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Trump Campaign

Mike Kai Chen

San Francisco Mayor London Breed conceded her quest for a second full term on Thursday after Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir, held on to a steady lead through 14 rounds of ranked-choice voting.

From the beginning of the bruising and extraordinarily expensive mayoral race, Lurie pitched himself as an outsider, betting that his lack of experience would be more boon than burden during a deeply unsettled time for the city. It paid off.

With his victory, residents appeared to be sending a resounding message: They were so fed up with the status quo that the best person to address <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/01/san-francisco-mayor-race-elections/" target=_blank>the city’s most dire problems</a> was someone who has never held office.

In the final round of balloting, Lurie held 56 percent of the vote to nearly 44 percent for Breed, who has presided over the city during a period of increased homelessness, public drug use and a downtown business exodus, all of which the pandemic supercharged. Other candidates were eliminated in earlier rounds. More than 140,000 ballots remained uncounted late Thursday, but Breed seemed sure Lurie’s lead was too large to surmount.

“Being Mayor of San Francisco has been the greatest honor of my lifetime,” Breed said in a statement. “I answered the call and always gave San Francisco and its people my heart and soul. At the end of the day, this job is bigger than any one person and what matters is that we keep moving this City forward.”

“Today I called Daniel Lurie and congratulated him on his victory in this election,” Breed said, pledging a smooth transition.

Lurie’s campaign benefited from his family’s fortune, as he spent nearly $9 million of his own money and another $1 million from his mother to blunt his opponents’ onslaught of attacks, which were in turn propelled by millions in campaign contributions from deep-pocketed business and tech titans.

The decisive win follows Lurie’s rapid rise during a tumultuous time in one of America’s most high-profile cities. Lurie, who said the future of his hometown was at stake in this election, will now be tasked with solving the seemingly intractable problems that had so many voters spoiling for a change.

“No matter who you supported in this election, we stand united in the fight for San Francisco’s future and a safer, more affordable city for all,” Lurie said in a statement following Breed’s concession.

Lurie, Breed and their top two challengers — Aaron Peskin, a seasoned member of the board of supervisors, and Mark Farrell, a former interim mayor — are all Democrats, but on the bright blue spectrum of San Francisco politics, several distinctions emerged. Early on, Lurie staked out more conservative positions on quality-of-life issues.

Violent crime is lower in San Francisco than in other big cities, but thefts and drug dealing have left many feeling unsafe. Lurie signaled that his administration would crack down on those and other offenses, which he said have too often gone unpunished.

“We need to enforce the laws,” Lurie said in an interview with The Washington Post last month. “We can be compassionate, but we have to be tough.”

His successful candidacy was part of a broader statewide embrace of tough-on-crime policies during this election cycle: In Los Angeles, voters ousted the county’s “progressive prosecutor,” and in Oakland, they <a href="https://oaklandside.org/2024/11/06/pamela-price-recall-likely-to-pass/" target=_blank>appeared</a> poised to do the same; meanwhile, Californians overwhelmingly <a href="https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/prop-36-california-election-result/" target=_blank>approved</a> Proposition 36, increasing the penalties for theft and repeated drug possession despite opposition from Democratic leaders.

The shift to the right — or, as the city’s moderate Democrats prefer to say, to the center — has been underway in San Francisco for several years. Voters <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/06/cehsa-boudin-recall/" target="_blank">recalled</a> their own liberal district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022 and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/07/san-francisco-welfare-drug-screening-police/" target="_blank">passed</a> a pair of measures this year that require drug screening for welfare recipients and give police more surveillance power and less oversight.

Responding to these electoral winds, Lurie rolled out his own suite of policy proposals, saying public safety would be his top priority. He promised to increase police staffing levels, which have been flagging in recent years, by offering officers incentives like workforce housing, rental subsidies and child care.

And Lurie also pledged to use geolocation and ankle monitors to track drug offenders and deter them from returning to the neighborhoods where they were arrested — a system Lurie described as akin to an iPhone’s “Find My Friends” app.

Some of the city’s more liberal voters winced at the campaign’s aggressive law-and-order messaging, but Lurie said he does “not want this city swinging all the way to the other side” of the political spectrum.

