Mayor

Occupy SF: Chron, Ex set the eviction stage

Zelda Bronstein
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Occupy SF: Chron, Ex set the eviction stage

The OccupySF camp is filthy. There’s violence, drugs and disease. Half the protesters are just drunken thugs who are there to party and make a mess. It’s a public-health hazard. Jeez, it looks like the message is lost and the place has to go.

That’s what the Chron and the Ex are saying — and it’s a perfect setup, a ready-made public excuse for Mayor Ed Lee to send the cops in with riot gear and an eviction notice. It could happen tonight, or tomorrow night.

Frankly, Lee needs the bad (for Occupy) press. The movement’s goals are popular in this city, and when he came very close to evicting the campers, with cops running around the city in buses, his popularity dropped. He saw what happened to Jean Quan in Oakland; her tear-gas assault on Occupy Oakland may have been the end of her political career.

But hey, it’s different now: The daily papers are proclaiming that the encampment isn’t about economic inequality any more. It’s devolved into an unruly mob that can’t be tolerated. Who can blame Lee for cleaning it up?

That also happens to be an utterly unfair characterization of what’s going on. Sure, there are homeless people in the camp, and yes, some of them have mental health issues. But OccupySF is talking about the 99 percent, some of whom have suffered greatly in this economy — and it’s no surprise that some of them part of the occupation. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it something that OccupySF is taking on. Oh, and by the way — the homeless people and people with mental health issues (that sometimes lead to violence) will still be on the streets of San Francisco is they evict the Occupy encampment. But they’ll be worse off than they are today.

Yael Chanoff just filed her report on what’s really going on at OccupySF:

At last night’s General Assembly, OccupySF organizer Philip Oje debriefed on that days meeting with Mayor Ed Lee, and participants in the 150-person meeting debated the best next steps. Several different viewpoints were discussed. Many were indignant about reorganizing camp to appease the city, saying that “I didn’t come her to comply with city ordinances that change every day. I came here to do what I think is right.”
Others believed believed that the camp should do everything possible to comply with the city in order to hopefully avoid a raid (and maintain credibility if one does occur.) It was generally acknowledged that the situation was a Catch-22: The camp could not comply with requirements such as maintaining four feet of space between tents without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza, but the city refused to allow any expansion to stand until their requirements were met. In general, those assembled agreed that regardless of the city’s difficult to follow guidelines, a clean-up would benefit the health and well-being of campers, and got to work.

This comes after a hard week of dealing with the frustrating realities of human interaction in a cramped space. The encampment has grown steadily since its start, and in recent weeks has been home to upwards of 300 people on a regular basis. Many campers would agree that in the past two weeks that tensions have built as high as they did. When Examiner Reporter Mike Aldax spent 24 hours at camp, it was during the peak of conflict.

Indeed, many at OccupySF are frustrated. There is a general feeling that there is not enough time in the day to maintain a safe and caring community that does not exclude anyone as well as progress with the political agenda that the movement stands for. However, there is also a basic agreement that those with addiction, mental illness, and other causes of suffering are affected directly by an unjust society in which a small percentage hoards vast majority of wealth while the masses struggle to afford food, shelter, health care and education; to attempt to exclude those who are in desperate situations, the most in need of emergency action to change our system and our lives, would be morally intolerable hypocrisy.

As famed radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen put it when he came to speak at the encampment November 12, “At the same time you’re building a resistance movement, you’re being put in the position of dealing with the needs of those who have been dispossessed and damaged by the system.”

It’s true: according to Connie Ford, a member of OPEIU Local 3 which represents many on the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, “The homeless come there because it’s safer than the shelters.”

This has caused difficulties in the past few weeks that the camp has been struggling to deal with. The solution is starting to come together. After physical fights began to become a major problem last week, the camp stepped up the process of enacting a culture of community policing. The night of November 15, when “Instigator Jimmy” was involved in an altercation during a general assembly, about 50 formed a mass between him and camp and slowly pushed him off the site, chanting “Whose park? Our park.” As one camper put it, “Jimmy’s individual will was extinguished by our collective will.” This is an experiment in radically non-violent coercion.

Since then, this tactic has been employed to greater and greater success. Last night, when one camper began to instigate conflict, it only took 10 or so others to cause him to leave in the same way, and hardly disrupted the peaceful mood at the site.

In addition, despite starting out completely unequipped to provide medical and mental health to the masses for free, OccupySF has set up a medical tent run by nurses from the National Nurses Association and several “emotional assistance” spaces, one of which has been facilitated by the Icarus Project and other groups with alternative approaches to mental health. According to an OccupySF press release today:
“Forty clergy, including bishops, have recently formed as ‘San Francisco Interfaith Allies of Occupy’ because we share the concerns of the ninety-nine percent,” said Rev. Carol Been of CLUE California, “and they have asked us for help because they were not prepared to handle homelessness, mental illness, people attracted for unseemly reasons not associated with the occupation. Resources have recently begun to be put into place.”

