Bay Area voters are tired of crime and homelessness and are moving to the right

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

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

Motivated by pent-up frustrations over property crime and homelessness — and a sense that San Francisco and Oakland had lost control of the city’s streets — Bay Area voters turned around in last week’s elections, electing the mayors of both cities and dismissed a handful of left-wing politicians. wing candidates. And in a stunning rebuke to the progressive movement to reform criminal justice that the region once championed, a majority of voters in all nine Bay Area counties voted in favor Proposal 36a statewide ballot measure that will impose stricter penalties for repeat theft and crimes involving fentanyl.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed lost her re-election bid in a race against four high-profile Democrats, two of them fellow moderates. Voters instead chose a political outsider, a wealthy philanthropist and… Levi’s heir Daniel Luriewho promised to close open-air drug markets and make San Francisco less hospitable to street camps.

In the East Bay, voters remembered 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 remain in office, emphasized that crime rates in their cities had dropped in recent months and asked for more time to implement changes. But they were unable to break the widespread perception among retailers and residents that the current crop of city and county leaders lacked strong answers to the region’s ongoing battle with homelessness, street crime and lackluster economies that have not yet recovered from the COVID -19 crisis. -19 pandemic.

“People are tired of feeling like government is unable to solve the toughest problems,” said Keally McBride, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. “It’s actually more about frustration over dysfunction.”

The shift to the right was financed on both sides of the bay tech titans and wealthy investors who are relatively new to local politics. In San Francisco, tech executives contributed millions of dollars to campaigns in a range of local races, systematically working to elect moderate candidates who competed with progressive incumbents.

The Oakland recall campaign against Thao, meanwhile, was heavily funded by hedge fund executive Philip Dreyfuss, who lives in Piedmont, a picturesque city surrounded by the borders of Oakland.

The tech industry has become increasingly involved in Bay Area politics as more executives and their employees have moved in. They see their enormous wealth as a means to infuse local government – ​​including the mayor’s office, provincial councils, municipal councils and school boards – with more centrist tendencies.

Their efforts began in earnest in 2022, when a group of political organizations funded by the tech industry supported the recall election in the former San Francisco. Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin and three members of the school board. Boudin was accused of being more focused on reforming the criminal justice system than prosecuting crime; while school leaders were criticized for keeping classrooms closed for months longer during the COVID emergency than in most other districts in the country.

Breed, the first Black woman elected mayor of San Francisco, took office in 2018 in a special election 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 she lost her political power as the theft of property and stores became more brazen and homeless encampments sprang up outside the city limits and throughout every corner of the city.

Over the past year, Breed has addressed these issues in the right way, successfully passing two ballot measures that strengthened police surveillance powers and required drug screening and treatment for people receiving benefits suspected of illegal drug use. She has led an aggressive campaign since August clear large tent camps.

But she failed to convince voters that she is the change the city needs 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%, according to Monday night’s count. When the race was called Thursday, Lurie had won a whopping 56% of the total ranked-choice votes, compared to Breed’s 44%.

“We are going to declare a fentanyl emergency on Day 1 of our administration,” Lurie promised during a press conference on Friday. “We are going to crack down on those who deal drugs. And we will be compassionate, but also tough, about the conditions in 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, went on to marry billionaire businessman Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, and a longtime executive at the denim company Strauss founded. Peter Haas died in 2005, and Lurie and his mother are among the leading 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 has never held elected office before, and his status as a political outsider resonated with voters tired of politics as usual.

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

Lurie could face less friction than Breed in getting the county’s powerful Board of Supervisors to back his agenda. Tuesday’s elections 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 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 during a post-pandemic crime wave and economic slump that she said had made her first two years difficult.

But her opponents had little patience for any missteps – and Thao made a few.

Her critics condemned her firing the police chief Shortly after taking power, she left a leadership vacancy in the department for a year, even as the city faced a wave of violence. A menacing one budget deficit and the departure of the The Oakland A baseball team didn’t help.

In June, the FBI raided Thao’s house right around the time the recall became eligible for a vote. The same day, the home of a waste company official who contracts with the city and has made campaign contributions to Thao and other elected officials was raided. Thao said she has been told she is not a target in the investigation, and that the FBI has not yet commented on what prompted the raid.

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

Thao rejected that criticism, most notably in an open letter to Dreyfuss, the hedge fund manager, accusing him of “trying to buy our city government.In a statement late Friday acknowledging her defeat, Thao touted recent statistics showing that crime in Oakland is falling and that her administration has approved 1,500 affordable housing units.

Price, a former civil rights attorney, was elected two years ago after pledging to implement criminal justice reform in the prosecutor’s office. She focused on alternatives to incarceration and vowed to prosecute police misconduct.

“Price’s recall should be seen 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,” she said. the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. opposed the recall, said Friday.

But Seneca Scott, spokesperson for the recall campaign against Thao, said the voter frustration rippling through the Bay Area should be seen as an indictment of local leaders who prioritize progressive politics over a functioning community.

“The progressives in Oakland did the same thing they did in San Francisco. They ignored the crime. They ignored poverty,” Scott said. “They need to do a little soul searching.”