What San Francisco's Mayoral Race Says About the City's Progressive Soul

“Why did the political establishment oust San Francisco’s first African American woman mayor?” The words are splayed across a wall of gilded portraits of San Francisco mayors past on the cover of a political mailer. The visible portraits are black-and-white shots of white men. In the bottom right corner, a young girl stands in the foreground, a shattered portrait at her feet of London Breed, San Francisco Board of Supervisors president, recently ousted acting mayor, and now mayoral candidate. The girl’s curly brown hair is divided into pigtails, and her skin tone matches Breed’s in the photograph below. Above her, a portrait of the current acting mayor, Mark Farrell, hangs to match the rest.

Breed’s biography—from a child raised in San Francisco public housing to, potentially, the city’s first African American woman mayor—makes for a compelling political narrative. But she isn’t the only candidate who would be a “first” for San Francisco. The other two leaders in the polls for the June 5 special election, Mark Leno and Jane Kim, would be the city’s first openly gay mayor, and first Asian American woman mayor, respectively. In the nation’s most progressive big city, where all the major candidates are liberal Democrats with similar policy prescriptions (clean the streets, combat homelessness, and build more affordable housing), identity stands out as a key differentiating feature. “There are no real ideological differences between the candidates, but each is a proxy for something larger,” Corey Cook, a political science professor at San Francisco State University told the Washington Post. Other non-policy factors, like each candidates’ perspective on super PAC money, and their strategy with regard to the city’s unique ranked choice voting system, have also played a major role in the election.