It seems that all of this grappling with difficult issues and hard work on the part of OccupySF has begun to pay off. Last night after General Assembly, campers worked to clear off the Bacci Ball courts as per the city’s request, take down tarps, and space out tents to the extent that they could without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza (renamed by some Bradley Manning Plaza.) Camp was clean and vastly quieter than it had been in previous days.

Around midnight, there were about 30 people awake, talking and playing mellow drums on the outskirts of camp while hundreds more slept in the approximately 180 tents. One man who had been sleeping there three weeks said, “There’s a new energy. After we cleaned, a lot of the riff-raff left.” With a grin he added “It looks like there’s still some, but they’ve been over there having some kind of profound conversation all night,” gesturing to the camp east side.

I pitched my tent about 10 feet from the “profound conversation” and drifted off easily, though I admittedly prefer a nice buzz of humanity while I sleep. I was, however, woken up around 6:00, when others began waking up and excitedly discussing the fact that the camp had made it through the night without a police raid.

It remains to be seen if the same will be said for tonight.

 

 

 

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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0

tredmond@sfbg.com

Occupy Oakland has been very good at exposing one local problem — police brutality. The first raids, and the tear gas and rubber bullets that flew afterward — showed the world how poorly trained the Oakland cops are and how unprepared they were for a largely peaceful demonstration.

But overall, the Occupy movement has been about national issues — or rather, The National Issue, which is income inequality. Nothing else going on in the United States compares. On an economic level, I could argue that nothing else matters — until we resolve the wealth and income gap, the recession will never end, the deficit will never improve, the unemployment rate won’t stabilize, the nation will grow weaker and weaker and more and more unstable … basically, we’re doomed.

But while there have been marches on local banks and corporations, not a lot of Occupy attention has gone to local inequality — to what the folks at San Francisco City Hall, and Oakland City Hall are doing to make the one percent in our own backyards pay its fair share for the services that most impact many of our lives. Mayor Jean Quan got booed for calling in the riot cops, but Mayor Ed Lee isn’t getting booed for corporate tax breaks.

The OccupySF people came out in force to a Board of Supervisors hearing to demand that their camp be left alone. But they aren’t out in force to demand, say, a local fee on bank foreclosures.

That’s not a criticism of a movement that continues to inspire me every day; it’s just a statement about tactics and strategy. And it’s one we all ought to be thinking about.

In a brilliant opinion piece this week, Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley Debug, notes:

“In San Jose, the city that used to promote itself as the capitol of Silicon Valley, city budget cuts have either eliminated or dramatically slashed hours for youth sanctuaries like libraries and community centers. … For us, the one percent are just up the street -– the 101 to be precise. Those tech giants exist in the same Silicon Valley that cannot even keep its library doors open. Why have they not given? Why have we not demanded?”

Good question.

U.S. mayors holding regular discussions about Occupy protests

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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4

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, a nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more, is holding regular discussions about Occupy protests nationwide. In recent days, protests that sprung up as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, Oakland, Portland, Denver, and some others were targeted with police crackdowns. In a recent interview with BBC news, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan stated that she had been in discussion with other mayors in the days before police raided Occupy Oakland.

The following is a statement issued by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“As with many other issue areas, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has facilitated regular conference calls with interested mayors to discuss issues of concern and exchange ideas about the Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations.

“Two of those calls have been a round robin discussion and provided a forum for mayors and police executives to discuss the impact of the demonstrations on their cities and how they are responding to it.

“Included in the discussions have been efforts cities have made to accommodate the demonstrators and maintain public health and safety. Other topics discussed include the costs cities are incurring as a result of the events and the impact on other city service and activities.”

Unclear at this point is whether federal agencies have also been involved in discussions held prior to the recent series of crackdowns. During protests held in Oakland last year decrying the fatal shooting of BART passenger Oscar Grant, there were federal agents mixed among police who were stationed in the streets.

Ed Lee’s challenges

Andrew Lam
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2

EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee has always talked about bringing the city together, about avoiding division and harsh conflict. And how that he’s won a four-year term, he’s going to have to address a wide range of city problems that in the past haven’t responded well to consensus and compromise.

He’s going to have to do it in the wake of an election in which the centrist candidates all finished low in the pack — and the strongest progressive actually won more votes than anyone else on Election Day. And his victory comes at a time when there’s more concern over economic inequality than this country has seen since the 1930s — represented most visibly by the large and growing OccupySF encampment.

The mayor received huge financial support — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — from some of the same people and businesses that the Occupy movement is targeting. Some of his campaign contributors have an conservative economic agenda that’s way to the right of the center of San Francisco politics. And some of his closest allies (and strongest supporters) are, to put it kindly, ethically challenged.

