Bay Area voters are fed up with crime and homelessness and are moving to the right

SAN FRANCISCO – For decades, the Bay Area has been celebrated — and sometimes mocked — as a progressive beacon, a proud throwback to the values ​​of the hippie era of love and tolerance.

But in the Nov. 5 election, voters across the region made it clear that their compassion has limits.

Motivated by pent-up frustration over property crime and homelessness — and a sense that San Francisco and Oakland had lost control of their city streets — Bay Area voters swung right in last week's election, unseating the mayors of both cities and a handful of left-leaning voters rejected it. Wing candidates. And in a stunning repudiation of the progressive criminal justice reform movement the region once championed, a majority of voters in all nine Bay Area counties voted for Proposition 36, a statewide ballot measure that would impose tougher penalties for repeat thefts and felonies provides with fentanyl.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed lost her re-election race against four prominent Democrats, including two also moderates. Voters instead elected a political outsider, wealthy philanthropist and Levi's heir Daniel Lurie, who promised to close open-air drug markets and make San Francisco less hospitable to street encampments.

In the East Bay, voters recalled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price, two progressive leaders elected in 2022.

Both Breed and Thao, in their efforts to stay in office, emphasized that crime rates in their cities have fallen in recent months and called for more time for change. But they failed to break the widespread perception among store owners and residents that the current crop of city and county leaders lacks forceful responses to the region's ongoing struggles with homelessness, street crime and lackluster economies that have yet to emerge from the Recovered from COVID crisis -19 pandemic.

“People are tired of feeling like government is incapable of solving the toughest problems,” said Keally McBride, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco. “It’s really more about frustration with dysfunction.”

The shift to the right has been financed on both sides of the Bay by tech titans and wealthy investors who are relatively new to local politics. In San Francisco, technology executives donated millions of dollars to campaigns in a number of local races and systematically worked to elect moderate candidates to run against progressive incumbents.

The Thao recall effort in Oakland, meanwhile, was heavily funded by hedge fund manager Philip Dreyfuss, who lives in Piedmont, a picturesque town bordering Oakland.

The tech industry is becoming increasingly involved in Bay Area politics as more executives and their employees put down roots. They view their enormous wealth as a means of imbuing local government – including the mayor's office, county supervisors, city councils and school boards – with more centrist tendencies.

Their efforts began in earnest in 2022, when a number of political organizations funded by the tech industry supported the recall election of former San Francisco Dist. supported. Atty. Chesa Boudin and three school board members. Boudin has been accused of focusing more on criminal justice system reform than law enforcement; while school leaders have been criticized for keeping classrooms closed for months longer than most other districts in the country during the COVID emergency.

Breed, the first Black woman elected mayor in San Francisco, took office in a special election in 2018 following the unexpected death of Mayor Ed Lee. She was hailed as a hero when she took bold steps to shut down the city in the early days of COVID.

But it lost political clout as property and retail thefts became more brazen and homeless camps sprouted beyond the boundaries of downtown and in every corner of the city.

Last year, Breed addressed these issues properly, successfully pushing through two ballot measures that strengthened police surveillance powers and provided drug screening and treatment for people receiving county benefits who were suspected of illegal drug use. Since August, she has led an aggressive campaign to clear large tent camps.

But she failed to convince voters that she was the change the city needed to get back on track.

Breed won 24.3% of first-choice votes in the city's ranked-choice system, which allows voters to select multiple candidates in order of preference, compared to Lurie's 26.7% as of Monday night's count. When the race was called Thursday, Lurie had won an overwhelming 56% of the total votes in ranked-choice voting, compared to Breed's 44%.

“We will declare a fentanyl emergency on the first day of our administration,” Lurie promised during a press conference Friday. “We will take tough action against those who deal in drugs. And we will deal compassionately but also harshly with the conditions on our streets.”

Lurie, 47, was born in San Francisco, the son of a rabbi. His parents divorced when he was a young boy. His mother, Miriam Haas, married billionaire businessman Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss and a longtime executive of the denim company Strauss founded. Peter Haas died in 2005 and Lurie and his mother are among the main heirs to the Strauss family fortune.

Lurie is the founder of Tipping Point, a San Francisco nonprofit that funds efforts to lift people out of poverty. He had never held elected office before, and his status as a political outsider appealed, as usual, to voters weary of politics.

Lurie said he believes the election results reflect a desire for accountability. “They want change and just common sense,” he said.

Lurie may face less tension than Breed in getting the county's powerful Board of Supervisors to support his agenda. Tuesday's election added at least two centrist Democrats to the 11-member board, which has long had a progressive majority.

In the East Bay, nearly 62% of Oakland voters supported recalling Thao, the city's first Hmong mayor, and 64% voted to recall Price, Alameda County's first black district attorney.

Thao won her election two years ago by fewer than 700 votes against a more moderate Democrat. She took office amid a post-pandemic crime wave and an economic slump that she said made her first two years difficult.

But her critics had little patience for any missteps — and Thao made a few.

Her critics criticized her for firing the police chief shortly after taking office and leaving a senior position in the department vacant for a year even as the city experienced a spike in violence. A looming budget deficit and the departure of the Oakland A's baseball team didn't help.

In June, the FBI raided Thao's home, just as the recall measure was on the ballot. That same day, the home of a waste company official who has contracts with the city and had made campaign contributions to Thao and other elected officials was raided. Thao said she was told she was not a target of the investigation and the FBI has not yet commented on what triggered the raid.

The recall campaign against Thao accused her of lacking the “competence, judgment and ability to lead a once great American city.”

Thao rejected this criticism, particularly in an open letter to hedge fund manager Dreyfuss, in which he accused him of “trying to buy our city government.” In a statement late Friday acknowledging her defeat, Thao pointed to recent statistics showing that crime in Oakland has declined and her administration's approval of 1,500 affordable housing units.

Price, a former civil rights attorney, was elected two years ago after promising to reform criminal justice in the district attorney's office. She focused on alternatives to incarceration and promised to prosecute police misconduct.

“Price’s recall should be viewed as part of a broader conservative strategy in California and across the country to roll back criminal justice reforms aimed at breaking the cycle of mass incarceration of Black and brown people,” said the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which declined the recall, said Friday.

But Seneca Scott, a spokeswoman for the Thao recall campaign, said Bay Area voters' frustration should be seen as an indictment of local leaders who put progressive policies over a well-functioning community.

“Progressives in Oakland did the same thing they did in San Francisco. They ignored the crime. They ignored the poverty,” Scott said. “You need to look into your soul a little.”