Bay Area Voters Embrace Political Outsiders in Historic Mayoral Shake-ups

Amid continued frustration over the cost of living, public safety and homelessness, voters in the Bay Area’s largest cities are embracing mayoral candidates and campaigns that promise a shake-up at city hall — putting aside concerns about experience and stability and embracing political outsiders in this year’s elections.

In San Francisco, nonprofit founder and philanthropist Daniel Lurie toppled incumbent mayor London Breed and bested a field of candidates with decades of combined city hall experience. In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan cruised to an early re-election in March, riding the momentum of his own insurgent victory less than two years ago. And in Oakland, Mayor Sheng Thao was removed from office after an unprecedented recall election.

Candidates have long rode promises of change to victory, but in Mahan and Lurie, voters in the region’s two largest cities have chosen leaders with a historic lack of government experience who touted their outsider status as evidence of a fresh and independent perspective.

“Matt Mahan felt like an outsider, and I think Daniel Lurie does, too,” said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the business advocacy group the Bay Area Council and a former mayoral chief of staff in San Francisco. “I think their campaigns were sort of saying, ‘Things aren’t being run the way they could be, and I could do a better job, and I won’t be afraid to make the changes.’”

After his surprising victory in 2022, Mahan faced no organized opposition in the mayoral contest held in March after the city moved its mayoral elections to presidential years. Lurie prevailed in a ranked-choice election, winning the most first-choice votes and also drawing second-choice support from voters across San Francisco’s political spectrum.

This wave of political change in Bay Area cities could have profound impacts on city management, government transparency and local labor unions — especially those representing city workers. Some progressives worry that a new preference for upstart campaigns could challenge the traditional pipelines of power that allow candidates without access to large financial resources to build support while slowly moving up the ranks of local government.

Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, benefited from record spending, much of it self-financed, to become the city’s first mayor elected without any government experience since Jim Rolph in 1911. When Mahan won the mayorship in 2022, he did so after just two years on the city council — the least government experience of any mayor since San Jose voters began directly electing the position in 1966.

Both Mahan and Lurie were able to seize on voter discontent over widespread and highly visible homelessness, a rise in shoplifting and commercial burglaries and ongoing disruptions from the pandemic by blaming city hall “insiders.” They argued that their years of experience outside of government — Mahan as CEO of the civic engagement tech platform Brigade, Lurie as founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point Community — would allow them to engineer a culture shift within the municipal bureaucracy.

At his victory press conference on Friday, Lurie promised “a government centered on accountability, service and change” that would move past years of corruption scandals. It was a message with echoes of Mahan’s 2022 campaign call for “common sense, accountability and transparency.”

Neither candidate emerged completely independent of their cities’ existing power structures. Lurie grew up amid San Francisco’s financial elite, and his work with Tipping Point brought him close contact with city leaders trying to reduce homelessness. Mahan was backed by the incumbent mayor, Sam Liccardo, and the city’s powerful business community.

But Wunderman said voters viewed these political outsiders as better equipped to take a data-driven approach to reducing homelessness, crime and blight — and more likely to ask tough questions of city department heads.

“Like ‘Why do we have so many employees in the city? What are we getting from the work of these departments and the individuals in them?” Wunderman said. “‘What kind of management do we have in place?’’

Many of those questions could portend conflict with existing city employees and the unions that represent them.

Mahan has sparred with municipal worker unions since taking office, and he voted against a deal that raised wages and benefits for city employees last year. Lurie’s relationship with labor is less defined. While he received the support of a few unions, most labor groups backed other candidates in the mayoral race.

IFPTE Local 21, which represents municipal workers across the Bay Area’s largest cities, has opposed Mahan and strongly supported Sheng Thao in Oakland. In San Francisco, they recommended only that voters leave former interim mayor Mark Farrell off of their ranked-choice ballots for mayor.

“It’s our fervent hope that Daniel Lurie’s administration is going to make it a priority to support the workers that actually make this city run,” said Bianca Polovina, president of IFPTE Local 21.

Polovina said the mayoral election results should not be read as a rebuke to organized labor — pointing to the success of a majority of IFPTE-endorsed candidates for supervisor and city council across the three cities.

“Working people across the San Francisco Bay Area are demanding bold leadership that prioritizes high-quality public services,” Polovina added. “Voters are pretty adamant that they want core essential services, they want clean streets, effective public transportation, and comprehensive public safety.”

Not only did Mahan and Lurie win without major backing from labor, incumbent elected officials across the political spectrum also opposed them. All of Mahan’s fellow city council members endorsed his 2022 opponent, Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez, and not a single sitting San Francisco supervisor picked Lurie as their first choice for mayor.

Facing entrenched interests and the daunting task of introducing themselves to voters, Lurie’s personal wealth and Mahan’s Silicon Valley connections provided them with access to capital, argued Kimi Lee, executive director of Bay Rising, a coalition of progressive groups working to build political power among working-class voters of color.

“What we see is that there’s definitely an influence of corporations and billionaires and outside money and venture capitalists,” said Lee, who also noted the outsized role of a single hedge-fund manager in funding the Thao recall.

On the losing end of last week’s electoral upheaval were two incumbents, Thao and Breed, who had spent years working their way up the ranks of city government before breaking barriers as their city’s first Hmong-American and Black female mayors, respectively.

“I think there is still something there, where people overly criticize women, women of color,” said Lee. “They expect higher things from them — just more critical, saying they’re soft on crime…or saying that they’re not someone who can handle this job.”

Lurie’s lack of experience will be tested quickly, as he will face the immediate challenges of building an administration, establishing relationships within city hall and closing an ongoing budget deficit. After a rocky first year in office in which he was often on the losing end of high-profile votes, Mahan found his footing in 2024 — winning unanimous support for his homeless housing plan, emerging as a leading supporter of the new criminal sentencing law approved by California voters, Proposition 36, and garnering 87% of the vote in his run for re-election.

The next test for insurgent campaigns will be in Oakland, where voters will likely pick a new mayor in a special election next spring. Any outsider running there will face a familiar historical obstacle: since the city returned to directly electing the position in the 1950s, every Oakland mayor has come into office with prior government experience.