After lengthy vote count, moderate community activist beats Mark Leno, who would have been first openly gay mayor
London Breed, a longtime community activist who grew up in public housing, has won San Francisco’s mayoral election, becoming the city’s first black female mayor.
“No matter where you come from, no matter what you decide to do in life, you can do anything you want to do,” Breed said Wednesday on the steps of City Hall. “Never let your circumstances determine your outcome in life.”
Her victory comes after the second-place finisher, Mark Leno, a former state senator who hoped to become the city’s first openly gay mayor, conceded defeat on Wednesday, about a week after the city’s voters went to the polls.
“She is a remarkable young woman and she is going to do a very fine job,” Leno said Tuesday. “Her success is San Francisco’s success.”
Jane Kim, the third-place finisher, said: “I’m proud to live in the largest city in America with a woman as mayor.”
Breed will be the only woman among the mayors of the United States’ largest 15 cities.
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Vote counting in San Francisco is a protracted process, thanks to the large number of people who vote by mail and the city’s ranked choice voting system, which allows voters to select their top three candidates. Though Breed won the most first-place votes, Leno held a narrow lead on election night.
However, with most of the ballots processed and an advantage of 2,177 votes, Breed’s current lead is believed to be insurmountable.
The race for mayor began after the unexpected death of the former mayor Ed Lee in December. As president of the city’s board of supervisors, Breed was appointed acting mayor, but she was quickly removed from the role by her fellow city supervisors, in a move that sparked significant outrage from her supporters.
Though San Francisco is a one-party town (the Republican candidate, Richie Greenberg, earned just 2.83% of first-choice votes), the divisions between “moderate” and “progressive” Democrats can be bitter, with stark disagreements over how best to address the city’s housing and homelessness crises.
Breed, a moderate, received significant support from the city’s business and tech elite, while Leno and Kim tried to form a united progressive front, asking their own supporters to choose each other as their second choices.
Breed will serve out the remainder of Lee’s term, and an election for a full four-year term will be held in November 2019.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption London Breed joins a small club of about 19 other black female US mayors
San Francisco is to have its first-ever female black mayor - at a time when African-Americans are becoming increasingly scarce in the US city.
London Breed, a long-time community activist who grew up in public housing, was declared the winner after her rival admitted defeat a week after city voters cast their ballots.
Winning with just over 50% of votes, the 43-year-old said she felt humbled.
Ms Breed is the only female mayor to serve in the top 15 largest US cities.
Image copyright Facebook
San Francisco is grappling with rampant homelessness, rubbish-littered streets that have been likened to developing-world slums, and a property-price boom that is driving working families out of the city.
She was formerly president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city government's legislative body.
Ms Breed briefly served as acting mayor following the death of Mayor Ed Lee in December, before running for the post.
The election was on 5 June, but a result has been delayed because the outcome was so tight that city election officials had to count thousands of provisional ballots.
Rival candidate Mark Leno, who would have been the city's first gay mayor, conceded the knife-edge race on Wednesday.
Ms Breed is not the first female mayor of San Francisco - that was Dianne Feinstein in 1978; she is now a California senator.
She joins a small club of about 19 other black female US mayors.
But she leads a city where 5% of residents are African American, and mostly living in public housing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
A lifelong San Francisco resident, Ms Breed started her career in the city government as an intern before climbing its rungs.
In a 2016 interview with the San Francisco Examiner she recalled her childhood of urban deprivation in the city she now runs.
She told the newspaper: "Five of us living on $900 per month. 'Recycling' meant drinking out of old mayonnaise jars. Violence was never far away.
"And once a week, we took Grandma's pushcart to the community room to collect government-issued groceries."
Ms Breed's sister died in 2006 of a drug overdose and her brother is in prison, according to SF Weekly.
San Francisco (CNN) For the first time, an African-American woman has been elected mayor of the city of San Francisco.
London Breed reached the milestone on Wednesday, when her opponent conceded a tight mayoral race. Breed will serve until 2020, finishing the term of the late Mayor Ed Lee, who died in December at age 65.
At a short news conference, Breed, 43, praised Lee and thanked her supporters, as well as the other candidates, including Mark Leno, a former state senator who conceded the race hours earlier. She struck an optimistic tone about the city's future.
