San Francisco Democrats are embracing “law and order” politics

“ARE YOU in a good spot for hearing?” one woman asks another as they shuffle into a sitting room at a retirement home in San Francisco. They fold their walkers and await Mark Farrell, a Democratic candidate for mayor in the city’s November elections. Mr Farrell launches into a typical stump speech—he grew up in San Francisco, is bringing up children there—but the conversation quickly turns darker. What will he do about crime, homelessness and drugs, the audience wants to know? Mr Farrell has an answer characteristic of San Francisco’s changing politics. “We’re gonna bring them off the streets,” he says. “Hopefully it’s shelter, maybe it’s hospital, maybe it’s county jail.”

Mr Farrell is not the only mayoral candidate running a “law and order” campaign focused on empowering the police and cleaning up the city’s streets. All politicians with power in San Francisco are Democrats, but there are different flavours. The three front-runners, including the current mayor, London Breed (pictured), are moderates competing to become the tough-on-crime warrior that voters seem to want after several years of disorder. Only one candidate with a chance of winning is from the party’s left wing. The irony is that San Francisco’s politicians have taken a right turn even while Donald Trump tries to persuade Americans that the city, where Kamala Harris made her start in politics, represents the worst excesses of the left.

Some of San Francisco’s problems during the pandemic were felt by cities across the country. Murders increased, though violent crime in San Francisco is relatively low. Drug-overdose deaths spiked as fentanyl spread. Car and retail theft rocketed. Police were ill-equipped to respond. During the summer of 2020, when protests against police brutality were roiling the country and “defunding” the police was in vogue among leftists, Ms Breed pledged to cut $120m from the police budget. It is not clear if that money was ever reallocated, but the number of officers in 2023 was the lowest since at least 2009.

The loudest voices for reform have been business and tech leaders. But residents of the Tenderloin, the neighbourhood most blighted by drugs and homelessness, are also fed up. “They are spending all these billions of dollars to fight this, but they have nothing to show for it,” complains JJ Smith, who rides through the Tenderloin on his scooter each day posting videos of what he sees on the streets.

Voters began to rebel in 2022 when they ousted the city’s left-wing district attorney and several members of the school board, who were more concerned with renaming schools than reopening them. Earlier this year San Franciscans passed ballot measures that require drug testing and treatment for welfare recipients, and expand police powers. Now the mayoral campaign revolves around public safety.

After the Supreme Court affirmed in City of Grants Pass v Johnson that punishing homeless people for sleeping rough is not cruel and unusual, Ms Breed vowed to use “aggressive” sweeps to remove tents from the streets, and threatened to impose criminal penalties if needed. She also strengthened a policy to bus homeless people out of town. Her opponents argue that she has conveniently found her nerve just in time for the election.

But they are running on similar policies. Mr Farrell, who was interim mayor in 2018, and Daniel Lurie, a charity founder and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, say they would declare a fentanyl state of emergency. Mr Farrell would like the Honduran drug dealers prevalent in San Francisco to be deported. Both men argue that permissiveness has attracted seedier types. There is a debate over how many people sleeping rough in San Francisco come from elsewhere. Studies suggest most are locals, while officials maintain that it varies by neighbourhood. “I will say it every day from the City Hall steps for as long as it takes,” says Mr Lurie. “You do not come to San Francisco to deal drugs, to do drugs or to sleep on our streets.”

It once seemed implausible that Ms Breed could win another term, yet her recent combativeness may help her get one. She is now leading the pack, according to a poll from the San Francisco Chronicle. But the city uses ranked-choice voting, so another candidate could receive enough second- or third-round votes to prevail.

The embrace of law-and-order politics can be seen beyond San Francisco. Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, celebrated the Grants Pass ruling, and issued an executive order directing agencies to clear tents from state-owned land. Mr Newsom also signed nearly a dozen new laws on August 16th aimed at cracking down on retail theft and property crimes.

This mirrors the strategy of another California Democrat: Ms Harris. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominee is using her history as a prosecutor in San Francisco to burnish her tough-on-crime bona fides. In one of her favourite campaign lines she recalls going after predators, fraudsters and cheaters. “So hear me when I say,” she pauses, “I know Donald Trump’s type!” During her run for president in 2019, Ms Harris argued for decriminalising illegal border crossings. Now she supports a bill that would have fortified the southern border. The evolution of both Ms Harris and politicians in San Francisco is emblematic of a broader turn within the Democratic Party back towards the centre.

Yet to Mr Trump and many Americans, San Francisco is the rotten core of the American left, a place from which political poison emanates. “That sense of San Francisco as a villain speaks to the base,” says Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. Californians proudly say that “as California goes, so goes the nation”, but Mr Trump uses the idea that America could become like California—like San Francisco—as a threat.

Last year he argued that “Marxist monsters” were “unleashing mayhem” on the city. He refers to Ms Harris as a “San Francisco radical”. J.D. Vance, Mr Trump’s running-mate, recently called Tim Walz, Ms Harris’s pick, a “San Francisco-style liberal”. Mr Vance failed to mention that he lived in the city for several years while working in venture capital, whereas Mr Walz visited for the first time last month.

Mr Trump is not the first Republican to villainise the Bay Area for electoral gain. When he was running for governor in 1966, Ronald Reagan galvanised Californians in opposition to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. He had contempt for the hippies that congregated in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967. In the 2000s Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, derided the “San Francisco values” of Nancy Pelosi, who would soon become speaker herself. When Mr Newsom was mayor of San Francisco the city briefly issued marriage licences to gay couples when doing so was still illegal. Republicans tried to use the backlash to help re-elect George W. Bush.

“For a party that focuses a lot on guns, God and gays, San Francisco is just a perfect target,” says Peter Richardson, a writer on California’s counterculture. Expect attacks on “San Francisco radicals” to persist—no matter how conservative the city’s politicians sound these days.■