So it’s not going to be easy for the mild-mannered mayor to lead the city — and if he wants to be successful, he needs to work with and not ignore the left.

There are a few critical steps that would show the people who opposed him that he’s not a captive of big-business interests and that he can be trusted:

1. Appoint a real progressive to Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi’s District Five supervisorial seat. If Lee is really a mayor who’s above petty politics, the chief criterion for the appointment shouldn’t be loyalty to Lee.

District Five supported Avalos over Lee by a solid margin (in the Haight, Avalos got twice as many votes as Lee). The district has been represented by two people, Matt Gonzalez and Mirkarimi, both of whom were elected as Green Party members. It’s almost certainly the most left-leaning district in the city, and deserves a supervisor who represents that political perspective. Most of the qualified people who fit that description supported a candidate other than Ed Lee for mayor.

2. Don’t send the cops to roust OccupySF. The movement has support all over the city and is making an historic statement. It’s probably the most important political demonstration in San Francisco since the 1960s. A mayor who has any shred of a progressive soul should recognize that the most important issue facing this city and this nation is the wealth and income gap and help OccupySF make its voice even louder.

3. Present a plan for more than a “cuts only” budget. Yes, the sales tax measure lost, putting a hole in the city budget, and yes, it will be a year before a credible new revenue measure can go on the ballot. But now is the time to start bringing people together to look at what comprehensive tax reforms might be more appealing than a regressive sales tax.

4. Don’t give away the city to the One Percent. A developer wants to build 160 condos for the very, very rich on the waterfront at 8 Washington. Mayoral ally Rose Pak supports the project. It’s about as blatant an example as possible of something that only benefits multimillionaires, and it will be one of the first major land-use decisions Lee will have to grapple with. Making his opposition clear would demonstrate his independence.

5. Run an open administration. Both previous mayors, Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, were openly hostile to the press, hostile to open government and supremely arrogant. Lee has a different personal style — and he ought to show that he respect the Sunshine Ordinance by directing his departments to abide by the rulings of the Sunshine Task Force.

That’s what good government would look like.

Rank complaints

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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27

steve@sfbg.com

Even before all the votes had been cast on election day, the two most conservative members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proposed a ballot measure to repeal the city’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, prompting all the usual critics of this voter-approved electoral reform to denounce it as confusing and undemocratic.

Those same two supervisors, Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell, were also the ones who unsuccessfully pushed for a weakening of the public financing system last month, changes that will likely be wrapped into discussions in the coming weeks over how elections are conducted in the city. And progressive supporters of both systems warn that district supervisorial elections will probably be the next target of this concerted push to roll the clock back on electoral reforms in the city.

"The [San Francisco] Chronicle and the [San Francisco] Chamber [of Commerce] have been at it from day one," Steven Hill, who helped crafted both the RCV and public financing systems, told us. "They’re really clear about what they want to eliminate, so we should be clear about what we need to defend and we can’t get confused by this."

Indeed, the Chronicle ran an editorial Nov. 14 advocating the repeal of ranked-choice, calling it "a fundamentally flawed system that is fraught with unintended consequences." The paper, as well as its allies at the Chamber and other downtown institutions, has been equally vociferous in criticizing public financing and district elections.

Hill said that’s because moneyed interests prefer systems that they can manipulate using the millions of dollars in unregulated independent expenditures they can summon — an ability they demonstrated again in his election on behalf of Mayor Ed Lee — such as low-turnout runoff elections, citywide supervisorial races, and elections without the countervailing force of public financing. "They’ve been doing this steadily and looking for ways to chip away at it," Hill said.

But conservatives aren’t the only ones raising questions about RCV; some progressives say the system needs adjustment, too.

Although Farrell opposes all three of those electoral reforms, he insists that his concerns about RCV are about voter confusion and the perception that winners don’t have majority support and could be viewed as illegitimate. "There is just so much voter confusion out there," Farrell said, citing comments from voters who don’t understand how their votes are tabulated to produce a winner.

Hill counters that voters do have a clear understanding of how to rank their choices, downplaying the importance of whether they understand all the details of what happens next. But Farrell said that and the majority rule issue have undermined people’s faith in the elections.

"People get very upset when they realize someone didn’t get a majority of the vote," he told us, referring to how the majority threshold drops as voters’ top three candidates are eliminated. "To me, it’s just simpler to go back to the runoff system."

Many moderate politicians agree. "I don’t like ranked choice voting and I never have," City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who finished third in the mayor’s race, told us on election night. "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."

Sup. Scott Wiener, a Herrera supporter we spoke to at the same election night party, also wants to see a change. "I supported ranked-choice voting and until recently I continued to support it, but this race changed by mind," Wiener said, attributing the large mayoral candidate field and free-for-all debates to RCV. "There is no way most voters will be able to distinguish among the candidates."

