant from the streets: “Whose city?” Avalos shouted, and the crowd roared back, “Our city!”

With 100 percent (sort of) counted …

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With 100 percent of the vote in — sort of — the election is shaping up this way:

Barring a real surprise, Ed Lee will win a four-year term.

Ross Mirkarimi is positioned 10 points ahead of Chris Cunnie, and ought to survive the RCV count to win the sheriff’s race.

George Gascon is too far ahead to catch.

The turnout was a miserable 31 percent.

That’s tonight, though — I’m getting reports that a lot of precincts had a lot of election-day absentees turned in. That could bump the turnout a few points — and since election-day absentees tend to break roughly the same as election-day votes, it will help Mirkarimi.

John Avalos really showed the strength of the progressive vote tonight and established himself as a leader in the movement. He and his campaign have a lot to be proud of; he lacked the big money and IE efforts that the other candidates had and he ran an impressive campaign. But without the type of early-voting effort that the Lee campaign had, it appears there was no way anyone could win this race.

That’s part of the lesson for progressives — the Avalos campaign surged in the last two weeks, but it was already too late. Those early votes can be decisive, and tonight, it appears they were.

 

 

 

93 percent of the votes are in

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And it doesn’t look good for anyone except Ed Lee.

John Avalos has done really well — he’s in solid second place, almost 10,000 votes ahead of Dennis Herrera, who is in third. But he’s also 15,000 votes behind Lee — and that margin is entirely the absentee vote. Lee was 20,000 votes ahead in the absentees; if Avalos had been able to stay close in the early-vote race, he’d be very competitive right now. But it’s going to be hard for him, or anyone else, to make up the vote difference.

Too early to tell for sure — there could be a strong “anyone but Ed” vote that shows up in the second-place selections. But it would have to be far stronger than the polls have shown so far.

It looks tonight as if Lee has a commanding lead. He did what he had to do — he had an effective absentee effort that got his votes out and in the bank. If he wins in the RCV calculation and become the next mayor, that will be the deciding factor.

The sheriff’s race is a very different story. It’s going to be close — but Mirkarimi is looking very strong. He’s not only in first place — he’s getting almost 50 percent of the election-day vote.

The DA’s race is tighening a bit — but Gascon is still 20 points ahead at 42 percent and needs only a few seconds from the other three to make it over the top.

 

 

Herrera and ranked-choice voting

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Dennis Herrera remains hopeful. “I want to see how the next round of votes goes,” he said.

But there was one thing that he was clear about: he does not like ranked choice voting. “I love the runoff system,” he said. “I have differences with candidates that need to be aired and it’s really hard to do it in a ranked-choice system.”

It is a point Herrera has made before. “I don’t like ranked choice voting and I never have, but I defended it all the way to the 9th Circuit [Court of Appeals in his role at City Attorney], but I think it’s bad policy,’ he said. Yet tonight, it was particularly stinging because he felt he could have beat Ed Lee in a head-to-head matchup.

At this point, though, it doesn’t look as if Herrea would have made a runoff anyway — John Avalos seems to be in a solid second place.

The latest numbers: The initiatives

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Well, we can call the election on most of the initiatives.The two bond measures, A and B, are going to win handily. Prop. C and Prop. D are both going to win, but Prop. C is going to have more votes — and thus be the one that takes effect.

I think the sales tax (Prop. G) is going down; the election-day vote is almost even yes and no, and it needs two-thirds to win. Not going to happen.

The “neighborhood schools” measure is going to lose. So are Props. E and F.

Oh: George Gascon will be the district attorney for the next four years. Not even close.

New mumbers: Mirkarimi, Avalos surge

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The next round of numbers are in, and the first clear trend is the Ross Mirkarimi is surging. Mirkarimi is 36 percent, to 28 percent for Miyamoto — but when you back out the absentee vote, he’s getting 45 percent of the election-day votes. Cunnie is going to finish second. If turnout is good, Mirkarimi’s in very good shape.

The mayor’s race is tightening up quite a bit, but Lee is still well ahead. He’s at 33 percent with Avalos at 16 percent — but here’s what’s interesting. In the election day (non absentee) votes, Avalos has gained 11,416 votes; Lee has gained 14,225. So in terms of the election day turnout, Avalos is only a few thousand votes behind.

Herrera, in third, has picked up 5,640 votes on election day.

So right now it looks like Lee first, Avalos second — and if Lee finishes with more than 30 percent, it’s going to be hard for anyone to catch him.

