Mayor London Breed Lacks a Ranked Choice Alliance. Here's How it Could Impact Her

As opponents move ahead with ranked choice strategies, San Francisco Mayor London Breed is steering clear of any alliances on the ballot and telling voters to make her their primary pick.

With the election just 18 days away, mayoral candidates are now strategizing on how to win voters’ second-choice picks. Breed has courted ranked choice endorsements from a broad spectrum of political groups and officials, but experts watching the race say it will be close.

Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, said that Breed’s strong polling shows she is performing well as voters’ first choice. “But that’s probably still not enough by itself to win,” he said. “I would be shocked if she wins the first choice majority and instant runoff process. She will need second and third-place support.”

San Francisco uses ranked choice voting, allowing voters to choose up to 10 different candidates in order of preference, unlike traditional elections in which voters pick a single candidate.

After all of the first-choice votes for each candidate are counted, any candidate with a majority wins the race. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to the next candidate on each voter’s ranking. This process repeats until a candidate reaches a majority.

On the campaign trail and in a recent interview with KQED, Breed encouraged voters to “first of all, vote for Kamala Harris. And second of all, vote for me. Full stop.”

It could be a risky move for an incumbent to align themselves with a challenger, McDaniel said, but it also means the mayor will have to seek out those second-choice votes through other avenues.

“I can’t blame her or her campaign for not doing that,” he said. “But it is a potential vulnerability for her campaign at this point.”

Although Breed isn’t forming an alliance with another candidate, she recently secured second-choice endorsements from several high-profile progressives, including the San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton and former Supervisor Jane Kim. Several of those progressive leaders, like Kim and Ronen, have endorsed Board President Aaron Peskin for their No.1 pick.

“I may not be someone’s first choice, but I’d like to be their second or third choice. Please consider me for your ballot,” Breed told KQED. “You may not always agree with everything I do, but you know that I know how to do this job. You know that I’m battle-tested and proven in a crisis. And you know that the city is starting to change because we’ve been able to do the necessary legwork.”

Nonprofit founder and political outsider Daniel Lurie appears to have a majority of San Francisco voters’ second-choice pick, according to a September poll from KRON and Emerson College.

Like Breed, Lurie isn’t aligning himself explicitly with any opponents. However, his campaign is still strategizing around ranked choice voting and working to convert some of those second-choice voters into first-choice supporters.

“We had a strategy going into this to be broadly popular across a lot of voters instead of isolating a thinner band of voters,” said Tyler Law, a campaign consultant for Lurie. “You need to convert second-choice votes into first. Because in [ranked] choice voting, you have to [reach] the final two to have those voters come to you.”

Meanwhile, former Supervisor and Interim Mayor Mark Farrell formally announced an alliance with Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, urging voters to mark them as their first and second choices.

The two represent vastly different backgrounds and constituencies. Farrell worked as a venture capitalist and served the city’s wealthy Marina district as supervisor, while Safaí, the only immigrant in the race with a background in labor organizing, oversees one of the city’s most prominently working class and diverse neighborhoods.

They said their approach was designed to extend their appeal to voters they might not capture on their own.

“When you think about alliances and partnerships, it’s about complementing,” Safaí said. “I’m going to spend time over the next month getting him in front of and having conversations with a number of my key constituencies that he might not have had history with so that they can ask him the tough questions and ultimately make their own decisions.”

Farrell and Safaí recently took their plea to voters a step further, asking them to explicitly leave Breed and Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the most progressive candidate in the race, off their ballots completely and calling for Lurie voters to rank Farrell second.

“We both believe London Breed should not be mayor of San Francisco,” Farrell said at a recent press conference. “This alliance strengthens our bases, broadens support, and boosts our chances of victory by uplifting each other in key parts of San Francisco.”

McDaniel said second-choice votes are still up for grabs in this election, especially for Farrell and Lurie, who polls show still have a path to unseating the incumbent.

“They both understand that to win, they have to get more second-choice votes,” McDaniel said. “Breed has a pretty clear first choice lead, and there is an opening in the second and third choice ranked support to maybe pass Breed’s lead in the rank choice voting tally.”

However, the unlikely alliance has already stirred some controversy and turned off some voters.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers this week announced it would rescind its second-choice endorsement of Safaí due to his campaign strategy with Farrell. The union has endorsed Peskin as its first pick for mayor and is now telling members to select Lurie as their second choice to “maximize the potential of electing a pro-worker mayor of San Francisco,” NUHW President Emeritus Sal Rosselli said in a statement.

“In our conversations with Safaí, he led us to believe that he would encourage his supporters to make Peskin their second choice,” Rosselli said. “We feel misled, and we are asking Safaí to return our contributions to his campaign.”

McDaniel said it’s still anybody’s race and the alliances — or lack thereof — can help voters make sense of an already long ballot.

“It’s good that the candidates are helping provide signals because voters have a hard time distinguishing between them,” he said. “This is something voters appreciate about ranked choice voting, so there is a potential positive benefit there.”