With an additional 55,407 mail-in ballots having now been tallied and added to the Election Day count, which, in total, now account for 209,697 (43.51 percent) of roughly 480,000 potential votes, London Breed has taken the lead in San Francisco’s mayoral race by a margin of 498 votes with an estimated 42,000 ballots remaining to be processed.

The accounting for the latest ranked-choice results are outlined in the table above with the current tallies for the top four vote getters, including first choice votes, below:

1. London Breed 36.28% of first choice votes (50.13% based on ranked choice result tallies)
2. Mark Leno 25.24% (49.87% based on ranked choice results)
3. Jane Kim 23.51% (CONCEDED)
4. Angela Alioto 7.27%

And if the trend for the latest batch of 23,213 ballots processed over the past 24 hours holds for the 42,000 waiting to be tallied, London Breed will win the election by a margin of around 1,700 votes (0.66 percent of all ballots cast).

UPDATE (6/10): With an additional 16,427 mail-in ballots having been added to the counts above, London Breed has extended her lead to 1,580 votes. And with an estimated 25,000 ballots remaining to be processed, if the trend for the latest batch of ballots processed holds, London Breed will win the election by a margin of around 3,200 votes (1.29 percent of all ballots cast).

UPDATE (6/11): With an additional 9,000 mail-in ballots having been added to the counts above, London Breed has extended her lead to 1,601 votes. And with an estimated 17,000 ballots remaining to be processed, which includes 14,000 provisional ballots, if the trend for the latest batch of ballots holds, London Breed will win the election by a margin of around 1,650 votes (0.65 percent of all ballots cast).

And if the 14,000 provisional ballots matched the trend of ballots cast in person at polling places on Election Day, a trend which favored Leno, Breed would still win by a margin of around 1,000 votes.

UPDATE (6/12): London Breed Wins SF Mayoral Race (With 99% Certainty)

68 thoughts on “London Breed Takes the Lead in SF Mayoral Race (Updated)”
  1. Breed needs to run up a margin with the remaining Vote By Mail votes, because the 14,000 Provisional Votes will likely, as usual, break Hard Left.

    1. Provisional votes break center left actually. Where does your concept that they break far left come from?

  2. Mark Leno far left? He was the well heeled SF establishment candidate and decidedly middlebrow. His base of support is district 8 — Castro, Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, and Twin Peaks. Not exactly a hotbed of far left activity.

    1. Leno will likely be conceding defeat by Thursday morning, if not on Wednesday night. I wonder if he will be up for running again in two years time, realizing that he will be up against an incumbent and that he will no longer be receiving Kim’s second hand votes?

  3. No, but Jane Kim is far left, and over 70% of her voters pick Leno 2nd. If Breed has less than a 1,000 vote lead after the rest of the Vote by Mail votes are counted, those 14,000 Provisional votes could overtake that. Provisional voters have always skewed far left – more transient (address changes), and, I believe, voters who registered at their polling place on Election Day – those tend to be the more fired-up activist voters. Kim fired them up. Leno and Breed fired up no one, really.

    As far as “far left”, it’s all relative in SF. Leno ran to the left of Breed. There are reasons why the SFAA and Small Property Owners of SF, and most all major business groups and tech companies backed Breed over Leno (and prayed to their gods that Kim got nowhere near the Mayor’s office).

    1. “over 70% of her voters pick Leno 2nd”

      Despite being consistently misreported elsewhere, as we’ve previously noted and can be calculated from the numbers in the handy table we provided above, that’s incorrect. The actual number is 67.6 percent, which is up from 66.7 percent based on the end of day tally on Election Day.

      But more importantly, even if the margins for those 14,000 provisional ballots match those from the Election Day count, which favored Leno, it wouldn’t yield enough votes to reverse Breed’s current lead nor trend.

    2. Kim is definitely far left. We’ve dodged a bullet by not having her become mayor. I am a bit concerned that Leno aligned himself with her, though. I read somewhere that he had some say in prop F?

      Perhaps one day we can get a conservative at the helm and reverse our misfortune.

      1. Prop. F which provides city funded lawyers to all tenants in eviction proceedings is going to be fun to watch. Can’t wait to sign up as one of the attorneys, I can easily blow through $100K in fees alone in a week. Yes, I do a lot of discovery and take numerous depositions. Just wait until one of the dissatisfied tenant clients decides to sue for legal malpractice. Hope the city has paid for sufficient professional liability insurance.