But Hill says it’s a mistake to attribute the large field to RCV, or even to the public financing system that some are also trying to blame, a problem he said can be addressed in other ways, such as changing when and how candidates qualify for public matching funds.

Wiener said he hasn’t made up his mind about repealing RCV, and he said that he absolutely opposes a return to the December runoff election. One alternative he suggested was a system like that in place in New York City, with the initial election in September and the runoff during the general election in November. But he does think some change is needed, and he’s glad Elsbernd and Farrell proposed an RCV repeal.

"They’re starting a conversation with the repeal, but that’s not where it’s going to end," Wiener said.

Indeed, the system still has the support of most progressives, even Sup. John Avalos, who finished second in the mayor’s race and would now be headed into a runoff election against Ed Lee under the old system. "I continue to support ranked choice voting," Avalos told us. It takes six supervisors to play the charter amendment repealing RCV on the ballot.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who was narrowly elected sheriff in the ranked-choice runoff despite a 10-point lead in first place votes, said of the Farrell and Elsbernd proposal, "I do want to hear their criticisms."

"I understand the larger discussion, which was a bit of a misguided approach that some of our colleagues used to go after ranked choice voting on election day," Mirkarimi said. "But they are good politicians and they seized an opportunity."

Mirkarimi did say he was open to "maybe some tweaks. I do think ranked choice works better when you have many choices." Others, such as former Sup. Matt Gonzalez, have also recently advocated a ranked-choice system that allows more choices, which would address the majority-vote criticism because fewer ballots would be exhausted.

Hill said the legislation that voters approved back in 2002 already calls for more choices, but the technology used in the city’s current system only allows three choices. Yet he said the city’s vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, has developed a system allowing up to 11 choices, for which it is currently seeking federal certification.

Although he said various tweaks are possible, "I think the system worked well in this election," Hill said, noting that few San Franciscans would have wanted to drag this long campaign out by another month or to pay for another election.

State of the occupations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
State of the occupations

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The police evictions of OccupyOakland and OccupyCal over the last week, and the looming threat of another attempt to evict OccupySF, presented challenges for the Bay Area protests just as similar police crackdowns targeted Occupy encampments in Portland, Denver, New York, and other cities nationwide.

These fast-moving developments also come at a time when university students from around California will be descending on San Francisco for a Nov. 16-17 University of California Board of Regents meeting that was canceled this week because of public safety concerns. All of this adds up to a big and unpredictable moment for the widening movement (see “The growing 99 percent,” 11/9).

So we’ve decided to start a regular feature to track the latest developments in an Occupy movement that seems adamant about standing its ground even as it’s forced to deal with threats from police, organizing challenges, and the coming of winter.

 

#OCCUPYCAL GROWS UP FAST

Students at the University of California at Berkeley burst onto the Occupy scene Nov. 9 with the launch of OccupyCal, a student-led protest that made waves nationally after university police advanced on around 500 students in Sproul Plaza, the historic epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, and struck them with batons after they tried to set up camp.

UCB police made 39 arrests in two separate actions against protesters, fueling student protesters’ resolve at a general assembly convened afterward that drew more than 1,000 people and lasted well into the night. At around 1:30 am, students voted to hold a student strike on Nov. 15 in solidarity with others throughout the UC system.

The harsh police response prompted condemnation from the Free Speech Movement Archives (FSM-A). “It appears that the campus police are in need of remedial education concerning fundamental protections offered by the US Constitution — including First Amendment rights to Free Speech and Free Assembly that were clearly recognized and enshrined on the UCB campus 47 years ago on these very steps,” the group noted in an open letter.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, who was out of the country during the violent police crackdown, issued a statement on Nov. 14 ordering a third-party investigation of the clash and granting amnesty under the Student Code of Conduct to all students who were arrested for blocking police from removing the encampment.

“It was only yesterday that I was able to look at a number of the videos that were made of the protests on November 9. These videos are very disturbing. The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community. Sadly, they point to the dilemma that we face in trying to prevent encampments and thereby mitigate long-term risks to the health and safety of our entire community,” he wrote. “Most certainly, we cannot condone any excessive use of force against any members of our community.”

 

#OCCUPYSF, THE NEXT BATTLEGROUND

At press time, student and labor groups that were planning to converge on the UC Regents meeting at UCSF Mission Bay on Nov. 16 by the thousands were deciding how to respond to the meeting cancellation, but protests are still planned for that day, with support from OccupySF.

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee continues to insist that OccupySF break camp, but instead it has only grown larger, with the tents spreading out from Justin Herman Plaza onto the nearby sidewalk along Market Street in front of the Federal Reserve. At press time, protesters feared what seemed an imminent police raid, particularly now that the election is over and busloads of student protesters were headed into town.

