Damian Writes About Stuff

San Francisco politics has often been described as a “knife fight in a phone booth”. Even if you win, there’s no way to come out unscathed. With that in mind choose your fighters! -Damian

Damian lent me his burgeoning readership to publish a voter guide for all 25 ballot initiatives appearing in San Francisco (including the 10 statewide measures for California). By popular demand, we’ve now also written a guide for candidates in San Francisco. Not all of these candidates will appear on your ballot; for example, you’ll vote for one supervisor¹, one state assembly member, and one BART board member, with your choices depending on where you live.

Elections for city offices – the mayor and your supervisor² – are ranked choice elections. This means you can vote for more than one person, in a particular order of preference. See a short explainer here.

We’ve kept this fairly short and light on explanations, except in cases where there’s something spicy or complicated. These are contained in a notes section at the bottom.

Finally, a reminder that this is the companion to the ballot measure voter guide here. The summary table is copied below. If you want to vote in person, you can bring your phone in and use it to follow this guide!

Early voting has started! GO VOTE! It might be the last time!

Federal

Presumably we don’t need to advise you on these

US President: Ridin’ with Biden, write in Biden! -Damian, NATO/AUKUS single issue voter

State

State Senate, District 11: Scott Weiner

State Assembly, District 17: Matt Haney

State Assembly, District 19: Catherine Stefani

Local

San Francisco Unified Board of Education: Pick at Random ^[note]

San Francisco Community College Board: Pick at Random ^[note]

BART Board of Directors District 7: Victor Flores

BART Board of Directors District 9: Joe Sangirardi

Mayor of San Francisco:

Rank 2
1: London Breed ^[note]
2: Daniel Lurie

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 9: ^[note]

Rank 4
1: h. Brown
2: Roberto Hernandez
3: Jackie Fielder
4: Trevor Chandler

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 1: Jen Nossokoff

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 3: Danny Sauter

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 5:

Rank 2, Order below does not express a preference. ^[note]
* Dean Preston
* Bilal Mahmood

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 7: Myrna Melgar

San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 11: Ernest “EJ” Jones

San Francisco City Attorney: David Chiu

San Francisco District Attorney: Ryan Khojasteh

San Francisco Sheriff: N/A

San Francisco Treasurer: N/A, Running unopposed

Some Notes:

Why did you say to vote for London Breed? Don’t you know about [awful thing she supports]?

Welcome to municipal politics.

All of the other candidates support policies that would majorly gut important pieces of the city – housing, public transit, or both. Mark Farrell wants to halt investment in MUNI and allow it to rot away, while increasing car traffic and concentrating housing development in SOMA and the Mission, continuing decades of pressure to displace the people who live there. He’s also excited to lavish public money on police and remove any oversight that might prevent them from brutalizing people.

Ahsha Safai has an incoherent set of policy positions, including: generally opposing new housing construction, leading an effort that blew a hole in the Muni budget, and writing the dumbest initiative on the San Francisco ballot as a vehicle to launder unlimited donations to his campaign.

Aaron Peskin is the ultimate transactional politician, doing his best to prevent any physical change to his district except when he personally stands to benefit, and there’s no reason to believe he’d stop as mayor. He actively promotes conspiracy theories about housing construction, opposes state-mandated plans to build housing in neighborhoods long segregated by zoning, and looks likely to waste our tax dollars fighting the state while the price of housing ticks further up. He also previously tried to defund Caltrain and quietly facilitated Safai’s plan to worsen the Muni funding shortfall (see above).

Daniel Lurie’s worst strikes against him are his opposition to Prop K and his unfathomable inherited wealth. He also has no policy record, though the things on his website are mostly okay.

We need to have a mayor, and we play with the cards we’re dealt. London Breed is the least bad option. Daniel Lurie is a distant second. The rest don’t deserve your vote.

Why did you say to vote for Dean Preston/for Dean Preston’s opponent? Don’t you know how awful he is?

We’re not recommending a ranking order between Dean and Bilal – the order they were placed in here was decided by coin flip. If you have strong feelings already, vote in that order³, but make sure to rank the other one too!

Dean’s signature issue is housing – which is a really important issue and one where his policy proposals run against both academic consensus [1] [2] and literal Marxist theory⁴ for how to bring down the cost of housing. This has earned him most of his online reputation – and it’s a legitimate criticism! This is the main reason we are recommending Bilal, who has strong pro-housing credentials and policy proposals to reduce the cost of housing.

At the same time, having watched an unhealthy amount of SFGovTV and hearing Preston talk, he is genuinely and obviously smarter than any of his Board of Supervisors colleagues. He’s vocally and reliably on the right side of issues relating to transit and bicycle infrastructure – a notable example being the critical vote on keeping car-free JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. I think he’s a good supervisor⁵, despite having some deep disagreements with him, and he’s infinitely preferable to the actual Republican running in D5.

What’s going on with District 9?

This is the most competitive Supervisor race in the city – and it’s both Damian’s and my district. The incumbent, Hillary Ronen, is term-limited, and a large field of candidates have sprung up to replace her.

h brown is a troll candidate who mathematically cannot win this race. We’re hoping to juice his first-round vote share because he’s funny and, by his own admission, at the threshold of death’s door. Thanks to ranked choice voting, your vote will actually go to the other candidates.

The election is otherwise fairly competitive. Roberto Hernandez is a long-time Mission leader with good positions on biking, transit, and housing. Jackie is a DSA candidate and a strong transit supporter. Trevor is a last resort to prevent any of the other freak candidates from winning.

Why did you say pick this office at random?

The policy implications of the school and community college boards are minimal. They’re mostly minor leagues for future city politicians. To prevent them from doing too much of anything, we suggest that you pick people at random to try and get an ideological mix onto each board. If it worked for the Kansas Libertarians, it can work here.

Why are there jokes in an election guide – isn’t this serious business?

It shows our confidence in our recommendations – the other voting guides out there are full of bullshit and they try to mask that with seriousness. We know our recommendations are correct, and thus we can afford to be funny.

One last note from Damian

At the end of the day, voting is the most important least consequential activity a person can do. While it’s good to vote, being politically active is how you can truly enact meaningful change. For most, national politics feel like an insurmountable monster, which is why you should look locally first. There, you can make tangible changes that actually affect your material conditions and those of the people around you.

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1. The “Board of Supervisors” is the city council in San Francisco. All California counties have a Board of Supervisors that governs at the county level; individual cities usually have city councils, but because San Francisco County is all one city, a city council would be redundant and thus doesn’t exist. ↩︎
2. Technically, there are other city offices that implement ranked choice voting, but not ones that have more than two candidates running this year. ↩︎
3. If you have strong feelings on the candidates in District 5, consider spending less time online – it’s done me a lot of good. ↩︎
4. That’s right, I’m both kinds of terminally online. I have strong feelings about Dean Preston from Housing Twitter and I’ll tell you to go read theory. ↩︎
5. I ran into him in person recently and tried to buy him a drink, as a genuine courtesy and to produce a funny campaign finance violation anecdote. He politely refused the offer. ↩︎