San Francisco progressives lost nearly every race and ballot measure in the June primary election.
The union-backed Overpaid CEO Tax went down in flames. A term-limit measure aimed at former supervisor Aaron Peskin prevailed. Progressive supervisor candidate Natalie Gee lost in the Sunset by such a wide margin that insiders’ jaws were left agape. And Lori Brooke, a supervisor candidate allied with progressives, didn’t make a dent in her District 2 rival’s campaign. In their place, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s preferred (moderate) candidates triumphed. Progressive Democrats even lost lower-stakes down-ballot races for the school board and superior court judge.
In short, the progs got their clocks cleaned.
And while there was some success for progressives, such as Supervisor Connie Chan, who has beaten back rival Saikat Chakrabarti, that win comes with an asterisk: She did so with the backing of one of San Francisco’s most powerful centrist icons, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Progressives didn’t have an easy road. They faced a mountain of PAC funding, largely from figures such as Ripple CEO Chris Larsen and SF Standard chairman Michael Moritz, in support of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s candidates and agenda. But it’s also true that the right idea can pierce through torrents of money. Progressives have floundered in their messaging for half a decade.
It wasn’t always so.
A quarter-century ago, the Progressive Class of 2000 swept Board of Supervisors races, including newly elected Supervisor Aaron Peskin. During that era, progressives passed law after law protecting tenants during the height of San Francisco’s worst eviction crises, a clear contrast against what they derided as the landlord- and business-friendly policies of Mayor Willie Brown and later Mayor Gavin Newsom.
But since the COVID-19 pandemic, when public safety became the top issue on San Franciscans’ minds, progressives failed to offer solutions. And as Lurie has captured voters’ imaginations through his “Let’s go, San Francisco” boosterism and a laser focus on reviving the city’s economy, progressives have struggled to make their case against his policy choices.
The failure of progressives to counter the moderates now in the ascendancy has consequences for people such as John Thorn, a San Francisco native and Department of Public Health IT worker. Thorn, a member of IFPTE Local 21, phone-banked and knocked on doors to convince voters to approve Prop D, the Overpaid CEO Tax, which aims to backfill a $300 million hole blown in San Francisco’s budget by President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
At the Yes on Prop D election night party at The Rustic on Church Street, Thorn said the measure’s failure would leave city staffers vulnerable to Lurie’s vision of San Francisco.
“His only idea is to cut a huge amount of the workforce,” Thorn said.
Lurie has already issued pink slips to 127 city employees this year. When he unveiled his city budget on Monday, he directed city departments to further reduce the city’s workforce over the next year by $80 million. If progressives had recaptured the Board of Supervisors, they could have fought against such reductions. As it stands, a Lurie-friendly board is unlikely to mount serious opposition.
Another element of the June primary initially suggested an insurmountable setback for progressives in the early returns: turnout. Political insiders have long known that low-turnout elections hew toward more conservative city residents, people who pay higher tax rates, who own property, and show up to every election out of habit rather than because of a big-ticket race, like a presidential election.
San Francisco’s first turnout count hovered near 23%, leading progressives to call out the anemic returns as key to their losses. But ballot counts shared by the Department of Elections later that evening revealed turnout nearing 50%.
One could almost feel the mourning as progressives jeered and booed Lurie at El Rio, calling his allies at the centrist political group GrowSF “bullshit.”
“We knew this was going to be a low-turnout election,” said progressive organizer Sunny Angulo, from El Rio’s stage. “We knew this was going to be more conservative; we knew that people were going to be buying the mayor and his billionaire friends’ taglines.”
After Angulo did her best to articulate the problem, the crowd of union members and progressive allies parted like the sea for Chan. Onstage, she, too, tried to offer hope.
A coalition of labor, progressive volunteers, and everyday San Franciscans just beat back Chakrabarti’s self-funded $10 million campaign, she said, to riotous applause. And now they’ve got to set their sights against the corporate spending supporting state Sen. Scott Wiener’s congressional ambitions.
“We’re going to show you what progressive taxation looks like. We’re gonna show you what working people’s power looks like,” she said. “You get to party tonight, you get to sleep tonight.”
But after this election, she said, “We’re gonna pick up and make sure that we fight, because we fight to win.”
This article has been updated since election night to reflect updated turnout counts.
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