Check back frequently for updates all day long and into the night.
Update at 1:05 p.m.: Pedestrians’ “I Voted” stickers served the same role as the blood of the paschal lamb in the tale of Passover: Politicians, eager to get out that last-minute vote spotted it on lapels and purses and masks and Passed Over.
Supervisors Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen wandered along Haight Street near Masonic in mid-morning; they received some nods and right-ons, but they did not find much in the way of undecided voters.
In what stands to be a recurring theme, pretty much everyone has already voted.
Both Preston and Ronen had dropped by polling places in the morning to find pollworkers outnumbering voters. Many day-of voters are, in fact, merely walking their sealed vote-by-mail ballot to the polls. This renders a potential last-minute pitch from a campaign into an impotent thank you for voting.
“I figured I’d go to bus stops early and talk to essential workers,” said Preston, who did plenty of that in his successful 2019 run. “But it was dead. Dead!”
It was, in fact, a bit dead for any random Tuesday let alone Election Day in a city where eight of every 10 registered voters figure to cast a ballot. There weren’t a whole lot of people for Preston and Ronen to interact with, and those they did approach had invariably already voted.
Well, there was one non-voter. A street kid named Thomas approached Preston and handed him an ornate, homemade pin (Preston politely returned it). Thomas hadn’t voted yet. Preston and Ronen both gave him the spiel — you can register on the day of the election at a polling place; you can cast a provisional ballot.
Thomas smiled. It’s not entirely clear what his plans were, but it seemed pretty clear what his plans were not.
“Look, when I win this thing by one vote, I’ll come back here and find you,” Preston told him. Everybody laughed
Exit Thomas. Enter Preston volunteers.
“Man, everybody’s voted,” said one.
Supervisors Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen took a moment for a campaign selfie at Haight and Masonic. Photo by Hillary Ronen
This was, again, a recurring theme. Earlier in the day Preston had walked onto the 1400 block of Waller; a gas pipe had been ruptured and firefighters were knocking on doors and asking residents to vacate.
Preston refrained from making his case to people fleeing a potential disaster. In any event, they probably already voted.
While Preston wandered down to the McKinley memorial sculpture in the Panhandle to meet perhaps two dozen volunteers inhaling pizza slices, his opponent Vallie Brown was knocking on doors in the Western Addition — where Preston had started his day.
Brown’s volunteers were easy to spot with their Pepto Bismol-pink placards. A pair bookended the intersection on Webster and McAllister. Stormy Henry, a Brown campaign manager, sang to drivers as they sped by.
Vote Vallllllllllie BROWN! The supervisor who’s ON-YOUR-SIDE!
Brown knocked on doors in the morning before returning home, showering, and heading out for a 2 p.m. rendezvous at Divisadero and Hayes with Sen. Scott Wiener.
Voters may be hard to spot at this point but San Francisco Election Day lore is replete with tales of candidates who took their foot off the gas too early.
Nobody wants to add to that list. — Joe Eskenazi
Update at 12:04 p.m.: Well, one by one, local and state politicos arrived at Manny’s to phone bank or text-bank to Pennsylvania.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and State Senator Scott Wiener. Photo by Lydia Chávez
Gov. Newsom had some thoughts on the general election and voter turnout.
And, Mayor Breed had some thoughts on the local elections and what she would like to see happen.
— Lydia Chávez
Update: 9:51 a.m.: The polls are open and moving slow — at least in the Mission District. One tradition lost to Covid-19 – campaign workers handing out material at the 16th Street BART. This morning, it was empty. Instead, what distinguished the plaza was the construction worker at Wells Fargo boarding up the bank’s windows in anticipation of possible demonstrations later tonight.
Oy vey.
Nearby, Manny Yekutiel, the owner of Manny’s at 16th Street, was readying the place for the entourage that will convene there at 10:30 a.m.: Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed, Sen. Scott Wiener and others. We will be there.
“I’m feeling very light,” said Yekutiel, who wore his I Voted sticker. Election day “feels very holy, very sacred. … There’s a lot of prayer and hope.”
Already, Mike Ingrasci, who worked on Obama’s two campaigns and was with Hillary Clinton on the night she conceded defeat in 2016, was working the phones at one of a dozen phone banking stations at Manny’s.
“I’m just doing as much as I can,” he said before starting his calls to Florida. “It’s going to be positive. It may actually end early with Georgia and North Carolina. If it doesn’t and moves to the Great Lakes, then it will be a nail-biter.”
He remembers 2016 well. Early in the evening, he said, “there was a lot of energy, and it felt like something big was going to happen.” Then, it was just sad. He expects tonight to be different. — Lydia Chávez
Creativity Explored on 16th Street. Photo by Lydia Chávez
12:01 a.m.
“I love winning, man. You hear what I’m saying? It’s, like, better than losing.” — Nuke LaLoosh
The last push: What to expect today
As of Monday, 62 percent of all ballots had already found their way back to San Francisco City Hall. That number will grow higher throughout today and the coming days; it is well possible San Francisco will cross 80 percent participation and head toward the gaudy sort of turnout you’d only expect to reach in realms where leaders erect gold statues of themselves in the capital square or have their family members executed with anti-aircraft artillery.