 

TRAGEDY STRIKES #OCCUPYOAKLAND

On Nov. 10, Kayode Ola Foster, 25, suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head following an argument, just yards from the Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza (Oscar Grant Plaza to the occupiers who’d camped there for a solid month).

A somber mood settled over the plaza in the hours following the shooting as the tent city dwellers absorbed the gravity of the situation, and occupy activists held a candlelight vigil. Although initial reports suggested Foster had no relationship to the camp, police later said they believed he and one of two shooting suspects had spent time there.

 

#OCCUPYOAKLAND GETS THE BOOT

Three days after the fatal shooting near the OccupyOakland encampment sparked a hard-line response from local government officials, the camp was dismantled in an early morning police raid Nov. 14, the second to befall the occupation since it began a month ago. That evening, thousands marched back to the plaza in response to the raid and held a general assembly.

On the night of the raid, it took several hours for police to arrive at 14th and Broadway streets, where protesters began congregating in the intersection around 2 a.m. in anticipation of the forced eviction from camp. Law enforcement came en masse, with mutual aid support from seven different regional law enforcement agencies.

While two lines of riot police formed an L-shaped formation blocking protesters’ access to the plaza and nearby streets, hundreds more poured into the plaza to dismantle tents, flatten structures, and make arrests. Police arrested 32, the majority of whom belonged to a group of clergy members from the occupation’s Interfaith Coalition tent who sat calmly together in the plaza and sang by candlelight as they waited for police. Occupiers who witnessed the dismantling of the camp from behind police barricades yelled out, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Guardian editorial: Mayor Ed Lee’s challenges

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 Mayor Ed Lee has always talked about bringing the city together, about avoiding division and harsh conflict. And now  that he’s won a four-year term, he’s must address a wide range of city problems that in the past haven’t responded well to consensus and compromise.
He’s going to have to do it in the wake of an election in which the centrist candidates all finished low in the pack — and the strongest progressive actually won more votes than anyone else on Election Day. And his victory comes at a time when there’s more concern over economic inequality than this country has seen since the 1930s — represented most visibly by the large and growing OccupySF encampment.
The mayor received huge financial support — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — from some of the same people and businesses that the Occupy movement is targeting. Some of his campaign contributors have an conservative economic agenda that’s way to the right of the center of San Francisco politics. And some of his closest allies (and strongest supporters) are, to put it kindly, ethically challenged. So it’s not going to be easy for the mild-mannered mayor to lead the city — and if he wants to be successful, he needs to work with and not ignore the left.
There are a few critical steps that would show the people who opposed him that he’s not a captive of big-business interests and that he can be trusted:

1. Appoint a real progressive to Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi’s District Five supervisorial seat. If Lee is really mayor who’s above petty politics, the chief criterion for the appointment shouldn’t be loyalty to Lee or Willie Brown or Rose Pak et al.  District Five supported Avalos over Lee by a solid margin (in the Haight, Avalos got twice as many votes as Lee). The district has been represented by two people, Matt Gonzalez and Mirkarimi, both of whom were elected as Green Party members. It’s almost certainly the most left-leaning district in the city, and deserves a supervisor who represents that political perspective. Most of the qualified people who fit that description supported a candidate other than Ed Lee for mayor.

2. Don’t send the cops to roust OccupySF. The movement has support all over the city and is making an historic statement. It’s probably the most important political demonstration in San Francisco since the 1960s. A mayor who has any shred of a progressive soul should recognize that the most important issue facing this city and this nation is the wealth and income gap and help OccupySF make its voice even louder.

3. Present a plan for more than a “cuts only” budget. Yes, the sales tax measure lost, putting a hole in the city budget, and yes, it will be a year before a credible new revenue measure can go on the ballot. But now is the time to start bringing people together to look at what comprehensive tax reforms might be more appealing than a regressive sales tax.4. Don’t give away the city to the One Percent. A developer wants to build 160 condos for the very, very rich on the waterfront at 8 Washington. Mayoral ally Rose Pak supports the project. It’s about as blatant an example as possible of something that only benefits multimillionaires, and it will be one of the first major land-use decisions Lee will have to grapple with. Making his opposition clear would demonstrate his independence.

5. Support public power and community chocie aggregation. And appoint SPUC commissioners with visible, credible public power credentials. PG&E has maintained its illegal private power monopoly in San Francisco for decades  by muscling  mayors to appoint only PG&E-friendly commissioners who keep City Hall safe for PG&E.

6.  Run an open administration. Both previous mayors, Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown, were openly hostile to the press, hostile to open government and and supremely arrogant. Lee has a different personal style and he ought to show that he respects the Sunshine Ordinance by directing his departments to abide by the rulings of the Sunshine Task Force. That’s what good government would look like.