"I am so hopeful about the future of our city, and I am looking forward to serving as your mayor. I am truly humbled and I am truly honored," she said.
She also acknowledged the competitive race: "Whether you voted for me or not, as mayor, I will be your mayor too."
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It’s a really big deal that SF elected London Breed as mayor
Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 2 Caption Close Image 1 of 2 London Breed speaks to supporters at her election party in San Francisco on June 5. London Breed speaks to supporters at her election party in San Francisco on June 5. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Image 2 of 2 San Francisco mayoral candidate London Breed addresses the media at a press conference Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at City Hall in San Francisco, Calif. after fellow candidate Mark Leno called breed to concede to her. less San Francisco mayoral candidate London Breed addresses the media at a press conference Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at City Hall in San Francisco, Calif. after fellow candidate Mark Leno called breed to concede to ... more Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle It’s a really big deal that SF elected London Breed as mayor 1 / 2 Back to Gallery
For a week, San Francisco political insiders huddled every afternoon in the bland basement of City Hall to get the latest vote counts in the mayor’s race, crunch data and make colorful precinct maps showing who was winning where.
He’s up! She’s up! She’s up by more! Check out those trend lines!
Lost in all the nerding out was the sheer significance of what was being counted. On Wednesday, we could finally let it sink in: Supervisor London Breed, 43, has become the first woman of color to win election to San Francisco’s top job.
She’ll be just the second woman ever to manage San Francisco, the first being Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor in 1978 when Mayor George Moscone was assassinated. That was so long ago, Breed was just a toddler.
Breed will not only make history here — she is also unusual nationally. Currently, the mayors of the country’s 14 largest cities are men. All but three are white men. (San Francisco ranks No. 13 on that list, and our present mayor, Mark Farrell, is, of course, a white man.)
New York City has never had a female mayor. Neither has Los Angeles. Or Philadelphia.
Black female mayors are even more unusual, though the small group is growing. Members include Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, and Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C. Both cities are smaller than San Francisco in terms of population and aren’t among the top 15.
Breed, who had an impoverished childhood in a public housing project, spoke to supporters on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Standing beneath the balcony of the office she will soon inhabit, she certainly seemed to grasp the historic nature of her win.
“I know it means so, so much to so many people,” she said.
“I grew up in some of the most challenging of circumstances,” Breed said. “The message that this sends to the next generation of young people growing up in this city is that no matter where you come from, no matter what you decide to do in life, you can do anything you want to do. Never let your circumstances determine your outcome in life.”
Meena Harris, a 33-year-old who lives in the Haight and volunteered for Breed’s campaign, said voting for her felt just as special as voting for Barack Obama for president and for her aunt, Kamala Harris, for U.S. Senate.
“It’s incredibly exciting for me as a woman of color. It’s about time!” said Meena Harris, head of strategy and leadership at Uber and a member of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women.
Currently on maternity leave, she said her daughters, Amara, 2, and Leela, 3 months, will grow up knowing that somebody who looks like them is running their city and that they could do it, too. Her older daughter has already started saying things like, “I’m going to a meeting!” and “I’m in a conference call!”
The significance of a black female mayor in San Francisco is arguably even greater because our city’s once-thriving African American population has been slowly decimated over the past half-century, starting with urban renewal programs that flattened entire neighborhoods and hastened by today’s insane cost of living, which has driven out much of the black middle class.
Now, fewer than 5 percent of San Franciscans are black, and the majority of them live in public housing. And Breed, who grew up in the Plaza East housing projects not far from City Hall, is about to sit in the big, plush Room 200 and bring in an annual paycheck of $335,996. In a country desperate for political inspiration, her story certainly fits the bill.
Francee Covington is an African American woman who has lived in San Francisco for 42 years and now serves on the city’s Fire Commission. She visited the City Hall basement on Monday afternoon to see the vote counting up close.
Asked what it would feel like to see a black woman become mayor, Covington said, “That’s a wonderful thing, but it’s mostly that London would be that person. She’s like Shirley Chisholm. She is unbought and unbossed.”
Fifty years ago, Chisholm became the first black woman to be elected to Congress, and her 1972 presidential campaign slogan was “Unbought and unbossed.”