The word from Leland Yee

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Leland Yee arrived at his campaign party defiantly hopeful despite being in fifth place. “The night is still young, and we continue to wait for the results,” he told reporters outside.

Then he went inside to a party packed with young volunteers and told them: “I’ve never had a better crew of individuals — and a younger crew of individuals — than in this election.” He said his campaign accomplished a lot: “No longer will San Francisco be run by machine politics. No longer will the power brokers run City Hall.”

We’re not sure how he arrived at that conclusion.

The race for sheriff

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This one’s going to be interesting. In my hasty first post I wrote that Chris Cunnie was trailing Mirkarimi, but in fact, the second-place candidate is Paul Miyamoto. That’s interesting because I didn’t think Miyamoto could win — but he’s obviously getting some benefit from the strong Asian vote. I figured Cunnie was the real threat to Mirkarimi, and I still think he is — but Mirkarimi did well enough in the absentees that he’s probably going to get a fair number of Miyamoto’s second-place votes.

And I still think Miyamoto will drop to third by the end of the night, will be eliminated in the ranked-choice voting runoff — and his second-place votes will determine who the next sheriff will be.

 

 

What the early numbers show

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For starters, they show that turnout is going to be low. Some people predict that the absentees will represent almnost half the votes cast; if that’s the case, then total turnout will be around 30 percent. I think that’s low — but it’s a safe bet that fewer than half the registered voters have gone to the polls.

If the low turnout trend continues, then Ed Lee’s lead is insurmountable.

The numbers suggest that Michela Alioto-Pier — who is in seventh place, only a few votes ahead of the widely discredited Tony Hall — is going nowhere. The same goes for Jeff Adachi, who is in sixth place.

Interesting also that David Chiu is ahead of Leland Yee (only by a handful of votes, but still ahead) in what looks like a westside and Chinatown absentee turnout. 

Scott Wiener isn’t faring well tonight; both of his measures (Prop. E, which would allow the supervisors to amend some ballot initiatives) and Prop. F (which would change the registration requirements for political consultants) are losing badly.

I’m a little nervous about the sales tax, Prop. G., which needs a two-thirds vote and is now trailing 57-42. That’s a lot of ground to make up — and if it loses, it blows a big hole in the mayor’s budget.

The first numbers

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The absentees are in, and it’s no surprise that Mayor Ed Lee is in the lead. In fact, he’s way in the lead — he’s got 39 percent of the 67,000 absentees. I expected him to have a big advantage here, since he did a lot of early GOTV.

Worth noting: John Avalos, the most progressive of the major candidates, is in second in the absentees. That’s a very good sign for the Avalos campaign. But Lee is almost 20,000 votes ahead of Avalos and Dennis Herrera, and that, folks, will be very hard to make up.

The district attorney’s race is over; George Gascon has won.

The sheriff’s race is interesting; Ross Mirkarimi — again, the most progressive candidate — is actually ahead in what is looking like a very conservative absentee vote. He’s only got a slight lead over Chris Cunnie (31.7 percent to 31.4 percent, a total of a couple hundred votes) but that margin will grow as the night moves on. Mirkarimi, it appears, will finish first.

Here’s why I say it’s a conservative absentee turnout: The sales tax, Prop G, is losing 57-42 and Prop. H, the neighborhood schools measure, is ahead 58-41. Both results suggest a strong westside turnout in the absentees.

I’m surprised that Mirkarimi is doing so well with this bunch.

And I’m a little surprised that Prop. C (the “consensus”) pension reform is so far ahead of Prop. D (the Adachi pension reform). Even in the conservative areas, C is leading by 7 percent.

By the way, the school and street bonds have won. If they’re over 66 percent (and both are) in this batch of votes, they’ll win handily.

 

Numbers coming soon

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Steve Jones tweets that the Department of Elections is planning to release the first (absentee) numbers at 8:45. Election-day numbers will come about 45 minutes later. Which means that by 10 p.m. we’ll have a good idea what’s happening.

More good omens

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The author of the racist Arizona law AB 1070 was just recalled. And Mississippi voters decided that life doesn’t begin at conception. Maybe some sanity is returning to America.

Oh, and those election monitors

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The state has sent election monitors to SF, which sounds nice, but I think it’s a bit too late. The damage is already done; if the accounts of voter fraud and campaign finance problems are accurate, the monitors were needed weeks ago, not today.

There’s good news in Ohio

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The terrible anti-union measure in Ohio — which was being watched nationwide — has gone down in flames. So that’s a good omen.