        BTW, ranked choice voting was a process created by liberal progressives to take numerous bites out of the same vote apple.

      2. If you are waiting for a conservative to be elected mayor of SF or get a conservative on the board of supes you will be waiting a very long time. There were conservatives on the Board when I moved here in the 60’s. Downtown business interests dominated city politics.

        1. I just want someone right of the Bernie Sanders ilk. I guess Breed is the closest that actually had a chance of winning. My vote went Greenberg, but that was clearly pie-in-the-sky thinking.

          1. Richie Greenberg? He is a Republican, diametrically opposite to Kim/Leno. For SF politics, any Republican would have a difficult time winning. However you can vote John Cox for governor. State law trumps local laws.

          2. Yep, voted for Richie Greenberg. No surprise he only got 3%, but he honestly didn’t campaign that much. If he ran on the independent ticket he may have gotten more traction. Also voted Cox since he was the only republican that could get to the top two. We’ll see what happens in November 🙂

          3. Breed is still pretty far left, but certainly the closest we can get to a left of center moderate. I dont want a republican, but a moderate democrat would be nice. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

            i hope Kim disappears from SF politics.

          4. If you are voting for Republicans you are part of the problem. Have you read the Republican Party platform? Pure evil. Republicans hiding behind the (I) label are highly suspect.

          5. Kim may govthe way of Eric Mar. It’s unclear what her next move is, having lost elections for Mayor and state senate.

          6. Nothing has been worse for California or SF than being such a 1 party state. What that means is that primaries determine the winner, which doesn’t cast enough sunlight on the process and allows for a political machine run by insiders that can’t be challenged, with politicians that are unresponsive. Look, for example, at Willie Brown’s administration.

            If you want to take back the white house, then stop nominating senators from heavily Democratic states for the Presidency. Candidates who are crowned because they can climb the state machine are not necessarily ones with broad appeal or the ability to wage a vigorous campaign outside of the primary system. Clinton was just one example, but Kerry is another. Now, they think Kamala Harris is going to have broad appeal. Lol.

            California would benefit from a serious challenge to the Democratic party which would hold elected officials accountable. Even the Democratic party would benefit.

          7. stevenj: LOL. The big scary republican party has you triggered apparently. All the while democrats and progressives are corroding all that is good with CA and SF.

  4. I wouldn’t say that. SFAA endorsed Breed because Breed was the more pro-development candidate, and would supposedly support construction of more rental housing. Whether anything like that will actually happen is doubtful, of course, but I don’t see the Yimby/Nimby divide as a left/right issue.

    1. Breed can support the development of more housing but the real deciding factor as to whether said housing will get built depends on the state wide initiative to repeal Costa Hawkins in November. Hopefully if John Cox wins as CA governor, he could do something to mitigate against that.

      1. The Costa Hawkins repeal is close in the polls. If it were to pass the key is that individual counties or cities could ( or could not) enact new rent control under it – on all units new or old, vacancy control and condos/SFHs. Some places like SF will do so, others won’t. For those cities that don’t there will be a rush of development from places like SF to rent control “free” zones.

        It’s a given SF would impose rent control on all units and homes and condos IMO. Vacancy control probably not. The problem is that tenant advocates would launch an initiative to impose vacancy control in SF if the Supervisors don’t. And it would pass. One wildcard is the initiative to repeal the gas tax increases. It has been pushed by the GOP in hopes it will help their candidates in November. One SOCAL state representative was recalled recently for supporting the gas tax increase. That initiative will draw voters to come out and not just Republicans. Libertarians and moderates are it’s natural base of support also. These groups would generally vote against the Costa repeal. Given that, even though polls are close, I think the repeal will fail in the fall, Hope so anyway.

  5. Repeal of Costa Hawkins is going to make half of the developers unemployed in SF. With unemployed developers, you are going to see some very unemployed architects and consultants.

    1. So say all the industry boogeymen and landlords. Developments that pencil now – based on current market rents – would still pencil post repeal but with smaller projected rent increases and downstream returns. A repeal would, however, negatively impact the value of existing rental properties not currently under rent control and likely depress land values.

      1. “but with smaller projected rent increases and downstream returns”

        That’s the crux of the issue. Few REITs, Pension funds or other investors are going to wish to purchase an investment with a declining annual real return. And with the tenant activists lobbying for vacancy control, the value of the development will decline still further. Instead most developers will cease building rental buildings in rent control jurisdictions and will solely build condos.