One percent assault the waterfront

Zelda Bronstein
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106
One percent assault the waterfront

While the 99 percent are fighting to hold onto a crowded encampment at Justin Herman Plaza, two new condo projects are moving along in San Francisco that would give the one percent specatular views from their mulitmillion-dollar homes on the waterfront.

And as much as OccupySF has been a challenge for Mayor Ed Lee, his administration’s response to giving choice parcels to some of the wealthiest people in the country will test his housing policy and his political independence.

The Port Commission is holding preliminary meetings on the 8 Washington project, which is about as direct a conflict with the city’s General Plan and housing needs as anyone could ever imagine. The developer wants to build 165 of the most expensive condos in the city’s history, aimed entirely at the very, very rich. Many will no doubt be used as pieds a terre for people who will live in San Francisco only a few weeks of the year. The project will do nothing to address the desperate need for affordable housing and housing for the middle class.

Rose Pak, the Chinatown business consultant who was central to Lee’s campaign, told me a few months ago that she supports the project. Marcia Smolens, one of the city’s top lobbyists, is working on it. There will be big money and clout pushing this — even though there is no rational reason why San Francisco should ever approve it.

And while BeyondChron claims that gentrifcation and overdevelopment isn’t so much of a problem these days because “financing … development is more difficult than ever,” the developers don’t seem to have noticed. A Nov. 11 story in the San Francisco Business Times (you can only get a few paragraphs if you don’t subscribe) explains that “developers are starting to plan new projects again after more than three years of inactivity” –and one of the biggest is a 284-foot, 160 unit residental highrise at 75 Howard Street. There’s a parking garage now on the site, which would be demolished to build condos that one expert told the BizTimes would sell for 1,000 a square foot.

You got that? A 1,000 square-foot one-bedroom unit would go for $1 million.

So we have two major waterfront projects — both of them high-end luxury condos, both of which would have just lovely views of the OccupySF encampment — moving forward while the barricades go up and the mayor decides when to evict the protesters. A classic battle for the soul of the city. Who’s side will Ed Lee be on?

Oakland occupiers respond to second police raid

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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4

By Shawn Gaynor

Angered yet undeterred by an early morning police raid, several thousand protesters came out in support of Occupy Oakland and marched from the Oakland Public Library back to the encampment site at Frank Ogawa Plaza — renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the occupiers — a little after 5 p.m. on Nov. 14. The atmosphere of the march was festive as the crowd made its way through the streets of Oakland, chanting and waving signs and banners.

The Oakland Police Department had a small presence of regularly uniformed officers in the plaza as of 5:30 p.m., but they did not interfere with protesters streaming into the square, where tents were dismantled by police earlier that day. However, city officials made it clear in the hours following the raid that they would not allow protesters to remain in the plaza overnight.

According to a text message update, an emergency general assembly was being convened at the amphitheater of the plaza to determine future plans.

Protesters were also circulating petitions calling for a recall of Mayor Jean Quan.

Check back here for more.

Lessons from 2011 for 2012

Zelda Bronstein
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4
Lessons from 2011 for 2012

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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Is SF moving to the right?

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.

 

 

Occupy SF: The eviction drumbeat begins

Zelda Bronstein
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Occupy SF: The eviction drumbeat begins

We all knew that Mayor Lee wouldn’t risk sending the cops in to evict OccupySF until after the election. But now the newspaper drumbeat has begun — the place is filthy, there’s shoplifting nearby and (gasp) the Ferry Building has to spend more money on toilet paper.

There’s an easy solution to the toilet paper problem: Install and maintain some more portable toilets near the camp. Not difficult, not expensive. And when you have that many people around (the camp keeps growing) and some of them have been living on the streets for a long time, having to hustle to stay alive, it’s not surprising that some cookies have been stolen. For the most part, the camp is pretty self-sufficient and there’s plenty of food, but if theft is a problem, a couple more beat cops at the Ferry Building would probably put a lid on it.

It’s too bad the Bay is so cold at this time of year; a quick dip with some Dr. Bronner’s would solve the need for the alleged sponge baths (and I just can’t imagine anything worse than the thought of a few people washing themselves off in a …. bathroom). It really wouldn’t be hard to install a solar shower on the scene, if the Department of Public works cooperated.

We all know there are going to be challenges dealing with a growing outdoor encampment in the middle of a big city. But this is something special, something important, a popular movement that’s responding to an emergency situation in the United States. This is a sophisticated city; we can deal.

But just as the merchants complaining in Oakland is putting pressure on Mayor Jean Quan, this sort of stuff will put pressure on Lee to send in the cops. Ugh.

