Portland isn't the only city where homelessness will be a key issue in the mayoral race. A competitive race in San Francisco, focused on crime and homelessness, is also shaping up to potentially change local dynamics in the city. Like Portland's mayoral election, the race will be conducted using ranked-choice voting. And for the first time this year, the San Francisco mayoral election will coincide with the presidential election, after voters passed a ballot referendum in 2022>) to move the date of the mayoral race — a change that gave current Mayor London Breed an extra year in office.
Unfortunately for Breed, that extra year doesn't seem to have helped her reputation in the city. According to an early September poll by Emerson College/KRON-TV, only 27% of San Francisco voters approved of the job Breed was doing as mayor, while 51% disapproved, numbers that are in line with other surveys of the city.
Breed first became acting mayor in 2017, after the death of Mayor Ed Lee, and was elected to a full term in 2019. She initially took more progressive stances on issues like police funding and homelessness, but she's since reversed course. Over the last few years, Breed has boosted funding to law enforcement, and in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest or fine people sleeping on the streets, she encouraged officials to start issuing citations to homeless people and offer them free bus tickets out of town, rather than housing them.
And while overall crime in the city is down significantly even from pre-pandemic levels, Breed has also struggled to manage a looming budget deficit and a significant number of overdose deaths in the city.
As a result, the incumbent is facing some tough competition today, with a total of 11 candidates appearing on the ballot. Her main competitor, based on polls of the race, is Daniel Lurie, a political outsider who is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of a local nonprofit organization that has worked on many of the key issues in the race — homelessness, criminal justice and poverty — a biography he's leveraged on the campaign trail. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin is running slightly behind them, though not far enough that he's out of contention.
The latest poll from Sextant Strategies for the San Francisco Chronicle shows Breed winning the largest share of first-round votes, but losing out to Lurie by 12 points in the final round of ranked-choice voting. Other polls released by the Peskin and Lurie campaigns have shown a similar picture, with Breed doing well in the first round, but trailing when voters' second and third choices are tallied.