        1. I don’t know if this is the norm, but an apartment complex that Avalon developed near me (about 180 units) was built as condos, even though meant to be rented as apartments. Smart thinking, anticipating possible further “tenant-friendly, owner-harming” laws in SF?

          If vacancy control ever gets instituted, I’d suspect that any vacancies would merely be sold as condos, rather than re-rented at below market rates.

          Have most new apartment developments done the same?

          1. One would hope that something like this happens, to make the city more of an owner occupied city and also to drive down prices for those who want to live in their house rather than view it as an asset.

            Large taxes on capital gains from selling property, more taxes on rental income, as well as repeal of Prop 13 would also help reduce speculative demand for housing. As a state, we should be focusing on producing goods and services that people want to buy rather than upgrading our bathrooms and hoping for windfalls from unearned income.

        2. None of my REITs are doing well and it is more of higher interest rates making it more expensive to construct new homes or multi-units, and on the flip side making it more expensive for most prospective buyers to finance and buy homes. This does not take into account the new tax laws, and SF’s regulations and bureaucracy.

  6. UPDATE: With an additional 16,427 mail-in ballots having been added to the counts above, London Breed has extended her lead to 1,580 votes.

    And with an estimated 25,000 ballots remaining to be processed, if the trend for the latest batch of ballots processed holds, London Breed will win the election by a margin of around 3,200 votes (1.29 percent of all ballots cast).

    1. Hindsight is always 20/20. Breed leads the first choice votes over Leno by a wide margin. The same result would have occurred with a one vote election. RCV only delayed the process to the tune of many man hours and expense, not to mention negative national press coverage over this unproductive system. Get rid of RCV once and for all.

      1. Hindsight?

        As we wrote the morning after the election, with Leno in the lead:

        “Keep in mind that Breed was ahead based on the early ranked choice count of mail-in ballots received prior to election day. And if the yet to be counted mail-in and provisional ballots follow the trend of the early vote-by-mail results, Breed could return to the lead in the overall ranked choice results.”

        Regardless, RCV has been proven to be the most efficient and just, in terms of reflecting the will of the majority of voters, system.

        And with respect to all the “delays and wasted time,” that has absolutely nothing to do with RCV, it’s a function of how San Francisco collects and processes vote-by-mail and provisional ballots.

      2. Amewsed, what I don’t think you’re getting is that while, yes Breed had a significant lead in terms of first choice voting, she did not have a majority of the votes. Without RCV there would have been a run-off election, which would have cost orders of magnitude more than the incremental costs associated with RCV.

        1. Is RCV a common occurrence for many large scale cities? Doubt it. There are grumbles about whether it should be kept or not and a possible repeal in November 2019. So wait and see then. Talking about it endlessly here isn’t going to change facts.

          1. I think the grumbling is less when the pluralist from the first round ends up the eventual winner (as would be the case here). People have a hard time understanding the reapportioning concept..and in their defense, highest-total-wins has long been the standard for many – if not in fact most – elections.

      3. Why do people keep acting like RCV makes the count take longer? They have to count all the ballots no matter what. It always takes this long, we are just noticing this time because the race is too close to call ahead of time. This is waaaay cheaper than a runoff.

        1. The ballots have to be counted multiple times, because the eliminated candidates (votes) need to be reassigned; I would think, tho, that this is done automatically, so that the actual ballots only have to be run through once, even if the there are multiple “counts”.

        2. the race wouldn’t have been close without RCV. I think that’s the point. its hard for anyone to imagine a candidate becoming mayor with <25% of people wanting him/her as 1st choice.

      4. Complete disinformation. RCV accelerated the [processing of] the election. The process would be greatly delayed if it required another round of campaigning, another round of voting and another round of counting.

  7. So what is the current ballot count on SF Prop C, Commercial Rent Tax for Child Care and Education? Any prediction?

    1. It remains close, but Proposition C is poised to pass with a current tally of 107,110 votes in favor (50.35%) versus 105,623 (49.65%) against, which is relatively in line with the preliminary Election Day tally of 50.33% YES and 49.67% NO and despite the pre-election day mail-in trend which was leaning the other way.