The major knock against Breed throughout the race was that she was bought and bossed by angel investor Ron Conway and other super-rich downtown power brokers. But that argument — along with the pledge taken by her competitors Supervisor Jane Kim and former state Sen. Mark Leno to reject super PAC money — didn’t appear to resonate with most San Franciscans.
Instead, voters seem to care most about making a real dent in the misery on our streets and sidewalks — the tent camps, open-air injection drug use and ubiquitous heaps of garbage — and ensuring more people can afford housing in the city.
Breed beat both Leno and Kim handily in first-place votes citywide, as well as in nine of the 11 supervisorial districts. Leno, who would have been the first openly gay mayor of San Francisco, won District Eight, which includes the Castro. And Kim, the most progressive candidate, took the most first-place votes in District Nine, which includes the Mission and Bernal Heights, both far-left bastions.
Leno kept it as close as he did only because of second-choice votes from Kim’s ballots under the city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank their top three choices in order so a runoff election can be avoided if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote.
Leno entered the race in May 2017, intending to stockpile cash and endorsements to scare off challengers for the expected November 2019 election. But when Mayor Ed Lee died Dec. 12 of a heart attack and Breed and Kim almost immediately jumped into the race to finish his term, Leno never seemed to pivot from a marathon to a sprint.
His sexual orientation didn’t seem to rally voters outside the Castro and the rest of District Eight, perhaps because gay men already have so much political, financial and cultural influence in San Francisco. As one insider said, “When you think about who’s struggling now, white gay men are not at the top of that list.”
Leno’s campaign also turned him into an attack dog, harping constantly on the super PAC issue, which never caught fire. He is known for being a kind, charming man who can work with people of any political stripe, so it was strange to see those qualities — so essential and rare in our current political climate — downplayed in favor of the constant, angry super PAC talk. Especially because he benefited from independent expenditure money in the race himself.
Leno also tried to portray himself as the agent of change at City Hall, which never seemed to ring true, considering his main competitors were much younger women of color.
Leno strongly considered challenging Lee in 2015, and I would have liked to have seen him do it. Running as a progressive, anticorporate change agent might have worked better against another older man who certainly was benefiting from deep-pocketed donors and who at that point hadn’t yet come to grips with the city’s huge homeless problem.
But that’s history, and now all eyes turn to the future. One of Breed’s first tasks will be appointing her replacement to represent District Five — the Haight, Western Addition and the Fillmore — on the Board of Supervisors. Names that have been bandied about include Shanell Williams and Thea Selby, both members of the City College Board of Trustees; Stevon Cook, a member of the school board; and Judson True, chief of staff to Assemblyman David Chiu and the husband of Andrea Bruss, a legislative aide to Breed.
Breed’s advisers say they haven’t given any thought yet to a District Five replacement.
The new Board of Supervisors will tip 6-5 in favor of progressives with the election of Rafael Mandelman over Supervisor Jeff Sheehy. One of the new group’s first orders of business will be selecting its president, a position Breed has held since 2015.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen has already started campaigning for the board presidency and said having a tough, progressive woman as board president and a tough, moderate woman as mayor would be “really exciting.” She said it could also help mend relationships that have been tattered during all the tumult at City Hall since Lee’s death.
“Clearly, London Breed and I are not afraid to speak our minds or fight hard for what we believe in,” Ronen said. “We do not pull punches and we don’t hide behind excuses. ... No matter how you voted for mayor, where we all agree is that we need major change in our city.”
Another side-effect of Breed’s win? Don’t look for Farrell to run to reclaim Room 200 in November 2019. He was considering it if Kim won, since he would have presented a stark contrast to her, but his politics are too closely aligned with Breed’s to make challenging her worthwhile. Also, since he already claimed the seat from her once when the board removed her as acting mayor and named him mayor in January, going after her again could be problematic.
Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist and adviser to Farrell, said, “I think Mark Farrell will have an interesting second act, and it remains to be seen what that is, but it’s unlikely to be anything involving mayoral politics.”
Ballard said he thinks Breed won because she “really captured the zeitgeist” in being a charismatic, upbeat black woman raised in public housing who can work across political lines. After all, the vast majority of San Franciscans are disgusted by the dour white man in the White House who grew up rich and can’t seem to work with anybody.
“We elected somebody who is the opposite of Donald Trump in almost every way,” Ballard said. “If San Francisco can’t secede, we might as well elect London Breed.”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
