SAN FRANCISCO — Mayor London Breed hasn’t conceded the election, but her path to winning another term leading San Francisco appears quite narrow.
Early returns show her trailing far behind Daniel Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder, who far outspent the incumbent using his personal wealth and blamed Breed for the city’s problems with homelessness, brazen theft and drug overdoses.
He leads with 56 percent of the vote using the city’s ranked-choice voting system, while Breed has 44 percent.
It’s a dismal showing for Breed, a moderate Democrat, who was nevertheless projecting optimism after early returns. “It ain’t over till it’s over,” she told supporters Tuesday night at a soul food restaurant near downtown.
The city doesn’t expect to release another batch of results until 4 p.m. Thursday, and Breed’s campaign said she won’t comment further until then.
“I’m reluctant to say anything because I want to respectful and considerate to the candidates and the process — losing and conceding is hard, I’ve been there,” said Dan Newman, a consultant who ran an outside independent-expenditure group backing Lurie.
He added, “So the candidates will speak when they’re ready, but the math has spoken. The math says this is over.”
Joe Arellano, a spokesperson for Breed’s campaign, declined to discuss how she is parsing the early returns. He said she was taking Wednesday to process the defeat of Kamala Harris, her friend and former mentor.
But even some of Breed’s close political allies are privately questioning whether she could mount a comeback in later returns given the size of Lurie’s margin and a pool of uncounted ballots.
Roughly 60 percent of votes cast in the election have already been tabulated, and city officials estimate there are 157,000 left to count. Lurie was ahead of Breed by more than 24,000 votes as of early Wednesday morning, after a ranked-choice tabulation. To close that gap, Breed would have to capture an outsize share of the remaining tally.
Lurie surged in the polls during the final weeks of the race and performed strongly across the city — most notably in the Sunset and Richmond districts, where he had the backing of many Asian-American voters.
Polls also consistently suggested that Lurie would benefit from ranked-choice voting in the crowded mayoral race. Part of his strategy was to be the second-choice for many residents who voted for another candidate first — namely Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin or Mark Farrell, a former interim mayor.
Not only is Lurie leading Breed with more of those second-choice ballots from the other candidates, he’s also ahead in first-choice votes. That surprised many political insiders in the city.
In San Francisco’s system of ranked voting, voters are allowed to rank up to 10 candidates in order of preference. In each round of tabulation, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated and their votes are reassigned based on voters’ second choices.
Lurie stopped short of declaring victory Tuesday night as he spoke to an electric crowd of supporters in the Mission District. But he declared San Francisco is a “city that will rise again,” standing in front of the city’s flag, which depicts a phoenix rising from the ashes.
“The moment that we are in calls for a new era of leadership in City Hall,” he said, “one rooted in accountability, service and change.”
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