      1. If they can institute a tax on commercial rents, what’s to stop them from instituting a tax on residential rents?

        1. Nothing. Given the animosity between landlord and tenant in SF such an initiative would likely do even belter than C. The fate of rental real estate in SF hangs on the outcome of the Costa Hawkins repeal vote. If it passes, IMO, SF will go for the whole enchilada. Rent control on old and new construction, single family homes and condos and vacancy control. I doubt Breed or the Supervisors would support vacancy control but the voters will if they don’t – if the initiative wins. Trying to explain why additional rent control in SF would hurt the rental market in the long run and primarily by ending new rental apartment construction in favor of condo construction to a renter friend, this person said well, if developers do that there will have to be a new law mandating new condo construction include rental units. Lordy, – only in SF!

          1. No wonder you sound so huffy. You need less renter friends. Seriously, most of my friends split their time living in SF and outside the country, where there are reasonable people and laws.

          2. Actually my tenants in the several metros I own homes in are great. A totally different dynamic. Before I purchase in a market I confirm it is “pay to stay”. To give you an idea, when a tenant re-signs a lease they are given a gift card. At Christmas they get a holiday/thank you card. The very antagonistic renter/landlord situation in SF is not the norm. I’d never own rental property in SF or California though I did at one time.

          3. True. SF voters will only be convinced of the stupidity of their ways by seeing the results play out first-hand.

            More likely however is a major “event” that would reshape the geographical landscape and force a review of the laws would be the equalizer. Tenants/landlord has much of the dynamic of labor/management. While the workers can strike and force mgmt to bend; a lock-out or move-away takes the wind from Labor’s sail. In the end Labor usually had less capacity to endure (putting food on the table) than mgmt (quarterly statements). If we had to totally rebuild, concessions on all those rules would be a cornerstone.

            However, we are not at the Revolution. Yet. Lets hope cooler heads prevail. And start working on the equation of more supply (housing) or less demand (people? jobs?)

    1. votes are still coming in by mail
      all counting is electronic, doesn’t take long once the ballots are in

      1. Vote by Mail ballots received by the Department of Elections after midnight on the 8th, or postmarked after Election Day on the 5th, are not valid nor being counted.

        And in fact, Department staff were onsite at the main postal facility on Evans at midnight on the 8th to collect the very last batch of (40) valid ballots.

    2. Something like 60,000 ballots were mailed in or dropped off at voting centers on election day. Even more came Wednesday and Thursday postmarked on Tuesday. Physically opening the envelopes and sorting them for feeding into machines takes time. Actually counting them does not. Last night on the news the head of the Dept of Elections said they’ve been working 6am to 10pm to get this done. Voting by mail has been slower all over the state, not just SF, and enables/motivates more voters to vote. The number of registered voters that voted citywide was estimated at close to 50% – way higher than normal for a primary election.

    1. From my reading of the Prop, it does not state that it is exempt from pass through. Although most pass throughs are limited to 50% of the pro-rata tax allocation.

    1. So basically Leno would have to get 54.7% of these remaining ballots, to win. Probably exceedingly unlikely given how they’ve been breaking to date.

  8. UPDATE: With an additional 9,000 mail-in ballots having been added to the counts above, London Breed has extended her lead to 1,601.

    And with an estimated 17,000 ballots remaining to be processed, which includes 14,000 provisional ballots, if the trend for the latest batch of mail-in ballots tallied holds, London Breed will win the election by a margin of around 1,650 votes (0.65 percent of all ballots cast).

    And if the 14,000 provisional ballots matched the trend of ballots cast in person at polling places on Election Day, a trend which favored Leno, Breed would still win by a margin of around 1,000 votes.

  9. The Leno / Kim strategy fails big time. One “progressive” running against Breed would have easily won.

    1. I think a single prog running would have just been defeated more roundly. They didn’t “split” their base and Leno’s RCV total almost doubled his first place total. Breed, meanwhile, had a massive lead over each candidate individually in terms of first place votes but will have just barely squeaked by on RCV if she does end up winning. If anything I think this election proves running multiple prog candidates is viable in RCV and will just encourage more coordination among that camp in the future.

      1. You don’t think that a similar strategy from the Mods would have worked even better? IF Breed and AA had somehow gotten past ego and teamed up (were their differences really significant?), that might have been a more impressive team than Kim-Leno.

    2. Not those two progressives at any rate, no. Breed would have handily beaten either of them solo.

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