Or, perhaps, significant numbers of erstwhile San Franciscans have skipped town but remain on our voter rolls. We shall see. Regardless, they make voting very low-barrier and easy in San Francisco. This is not the most well-run of places. So, every municipality or state could do this. If they so chose.
They’re not, of course. High barriers to voting, post-facto challenges of valid ballots, the specter of armed loons LARPing with live ammunition and insecure election systems are on the front, center, and back of everyone’s mind. As it should be: But we still have an election to carry off today in San Francisco.
The fireboat Phoenix at sunrise. Photo by David Hawkins
Here’s what you can know going in — in a year where it’s hard to know much.
San Franciscans are used to lengthy, agonizing elections. That’s not the fault of ranked-choice voting, though people do complain about that every election cycle. Rather, it’s that even before Covid, the vast majority of San Franciscans voted by mail — and counting mail ballots takes time (Counting lengthy mail ballots takes even more time). Waiting days for all the ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 to be delivered takes time. Counting all the votes, in general, takes time.
But the big change this year is that the majority of ballots are already here — and they’ve already been tabulated. We should know the results of that vast stack of early votes by evening — and, by late evening, we may have a good bit of today’s in-person voting in the can as well. By Wednesday, we may have a good idea how things are going.
But how things will go is anyone’s guess. As we wrote last week, traditional voting patterns — early absentee, late absentee, day-of — have been scrambled in the Covid era. Traditionally, more conservative voters sent in their ballots early and more progressive voters sent them in late or voted in-person. But that pattern seems to be off this year, in San Francisco and most everywhere else.
Rather, what’s important in San Francisco is that the first batch of votes announced at roughly 8:45 p.m. tonight will be huge.
We may not be able to predict the ideological leanings of whose votes are being tabulated in earlier vs. later rounds, but we can do the raw math: In 2020, as of Nov. 2, 322,000 ballots had been amassed. In 2018, 118,000 had been returned at this time.
In short: If you’re trailing after Tuesday night’s announced first round of results at around 8:45 p.m., the pressing issue isn’t so much the ideology of the remaining voters, but that there aren’t that many of them left (especially if a fair amount of people have skipped town).
For the candidates or measures trailing after the first round’s tally, the opponent becomes mathematics. That’s a hard opponent to beat.
In their final push today, candidates will try to maximize their visibility. But with most ballots already accounted for, and a goodly number of voters walking their sealed vote-by-mail ballots to a polling place, waving a placard in someone’s face will only be so effective.
Mission Sunrise. Photo by Kathleen Narruhn
Questions to be answered
Four years ago, two District 5 residents out of three voted against Proposition Q, which was marketed to voters as a means to roust homeless encampments.
This year, District 5 residents are being urged to vote against the incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston by a heavily funded Independent Expenditure campaign featuring lurid images of tent encampments and menacing homeless dope fiends. Challenger Vallie Brown has, herself, harped on tents and homeless issues.
Is this the political messaging equivalent of World War I trench warfare, in which wave after wave of soldiers was made to futilely charge into machine-gun fire because that’s the only strategy the generals knew? Or has the electorate’s mood soured with the onset of the pandemic and increased street homelessness?
We’ll soon know.
San Francisco voters have, in the past, spurned big-money independent expenditure campaigns bankrolled by wealthy, right-leaning and often out-of-town donors — and these operations have, at times, been undertaken in a manner that seemed to maximize consultants’ ability to spend clients’ vast sums of money rather than produce effective political messages. And, at times, they’ve galvanized the opposition, such as a ham-fisted 2019 Police Officers Association attack on candidate Chesa Boudin paradoxically assisting in his ultimate election.
But this year could well be different. People are at home a lot more, on social media a lot more and struggling with the mental and physical burdens of the pandemic — all while being besieged with a gaudy number of attack mailers. The traditional, grass-roots, Get Out The Vote efforts normally deployed to counter this impersonal big-money spending have been mitigated during a plague.
It really is anybody’s guess how voters react — we just know lots of them are voting.
In high-turnout election years such as this one, the conventional wisdom is that a place on the county Democratic Party slate mailer is a tremendous boost. A hefty percentage of the people swelling turnout to potential Turkmenistan levels are what political professionals might refer to as “low-information voters.” San Francisco has about 9.5 registered Democrats to every Republican, and “low-information voters” are wont to vote the straight Democratic ticket.
So, it remains to be seen if the ersatz slate mailers funded by big-dollar donors and mimicking the Democratic Party slate, the Tenants Union slate, and others peel off a significant number of voters or merely serve to line the city’s bird cages.
And, finally, it remains to be seen if the multi-million-dollar anti-tax campaign footed by the city’s developers and business interests unseats not only Proposition I — which would ding sellers of real-estate priced at $10 million or higher — but also dooms the more innocuous Proposition F and the bond Prop. A, on which your elected officials are counting to balance the budget.
We can begin to piece together these answers starting tonight. Knowing for certain will take longer. In the meantime, check back often, as Mission Local covers the last efforts of Election 2020, and then begins to answer what happened — and what happens next. — Joe Eskenazi
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Election 2020: Check back all day for up-to-the-moment news and analysis (updated 12:04 pm) - Mission Local
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