San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston conceded Sunday to challenger Bilal Mahmood in the race to retain his District 5 seat in last week’s elections.
According to the latest results released Sunday afternoon by the San Francisco Department of Elections, Preston won more first-choice votes but finished trailing after the city’s ranked-choice voting system eliminated other candidates in the race, leaving Mahmood with 13,083 ranked-choice votes compared to 11,744 for Preston.
Although there are still votes left to be counted, Preston, who was first elected in 2019 and touted himself as the first Democratic Socialist elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors in more than four decades, conceded Sunday evening.
“We received the most first-place votes of any candidate and I am proud of my record, especially on tenant rights and affordable housing. I will continue that work to make housing in our city a human right for all make,” Preston said. in a social media post. “We will continue to fight for every working person, every struggling neighbor and everyone on the sidelines in our city, whether we do that work inside or outside City Hall.”
Mahmood is a former policy analyst in the Obama administration who went on to found and work for several philanthropic nonprofits. He was supported by Mayor London Breed and Senator Scott Wiener, among others.
He pledged to speed up the affordable housing permitting process by using technology to process permits faster, lower costs and the number of permits needed to build housing, and coordinate city agencies to target both fentanyl dealers and strategies to provide shelter for homeless residents. , according to his campaign website.
The political action committee Coalition to Grow San Francisco, known as GrowSF, which has opposed multiple incumbents this election cycle, celebrated the effort to “dump” Dean on Sunday.
“Ordinary people just want the basics to work,” says Sachin Agarwal, director and co-founder of GrowSF. “That’s what Dump Dean stood for: removing a sitting president who ignored his voters and made excuses instead of getting the job done, and replacing him with a forward-looking, effective leader like Bilal.”
District 5 includes the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, Western Addition, Fillmore District and Civic Center neighborhoods.