 

AIDS vigil returns at Occupy SF

Zelda Bronstein
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AIDS vigil returns at Occupy SF

A coalition has come together to bring a striking new component to OccupySF: a rebirth of the ARC/AIDS Vigil. The vigil created an encampment similar to OccupySF’s at UN Plaza in the 1980s and remained there for ten years, protesting the federal government’s refusal to put resources into research and support for people with HIV/AIDS. Some who were involved in the vigil are currently part of the OccupySF encampment as individuals. Now, many hope to make that relationship more direct and active.


Brian Basinger, a longtime activist in several capacities including work with the AIDS Housing Alliance, is one of those involved in this effort. Says Basinger, “We are resurrecting the ARC/AIDS Vigil at 11/11/11 at 11:11 am. We are going to provide housing counseling, bring needle exchange, providing HIV testing, distributing organic vegetarian brown bag lunches, holding a speak-out, and presenting our demands to mayor Ed Lee to cure homelessness for people with HIV/AIDS, LGBT youth and transgender San Franciscans.”

All of this will take place tomorrow from 11am-2pm at Justin Herman Plaza, the site of Occupy SF’s encampment. Or, says Basinger, “Ethel Merman Plaza, as we like to call it.”

Those interested in the speak-out should be sure to get there by 11:11, as that will likely be first on the agenda. The food distribution is planned for the end of the kick-off event.

The group will provide services to the OccupySF encampment and anyone who comes through it. “We’re looking to create a safe space for homeless LGBT youth to gather…queer homelessness is invisible. We experience homelessness differently than the non-gay world.”

Like the ARC/AIDS Vigil of the 1980s and the Occupy Movement today, this event has the potential to be ongoing. Said Basinger plainly, “We won’t leave until we get our demands are met.”

Basinger warns: “It’s going to rain. But we want to highlight that people with fullblown AIDS and cancer are out in the goddamn rain everyday because the mayor has failed. ‘Ed Lee gets it done’- he’s not ‘getting it done’ for people with AIDS.” Basinger added that San Francisco “has the highest rate of homelessness for people with AIDS in the country.”

The group is putting out a call for “Rain gear to keep us warm- tarps and umbrellas.” Added Basinger, “Umbrella, ella, ella. Also, we put out a call for Rhianna. Rhianna, if you’re listening, come tomorrow.”

And with the impossible to predict explosion of the Occupy Movement- hey, anything could happen.

 

Mirkarimi victory seems assured

Sasha Cuttler
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Mirkarimi victory seems assured

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

Zelda Bronstein
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The next D5 supervisor

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.

San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

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San Francisco’s political spectrum: a primer

During yesterday’s post-election wrap-up at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultant and analyst David Latterman cited the ideological breakdown of San Francisco voters: 19 percent are progressive, 36 percent are liberal, 39 percent are “moderate,” and 6 percent are conservative. I cited those figures in a post I wrote yesterday on the latest election results, and some people responded by asking me to explain those terms, so let me take a crack at that because I think it’s important to understanding the city’s political dynamics.

I even discussed the matter with Latterman – who self-identifies as moderate, whereas I and the Guardian have a progressive worldview. “That’s a fantastic question and I don’t think any of us can give suitable answers,” Latterman said. “These aren’t hard lines. It’s like: I don’t know how to define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Nonetheless, we agreed on the basic outlines and borders between the labels, even though we might frame them and value them a little differently.

In San Francisco, there is general agreement on most social issues among the moderates, liberals, and progressives, although we may disagree on political tactics. We all basically support gay rights, reproductive freedom, the value of diversity, environmentalism, and freedom of expression. That’s why most people consider San Francisco to be a famously liberal city, because of our tolerance on social issues, which only that 6 percent who are conservatives don’t share.

Yet San Francisco is still a deeply divided city on economic issues, including land use and the role of government. This is where most of the political conflicts and divisions occur, and it is here where our political spectrum is as wide as anywhere – perhaps even wider given the extreme wealth and poverty here, as well as the long history of political activism and the setting of national political trends. And it is in this realm that our labels come from.

A “moderate” in San Francisco – which is a real misnomer despite its widespread usage – is a fiscal conservative: anti-tax, anti-regulation, an almost religious faith in the free market, and a resentment of the poor (particularly the homeless and the jobless) and those who advocate for them. They want bare minimal government and see the role of government as primarily to facilitate economic activity in the private sector and to provide the basic infrastructure that the private sector needs to operate efficiently. They even believe social services should be provided by the private sector, such as nonprofits, rather than by government. On economic issues, they’re almost indistinguishable from conservatives, with whom they disagree on social issues.

