Daniel Lurie Leads as Early Results for San Francisco's Mayoral Race Come In

Initial voting results on election night show philanthropist and political outsider Daniel Lurie is leading the race to be San Francisco’s next mayor.

A victory for Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, would symbolize voters’ desire to shake up City Hall, a central promise of Lurie’s campaign platform. If elected, he would oversee the city’s 800,000 people and its nearly $15 billion budget, at a time when tech and business leaders are pouring millions of dollars into local elections and efforts to influence public safety, housing development and accountability in City Hall.

“It’s going to be a long night nationally and locally. The first returns here in San Francisco are making us feel optimistic. But we do not need to know the final results to know what this city means to us,” Lurie told supporters from an election watch party on Tuesday night at the Chapel, a music venue in the Mission District. “We launched this campaign 13 months ago because we believe, strongly, it is time for accountable leadership in City Hall.”

Official race outcomes have not yet been finalized. But results released late Tuesday night had Lurie in first place with 28% of first-choice votes, followed by incumbent Mayor London Breed with 24.4% of votes. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had 21.5% of first-choice votes, and former interim Mayor and Supervisor Mark Farrell had 18.4% of votes.

San Francisco uses ranked choice voting, where voters can list up to 10 candidates on their ballot. After accounting for ranked choice votes, Lurie and Breed were leading with 56.3% and 43.7% of votes, respectively.

Lurie campaigned as an alternative to City Hall insiders. But without a track record in governing, it’s unclear exactly what his approach to leadership of a major city will actually look like.

Founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, Lurie has never held an elected office or a position in government before. The native San Franciscan leaned into that background throughout his run for mayor, casting problems like homelessness, corruption and crime as a product of dysfunctional City Hall insiders.

He’s been fighting to unseat incumbent Mayor London Breed, a fellow moderate Democrat who has held the seat since 2018. Breed steered the city through the COVID-19 pandemic, but her opponents have attacked her for not doing enough to resolve issues around homelessness, public safety and drug use.

“We knew this would not be easy,” Lurie said. “We see it everyday on our streets. We cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions.”

This year’s mayoral race is one of the most expensive since the city adopted ranked choice voting in 2004, in large part due to Lurie, who has raised more than any other mayoral candidate before him. A pro-Lurie PAC totaling nearly $10 million includes $8.7 million from his own fortune.

At her election party on Tuesday night, Breed criticized Lurie’s wealth advantage.

“San Francisco is not for sale,” she said, referring to Lurie’s record-breaking campaign fundraising. “It’s really unfortunate and pretty disgusting.”

The incumbent did not appear too swayed by Tuesday nights’ early results. In 2018, Breed similarly was behind the leading candidate on the night of the election, she told supporters, “And you see me standing here right now as the mayor of San Francisco.”

Breed faced — and at times leaned into — “doom loop” narratives casting the city as stuck in perpetual economic and social crises during her tenure. But on the campaign trail, she became the cheerleader candidate telling voters the city was finally on the upswing.

“We’re still hopeful,” Breed said Tuesday. “It’s going to take time to count all of these votes, there are a lot of votes in the mail, there are a lot of provisional ballots.”

This year’s mayoral race is one of the most expensive since the city adopted ranked choice voting in 2004, largely due to Lurie, who has raised more than any other mayoral candidate before him. A pro-Lurie PAC totaling nearly $10 million includes $8.7 million from his own fortune. Breed’s campaign has raised $3.1 million, including $1.45 million from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and $850,000 from Chris Larsen, cryptocurrency investor.

Peskin’s campaign meanwhile surged in polling in the last leg of the race, but he trailed Breed and Lurie on Tuesday night. His campaign has fundraised a modest amount in comparison to both opponents, nabbing big donations from labor unions and a broad base of small, individual contributions, totaling around $2.5 million.

Farrell has received nearly $1 million from conservative donor William Oberndorf and $500,000 from real estate investor Thomas Coates. Meanwhile, billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, who penned an op-ed in the New York Times attacking Peskin in October, has contributed nearly $3.1 million to Proposition D, a measure that would cut the number of city commissions in half.

Farrell conceded the race at a watch party with supporters and his family.

“Obviously early results are not what we want them to be in this mayoral race,” Farrell told supporters at Campus, a swanky Marina District bar. “Let’s make sure that as San Franciscans, whoever the next mayor is, we get behind him or her. It’s the right thing to do.”