Just about two weeks after Election Day, the race for mayor in San Francisco appears to be heating up.
Two polls show that the race for first place is within the margin of error and that there are multiple candidates. However, many voters are still holding on to their ballot paper
Think back to when this race was starting to take shape and the conventional wisdom was that it was going to be very close. Could a progressive, via ranked choice, upset a group of moderates? The conversation has changed several times since then, but two weeks before the election, the first impression wasn’t that far off.
“Two weeks away and two weeks to go for the snap election as we get closer to the election,” said SF Elections Director John Arntz.
For Arntz and the San Francisco Department of Elections, this is the halfway point. And this milestone comes with two polls in the city’s closely watched mayoral race. The first, released by the Aaron Peskin campaign, shows the supervisor tied with Daniel Lurie for the top spot.
“I mean, look, the other three candidates, all of them, backed by billionaires who are pushing San Francisco in the wrong direction, have been busy trying to tear each other down,” Peskin said Monday.
For Peskin, it would be a comeback of sorts after being largely left out of the conversation in recent months. And there is some history to support the idea of a late progressive wave.
“Yes, historically in San Francisco elections we have seen a progressive candidate emerge toward the end of the election,” said Corey Cook, PhD, professor and provost at Saint Mary’s College. “It often misses the numbers. We can go back to any number of elections over 20 years and see that the progressive votes tend to come together late.”
The second poll, conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle, shows Peskin has jumped ahead of Mark Farrell in first-place votes but is behind a dead heat between Mayor London Breed and Daniel Lurie, who has appeared to be ahead for several weeks to have. lead in polls that play a role in ranked choice voting.
“I think Daniel Lurie has run a pretty much flawless campaign, positioning himself as an outsider,” Cook said. “But it’s still true that everything is within the margin of error.”
And that brings the conversation back to the elections office and something else that will play a big role in the race. The consolidation of the municipal elections means that the mayor’s election will have a presidential turnout, which means many more votes. And voters have now had two weeks to cast their votes in these elections.
“But the total is less than we would expect, normally at this point when there’s a presidential election coming up,” Arntz said of the results so far.
Slow returns are a very good sign that people are still watching this race and waiting to make that three-vote calculation, perhaps until the last minute.
“I think they’re still organizations whose messages of support have just come out,” Cook said. “I think voters are still sifting through a lot of information.”
And that says something else about the race and the result. If voters wait to make that decision, perhaps until the last minute, it means the numbers released on election night will become an increasingly smaller share of the total. It will then take even longer to go through all those subsequent ballots that come in and go through all the rounds of rank selection.
So the evidence is already mounting that it will be close, and it may take more than a few days to find out who will be San Francisco’s next mayor.