On the other end of the spectrum are the progressives, who don’t trust capitalists and large corporations and believe they need to be heavily regulated and taxed to provide for the common good. We believe in progressive taxation and a redistribution of wealth, particularly from the richest 1 percent, and that government has an important role to play in leveling the economic playing field and playing referee. Progressives generally believe this country has been drifting to the right for at least the last 31 years and that this is a dangerous trend that needs to be addressed with fundamental, systemic reforms. And at this point, we’re willing to adopt radical strategies for triggering that change, such as Occupy Wall Street or other forms of civil disobedience.

The liberals of San Francisco are somewhere in the middle. They’re Democrats (or DTS) who don’t believe in radical change or anything that might disrupt the existing order, preferring incremental reforms over long period of time. They accept the legitimacy of the two-party political system and an economic system governed by Wall Street and powerful corporations, and they believe we need to do what we can within that framework. They use neoliberal economic policies like business tax cuts and incentives to encourage private sector job creation and housing development, and they accept a shrinking public sector, which they expect to operate more like the private sector, and a waning labor movement.

The reactions to the OccupySF movement is an interesting illustration of the dividing lines. Moderates have voiced tepid support for the movement’s critique of the growing gap between rich and poor, but they’re appalled at the tactic of occupation, believing curfew and anti-camping laws are more important. Progressives have been the most enthusiastic supporters of a movement that echoes their core values and physically challenges the status quo. Liberals basically support the movement, but they’ve been very uneasy with the tactic of occupation and have been vacillating on how to deal with it.

Latterman and the moderates – as well as many liberals – see ideology as a dirty word, and he was happy that in this election “it was the least ideological race we’ve seen in a long time.” Mayor Ed Lee and Board President David Chiu – both of whom hover in the liberal to moderate range, depending on the issue – also treat the notion of ideology with disdain, claiming to support practical, pragmatic, or common sense solutions to problems.

But progressives see ideology as the essence of politics. They understand the world in terms of class struggle, and believe that the very rich have been aggressively exploiting the people and the planet for too long, and that the only real way to make progress is to fight them and win. They believe in the Occupy paradigm that the 1 percent – the greedy rich who have corrupted our political and economic systems – are actively hostile to the interests of the 99 percent. We know that’s an unsustainable system and we’re hopeful that this is the moment when progress – the core of our belief system, that it’s possible to devise better economic and political systems than the ones we’ve inherited – could finally be attainable if we continue to organize and challenge the system.

That’s my general analysis of San Francisco’s political dynamics. What’s yours?

The low-turnout election

Zelda Bronstein
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The low-turnout election

A factor that hasn’t been discussed much in the analysis of the election results is the very low turnout for a contested mayor’s race. The turnout without the provisionals and final absentees was about 30 percent; by my figures, when the 35,000 remaining ballots are counted, it will total about 37 percent.

That’s about the same level as the 2007 race, when Gavin Newsom had no serious opposition and the races for sheriff and district attorney were essentially uncontested.

The past two contested mayoral races had much higher turnout. In 1999, when Tom Ammiano ran against Willie Brown, 45 percent of the voters turned out; same for the 2003 race pitting Matt Gonzalez against Gavin Newsom.

It’s odd — the weather was good, there were three contested races, all of the candidates had and spent money … and even in traditionally high-turnout areas, not that many voters went to the polls.

In the Mission, where John Avalos won overwhelmingly, turnout was only 30 percent.

Clearly, one of the reasons that Ed Lee won is that he got his voters to the polls. Would higher turnout on election day have made a difference? Maybe. Lee had support all over the city, and he was going to be tough to beat. He also got most of the second-place votes from candidates like David Chiu and even Leland Yee, who had spent much of the fall attacking him. And although Avalos won on election day, Lee was so far ahead from the absentees that catching him would have been difficult.

Still: The race certainly would have been closer. And the low turnout is curious. Did people just assume Lee was going to win? It’s hard to imagine that voters had no appealing candidates — there were so many choices. And there was so much election hype — I got about 30 mail pieces in the last week.

By the way: Randy Shaw did his list of winner and losers, and he left out Avalos entirely. Avalos didn’t win the election, but his suprisingly strong finish established him as a progressive leader for the future and helped keep the left organized and in the game. He also left out Ross Mirkarimi, who is the first solid progressive to win a citywide office in quite a while — and he did it running for sheriff against two law-enforcement types. Mirkarimi has now established himself as someone who can win in all parts of town and has made crime and law-enforcement a progressive issue.

Then there’s OccupySF — and while a lot of the people there probably didn’t vote, the fact that that Avalos stood with the occupiers and contrasted himself to Ed Lee (who came very close to using the cops to evict the protesters) helped his campaign immensely.

Lee, Mirkarimi, and Gascon win first ranked choice tally

Sasha Cuttler
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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

Zelda Bronstein
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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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Analyzing the numbers

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

Zelda Bronstein
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Ed Lee’s absentee coup

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

Zelda Bronstein
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Ed Lee, Leland Yee and the progressive vote

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.

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