Mayor Daniel Lurie wasn’t running for reelection Tuesday night. But he may have won bigger than anybody else in San Francisco politics. 

The mayor, who has enjoyed a moderate majority on the Board of Supervisors since taking office in January 2025, will maintain a team of allies with the decisive wins of his two preferred incumbent supervisors: Alan Wong in District 4 and Stephen Sherrill in District 2. Both crushed their opponents in early victories. 

What’s more, Propositions C and D, dueling tax measures that Lurie opposed, appeared to flop with voters. Everything, it seemed, was coming up Daniel on primary night. 

“The early returns that we are seeing show that San Franciscans like the direction that we are going in,” the mayor told reporters at a party for Prop. A, the Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond — supported by Lurie, and winning by a landslide — outside Original Joe’s in North Beach. “We are just getting started. We are going to continue to put our foot on the accelerator.”

Wong, whom Lurie appointed after voters recalled former Supervisor Joel Engardio, crushed a host of challengers, including progressive activist Natalie Gee, with early results showing support from more than 52% of Sunset and Parkside voters. Wong said he knocked on more than half the doors in his district in the run-up to the election.

The biggest issue in the District 4 election — and the biggest issue in the Sunset for the last six years — was the Great Highway: Should it remain a park or reopen to cars? Wong and most of his challengers advocated for the latter, but Wong seemed to have most successfully associated himself with the pro-car stance.

In District 2, Sherrill walloped neighborhood organizer Lori Brooke, pulling in 70% of votes tallied by 9:45 p.m. Apparently, allegations that former Mayor London Breed appointed Sherrill as a favor to Michael Bloomberg (Breed and Sherrill denied the claims) did little to hurt the supervisor’s campaign. Brooke and Gee have both filed (opens in new tab) to run again in November, when Wong and Sherrill will once again have to defend their seats.

These victories mean that moderates will retain the upper hand on the Board of Supervisors and can breathe a sigh of relief after fears of a progressive groundswell. The presumed failure of Prop. D, the Overpaid CEO Tax, says the same. Labor unions had hoped to ride a surge of voter anger over wealth inequality to an election victory against greedy corporations, generating up to $300 million annually for the city’s general fund. 

But Lurie took the side of the pro-business camp, which pointed to reports that the tax could cost San Francisco nearly 1,000 jobs and shrink the local economy by more than $200 million annually over the next two decades. 

At the same time, Lurie opposed the competing Prop. C, arguing that labor and big business should have worked out a deal among themselves instead of bringing their fight to the ballot. He called the dueling measures evidence of a “broken system.”

Huddled with reporters outside Original Joe’s, the mayor conceded that Prop. D’s existence speaks to wealth inequality and the soaring cost of living in San Francisco. “Oh my goodness, this city is incredibly expensive, it’s unaffordable for so many people,” he said, pointing to his early childhood education program and Family Zoning Plan as efforts to attack the problem. “The affordability crisis is at the top of my agenda.” 

And for another election cycle, that agenda seems to be in good political shape.