“I want to bring back common sense,” he said in the interview. “We can’t allow the disorder on our streets to continue.”

The posture seemed to resonate especially well on the city’s west side, in neighborhoods with a large Asian American community, a base that was crucial for Breed’s 2018 election but  had grown frustrated with her tenure, said David Ho, a San Francisco political consultant and organizer in Chinatown.

Breed’s loss was “not an overnight process,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not about data, it’s about how people feel.”

The pandemic’s economic and psychic toll left a “moody voter base,” Ho said, and Breed, the incumbent, paid the price — an echo of the U.S. presidential election.

“I don’t think anyone would have staved off this outcome,” he said. “Whoever is in the driver’s seat is going to get the blame.”

While large parts of the city remain vibrant and verdant, downtown San Francisco has been mired in the slowest pandemic recovery of any major metro area. More than a third of offices are empty, and many name-brand retailers have shuttered their storefronts.

Lurie has said he would launch a quasi-public agency tasked with downtown revitalization, modeled after the development corporation that was formed in Lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks. And he also said he would create a new police district for the city’s hospitality zone, where the recent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/31/ricky-pearsall-shot-san-francisco/" target=_blank>shooting of a San Francisco 49ers player</a> seemed to reaffirm the worst caricatures of the area.

The city’s core has attracted gleeful criticism from national Republicans, who point to its street conditions as evidence that Democrats have failed the city. Lurie framed his campaign as a way to signal to the rest of the world that San Francisco is ready to revive its reputation.

When asked which mayors he most admires, Lurie listed the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who led the city in the 1970s and ’80s, along with former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, another wealthy city executive who funded his own campaign — and, as it happened, spent nearly $1.5 million supporting Breed this year.

Lurie’s candidacy received a lift during the race’s final weeks, when <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2024/09/16/london-breed-dream-keeper-scandal/" target=_blank>Breed</a> and <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2024/11/04/farrell-to-pay-108000-in-ethics-commission-settlement-for-election-violations/" target=_blank>Farrell</a> struggled with ethics scandals, adding to the aura that the city’s political establishment was no longer trustworthy — a dynamic that helped Lurie, who reliably invoked the phrase “city hall insiders” when talking derisively of his opponents in interviews or campaign stops.

Breed, who first took office after winning a special election following the death of Mayor Ed Lee and then was elected to a full term, also faced temporal headwinds, said Jim Ross, a Bay Area political consultant.

“People had that six-year itch for something new,” Ross said. “I’m surprised she ended up doing as well as she did.”

By comparison, Lurie, who started the antipoverty nonprofit Tipping Point, was relatively unknown among most of San Francisco’s electorate when he entered the race more than a year ago. But he was able to leverage his personal wealth to increase his name recognition around the city, with a flood of digital ads and mail advertisements, Ross said.

“That’s the story: the money piece,” he said. “It all comes down to the guy who had the mountain of money.”

When Lurie was a boy, his mother Mimi married Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of the denim legend Levi Strauss and longtime president of the eponymous clothing company. The Strauss name has been synonymous with San Francisco for more than a century, and Lurie said in the pre-election interview that it was<b> </b>fitting that someone who grew up around the company would be charged with leading the city’s revival.

“I think the forefathers of the company would be proud,” he said. “I think my stepfather would be really proud of this run.”

University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism

Miami University, BA in Journalism and Interdisciplinary Studies

Reis Thebault reports on the American West Coast from Los Angeles for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2018 and has covered national breaking news, European politics and D.C. city hall. He previously worked on the local desks of the Boston Globe and the Columbus Dispatch.

Reis Thebault

Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting, 2023 

Livingston Award finalist, 2023

Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for outstanding watchdog journalism, 2022

Scripps Howard finalist for excellence in multimedia journalism, 2023

Boston University, BA in journalism

Trisha Thadani joined The Washington Post in 2023 from the San Francisco Chronicle. She covers the technology industry.

Trisha Thadani

washpost

San Francisco Mayor London Breed concedes election to Daniel Lurie

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Mike Kai Chen for The Washington Post

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